petnoyer
Posts by this author
January 25, 2008
When I was invited to join Deep Sea News two years ago I must admit I hesitated. I took a deep breath and held it for like 45 seconds in a simulated free dive. Then, I said "yes, wow, what an amazing idea". Craig's passion for the deep-sea is obviously contagious. Who would have thought we could…
January 24, 2008
The New York Times has a nice investigative piece on mercury levels in your local urban sushi parlors that briefly restored my faith in mainstream science journalism. The Times performed what you might call a guerilla science action, hiring a pair of local professors to help to analyze bluefin tuna…
January 22, 2008
Marine sciences were in full effect at the 2008 North Carolina Scienceblogging Conference this past weekend at the Sigma Xi building in Research Triangle Park. Kevin Zelnio of the Other 95% headed up a session on real-time blogging in the marine sciences. The session included Karen James of the…
January 17, 2008
Deep-water formation is one of the most fascinating aspects of global thermohaline circulation. Deep-water doesn't form only at the poles, though, as cold water sinks below warm. Subtropical Underwater, for example, is formed in the central Atlantic where the difference between evaporation and…
January 17, 2008
A French court ruled that Total oil, the cargo owner in a 1999 oil spill that polluted 400km of coastline, is partially responsible for damages to the environment. The court faulted Total for "carelessness" in leasing the 23-year-old Maltese-registered vessel Erika, which had sailed under eight…
January 14, 2008
What's happening in the Science News section at the Washington Post? A recent story about bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) made me wonder exactly what's going on behind the journalist's desk. The article in question is called "Advocates hope science can save big tuna", published Dec. 24, 2007.
The…
January 10, 2008
Here's another elegant headline from the Telegraph UK publication I mentioned below. You gotta love the Brits.
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
The comments section is pretty fascinating... "Interesting. Similar to my onion-model of the universe. Remove the time dimension...…
January 10, 2008
You may have learned in Oceanography that wind driven surface effects are limited to the first 70m of the ocean, in what's commonly known as the Ekman layer. However, climate oscillations, even small ones, have a deeper impact on the oceans. They can influence oceanic conditions a mile below. The…
January 3, 2008
The deep-sea pickings are sparse this year at the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology in San Antonio, TX. That's OK, It's a great meeting. "Horizontal", my advisor says, "not vertical." I'm learning about the flights of damselflies, hummingbirds, and bumblebees in between lectures on…
December 28, 2007
One of my back up plans for early retirement is to start a consulting business for Hollywood special effects (SFX) studios. My crack team of marine invertebrate biologists and kinesiologists will advise big studios on new scary creatures for space-based and terrestrial monster movies.
The first…
December 27, 2007
A recent study linking deep-sea biodiversity to ecosystem processes recognized that 1) the deep-sea supports the largest biomass of living things on the planet and 2) the deep-sea represents the most important ecosystem for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. The chosen indicator species for…
December 24, 2007
This video shows why it can feel like Christmas when you're cruising the seafloor in a submarine and you stumble upon a deep-sea coral community. The "marine snow" is falling, the bamboo corals light up like Christmas trees, the anemones, well, they kind of remind me of poinsettias.
Yet, perhaps…
December 21, 2007
Here's an old favorite from April 2006.
