Over a week ago, Thaler tagged in my a Tweet.

O’ how I coveted my neighbor’s Life magazine.  In case you cannot tell that is February 15, 1960 issue featuring Picard, Walsh, and the Trieste on the cover.  The two men in the Trieste reached a record maximum depth of about 10,911 metres (35,797 ft), in the deepest known part of the Earth’s oceans, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench.  This Life issue was published just weeks after this record dive (January 23, 1960).

I am in awe that Thaler parted with such a momento and gifted it to me.

The post An Unexpected Surprise in My Mail first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Andrew and I designed the boat as a birthday present for our boss, a famous deep-sea vent biologist who worked on this shrimp’s biology and ecology earlier in her career.  This was a team project between myself, Andrew and Amy at SFS, William and David from our lab. You will have to go to Southern Fried Science to get all the details but here is a sneak peak of the awesomeness and a description of the Rimicanoe’s anatomy and biomimetic characteristics!

The post Behold the Rimicanoe! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You might have noticed that my posting frequency is down recently.  Why?

1. Kevin Z convinced me to start Tweeting.  There seems to be an inverse relationship to my writing for DSN and posting Tweets.  Previous attempts to integrate our Twitter content into DSN were rocky at best and met with many complaints.  Suggestions on how to integrate the two meaningfully are welcomed. You can follow me at DrCraigMc

2. I am working on a review of this book for American Scientist.

3. I am also writing a feature article for American Scientist following on the theme of my talk last year at Sigma Xi.

4. Isopocaplyse 2010 consumed a bit of my time.  If you didn’t catch it already check out GlassBox Design and National Geographic’s coverage.  I am delightfully snarky!

5. I worked with the spectacularly talented Robin Smith to put together a press release and video for my recent paper in Ecology.  That was met with a fair amount of cricket chirping.  O’ well Bora, Science360, and I think its cool.

6. Multiple scientific papers in the works right now on deep-sea biogeography, source-sink dynamics in the deep sea, the evolution of body size in deep-sea bivalves, what drives the evolution of size on islands, describing the new species above, changes in energy consumption of snails through geologic time, changes in seamount diversity with increasing depth, and how microhabitat diversity in the deep sea drives biodiversity.  Whew!

7.  My day job.

8.  The fact there is only 24 hours in a day.

So what would I like to blog on but haven’t found time?

1. The discovery of the world’s deepest hydrothermal vent. It’s really hot and deep!

2. What will likely be the coolest discovery of the year and decade…anaerobic multicellular organisms in the deep sea.  This one is so cool I just decided to stay up late to write about it.  While I grab another Ardbeg and you wait for the next couple hours, check out Susan Milius’s spectacular write up.

3. Larvae from afar colonize deep-sea hydrothermal vents after a catastrophic eruption

Any other papers or news I should add to this list?

The post What’s New With the Dr. M and the Oceans? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Miriam Warns of Diving with Jewelry in Ocean Story Slam! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

And if for some strange reason you are not reading Southern Fried Science, read their recent posts Sea Sheppard FAIL and What a Good Conservation Organization Looks Like. Then watch this amazing creation. Open thread for discussing the utter uselessness and waste that is Sea Sheppard.

Also, see Shark Divers’ blog.

The post Southpark Hates On Sea Shepherd first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“Dear Christopher, Dr. H, Peter, Timothy, Jeanne, Eric, Jannel & Janet and Anonymous Donor,
I am overwhelmed by the generosity of others. The invertebrate salt water tank was just a dream I put on a wish list and now the dream will come true thanks to people like you. Being able to share the variety of fascinating marine organisms that live in the sea with my students will be wonderful. Being able to explain to them that these things are here because of kind and giving individuals from all over the United States will allow me to add a valuable lesson about philanthropy too.

I am grateful for the organisms and other items of my list and for your show of support for teachers, for students and for spreading the joy and knowledge about our oceans. Your have inspired me and invigorated my spirit. You have touched the lives of my students and like the pebble in the pond, started little ripples that will continue on in ways and directions we may not even know or be able to predict. Thank you doesn’t seem like enough but please accept this very big TEXAS-SIZED THANK YOU SO VERY VERY MUCH!!!!

With gratitude,
Mrs. B.”

I for one cannot wait to see photos of those kids setting up and enjoying their new aquarium. The power of observation is an art form that will benefit these children greatly throughout their lives. Not only will this enrich the education of 114 students, but EVERY YEAR another 100+ students will be learning about ocean life as long as that aquarium is maintained!

Because people who care about the ocean are so awesome Southern Fried Science has posted another donation match challenge!

“Our 3,000 commenter is Kevin Z, from Deep Sea News. As a reward, Southern Fried Science will match dollar for dollar the next $75 donated to Deep Sea News’ Oceans in the Classroom Initiative. “

Really, this challenge isn’t about Deep Sea News. It is about ocean bloggers pulling together to help ocean education in cash strapped schools. We couldn’t have bagged in OVER $1200 if it wasn’t for the best readership in the blogosphere! You guys are the rock stars, but there is so much more we can do and every $10 or $100 helps. Now your effort will be doubled up to the next $75 thanks to the tubular trio at Southern Fried Science.

Here is the roll call of the fabulous ocean bloggers supporting this initiative:
The Right Blue
Memories of Island and Ocean Life
The Drop-In to Moss Landing Marine Labs
Southern Fried Science
The Other 95% (Eric H is revealing a new molluscan trading card each time a proposal gets funded!)
Squid A Day (She will post squid cartoons for every funded project!)
Matt’s Marine Music Medley

On twitter, the message has been spread by:
@eclecticechoes
@oystersgarter
@kejames
@drugmonkeyblog
@sciwo
@SFriedScientist
@DonorsChoose
@NMNH
@therightblue
@rmacpherson
@kwing
@jebyrnes
@NerdyChristie
@DCShoutOuts
@BraveBlueWords
@petnoyer

Corporate funders:
Sandshack
Bradley Photographic
Royal Bank of Canada Blue Water Project
HP

Don’t see your name on any of these lists? What are you waiting for! Donate and spread the word! Drop me a line to let me know so I can thank you properly!

