https://youtu.be/FuMxVu9F7XU?t=10s

Check out this incredible video of jellyfishing (aka ‘jellyballing’). The first part of the video, with the brown-colored jellyfish, is from the US state of Georgia, where jellyfishing is one of the state’s largest fisheries. The second part of the video, with the blue jellyfish, is from the Gulf of California, Mexico. And the third video, with the man and the net…well I’m not actually sure where that’s from. Possibly South America.

In all three cases the species being harvested is supposedly the ‘cannonball jellyfish’ Stomolophus meleagris. However, recent work done scientist Dr. Liza Gómez Daglio is shaking this idea up a bit: using DNA, she discovered there are at least six undescribed species of cannonball jelly, possibly more (paper).

We don’t actually know the species boundaries for all these different cannonball jellies, so it’s hard to say if some species are being fished more than others. Though the blue ones vs brown ones are clearly very different.

Regardless of species or color, nearly all of the jellyfish caught in the US are shipped overseas to Asian markets, where people enjoy jellyfish in a variety of different dishes. Personally, I find jellyfish to be a bit like eating chicken cartilage crossed with rubber bands. While it may be an acquired taste, clearly many people have it: a recent paper reports that “Japan has imported 5400–10000 tons of jellyfish products per year, valued at about 25.5 million US dollars, annually from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Myanmar” (paper).

Thousands of tons of jellyfish is a lot by any measure. But how many tons of jelly are caught in the Americas is harder to say. Scientists have no idea what impact, if any, jellyfishing has on jelly populations here in the US, particularly for undescribed cannonball species. In China, fisheries experts bump up the jelly population by ‘seeding’ wild jelly stocks with hundreds of millions of baby jellies each year. That’s right: China actually adds hundreds of millions of jellyfish to their coastal waters annually. Good jelly harvesting and culturing practices may help make their jellyfishery sustainable over the long term, while feeding demand for these crunchy, rubber band-esq invertebrates. With more information on the US cannonball species, perhaps we could develop similar conservation measures to help preserve and protect our local species, while also supporting local fisherman.

Regardless of how we protect our local species, I doubt jellyfish will become a popular snack here in the US anytime soon. While I’d love to catch jellyfish by the boatload, when it comes to eating jellyfish, my personal favorite is still the Swedish kind.

The post Jellyfish fishing: A multi-million dollar industry first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On July 20th, 1963, three scientists sat on a research ship 200 miles south of Woods Hole, MA, waiting for something remarkable. They were nearly 4000m above the seafloor, and using a sounder (similar to sonar), they could ‘see’ a line of creatures resting in the deep. By this time, biologists were beginning to unravel the mystery of this ‘false bottom’–a layer in the ocean that looks the the sea floor on the sounder but isn’t–which covered much of the ocean. This false bottom rises in up at night and sinks down during the day. This rising and falling is in fact caused by the largest migration of animal on Earth–everything from fish, shrimp and jellyfish, moving hundreds of meters in unison up and down each day. But how and why these animals rose in fell in the ocean wasn’t clear. As the scientists watched their instruments, the light began to fade. Not from the setting sun, but from something else.

The scientists were trying to answer a question that could be answered literally no other way. Some experts suggested that this massive migration was due to each animal’s own biological rhythm; the same rhythm that causes you to feel jet lag after a long trip. But others thought that the sun itself was driving this massive shift from shallow to deep and back again: as the sun set, animals saw the dimming light and rose to the surface. As the sun rose, they sank again into the deep. How could the scientists test between these two different hypotheses? They can’t exactly alter the sunrise…

Luckily, Earth’s view of the sun is altered once a year thanks to a cosmic twist–when the moon blocks it from view. A solar eclipse on land can be an eerie phenomenon. Nighttime crickets and frogs begin to sing, birds fall silent, even bees return to their hives. But until recently, what happened in the ocean depths was a mystery.

Back on the research ship in 1963, the moon moved into its place in front of the sun, daylight rapidly faded, and the scientists solved the migration mystery: the deep layer of animals began to rise. Bioluminescent creatures started to shine, and nocturnal creatures started a frantic upward thrust. As the world grew darker, they swam upward nearly 80 meters. But this frantic migration didn’t last long. As the moon receded and the sun revealed itself, the massive animal layer did an about-face, scrambling back into the safety of the darkness. One can only imagine the frenzy as millions upon millions of creatures clambered towards the surface and then, just as quickly, rushed back to the deep.

