Connecting the oceans to land are numerous carbon highways.  These conduits bring food from land to the ocean, supporting an abundance of life.  Our group explores these carbon chains and explores some potential methods of carbon delivery to the deep.  Thus, alligators on the abyss.

At first it may seem fanciful that an alligator carcass might find its way to the deep.  However, dozens of species of alligators and crocodiles are found across the globe, in high numbers, and often in coastal areas.  Through either their normal migrating or foraging activities, or during flooding events, individuals may be found offshore in the ocean.  If one of those individuals meets an unfortunate end, it may fall to the seafloor.

In prehistoric times, the impact to the deep oceans could have been even larger, as large reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs dominated the sea. Deploying a reptile in the deep sea today may reveal the animals that specialized on the carcasses of long-extinct ancient emperors of the sea.

Earlier this year, our research group placed three alligator carcasses 1.5 miles deep on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico in the first-ever alligator fall experiment.  Each of the three alligators met a different fate.

The first alligator had been on the bottom of the ocean for less than 24 hours. Despite the tough hide of the alligator, scavengers quickly got through and began to gorge themselves on the flesh of the alligator. Football-sized animals called giant isopods, relatives of rolly pollys or pillbugs, penetrated the hide in this short time-frame.  This demonstrates the speed and precision with which deep-sea scavengers can utilize any carbon source, even food from land and freshwater systems.

A little over 60 miles to the east of the first alligator, the second alligator had been sitting on the seafloor for a little over a month and a half.  All the soft tissue of the alligator had been removed by scavengers.  A small animal called an amphipod was still darting around looking for scraps, but the only thing that remained was a skeleton.  All of the soft tissue had been consumed. The spine curved just as it had been left.  A depression in the sediments indicated where the full body once laid.  The skull was turned over, likely by scavengers while picking at the flesh on the skull.

A fuzzy carpet covering the bones of the second alligator represented a brand-new species, previously unknown to science.  These zombie worms, or Osedax, colonize the bones of many types of vertebrates and consume the lipids within.  This was the first time zombie worms had ever been observed in the Gulf of Mexico or from an alligator fall.  They also demonstrate yet another pathway in which carbon from land makes its way into deep-sea food webs.

Another 60 miles east lay the third alligator.  It had only been eight days since it was laid on the seafloor.  As the camera panned to the marking device, a floating bucket lid attached to a rope like an underwater flag, it became clear that the alligator was missing.  All that remained where it had been dropped was an alligator-shaped depression in the sediments.  Drag marks in the sediment paved a path to what remained of the alligator fall.  An animal dragged this alligator 30 feet and left only the 45-pound weight and rope.  The rope had been bitten completely through. To consume an alligator, and create this disturbance, the animal must have been of great size.  We hypothesize that most likely a large shark, like a Greenland shark or sixgill shark, consumed this alligator whole.

Three alligator falls in the abyss met three very different ends, from being consumed by football-sized cousins of rolly polys, to zombie worms eating their bones, to a large shark dragging it away and consuming it whole.  This research has given us a glimpse into what impact large reptiles had in past oceans, as well as the role they play today.  It is clear that deep-ocean scavengers have no qualms about successfully and quickly consuming food that originated on land or freshwater.

Read more about this research in our group’s recent publication in PLOS One: “Alligators in the abyss: The first experimental reptilian food fall in the deep ocean.”

The post Alligators in the Abyss: Part 2 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Dear Dr. Craig McClain.  

I am contacting you on behalf of [A Major Textbook Publisher]. [The Publisher] seeks permission to use your material in the upcoming text book [Name of commonly used freshman text book but a long line of authors].  Please see the attached permissions request letter which formally lists the rights we are requesting. I am also attaching the copies of the materials we intend to use in the book along with the letter for your easy reference.  I would really appreciate it if you could kindly review the request and return the signed letter to me via e-mail at your earliest convenience. Or, you can indicate via email that you are granting us permission to use the material by agreeing to the following terms:

“Following rights to the licensed material specified herein are granted to [The Publisher], its worldwide subsidiaries and affiliates, authorized users, and customers/end-users: Use of the licensed material, in whole or in part, in the [Textbook], and in subsequent editions of the same, and in products that support or supplement the [Textbook], and in products that use, or are comprised of, individual chapters or portions of [Textbook], and in-context promotions, advertising, and marketing materials for the same; Territory (World); English; Formats (print and electronic, and accessible versions); Term (Life of the Edition + Future Editions); Print Quantity (No Limit); Electronic Quantity (No Limit).”

