This week the best part of the 90s has returned in full force with the Niantic’s release of Pokémon Go. You guys, this is like that thing when they re-released Oregon Trail for mobile devices…but better.

For those not in the know, Pokémon Go basically blurs the lines between the real world and the virtual world by allowing “Pokétrainers” to catch em’ all as they go through their everyday lives. Quite effectively getting the nerds out into nature to exercise. Sneaky sneaky.

Reports have poured in regarding the rather interesting places people have found themselves looking for wild Pokémon. From strip clubs to delivery rooms, you never know where a Squirtle may be hiding. Perhaps even next to a dead body. 

With that said, I think we can all agree, there are good places to look for Pokémon and very bad, bad places to look for Pokémon. We here at Deep Sea News believe it is our sacred duty to keep the public well informed of all things ocean-faring and would like to point out some of the places that perhaps you shouldn’t go looking for your next Seel or Horsea. You’re welcome.

1. Mariana Trench 

Nearly 7 miles down (36,070 feet), the Mariana Trench clocks in as the deepest point in the world’s oceans. Not only would you not be able to see anything, but the pressures 1,000x that of sea level would crush you and your hopes of catching all the Seadra lurking around in the ocean’s depths. Of course, if you are besties with James Cameron…you might have a chance.

2. Rocky Intertidal Zone

Unlike most of the sea stars on the West Coast of the United States, Starmie’s are immune to Sea Star Wasting Disease so you might actually by lucky enough to find one. However, you must remember that they occupy one of the most extreme ecosystems in the world, the Rocky Intertidal Zone. Thus, in order to be the very best like no one ever was, you must first combat some potentially massive wave action.

3. Hydrothermal Vents

Ironically, there are probably a crap ton of Pokémon at hydrothermal vents and most likely the rarest and most exotic species of all. These vents are teaming with biological diversity uniquely adapted to this most extreme environment comprised of high temperatures and seemingly toxic water. They are adapted…you aren’t.

4. Cook Inlet (Anchorage, Alaska)

Boasting some of the most dramatic tidal exchanges in the United States, this area off the coast of Anchorage, Alaska is no place for Pokétrainers. Krabby and the rest of the water Pokémon won’t get stuck in the quicksand-like glacial silt, but you might. Combine that with a 12.2 m tidal shift and Team Rocket trying to steal your Pokémon will be the least of your worries.   

5. Dead Zone (Gulf of Mexico)

Hypoxic Areas, or Dead Zones, occur when the level of dissolved oxygen in the water column is so low that the area can no longer support aerobic life (note: of which I assume for the sake of this post Pokémon to be). The United States claims domain over one of the second largest hypoxic zones world wide, the Mississippi River mouth in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. This is due, in major part, to large agricultural nutrient run-off. Do not let the photoshopped Squirtle in this picture fool you. There are no Pokémon here. They are all dead.

6. Polar Region

Let’s be real. It’s cold. There is ice everywhere. You don’t have an ice breaker. Though with climate change the way it’s going, catching that Seel might just be a waiting game.  

7. Mediterranean Sea

“The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that 650,000,000 tons of sewage, 129,000 tons of mineral oil, 60,000 tons of mercury, 3,800 tons of lead and 36,000 tons of phosphates are dumped into the Mediterranean each year.” Probability has it that the Mediterranean Sea is the world’s most polluted ocean, meaning that there are most likely low levels of Pokémon and high levels of “you don’t want to swim there”.

The post The Worst Ocean Environments to “Catch Em’ All” first appeared on Deep Sea News.

With things such as penis fencing and massive sea hare orgies, I think we can all agree, the ocean does “it” in some pretty weird and marvelous ways. So in the spirit of sperm and gif week, I decided to compile some of the kinkiest and intriguing ocean romps, courting displays, and ‘techniques’ for your viewing pleasure. Don’t worry…it’s safe for work…No one will actually know what you are looking at and they probably won’t believe you when you tell them.

1. ‘Knock, Knock.’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Barnacle Penis.’ ‘Barnacle Penis whooooaaahhhh.’ Like one of those Facebook Instant Videos you just can’t stop watching, the longest member* of the animal kingdom prowls around looking for a likely mate. Being completely cemented down for almost all of their life, these crusty Casanovas had to figure out another way to carry on the family line.