On the boat the scientists could only observe this massive movement with sounder. But it was enough to answer their question. Thanks to the solar eclipse, we now know that animals hiding in the deep are governed in part by the external ebb and flow of light from the sun.

Ancient humans considered eclipses ominous signs. Now, modern humans adopt a more spectator role in this celestial occurrence. There’s even a citizen scientist initiative to understand how creatures on land responds during the upcoming eclipse. But for millions of creatures living in the open ocean, a solar eclipse, at least for a short time, may really spell calamity.

Work cited

RH Backus, RC Clark, AS Wing. (1965) Behaviour of certain marine organisms during the solar eclipse of July 20, 1963. Nature. 4975. pp 989-991

The post What happens in the sea during a solar eclipse? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’m constantly amazed by the beauty and diversity of life under Antarctica’s ice. Below is one of the best videos I’ve seen of this stunning natural wonder. The water is below freezing, at a heart-stopping -1.5°C (29.3°F)*, a meter of ice covers the surface for much of the year, and the whole ecosystem is plunged into Antarctica’s winter darkness for months at a time. Yet, look at this beauty. Look at all the creatures calling this alien world home. Watching this, I can’t help but wonder about all the mysterious places that we haven’t been. From the deepest depths under polar ice, to the watery moons of other planets. If this is what we’re finding so far, what else might be out there?

The original article can be found at: http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2016/rare-glimpse-into-antarctic-underwater-world

Transcript of video:

We’re diving under the sea ice in O’Brien Bay, south of Casey research station in eastern Antarctica.

This is a thriving, colorful world filled with sponges, sea cucumbers, sea spiders, worms, algae and starfish. Here we are at 30 m below the surface, where the water temperature is a chilly −1.5[°C] year round, and the sea is covered by ice that is a meter and a half thick for more than 10 months of the year.

This ice provides protection from Antarctica’s harsh weather conditions, and a stable marine environment that allows biodiversity to flourish. This important biodiversity is the focus of our research into the effects of climate change and ocean acidification.

Here at the Australian Antarctic Division, we’re working hard to ensure the continent remains valued, protected and understood.

***

*The salt in seawater lowers the freezing temperature, and prevents the water from turning to ice at 0°C (32°F), much the same way road salt melts the ice on roadways.

The post New video shows the hidden world under Antarctica’s ice first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now I give the eye of disdain to another two fisherman, who found a detached piece of an mooring and have decided to hold it for ransom. It’s not unusual that oceanographic moorings break free and sometimes float to the surface. It’s also not unusual that fisherman sometimes scoop them up. I’ve had that happen twice and both times they were nice and cooperative we got the instruments back. But this is absolutely ridiculous.

Here’s the timeline of events:

January 15th: There was a strong bottom current event during an underwater storm that caused the mooring to detach from its anchor and float to the surface. Other floats also detached during this event which MBARI also chased after and found. These mooring were actually designed to capture and measure these types of underwater storms, which are more like crazy sediment landslide, and they are actually notoriously awesome at ripping moorings from the seafloor.

January 17th:  The broken bit of mooring phoned home and told researchers at USGS it was in Moss Landing.

January 19th: Fisherman tells USGS he has the mooring and demands money for it. They say no. They tell him they want it back.

January 20th: Fisherman drives away with mooring.

And here we are at the current legal scuffle. USGS wants its mooring back and one of the fisherman has his father, an attorney, arguing that the fisherman are now “OWNERS” of the mooring and will “SELL” it back to USGS (their capitalization, not mine).

If you lose something in the ocean, it doesn’t stay yours forever.

I’m just going to file this under arcane misinterpretation of salvaging laws by a lawyer out of his element. It had a homing beacon on it. It was SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND. That’s how they found it on the dock. And it had a tag indicating it was owned by USGS with a phone number because you know, they wanted it back.

I don’t need a million dollars—I just want to be compensated for my days lost

Two words: GHOST NETS. Seriously, if that fisherman wants to be compensated for losing money and time for getting his propeller entangled in a rogue floating piece of rope, then all fishers better pony up and make a fund to reimburse all the other boat owners that have been entangled in discarded fishing nets. I absolutely agree it sucks, but one mooring is literally a drop in the bucket of ALL THE CRAP we throw into the ocean. And this thing was actually designed to be retrieved unlike the majority of other marine debris!

“It’s his rollerskate and he can sell it to whoever or keep it all he wants

YOU GUYS. I’ve always wanted an ocean rollerskate. If that’s the way current salvaging laws work I’m totes headed down to the marina to sit on your boat, claim it as my own and sell it on ebay. But for reals, the mooring was not abandoned so these guys can’t just lay claim to it.

