Crown-of-Links

Starfish fight scientists back with… MUCUS! And LOTS of it! Details at the oozyliscious Echinoblog.

Of maps and octopuses. ‘Nuff said.

Over at ye Old Salt Blog, we learn that ancestry.co.uk has published prison ship records from the 19th century. A rare glimpse into the absolutely dreadful and dreary (by our modern standards) life British onboard prison ships.

So, um, now we are concerned with aging oil industry infrastructure rusting away in the Gulf? It took an enormous oil spill to make the environmental catastrophe potential realizable?? The Interior Dept. issued an order that wells unused for 5 years are to be plugged and dismantled. Its good news, and will hopefully provide jobs to oil workers, but sad when one realizes that this hasn’t been the case since ever!

Cargo ship strikes whale and drags it into the Port of Oakland where it rests limply on the bow :(

What’s in the stomach of a fish? Well, Dustin at Spawning is Imminent has the low down about the whole process of identifying fish stomach contents.

Speaking of fish, Water Blogged tales us a sad tale about a sad fish. When fishermen call a poor, long-lived, slow-growing deep sea fish the “Idiotfish”, you know this story is not going to end well, especially when the Japanese find it and nearly eat it out of existence!

The Dispersal of Darwin has dispersed a interesting dissertation for your reading perusal: Coral reef formation and the sciences of earth, life, and sea, c. 1770-1952. Apparently coral reef formation theories started back in the 1770s, yet remained unproven until reef drilling in 1952.

Brian Romans takes us on a tour of the Monterey submarine canyon with some real beautiful imagery. Hey I saw my old house on Ramona Avenue! He puts it eloquently as he closes out his post:

“Next time you are standing along the coast in Santa Cruz or Monterey and looking out into the ocean remember that there is an entire landscape on the seafloor as beautiful and complex as what we see on land.”

National Geographic story on a massive fish kill in Louisiana. It is likely the result of the annual appearance of a large “dead zone” in the Gulf, but it is not clear if it’s oil spill related. Although, it sure as hell couldn’t have helped! The pictures are very disheartening…