I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to contact me if you.

Thank you! Regards,

[Person from Major Publisher]

 Yeah…that was the tipping point.  So I responded back.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

My image is not free for use.  I can send you an invoice for usage if the [The Publisher] is interested.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

Apparently, they were fine with me invoicing them so I responded.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

Given the current cost of your textbook of is well over $200 for an undergraduate, I don’t believe I can support the use of my image in your textbook.  The only way I will allow usage of the image is if the company agrees to donate 30 free textbooks to the Louisiana College or University of my choice.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

 

From this, I received this response.

Dear Dr. McClain,

I passed your request to the Development and Managing Editors and after some consideration [The Publisher] is electing to decline the request.    We appreciate your response and will search for a replacement image to be included in the book.

Kind regards,

[Person 2 from Major Publisher]

Here’s the thing. How can I support a textbook that students will need $214 dollars to buy?  I cannot.  Not as a scientist committed to the tenet that information should be available to all, an educator who believes education is a right not a privilege, a mentor who needs to remove barriers for my students, and lastly someone who came from a lower socioeconomic family, struggled to purchase textbooks, and is now committed to reaching back and pulling others up.  I. CAN. NOT.

Even more, the landscape of Louisiana represents one of considerable struggle. The poverty rate in Louisiana’s poverty rate is 19.6%, well above the national average of 12.4%.  Child poverty nationally is 21.9% while in Louisiana’s is a shocking 27.8%. Twenty-four of Louisiana’s parishes are considered persistent poverty parishes with more than 20% of the population falling below the poverty line consistently since 1970.  Thirty-two parishes are classified as black high poverty areas.  These poverty rates place Louisiana number one among the 50 states in both poverty and child poverty levels (WorldAtlas.com 2016).  The ramifications of this poverty are seen in higher education in Louisiana.  The adult population with a bachelor’s degree or more nationally is 32.5% while in Louisiana is 14.7% and among African Americans, the national average is 14.7% compared to the 13.4% in the state.

I am, and need to be, personally committed to providing educational opportunity to all those in this state, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.  The high costs of textbooks are prohibitive for students in Louisiana. Indeed, the Louisiana Board of Regents through the LOUIS system is also committed to addressing the textbook issue including purchasing eBooks that can be substituted for required course textbooks.  This program has saved 40,000 students around $4.8 million dollars.  Also, consider that,

 college textbook publisher Cengage conducted a survey titled, “College Students Consider Buying Course Materials a Top Source of Financial Stress”. The results revealed that, “about 43% of students surveyed said they skipped meals because of the expense for books, about 70% said they took on a part-time job because of the the added costs, and around 30% said they had to take fewer classes” 

All of this has occurred on a backdrop of textbook prices rising almost 1000% in recent years — more than three times the rate of inflation (Bureau of Labor Statistics).  And instead of the publishers admitting there is a problem, they deflect.

Marisa Bluestone, spokeswoman for the the Association of American Publishers, called the BLS data “misleading” because of the “law of small numbers” where a small item that increases from $100 to $200 will appear as a 100 percent increase whereas if tuition increases from $10,000 to $11,000 it’s only a 10 percent increase. Further, the BLS data is “not the reality today” added Laura Massie, spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), as it doesn’t count buying used books or renting.

The prices for academic institutions to access the scientific literature has also gotten out of hand.  Despite scientists volunteering to both serve as editors and reviewers for journals and often paying to publish in these journals, many for-profit publishing companies continue to rake in profits while choking out access to the very scientists and scientific institutions they expect to volunteer and read their publications.