2. It’s a Torpedo! It’s a Worm! Actually…it’s a penis. Well, kind of. It’s more correctly termed a hectocotylus. Once an arm attached to the male Argonaut, a group of octopus that secrets a shell known as a paper nautilus, these organs are filled with sperm and ejected in search of a female suitor. Fully detached, they can free swim in search of a female pallial cavity and copulation can ensue. The ocean is weird people.

3. Flatworms are fierce lovers. Being hermaphrodites, they have both lady bits and man bits. But because raising flatworm babies takes so much effort and energy, no one wants the responsibility. So what do they do? They gouge each other with their man bits in a battle royale unlike any other. The fastest shooter in this situation is the winner and goes on floating about sex battling other flatworms, while the loser is stuck with the real world responsibilities of taking care of the kids.

4. They might look all cute and innocent but Sea Hares are actually quite sexually promiscuous. They too are hermaphrodites and will join together in 50 shades of red to form long love chains of copulation. The impregnated individuals will then lay noodle-like pink eggs in large mats covering the ocean floor.

5. Many ocean-faring critters are Stage 5 Clingers when it comes to relationships. In certain copepod species, duration of when females can mate is a relatively small window.  Males will latch on to the females and wait till this time comes, despite how annoying this might be for the female individual. Anglerfish males are also well known for a similar behavior, however in that instance they will fuse with the female entirely and are only used as baby making machines for the rest of their existence.

6. Perhaps one of the most beautiful courtship displays is brought to us by the Cuttlefish. Male Cuttles will attempt to impress the ladies by pulsing vibrant patterns across their mantles while defending territory on the reef. After a extensive display, it’s ladies choice and the fun begins.

7. Male turtles use the small claws on their flippers to lock-in a female for mating. But what happens when you another guy comes around and thinks he’s a better suitor? Things. get. ugly…

8. I believe I can fly!! I believe all the ladies are minnnnneeee! Mobulas, or Devil Rays as they are often referred, can school in the thousands. Sometimes they are observed jumping high out of the water. Though scientists are not 100% sure on the purpose of this behavior, one of the reasons purposed is as a sort of courtship dance or proof of prowess. The higher you can jump, the better you are…fathering mobula babies.

*Proportionally the longest at 8x times the body ratio

The post This Is How We Do It first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In trying to explain to friends, colleagues and Twitter followers during recent days what James Cameron may have seen out that softball-sized window of the Deep Challenger submersible last Sunday, I’ve struggled to convey effectively just how hostile the deep sea environment can really be.  It just looks so plain, serene and (in Cameron’s words) desolate.  I have one skeptical friend who objected to my statement that, relative to the Marianas Trench “space is easy”.  Of course space is not entirely easy.  Getting there is the hardest part, and once you’re there, cosmic rays, weightlessness and those nasty bitey little micrometeoroids can play havoc with even the most well-prepared astronaut and his/her spacecraft.

But there is one property where my throwaway holds true and that is pressure.  You see, inside a space capsule the pressure is 1 atmosphere, the same as on land at mean sea level on earth, while the pressure outside the capsule is close to zero: the vacuum of space.  That’s a pressure difference of 1 atmosphere.  When Deep Challenger descended to the earth’s deepest point, however, it passed that difference at just 10 meters (30ft) below the surface!  Indeed, you can experience and survive this difference quite easily for short periods, so that scene in Total Recall where Arnie and Rachel Ticotin’s eyes are bugging out of their heads on the Martian surface? Yeah, not so much.  At the bottom of the Marianas Trench, however, the weight of seven miles of water overhead means that the ambient pressure is about 1,100 atmospheres.  That’s a different of 1,099 ATM between Mr. Cameron and the outside of that 40-inch sphere he’s jammed into.

