petnoyer | May 9, 2008"Dead men tell no tales" - Hiriam Breakes
Hiriam Breakes was a Dutch pirate, the second son to the Councillor of the Island of Saba in the Netherlands Antilles. In his twenties, he stole the ship and cargo of his employers and renamed the vessel The Adventurer. Almost immediately he came upon the Chilean vessel "Acapulco" which was carrying 200,000 small gold bars. The hapless crew were all murdered in a most despicable manner, and being the Acapulco was better ship than the The Adventurer Breakes stole the ship and refitted it for piracy.
Now there's a good lad.
From "Wanted for piracy"
cmcclain | May 9, 2008One of the best versions I have heard. Perhaps a funnier version below the fold.
cmcclain | May 8, 2008This week I have found that my cup runneth over with work. Several things around the web have caught my eye which deserve substantial commentary. That's what you pay for, right? Unfortunately, today they get a link.
First, here is a specific example of push into the deep as shallow fisheries collapse. In this case, the dwindling numbers of blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay is providing incentive for companies like Benthic Fishing Corp. to fish for the vaguely named "deep sea red crab", Chaceon quinquedens
Rick at MBSL&S gives us an update of Nautilus Mining's activities in PNG. Rick…
cmcclain | May 7, 2008A new study lead by Chao in Science estimates that nearly 10,800 cubic kilometers of water are stored in artificial reservoirs. That is little over twice the volume of Lake Michigan. The authors estimate this quantity of water reduces global sea levels by -30mm, with an average rate of -0.55mm per year over the last half century.
cmcclain | May 6, 2008Findings by Daniel Odess, curator of archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, suggest that whale hunting dates back at least 3,000 years. Odess's team found a piece of walrus ivory inscribed with scenes of hunters in boats pursuing whales. Wood directly adjacent to the ivory was radiocarbon dated to arrive at the age. This predates previous evidence of whaling by 1,000 years.
kevin z | May 6, 2008This is the final installment of VBS.tv's TOXIC-Garbage Island series. Part 12 is more of an epilogue of sorts. The bonus interview with Frederick vom Saal is very informative!
I would like to thank the producers and hosts of the film series. Even though I ragged on them quite a bit, the issue is very important and I am grateful they were able to go out there and document some of this stuff. They even occassionally made some very good points ; )
I also wish to thank the captain and crew of the Oceanographic rRsearch Vessel Alguita for their dedication to conservation issues. You can read more…
cmcclain | May 6, 2008Finally, I have a back up plan if this whole marine biologist thing doesn't work out.
And to continue with the theme of PowerPoint...
cmcclain | May 5, 2008As I was catching up on all of my favorites blogs, I noticed that James Hrynyshyn at The Island of Doubt posted about the recent oddness at the Heartland Institute. To catch you up to speed the DeSmogBlog notes...Dozens of scientists are demanding that their names be removed from a widely distributed Heartland Institute article entitled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares. The article, by Hudson Institute director and Heartland "Senior Fellow" Dennis T. Avery, purports to list scientists whose work contradicts the overwhelming scientific agreement that…
cmcclain | May 5, 2008When a scientist is writing a scientific paper we look for that one quintessential figure that tells the whole story. Other figures are ancillary to fill in the specifics but the 'cardinal figure' is where all the meat of the paper is distilled to one remarkable graph. A senior scientist once told me that deciding on and constructing this figure is the hardest part of writing the paper. After the "cardinal figure" everything else writes itself.
Think of the "cardinal figure" as manuscript feng shui. An off-balance figure with improperly aligned objects lead to paper disharmony. Bad figure…
cmcclain | May 5, 2008Take a few moments to let the size of the Colossal Squid really sink in
In my absence for a body size evolution workshop and during Peter's coral week spectacular the media took the opportunity to spread disinformation about my favorite phyla-Mollusca. To bring you up to speed, a crack team of teuthologists* dissected both Giant and Colossal Squids at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand last week. This is where the confusion arises as a Giant Squid AND 2 Colossal Squid were dissected. One of these was the 495kg giant caught over a year ago by fisherman in the Antarctic (oh yeah...she's a girl…
kevin z | May 4, 2008Continuing the series of VBS.tv's TOXIC-Garbage Island series. Contains some vulgar language. It finally gets good. In part 10, "Its totally not like the money shot, its totally worse". Says it all right there, totally. Watch the net closely in part 11, disgustingly amazing.
cmcclain | May 4, 2008I would like to say I have never used any of these statements in my papers but...