Last week the marine lab (the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, LUMCON, where I serve as Executive Director) received the notification for renewal for a major journal, now published by a for-profit publisher. The cost for the publication next year is $9,545. The average inflation rate since we first subscribed to this title (starting in FY2010) is just over 20% annually. The number of issues has not changed (12 per year), nor has the size of the issues in terms of pagination, so it’s not a matter of getting more for the money.  Another way of looking at it is that one journal subscription would have eaten up 25% of the journals budget that we allow for LUMCON’s small library. It is hard to justify spending $10,000 a year for a single subscription for less than a dozen faculty.

So a couple of weeks ago, LUMCON made a bold move.  We canceled all of our paid journal subscriptions. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.  These funds will remain with our library, reinvested into other initiatives.  We have set aside some of these funds to purchase hard volumes without electronic versions, pay for singly purchased articles from the canceled journals, investing heavily in LUMCON faculty to publish in Not-For-Profit, Open Access Publishers, new library printers, and variety of other smaller library upgrades.  Needless to say, the amount LUMCON spent on journal subscriptions was considerable and freeing up those funds is actually allowing us to be able to provide BETTER support to our scientific teams.

You read that right.  I feel that even though we are losing journal access and the burden on the faculty and librarian to find needed articles may be higher, the funds that LUMCON now has available to invest in other library projects will provide a greater depth and variety of support for scientists and students at LUMCON.  Our journal access simply prevented us from affording these programs and infrastructure before.

I am in a position of leadership and have an amazing, supportive, and forward-thinking faculty to work with.  We are able to accomplish things that may not be possible in a larger university system.  So what can you do?

I am going to take a hard stance but here we go.

1. Do not require textbooks for your courses. Provide other materials and make them freely available to your students.
2. If you absolutely need to use a textbook, teach out of older editions. Provide in your syllabus a variety of links where that textbook can be purchased at a reduced fee. If you ever come across a good deal on that textbook, purchase it yourself.  Give or loan the book to your students in need.
3. Work with your university and state on ebook programs that purchase electronic rights to textbooks that are made freely available to your students.
4. Through your departmental and university committees, and your faculty senate, start working with your university (or putting pressure on them) to replace the antiquated and overpriced book model at your institution.
5. Do not serve as editor, reviewer, or author of a paper in a for-profit journal. Support the innovative models you want to see.  I recognize the commitment will be dependent on your career stage.  But you the senior faculty need to step up to the plate and be an example. Create safe places for junior faculty to be able to pursue this.
6. Change evaluation policies for faculty that reward open science models and decrease value on publishing in and with for-profit journals and publishing houses.
7. Do not grant interviews to journalists that work for these for-profit publishing houses and/or limit access to the materials behind a paywall. If we believe that scientific information should be available to all, then the public discussion and public translation of that work should also be freely available.
8. Educate yourself on open-access publishing standards. Here is a directory of all open-access journals.  Read about the difference between gold, green, and even copper open access standards.
9. Lastly, make sure you retain copyright over all your own work and make sure it is available for free on the web. I have been woefully poor on this front.  But as of today and moving forward, I will be posting all my preprints on https://arxiv.org/.  I will research all of the copyright and sharing restrictions on all of my published articles and try to find solutions in making them all more available.

I realized that this is a tremendous amount of burden on all us all.  Indeed, many times in science what is for the benefit of the scientific community is not for the benefit of the individual scientist.  These are big standards to follow, and depending on your career stage, opportunity, current funding, etc., you may not be able to follow all of these or follow them all of the time.  This does not make you a bad person or scientist.  But with all of us trying to make small decisions in the right direction, working toward this goal, we will move the field in total to the right place.

UPDATE: A colleague and friend asked this…

Great piece but genuine question, does open access = not for profit? Who are the not for profit publishers? Is there a list somewhere? I am all for open access and detest the pay wall system. But the problem with the current open access model is it places the burden of publishing cost on the individual scientist as opposed to the pay wall model where costs are met by library subscription and it is “free” for the individual researcher to publish. There must be another way to do this? I would like to see more societies running and profiting from journals. Then the profit goes back into science.