What does that mean though?  1,100 ATM is just an abstract number.  OK.  Well, in Cameron’s own words, it’s so great that the steel sphere in which he travels to the bottom actually shrinks measurably during descent.  One analogy the Deep Sea Challenge team uses (and I quoted yesterday) is that 1,100 ATM is equivalent to inverting the Eiffel Tower and resting its point on your big toe. Ouch. Now imagine another Eiffel Tower for every square inch of your body.  A second way to think about it is that 1,100 ATM is about the same as the peak pressure that occurs in the chamber of a handgun for a fraction of a second after the bullet fires.  Unlike the gun, however, the pressure in Challenger Deep is sustained and pervasive.  It’s like living in a moment frozen in time, inside an explosion.  If the sub had rivets to pop (which it doesn’t), they would literally become bullets inside the sphere.  1,100 ATM is also a little less than the pressure in a commercial water cutter that uses a high pressure jet of liquid to cut patterns out of steel.  It would certainly be enough that after that imaginary rivet popped, the ensuing water jet would slice soft human tissue like butter.  Of course, not for very long, because the weakness in the vessel would likely result in catastrophic implosion and instantaneous death for the unfortunate occupant.  Outside an appropriately strong metal sphere, the human body would be compressed to a fraction of its volume at the surface as every last void space collapses and the tissues themselves condense under the massive load.  I don’t know what the final effect would be, but I’m imagining something like an extra large meat-lovers pizza…

OK, I think we’ve established that the pressure down there is really high and that generally speaking it’s not especially good for one’s health.  It couldn’t get worse could it?  Well…  There are other differences at massive pressures that any organism that wants to live down there has to cope with.  Here’s just three:

One important difference concerns cell membranes, those phospholipid bilayers that surround every cell in the body.  Cell membranes are “semi-permeable”, which means that some things pass through them and some things don’t.  It turns out that the permeability of membranes is very sensitive to pressure, so something as fundamental as keeping water or important molecules inside (or outside) cells becomes harder to manage at hadal pressures.  The cells of organisms may shrink like raisins or swell and burst, or simply leak important chemicals in or out, none of which is A Good Thing.

The second difference concerns proteins and enzymes.  Proteins are long, complex chains of amino acid molecules that have to fold up like molecular origami in order to work correctly.  You can maybe guess that the folding is different under pressure.  This is especially important for the class of proteins called enzymes, which are catalysts for chemical reactions in the body (they make the reactions occur but do not themselves change in the process).   If enzymes fold incorrectly, then the chemical substrates they work with may no longer fit the enzyme properly and the reaction may cease, or possibly they fit too well and the reaction accelerates out of control.  The majority of biochemical reactions in cells are enzyme-mediated, from energy metabolism to cell division, so the effects of enzyme disruption would be profound.  Pressure can even make molecules more (or less) toxic.  Urea is a good example: it becomes far more toxic as pressure increases.  So deep sea sharks, which like all sharks have a lot of urea in their blood, also have a lot more of the protective chemical TMAO to offset this effect than do their shallow water cousins.

The third difference relates to solubility and this is the biggie for fish in the hadal depths.  This is because at those sorts of pressures, some organic molecules or organic/inorganic complexes, like bones, can quite literally dissolve and go back into solution in the water and this is hypothesized to prevent fish and other animals with hardened body parts from living at those depths (but we shall see if this holds true!). This process is called, rather confusingly, “remineralization” and it affects the rest of the food web too.  The marine snow of animal feces and dead bodies and mucus and other dross that gently falls from the sea surface to the depths, for example, can partly or completely dissolve as it falls, leading to a sort of horizon depth above which it is snowing and below which it is not.  In this way remineralization could result in less food making it to the bottom, perhaps contributing to the general sparseness of life.

The old chestnut that “nature abhors a vacuum” might be amended in the deep sea as “nature abhors a vacuum but it is flat-out terrified of 1,100 atmospheres”.  It’s difficult to wrap your head around how staggeringly, mind-bogglingly, literally bone-crushingly intense the pressure is down there, and yet there is still life in those dark, cold, silent, heavy depths.  You can’t help but wonder how they cope and what things we might learn from the biology of pressure-loving life of the hadal zone: the piezophiles.

The post Cool as a sea cucumber: life (and death) at extraordinary deep sea pressures first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post A reminder that… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Lucky deep-sea organisms get the paradise described above.  Ones not so lucky live their lives in the oxygen minimum zone.  This is exactly what it sounds like, an area of no to little oxygen. It even comes with a clever acronym that makes it sound like a combat zone, OMZ.  OMZ’s typically occur at depths of 200-1000 meters forming a band of low oxygen hell in the eastern Pacific, southeast Atlantic, Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.  In OMZ’s larger organisms fair the worse with their numbers typically suppressed.  In contrast, in really small organisms, e.g. bacteria, copepods, nematodes, ostracods, forams and the like, the numbers are the same in and out of the OMZ.  What is also clear is that to survive the OMZ, an organism needs to be packing the right physiological and anatomical toolset.  Accordingly, OMZ species are different than their non-OMZ counterparts.