An enormous sea anemone from 2500m depth on the East Pacific Rise was reported in in the journal Marine Biology. The monstrous actiniarian Boloceroides daphneae is abundant on boulders, cliffs, and rocky outcrops near hydrothermal vent sites but not on them…
December 20, 2007
We have a new state in this country! Welcome number 53. It's called "The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States"
Of course, it's not a state, really, in the Nunavut sense of the word. This is a federal deep-sea coral report prepared by NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program to address…
December 20, 2007
There is so much happening in the field of deep-sea coral research right now that there is no way to cover everything in detail without cheating you out of some of the excitement, so I'll list it all in a couple posts and let you pick through it over the holidays. This assumes you're interested, of…
December 5, 2007
This is a funny story about a recent expedition to Saba Bank in the Netherlands Antilles. I've been engaged in a few of these over the last couple years, and each trip was funny in its own right. For instance the time we rode four hours each way in 12 foot seas to survey a barren sandy piece…
December 3, 2007
This month's Carnival of the Blue is happening now at The Natural Patriot. The quality and layout have improved remarkably over time, due largely to the efforts of past Carnival hosts. This is also one of the better moderated collections so far. Host Emmett Duffy does a great job providing a few…
November 29, 2007
No overdue paper on deep water formation in the western North Atlantic for last semester's PhysO class is gonna stop us from having a little fun on Thanksgiving day. In about one week there should be a Christmas tree behind us. That's Maria and Ana on the right. Clara and me on the left. Clara…
November 19, 2007
A friend of mine from Japan used to like to begin his grad school seminar talks with a favorite recipe for preparing whale meat. His first slide would feature a steaming hot bowl of soup with sliced layers of meat dangling over the side. He was not a joker. He did these things to shock students…
November 16, 2007
Deep-sea poster art could make a great Christmas gift, don't ya think?
This one from Allposters.com is unique because it has a black-light quality.
It would look real nice next to my Velvet Elvis.
November 13, 2007
What do hyperbolic crochet and coral reef organisms have in common? They both evolved to maximize surface area within a limited volume. So, naturally, a crafty and talented group of mathematicians at the Institute for Figuring who are concerned about the effects of global warming would want to…
November 3, 2007
Rick laments below that I ruined his Friday with the anchor scar story, so I'll try to spice up his weekend with a lighter note. The road from Saba's airport to Fort Bay Harbor is a thing of wonder. It climbs and descends the sleeping volcano through villages like Hell's Gate, Windwardside, and…
November 2, 2007
Thank God it's Friday. Work moves to the back burner, social issues move to the front burner. This week we provide two underwater movies to help your work hours pass quickly. Both videos (below the fold) show the devastating impacts of anchor damage on the Caribbean Sea's Saba Bank, in the Dutch…
November 2, 2007
If you wondered yesterday why we're collecting gorgonian samples (as well as fish, shrimp, crabs, algae, and sponges) for the Saba Conservation Foundation, this 6m anchor scar on the Saba Bank should help to explain. We're collecting biological samples in order to document the biodiversity of the…
November 1, 2007
Hello again. Sorry to be absent from posting at DSN lately, but I was all wrapped up in a diving expedition to Saba Bank in the Netherlands Antilles. You'll hear more about it as we assemble the material and results, but first thing's first. Let's get to the good stuff!
This here 8' tiger shark…
October 19, 2007
Industrial fishing operations take most of the blame for collateral impacts to sea-turtle populations, but new research shows that small-scale fisheries--operated by hand from little open boats --can kill as many critically endangered loggerhead sea turtles as industrial scale fisheries. A…
October 14, 2007
We don't mention it often, but Craig and I publish regularly outside Deep Sea News, in the public arena of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Craig authors ~3 scientific journal articles per year since 2004. I author ~2/yr. The last two years were above average for both of us. This is amazing to…
October 10, 2007
The Chosun Ilbo reports that Korea is joining an exclusive club of countries now bottling deep-sea water, along with U.S., Japan, Norway and Taiwan. The deep-sea water industry claims health benefits to the deep-sea water because it's "clean and bacteria free". Craig hates the idea of this stuff,…
October 8, 2007
Today is Cephalopod Awareness Day. Jason at Cephalopodcast asks us to "embrace your inner octopus and let the world know what we think of our tentacled friends."
At the moment, Craig is in the running for a spot on a documentary series about the deep-sea. He is one of five finalists on the casting…
October 4, 2007
This is one of the stamps Dr. Frederick "Ted" Bayer painted for a coral reef series from the country of Haiti. Dr. Bayer passed away earlier this week. This stamp is part of his legacy.
The image depicts the deep-sea scleractinian cup coral Stephanocyathus diadema, one of the most ornate and…