So open access does not always equal not for profit.  These are not mutually exclusive categories.  A journal can be

1. Completely open access, hybrid open access (papers are open access if the author chooses to pay additionally), or closed access
2. For- or non-profit
3. Society or not  (profit can be completely applied to the society or shared with a large for- or non-profit publishing house).

For example, PeerJ or PloS are open access and not for profit (UPDATE: Ok, ok people…PeerJ is technically for profit).  Nature Communications is an open access and for profit.  Unfortunately, I am not aware of a list of not for profit or non-profit journals.

My colleague does raise another issue which I’ve been burdened by for a while, the movement of paying for publishing of articles from the institution to the scientist.  The switch does not really address the real money issue and ultimately the taxpayer is footing the bill, the conduit of the money is just different.  I am not sure what the right model here is to solve this dilemma.  I am a fan of the PeerJ model that limits the publishing cost to a one-time fee for authors with each author of the paper paying this fee.  But the fee is negligible and spans an entire career.

Pricing for Lifetime Memberships is (from October 1, 2016):

• Basic: $399
• Enhanced: $449
• Premium: $499

Memberships allow for one, two, or five peer-reviewed publications per 12-month period respectively, counting from your last publication to your next first-decision.

The post Tipping Points, For-Profit Scientific Publishing, and Closed Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

1. We focus a lot on science communication as the generation of content.  However equally, and if not more, important is the filtering of content.  In the last few years, poorly informed, incorrect and out right maliciously wrong content has become prolific.  We need now, more than ever, for trusted domain experts to amplify, share, and provide reliable and accurate information. I saw this first hand reporting here at DSN with both the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and the Fukishama Reactors that bad information was rampant and people were looking for trusted content.

2. Somewhere we stopped teaching students and the public how to critically evaluate information. Or may be it never existed at all.  We need with renewed vigor to teach students and the public how to think, reason, and evaluate information.  We need mandatory classes and lessons across education levels in logic, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, problem solving, and scientific methodology.

3. We need to make sure good and correct information is more accessible and more viral than bad information.  We need to make it easier for students and the public to get the information they need to be an informed citizenry.

4. Science needs to be more open.  Open access publishing, science communication, and citizen science and other initiatives were good start of a larger “open” movement.  But now we need to swing the doors of science open a little wider.  We are not open or honest to our failures in the enterprise of science.  Metal health issues, inequality, profiteering, and harassment run rapid.  We need change and a river in Egypt isn’t the first step.

We need to be more open about our failures not just successes. @DrCraigMc giving a rallying cry rant I needed to hear and can get behind this morning. #nerdsoftrust

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

5. We need to renew the social contract between educational institutions and the public.  We need to place value on an informed and educated citizenry.   This is the hallmark to economic prosperity and quality, political stability and growth, innovation in the sciences and humanities, and overall public health.  The renewal of this contract comes first and foremost with economic commitment from local to national levels and the foresight that this investment will be returned 10-fold.

6. Scientists need to all become nerds of trust. On Facebook, over beers at the bar, in your local and state government meetings, you need to be there with science.

@DrCraigMc of @deepseanews encourages us librarians to be “nerds of trust for friends & family” & use social media like Facebook to discuss science in our social spheres. @alaannual #alaac18 @ALA_ACRL #STS pic.twitter.com/8it9UtOV4m

— Michael R Leach (@mikeleach42) June 25, 2018

7. Science communication needs to be goal and mission oriented.  The idea of a “Field of Dreams” model of putting something out there and expecting it work is ridiculous.  If you have not thought about what success is and how you are going to measure it, stop now.  Science communication has to be deliberate in action.

“We need to stop half-assing our science outreach” and to think I almost meh’d out of this mornings session because sleep. >⁦@DrCraigMc⁩ https://t.co/5wOgz5bTEJ

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

8. We need to break out of the echo chamber.  If you defriended all of your Facebook friends who had different political leanings to you, you are probably part of the problem.  Are your science communication efforts only reaching the NPR and PBS, science-enthusiast audience?  Was the last science and drink night you talked at just hipsters in tweed? Probably…  Are you still wondering why the public is struggling with science or just actively anti-science.  YOU ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM.  We need new and creative ways to reach new audiences especially those in lower socio-economic classes. We need to go to where they are and put science there.