Statement
Really means
It has long been known...
I haven't bothered to look up the reference.
It is thought that...
I think so.
It is generally thought that...
A couple of other people think so, too.
It is not unreasonable to assume...
If you believe this, you'll believe anything.
Of great theoretical importance...
I find it interesting.
Of great practical importance...
I can get some good mileage out of it.
Typical results are shown.
The best results are…
kevin z | May 3, 2008Welcome to the 32nd edition of the Circus of the Spineless. It our distinguished pleasure to be host here at Deep Sea News. To make it easier for you to navigate through 95%+ of the diversity of animal life, I've developed a dichotomous key to help you work through it. Naturalists will undoubtedly be familiar with such a tool, but for the beginner I provide a brief overview. Read both parts of the number and follow path that best describes the post you are looking for. If there is a number at the end, go to that number and repeat until you come to a post you are attempting to identify. Simple…
petnoyer | May 3, 2008Well, all good things must come to an end, so this is it for Coral Week. I wanted to finish things on a high note with the "naked coral" hypothesis. Does it sound like something out of an Austin Powers movie? Really, folks, its in Science! It probably won't save corals from global ocean overturning or anything, but its important to know anyway for your oral exams, for breadth of perspective in the face of doomsday scenarios, or just for good cocktail party conversation.
It was a good theme week here at DSN, our third. Seven or eight different blogs participated. We posted 27 stories in seven…
petnoyer | May 3, 2008There remains a cause for optimism. Shallow-water corals have weathered a host of insults over the last 18,000 years. The Atomic Age is just one in a long list. Since the Pleistocene Era, sea levels rose ~100m to the current sea stand. This literally drowned once thriving tropical reefs. You can scuba dive to 30m on Saba Bank, Caribbean Sea to a 1m high notch that indicates a wave swept shore, so long ago. Another 20m below, gorgonians grow on the dead coral heads of an ancient reef-crest. But who sheds a tear for the Pleistocene?
Corals are tougher than we give them credit for. They…
petnoyer | May 3, 2008This is the fifth of five articles about the shared characteristics of shallow and deep-water corals. It's far from complete, I'm afraid.
Deep corals are out of sight, but not out of reach. The commercial fishermen working above just trawled an old growth sea forest near New Zealand. The bubblegum corals (Paragorgia sp.) on deck in the pictures below are on the order of 100-200 years old. Notice there's not one colony on the deck, but several. The corals were collected from a seamount by commercial fishers trawling for "orange roughy"- the fish formerly known as "slimehead". They changed the…
petnoyer | May 3, 2008a special guest post by John Guinotte, Marine Conservation Biology Institute
The answer is uncertain as very few manipulative experiments have been conducted to test how deep-sea corals react to changes in temperature, seawater chemistry (pH), water motion (currents), and food availability. It is likely that the effects of climate change will not be positive for deep-sea corals, because they are highly specialized and have evolved under very stable (cold, dark, nutrient-rich) conditions. Temperature, salinity, seawater chemistry, and light availability control calcification rates in shallow…
petnoyer | May 2, 2008This is the fourth in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals.
Shallow water corals reefs have been called "the rainforests of the sea" because nooks and crannies created by reef building corals form micro-habitats for other animals, like trees in the rainforest create habitats for beetles and birds. On the coral reef, these niches are home to small mobile species like gobies, gastropods, shrimps, crabs, and seastars; and sessile fauna like bristleworms and sponges. A single 10cm radius colony of Oculina sp. in the shallow Gulf of…
petnoyer | May 2, 2008How does Coral Week end? With a bang or a whimper? Can you tell? I still don't know.
Three stories still sit on my desktop. While I polish them off, consider this:
Coral reefs are in decline around the world, and species are disappearing every day. But new species are being discovered, too. So, can society mitigate species loss by investing in species discovery? Below the fold is a graphic illustrating coral species discovery rates since the 1750's.
Reference:
Cairns, SD. 2007. Deep-water corals: an overview with special reference to diversity and distribution of deep-water scleractinian…