The post People Who Care About the Ocean are Awesome! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Acid Test first appeared on Deep Sea News.

… is over at Southern Fried Science. Don’t forget to vote for the BEST (=me) Darwin Beard! The survivors include:

“Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News – who gets major league extra props by wearing these tremendous chops while sailing in Brazil with the Beagle Project…”

“Andrew Thaler, the Southern Fried Scientist, who definitely knows how to wear a hat.”

“…the clear winner in shear volume of beard (but is it Darwinesque enough?) – David WhySharksmatter Shiffman”

The post From Birth to Origin: The Great Darwin Beard Challenge Finale first appeared on Deep Sea News.

• Comparison of Pleistocene and modern community structure shows that Recent human impacts have changed coral community structure in ways not observed in the preceding 220 000 years
• The overall historical trajectory of reef degradation across all cultural periods is strikingly linear, despite the wide range of values within any one cultural period. Most importantly from the perspective of reef conservation and management, most of the reef ecosystems were substantially degraded before 1900.
• Populations of endangered Caribbean sea turtles are far more depleted than realized because current conservation assessments do not reflect historic nesting data…Our results indicate that 20% of historic nesting sites have been lost entirely and 50% of the remaining nesting sites have been reduced to dangerously low populations.
• The productivity and biomass of pristine coral reef ecosystems is poorly understood, particularly in the Caribbean where communities have been impacted by overfishing and multiple other stressors over centuries. Using historical data on the spatial distribution and abundance of the extinct Caribbean monk
  seal (Monachus tropicalis), this study reconstructs the population size, structure and ecological role of this once common predator within coral reef communities, and provides evidence that historical reefs supported biomasses of fishes and invertebrates up to six times greater than those found on typical modern Caribbean reefs. An estimated 233 000–338 000 monk seals were distributed among 13 colonies across the Caribbean. The biomass of reef fishes and invertebrates required to support historical seal populations was 732–1018 g mK2 of reefs, which exceeds that found on any Caribbean reef today and is comparable with those measured in remote Pacific reefs. Quantitative estimates of historically dense monk seal colonies and their consumption rates on pristine reefs provide concrete data on the magnitude of decline in animal biomass on Caribbean coral reefs. Realistic reconstruction of these past ecosystems is critical to understanding the profound and long-lasting effect of human hunting on the functioning of coral reef ecosystems.
• Ecological extinction caused by overfishing precedes all other pervasive human disturbance to coastal ecosystems, including pollution, degradation
  of water quality, and anthropogenic climate change. Historical abundances of large consumer species were fantastically large in comparison
  with recent observations. Paleoecological, archaeological, and historical data show that time lags of decades to centuries occurred between the
  onset of overfishing and consequent changes in ecological communities, because unfished species of similar trophic level assumed the ecological
  roles of overfished species until they too were overfished or died of epidemic diseases related to overcrowding.

Corals…gone, turtles…gone, fish…gone, seals…gone, and all the other species yet to be quantified…gone.

So that was to be the post.  Everyone feels nauseous or a least ‘environmental degradation’ induced vertigo. But then I get this email from Jives

This weekend I opened my inbox to find some powerful words from Les Kaufman about coral reef ecology. He’s writing reports from the Enderbury Island dive site in the Phoenix Islands Expedition. On Sunday he wrote: “This is the first time I’ve felt, with full conviction, that the reduction
of human coastal impacts could significantly help the ocean to heal itself.”

This morning I put up a post that explained why: “The moment we dropped into the sea just off NAI’A’s bow in the lee of Enderbury, our mouths fell agape and stayed that way for the entire dive and a good while afterwards. A fully regenerated reef! Over 90% coral cover, sharks, dogtooth tuna and the joy of having a good reason to be careful about neutral bouyancy. The transect methodology was the same tired old routine, but we felt like whistling the entire time.”

The 2005 expedition found these reefs severely damaged by a coral bleaching incident. The research team has been cautiously optimistic until now… But this seems to border on full-on optimism. Reading the posts as they go up, I get a pretty good idea of what’s going on with the expedition, but the power of that statement kind of overwhelmed me, especially coming from Dr. Kaufman.

What? There is hope?  This email combined with the OCEAN initiative by David “WhySharksMatter” Shiffman are actually make me a bit warm an fuzzy.  In case you haven’t heard…

I am announcing the formation of a new volunteer-based conservation group : the Online Community Environmental Action Network (OCEAN). The purpose of this group is to use online resources  to spread conservation related information. Members of OCEAN will help spread the word about certain blog posts, petitions, multimedia resources, and conservation websites. They will do this via the following online resources [Facebook, Digg, Neatorama, Twitter]

Take some time and head over to the Southern Fried Scientist to learn more about this important effort and how you can join. Do it because I am tired of losing sleepless nights, curled in the fetal position, weeping

The post There Is No Marine Biodiversity Crisis… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’m sorry guys, I’ve been drinking too much with the Southern Fried Scientist that he just passes out before he can even open his laptop. Well, he sobered up enough to post the 42nd edition of the Circus of the Spineless. Go check it out, lots of good stuff there!

Get your submissions in to Wanderin’ Weeta by the end of the month for the next edition of the Circus! Her email address is in the profile.

The post Circus of the Spineless Finally Up! first appeared on Deep Sea News.