9. We need to create and support places and times of innovation…places that domain experts in humanities, social science, education and pedagogy, science communication, and scientists learn from each other and build together.  These need to be places that applaud risk and go after moon shots while focused on action and products. Events like #oceandotcomm are one example.

10. Even if we don’t get anything else right, we need to get one thing right.  Be passionate.  This idea of science as cold, heartless, and stale enterprise needs to die.

“Be passionate. Science is not a cold place, it is an amazing place. Share that.” – @DrCraigMc in how we connect and excite the community in science efforts #alaac18

— Paige Dhyne (@LibandLife) June 25, 2018

The post 10 Things Science, Science Communication, and Just Maybe All of Academia Needs first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For more updates on my research, follow along at jellybiologist.com, or on twitter @RebeccaRHelm

As a scientist, I love jellyfish, and I suffer for it. Up until a few years ago, I had no way of knowing exactly where or when the jellyfish I study would appear. So I traveled to Washington and France and Florida looking for them, and more often than not, came up empty handed. The most frustrating part of all this travel was that I had all the species I needed right at home, but couldn’t use them. That’s because jellyfish, like butterflies, are the last stage in a complicated life cycle. Jellyfish have a stage that’s analogous to a caterpillar, termed a ‘polyp’, which lives happily in the lab. So imagine studying butterflies, and having all the caterpillar you need, expect none of them will metamorphose. No matter how hard you try to convince them, they just sit there eating leaves, and so you travel all around the world to find and study the actual butterflies. That is the exact position researchers and aquarists have been in with jellyfish.

This is why I’m so excited to share with you a paper I just published in PLOS ONE on a simple method for triggering metamorphosis in a huge variety of jellyfish species. Now, rather than traveling halfway around the globe, scientists can add a couple drops of a special compound to their polyp tank, and have jellyfish to study in under a week! I hope this work will be helpful to many different kinds of jelly-lovers, form biologists to aquarists and beyond.

This research started out of frustration. I’d been traveling for over two years looking for the best species to study, and was consistently coming up short. I wanted to better understand the process of metamorphosis, called ‘strobilation’, but I needed to find a species that would easily strobilate in captivity. No luck. And so one day, rather than going out to look for jellies,  I decided it was time to spend a couple months indoors, to test out a hair-brained idea that was all together different.

Throughout the decades, a handful of scientist have recorded that this-or-that chemical, when added to water with this-or-that polyps species, will trigger strobilation. Most of these papers stretch back to the 70’s and earlier, and most have been largely forgotten. But I decided it was time to revisit those old studies, and test out different chemicals. The experiments were messy and quirky–I had a bunch of chemicals, jars, and polyps all soaking in different substances for different lengths of time–but I remember the exact moment when I got my first breakthrough.

I carried a small dish of polyps, which had been soaking in a type of chemical called an ‘indole’, to the microscope. I was working alone in the lab, and I was feeling pretty discouraged. It’d been two weeks of stirring up different chemical solutions, doling them out in precise proportions, and checking every single day for signs that the little polyps had begun metamorphosis. Nothing. But when I looked down at the polyps soaking in indoles…well, I think my lab notebook can express it better than I can (there was, um…some language):

Each polyp had formed a small ring below the tentacles. This ring was the first sign of metamorphosis. Each ring would eventually grow to be a tiny jellyfish (the pictures at the top of this post are the same animals I saw that day!) This species is the Pacific sea nettle, but the same compound also worked for species from the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Almost every species I tried would dutifully metamorphose into a tiny jellyfish.

Not only did this open up a whole new research avenue for me, it has become the foundation for my career. Now we can have tiny jellyfish of almost any species in under a week. Even box jellies!

