Deep Sea News

Across the internets a movement is surfacing.  Its nothing short of a smear campaign.  Across the web it is becoming fashionable to hate on the blobfish.

Neatorama…Back in 2006, we blogged about Mr. Blobby, the ugliest fish ever

John Kaus at the Chicago Tribune and LA Times…With its humanlike face, the blobfish is a creature of nightmares and who knows what terrors it could bring upon us…Its hideously deformed body is quite boneless, a gelatinous orb hovering in the deep, covered in slime and mucus. But there’s something even worse. Its face.

Metro…the the ocean’s saddest little gelatinous lump, the Blobfish

Mail Online…the world’s most miserable-looking fish

The smears start with the name, blobfish. Why can we not use the more preferable Australian Sculpin or Toadfish for this deep dweller?  Even the Smooth-Head Blobfish would be better.  Better yet, can we all use its scientific name, Psychrolutes marcidus (Greek, psychrolouteo = to have a cold bath)?

Miserable, sad, ugly, evil?  Hardly!  This sweet little fish is the product of millions of years of evolutionary fine tuning!

Fish with bladders would fair poorly in the deep depths (600-1200m, ~2000-4000ft) of Australia and Tasmania where our friend dwells.  The gelatinous appearance everyone seems soooo critical of is a brilliant adaptation allowing this fish to be slightly less dense than water.  This slight positive buoyancy allows P. marcidus to hover over the seafloor without expending energy, a huge advantage in the food poor deep sea.

Psychrolutes marcidus may be no muscular tuna but that relative lack of muscle is o’ so advantageous.  Muscle tissue consumes a lot of energy.  Why have it?  Why even swim or move if you don’t need to?  Why not just wait for your food to float by?

And where did that photo come from used all over the internet?  Worst picture ever! This pictures looks a like a mug shot taken Sunday morning after Psychrolutes marcidus went binge drinking across the town, smoked 5 packs of Marlboro reds, hadn’t showered in 48 hours, and got arrested for public nudity.  How about the lovely video below instead?

We at DSN ask the rest of the internet community to cease and desist in the slander of the Psychrolutes marcidus. We at DSN herald the Blobfish (your term not ours) as the elegantly adapted creature it is, a product of its environment.  So don’t hate the player…hate the game.

Maybe if more of us appreciated the blobfish it wouldn’t be threatened.

P.S. Crocheted blobfish coolest thing ever…me wanty!

From Matt’s Marine Music Medley.

Finally, the truth about shark attacks that sharks DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

Thanks Summer!

Via Climate Shifts this morning I discovered this video which enamored me for two and a half minutes. You have to go there to get the skinny on the video though (you should be reading them anyways!), but the punchline is “The range of fish, sharks, rays, sea snakes and other animals sighted on BRUVS tapes has been remarkable – over 300 species to date, from 3cm leatherjackets to 3m hammerhead sharks.”

The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) lives in the deep ocean, home to the largest ecosystems on our planet. A “living fossil,” this animal has remained relatively unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. The deep ocean contains what may be the greatest number of animal species, the greatest biomass, and the greatest number of individual organisms in the living world. Humans have explored the deep ocean for about 150 years, and most of what is known is based on studies of the deep seafloor. In contrast, the water column above the deep seabed comprises more than 90% of the living space, yet less than 1% of this biome has been explored. The deep pelagic biota is the largest and least-known major faunal group on Earth despite its obvious importance at the global scale. Pelagic species represent an incomparable reservoir of biodiversity. Although we have yet to discover and describe the majority of these species, the threats to their continued existence are numerous and growing. Conserving deep pelagic biodiversity is a problem of global proportions that has never been addressed comprehensively. The potential effects of these threats include the extensive restructuring of entire ecosystems, changes in the geographical ranges of many species, large-scale elimination of taxa, and a decline in biodiversity at all scales. This review provides an initial framework of threat assessment for confronting the challenge of conserving deep pelagic biodiversity; and it outlines the need for baseline surveys and protected areas as preliminary policy goals.

Via Boing Boing, I’ve discovered a new place to go for eye candy.

Morphologic is a scientific art endeavor led by marine biologist Colin Foord and designer Jared McKay. With the aquarium as our primary medium, we explore the artistic possibilities of living coral reef organisms in an educational manner. Our laboratory/studio is a state certified aquaculture facility perpetuating marine life within the confines of downtown Miami.

Our installations create fluorescent new worlds with a juxtaposition of urban environments; the city and the reef. Through a variety of multimedia experiences, we provide public and private installations designed to stoke the imagination with a marriage of art and science.

So update your blog feeds, follow them twitter and check out their videos. Here is why:

‘Preener’ from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

Just in case you aren’t convinced.

‘Corynactis viridis’ from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

So here I was, just minding my own business under this rock-type thing and some freakish looking thing from Poseidon-knows-where started kicking up dirt and messing with me!

From NeptuneCanada’s youtube account:

“2-September-2009: As ROPOS touches down on the sediment next to the drillhead, an octopus watches warily from its lair at Ocean Drilling Platform 2016B (2660m below sea level). When ROPOS grasps an anemone-festooned rope, the startled animal shrinks into a pink ball. A short while later, as ROPOS prepares to fasten the rope to the drillhead, the octopus first lurks in the sediment, then flaps its web and flies off into the darkness.”

Looks like a Vulcanoctopus almost, I wonder if one our octopus experts out there can confirm… Thanks to Neptune Canada and other organizations out there for making these little moments available for us to see!

This week’s TGIF comes from a post I read on Penguin Wanderings. Craig and I are looking into these as our new base of operations for Deep Sea News.

See all 10 at Oobject.com: 10 Dry Land Submarines.

Of course Kevin and I will still need to work out some logistics