A new suite of excellent studies on the Pakistan OMZ in the NE Arabian Sea was unleashed in the recent issue of Deep-Sea Research II.  The set of multidisplinary studies exhaustively examines the biological and geochemical processes in this particularly thick (150-1300m) and extreme (near 0 ml/L oxygen concentrations) OMZ.  That’s what she said.  This OMZ is the grandpappy of all OMZ’s.  Some of the findings of the group are that indeed the Pakistan OMZ is hell-hole that becomes more or less so as a result of monsoonal variation, that microbial processes and bioturbation are predictably affected by the suckiness of OMZ life, and even the organic material is more degraded than predicted.  In the core of the Pakistan OMZ (250-750m), where oxygen hits a record low, larger organisms are extremely rare, even more so than other OMZ’s like the nearby Oman OMZ.  All the large organisms move to the OMZ suburbs leaving behind the forams to do as the like and do it absence of predators like ispods and scaphopods. Of course, until an “urban planning commission” “revitalizes” the neighborhood and everyone comes back to the city. Sorry I got caught up in the analogy. Finally, given the harsh conditions of an OMZ and the requirements needed to live in one, a rapid turnover in species makeup is observable as you progress through and out of the OMZ.

Gooday, A., Levin, L., Aranda da Silva, A., Bett, B., Cowie, G., Dissard, D., Gage, J., Hughes, D., Jeffreys, R., & Lamont, P. (2009). Faunal responses to oxygen gradients on the Pakistan margin: A comparison of foraminiferans, macrofauna and megafauna Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, 56 (6-7), 488-502 DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr2.2008.10.003
Cowie, G., & Levin, L. (2009). Benthic biological and biogeochemical patterns and processes across an oxygen minimum zone (Pakistan margin, NE Arabian Sea) Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, 56 (6-7), 261-270 DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr2.2008.10.001

The post OMZ’s: God-For-Saken Pits of Despair first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When you think of cold marine environments, you probably think of blubber-wrapped seals, whales, and walruses, big, furry bears, or a huddled mass of penguins. What do those animals have in common? They are endotherms, their body temperature maintenance depends on consistently high levels of heat generated (and retained) internally.

Animals you probably do not identify with cold conditions are reptiles. Generally speaking, reptiles (e.g. lizards, snakes, and turtles) are ectotherms, meaning that their body temperatures depend on ambient temperatures, such that reptiles in fluctuating thermal environments must behaviorally seek microclimates that will best suit their physiological needs. Thus, because they rely on heat from their surroundings, reptiles typically don’t handle cold environments very well.

In the 1960s, marine biologist Sherman Bleakney collected fishermen’s anecdotes, observations, and specimens of noteworthy large-bodied marine animals in frigid Nova Scotian waters. However, the fishermen weren’t telling stories about the grey seals or the minke whales. The tales were about turtles. Big turtles.

Bleakney and others had heard about the rotund, inky-blue turtles called leatherbacks occasionally reported in Nova Scotia, but considered them rare visitors that inadvertently appeared in these fog-coated cold waters. But once he put together all of the records, he realized that these critters were not lost; they were regulars.

Leatherbacks are extraordinary for many reasons, but perhaps their most impressive characteristic is their expansive distribution. They have the widest geographic and thermal range of any reptile species. Their tolerance of cold water allows them to exploit highly productive marine foodwebs at high latitudes and extreme depths that are unavailable to other sea turtle species. The fundamental question that Bleakney and others asked was: how can these turtles go where no other reptiles would dare?

Some pioneering work in the 1970s established that leatherbacks were able to maintain elevated and relatively consistent body temperatures in cold water (Frair et al., 1972). This was straightforward and not necessarily surprising given the observations in Nova Scotia, but the finding presented a significant challenge for the endotherm-ectotherm dichotomy: leatherbacks are turtles, but turtles are reptiles, and reptiles are not supposed to be able to generate and retain heat over long periods of time, especially in cold water. So how do leatherbacks it? Were they mammals in a turtle’s body?