But here’s a result that’s got me head scratching: one type of polyp, from a crown jellyfish, didn’t strobilate with the indoles. I tried all sorts of different combinations of conditions, nothing worked. But there are a couple really cool things about crown jellies that may explain why they didn’t respond. First, the polyp lives in a small tube, unlike any other species. So it’s possible the compound didn’t work because the polyp is mostly tucked away behind a barrier. But the second cool thing about this species is that it’s a very distant cousin of most of the species that I studied. So it is possible that over evolutionary time it evolved a slightly different biochemistry, which makes it insensitive to indoles. Similar to the way catnip gets cats high, but doesn’t have the same impact on people. Indoles works well on many related species of jellies, but not so well on a distant relative.

I’m now working on figuring out the reason why indoles works so well for some species. What genes might this compound help turn on and off? By studying metamorphosis in jellyfish, I hope to better understand how metamorphosis evolved over long time scales. For example, are there genetic similarities of metamorphosis between frogs, butterflies, and jellies?

Those results are still pending. For now, I’m enjoying all the new jellies we have growing in the lab. And I hope these results can be helpful to all those seeking to learn more about jellyfish in this coming new year!

Paper:

Rebecca R. Helm & Casey W. Dunn (2017). Indoles induce metamorphosis in a broad diversity of jellyfish, but not in a crown jelly (Coronatae). PLOS ONE 12(12): e0188601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188601

The post New Research Reveals How to Easily Grow Jellyfish In Captivity first appeared on Deep Sea News.

And luckily for us, Roxanne posts all of her adventures as they happen on her Istagram and Twitter feeds. Even better—Roxanne is currently on an expedition to explore the deep-sea Gulf of California with Nautilus Live, which is live broadcasting all of its dives for the world to watch. So you too can follow Roxanne and the octonaut crew on their real-life mission of discovery. As they say on the show: Octonauts, let’s do this!

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The #octonauts are back at it! Join us with @nautiluslive as we explore new vent and seep sites off the coast of Mexico. Dives will start in a few days!

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 19, 2017 at 5:10am PDT

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Arrived at the ship and getting settled into the snazzy top bunk

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 19, 2017 at 5:06pm PDT

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The #octonauts are steaming to station with @nautiluslive

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 20, 2017 at 4:57pm PDT

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Working hard, processing samples with @nautiluslive

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 22, 2017 at 2:30pm PDT

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#octonauts #roxbscience

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 8, 2016 at 2:37pm PDT

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Look closely at the boxing glove. The #octonauts are psyched about this gup! #roxbscience

A post shared by Roxanne Beinart (@rbeinart) on Oct 8, 2016 at 10:38am PDT

The post When real-life marine biologist and mom goes to sea, she takes the octonauts with her first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post When Is An Internship Not An Internship? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve been lucky enough to see a few live trachymedusae in my lifetime. They’re among the most beautiful jellies I know, with fascinating colors and structures. Why this jelly has two types of tentacles–those facing up and those facing down–is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a way to help it capture prey? But what might that prey be? We really don’t know.

So much left to learn and discover!

The post This deep-sea jelly looks like something from a dream first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When it comes to ocean outreach, Dr. M is a giant: a rum-loving, goggle-wearing outreach giant, one with whom I had the pleasure of working on his most massive (though by far not his only) science-meets-outreach success. Dr. M was the lead author on a groundbreaking 2015 review paper called “Sizing Ocean Giants,” cataloging the largest members of many marine animal groups. He was kind enough to include me as a participant, and the experience was beyond inspiring. I’ve never seen someone so seamlessly integrate teaching, outreach, and research, and all with remarkable results.

Best I can tell from sleuthy internet sleuthery, Dr. M first realized there was a need for such a paper sometime around 2006, a full nine years before publishing “Sizing Ocean Giants” (talk about commitment!) Why do think 2006 was the golden year? Because he wrote about it, briefly, in a 2011 article for Wired on the value of taxonomists:

In 2006 I set out to explore how biodiversity and body size were linked among animals. To do so I needed information on the largest- and smallest-sized species for each group of animals — something surprisingly not readily garnered from the published literature.

So what did he do? He published the literature. How? He lead a team of five undergraduates on a semester-long adventure to solve the mysteries of the biggest ocean beasts. All five undergrads earned authorship on the paper. In conceiving the idea, Dr. M had a teaching vision:

The students would become experts on their individual animals. Part of that coming about by searching the literature for body size data. Part coming from sharing that knowledge with the public. I would ask each student to contribute blog posts to storyofsize.com and that would serve as our core of outreach. I would require each student to engage the science community and public via Twitter.

But the really amazing part, at least to me, is that it worked. I mean, it’s a beautiful idea, but actually pulling it off? Dr. M made it happen, coordinating his team of five students and 10 scientists to publish the 69 page manuscript, complete with publicly available dataset and computer code to back it. The paper rapidly became one of the journal’s top marine biology papers. Science, education, outreach: I’ve heard a lot of people talk about ways to combine these goals, but Dr. M did it, and he did it beautifully.

And the thing is, I don’t really know if Dr. M appreciates just how impactful his outreach is. My experience with Sizing Ocean Giants left a lasting impression. When it was all over I thought, ‘I want to do that some day. I want to be like that guy.’

And I’m not the only one. I wasn’t even looking for examples of people whose lives have been changed by Dr. M when a friend of mine told me this:

I read [DSN] at 15 and it made me want to do what I do. Way back when it was part of this amazing community of science bloggers called “Science Blogs”- I subscribed to DSN, as well as many others through Google Reader (this amazing, now non-existent RSS aggregator). I followed them through their migration…for this science obsessed teenager, this was the perfect place for me to read about things I was fascinated by. I wanted to be a marine biologist, but this helped to narrow the scope, and here I am!

She is now a PhD candidate studying deep-sea animals.

I don’t know how many people Dr. M has touched with his humor, dedication, and intellect. But counting me and my friend–well that’s two right there. Add to that all the folks he has reached through Sizing Ocean Giants and Deep-Sea News? I bet my friend and I are in good company. So thank you Dr. M. Thank you for your Giants paper, thank you for your leadership, thank you for helping to change science outreach for the better.

The post Dr. M: An Ocean Outreach Giant first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Discoveries in science are not often the result of the stereotypical and unrealistic step-by-step scientific method, but usually occur through other more mundane and unexpected routes.  Think of Flemming’s moldy lunchbox sandwiches as the pathway to developing penicillin, or Newton stone-drunk in an orchard contemplating gravity with a rain of apples falling on his noggin’. When marine biologists discover a new species, especially a new shark species, it isn’t the result of putting on a red-knit cap and a pair of Speedos on your research vessel and loudly declaring that you are going to discover a new shark. Throw the mini-sub overboard, gaze into the darkness through an oval window, and bam – a new species is discovered. Bottles of Clicquot pop back on deck, the scientific community hoists you on their shoulders and applauds your excellence in zoology. Maybe the jackals from Shark Week give you a call to recreate your daring feats for a documentary low on facts and ripe with pseudoscience, likely replacing you with younger C-list actors and warping what actually happened with their own overly-dramatic narrative. With our discovery of the newly-described Ninja Lanernshark, it wasn’t the reward of a planned grand adventure, but was the usual meander of social connections, cooperation among colleagues, the benefits of museum archives, hard work from unpaid graduate students, and plain old good luck.

Several years back, John McCosker of the California Academy of Sciences and Dave Ebert, also a Cal. Academy research associate like myself, and I were studying chimeras, distant deep-sea cousins of sharks. One day I got an email from D. Ross Robertson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute who in 2010 chartered a Spanish trawler and conducted a number of deep-sea collections off the Pacific coast of Central America, and among the barrels of specimens he collected were a few odd-looking chimeras he wanted us to identify.  Ross had the good sense to photograph many of these specimens while they were still fresh out of the nets, and he forwarded them to us. Along with the photos of these chimeras were hundreds of other photos of deep-sea fishes, including sharks, skates, and bony fishes that were either entirely unknown species, or new locality records for previously-known but poorly documented species.  To a deep-sea ichthyologist, this was the jackpot.  I soon headed to the ichthyology collections at the Smithsonian and spent several days pulling these specimens out of gallon jars of ethanol or dipping my arms nearly shoulder-deep into huge vats of the stuff where the large specimens were preserved. Taking photographs, measurements, and making on-the-spot identifications, I compiled a large number of specimens that the fine folks in the Smithsonian ichthyology department shipped back to the California Academy of Sciences where we could more closely study them.