With this question in mind, Jim Spotila and Frank Paladino hit the beaches of Costa Rica in the 1980s to solve the riddle of leatherback thermoregulation. While fending off hoards of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, sneaky scorpions, and earth-rumbling thunderstorms, they discovered that leatherback metabolic rates were much lower than those of mammals, but slightly higher than those of reptiles sized to leatherback size.

Using these metabolic rates in biophysical models, Paladino et al. (1990) figured out that leatherbacks could combine these relatively low, but consistent, metabolic rates with their huge body mass, a thick layer of peripheral fat for insulation, and adjustments in blood to stay warm in cold Canadian waters and to avoid overheating in toasty tropical Caribbean waters.

Because leatherbacks do not fit neatly into either the ectothermy or endothermy categories, their unique integration of heat generation and retention adaptations earned them a different term: “gigantotherms.”

A recent review of sea turtle metabolism and thermoregulation confirmed that leatherback metabolic rates are not significantly different from those expected for leatherback-sized reptiles, and that large body size is crucial to heat retention (Wallace and Jones, 2008). Leatherbacks can alter swimming behavior to increase heat generated internally through vigorous swimming (Bostrom and Jones, 2007), or by shuttling between different water temperatures to regulate heat loss, but their reptilian metabolic rates mean that being huge is necessary to avoid losing body heat. In fact, researchers have determined a body size threshold (~100 cm carapace length) below which leatherbacks are unable to penetrate water temperatures colder than 26°C, which means that to get in to the cold water habitats, big bodies are required (Eckert 2002).

Leatherbacks’ considerable girth is important for staying warm, but does it continue to their deep diving prowess? In general, for an air-breathing diver, buoyancy decreases as an animal gets bigger, such that really small sea turtles have to work harder to overcome positive buoyancy near the surface, but adult turtles can power down more efficiently. Additionally, large body size can mean higher oxygen stores in blood and muscle, facilitating longer and deeper trips beneath the ocean’s surface away from the turtle’s next breath.

However, these size-based differences in diving and thermoregulation appear to disappear after the 100 cm threshold, as Searcher (the smallest turtle in the Great Turtle Race) showed with a very respectable finish in the Cold Water Challenge. The Iron Turtle competition should also bear this out. There is no size advantage for extreme diving – stay tuned to www.GreatTurtleRace.org to find out more!

Large-bodied leatherback turtles are gigantotherms because they integrate physiology, anatomy, and behavior to be able to forage in waters cold enough to kill a human in a matter of minutes, something no other reptiles on the planet can do.

At least no living reptile…

Leatherbacks are not the Earth’s only gigantothermic reptiles; dinosaurs employed the same mechanisms to range from the tropics to temperate latitudes during their heyday.

So at least now you know that size most definitely matters to turtles, particularly if you are a leatherback doing an impression of polar bears or penguins…

Citations:

– BOSTROM, B.L., JONES, D.R., 2007. Exercise warms adult leatherback turtles. Comp. Physiol. Biochem.,Part A 147, 323–331.
– ECKERT, S.A., 2002. Distribution of juvenile leatherback sea turtle Dermochelys coriacea sightings. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 230, 289–293.
– FRAIR, W., ACKMAN, R.G., MROSOVSKY, N., 1972. Body temperature of Dermochelys coriacea: warm turtle from cold water. Science 177, 791–793.
– PALADINO, F.V., O’CONNOR, M.P., SPOTILA, J.R., 1990. Metabolism of leatherback turtles, gigantothermy, and thermoregulation of dinosaurs. Nature 344, 858–860.
– WALLACE, B., & JONES, T. (2008). What makes marine turtles go: A review of metabolic rates and their consequences Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology DOI: 10.1016/j.jembe.2007.12.023

The post Gigantothermy: Size Matters first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Thankfully Ed Yong has tackled one of them and probably did a better write up than what I intended.  Ed you master of the written word o’ how I long to be you. Ed discusses how a recent study shows that three families of fish are actually the male, female, and juveniles of the same family.

The second article titled “A Novel Vertebrate Eye Using Both Refractive and Reflective Optics,” describes the the crazy eyes of the spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes. The eyes are tubular, like many other deep-sea fish, but uniquely divided into two part one facing downwards and another facing upwards.  Further craziness ensues with both refractive and reflective optics.  Cool stuff that deserves a longer write up.

The post Two Papers I Want To Write About But Can’t Find The Time first appeared on Deep Sea News.