Once the sharks arrived, Dave and I looked them over and we both thought they were a new species since
they were unlike anything yet known from the eastern central Pacific, but “discovering” a new species isn’t as easy as that.  To describe a new species you need to conclusively show the range of variation in your new species is outside the range of variation in previously-known species. It has to be significantly different than any relative species thus far known. To do this required the painstaking and time consuming process of morphometrics, the detailed series of measurements of the sharks anatomy, and meristics, the count of such things as vertebrae, tooth rows, number of dermal denticles, etc. Fortunately, Dave and I already had a process where we worked with young go-getters, mainly his graduate students at the Pacific Shark Research Center in the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, to learn the process of describing and publishing new species of sharks, rays, and chimeras. Victoria Vasquez was one of his students already with experience in shark ecology and conservation outreach, so he assigned her to heading the job of the not-so-sexy nitty-gritty of the detailed analysis of the formalin-preserved shark specimens with microscopes, rulers, and dial calipers, and she was a superstar at it.

It soon became clear that these small sharks did indeed represent a new species of lanternshark, a family of deep-sea sharks with this as the first species yet known from the region.  Most deep-sea sharks are dark brown or black to blend in with the darkness of the depths, but some species, like the lanternsharks, have bioluminescent organs that glow a shining pale green. This adaptation may either be to attract mates, maintain group cohesion in a school, lure smaller invertebrates within snapping range of their mouth, or possibly to create a halo-like effect to mediate the downwelling light from above and the tell-tale shadow a predator might see from below, making them effectively invisible. The newly described Ninja Lanernshark seemed to have few of these glow-in-the-dark organs, appearing less like a shark jack-o-lantern and more like a Japanese ninja dressed in black, and using their dark visage to their advantage, so prey may never see it coming. When Victoria consulted her young cousins to help with a common name for this new species, there were many options from the excited shark-loving kids, but Ninja Lanternshark, honed down from Super Ninja Shark, seemed appropriate.

The scientific name was of course in honor of Jaws author Peter Benchley. Several decades earlier I worked with him during a shark conservation program through the Cal Academy, and he admitted – what I had already heard through many other people – that he carried a burden of regret for the violent backlash against sharks unintentionally instigated by his book.  For years afterward, he was not just an advocate for sharks, but a tireless campaigner in promoting ocean conservation. Long after his death, the Benchley Awards fund those who share his dream. Coincidentally, this year was the 40th anniversary of the publication of Jaws, and Victoria already knew Benchely’s widow, who was told about the new shark bearing her husband’s name. After several months of measurements, comparisons with other known species, and countless revisions of the manuscript, it was submitted to the Journal of the Ocean Sciences foundation, one of the rare but essentially important journals that still publishes species descriptions of fishes, and more importantly, one with open access, making this shark species immediately available to the world just this week. The ‘discovery’ of a new species of shark means nothing until a detailed, peer-reviewed study is finally made public.  Fortunately, the bottles of Clicquot can still be popped.

Vasquez, V.E., D.A. Ebert, and D.J. Long.  2015. Etmopterus benchleyi n. sp., a new lanternshark (Squaliformes: Etmopteridae) from the central eastern Pacific Ocean. Journal of the Ocean Sciences Foundation, 17:43-55.

The post Ninja Lanternshark: the New Shark Species You Will Never See Coming first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Calling all scientists!!!

Looking for a way to make a big impact with relatively little effort ? Do you like talking about your research to a captive audience that won’t run away? Do you actually remember how to write a letter that’s not an e-mail? (Seriously though….).

You are in luck. The group “Letter’s to a Pre-Scientist” are currently looking for science pen pals to inspire kids who might not normally interact with REAL scientists.

This is something that could take less than 30 minutes of your time, yet make a huge difference for a young person. Who knows, you might even find some of that much needed inspiration as you trudge through proofreading that last grant application.

To participate, you just sign up at www.prescientist.org and commit to writing four letters a year to your pen pal. Tell all your science friends.

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