Let’s just summarize by saying that the arguments for keeping the buoy are at boorish and incorrect. Coincidentally or not, it sounds like this fisherman has fired his lawyer dad. What I am really hoping is that these dudes just give the mooring back. I feel for you, propeller entanglements are the worst, but holding public property hostage is just not the way to go.

SOURCES:

2 men take US gov’t ocean science buoy, now want to “sell” it back for $13,000

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2777911/1-Main.pdf

Fisherman who has kept USGS buoy for 10 weeks: All I want is compensation

Fishermen Ransom Uncle Sam’s Sea Gizmo

The post Two California fishermen pretend they are maritime pirates and hold an oceanographic mooring for ransom first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Another year of science closes, giving us pause to review those new species of sharks described in the scientific literature, bringing the total number of known shark species to 512. Perhaps it’s a hollow victory to have so many different species known at a time when sharks populations worldwide are either in decline or in a complete population tailspin. But as taxonomists continue to kick ass and give names, our knowledge of shark evolution, biogeography, and ecology continue to get richer. Meet the new sharks of 2015:

Ginglymostoma unami, the Pacific Nurse Shark
This isn’t really the brand-spankin’ new species you might think, but it has been known for well over a century. The Nurse Shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum) had a disjunct distribution between the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico and the eastern central Pacific oceans, meaning their range was divided into two separate populations. Like some nooks in the Ozarks, land barriers prevented gene flow, so the populations were both physically and genetically separated by a small spit of land called Central America. This team didn’t use genetic methods to test if the populations were distinct enough to be considered different species, but relied on a meristics, the process of compiling detailed measurements of the shark’s anatomy and comparing these values between the populations.  However, a 2012 paper on populations genetics of G. cirratum showed that the Pacific population was genetically quite unique, and divergent from any of the Atlantic populations. Since these two nurse shark populations had been separated by three million years, a few things can happen, like speciation. Indeed, their analysis showed that these two species are morphologically different enough to warrant giving the Pacific population its own scientific name. This name, G. unami, is an acronym of their alma mater, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Moral-Flores, L.F.D., E. Ramirez-Antonio, A. Angulo, and G. Perez-Ponce de Leon. 2015. Ginglymostoma unami sp. nov. (Chondrichthyes: Orectolobiformes: Ginglymostomatidae): una especie nueva de tiburón gata del Pacífico oriental tropical. Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 86 (2015) 48-58.

Scyliorhinus ugoi, Dark Speckled Catshark
Way down among Brazilians sharks once swam there in the millions, but overfishing took surely took a hefty toll, yet there are still new shark species to be found. Case in point: a new catshark that had long been swimming along most of the Brazilian coast but had been confused as other known species. Catsharks are a widespread, diverse, and somewhat confusing group of sharks. Differences in color, morphological changes between juveniles & adults, and sexual differences between males & females create difficulties in sorting out just how many species there are. Here, the authors use detailed meristic analysis to extract out a species that had been there all along, but the morphological features that delineate the species had not yet been defined.

SOARES, K.D.A. & GADIG, O.F.B. & GOMES, U.L. 2015. Scyliorhinus ugoi, a new species of catshark from Brazil (Chondrichthyes: Carcharhiniformes: Scyliorhinidae). Zootaxa, 3937 (2): 347-361.

Atelomycterus erdmanni, Spotted-belly Catshark

This sexy beast is one of the more colorful species of catsharks, and is one of several new species discovered from a larger taxonomic mess called the coral catsharks.  Using meristics, genetics, and biogeographical analyses, it turns out that the “coral catshark” represents several species, with this species as the newest. They don’t live in coral, so much as they crawl on and among coral reefs of Indonesia, using their pectoral and pelvic fins like tiny feet and walking like a more limber and agile salamander. Named after Mark Erdmann, a fish taxonomist who collected most of the known specimens, and was rewarded with this li’l shark bearing his name.

Fahmi & White, W.T.  2015. Atelomycterus erdmanni, a new species of catshark (Scyliorhinidae: Carcharhiniformes) from Indonesia. Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation 14: 14-27.

Bythaelurus tenuicephalus, Narrow-head Catshark
2015 also brought us two more catsharks, from the same genus, and both from the depths of the southwestern Indian Ocean. Hailing from the outer continental shelf of Mozambique and Tanzania comes the Narrow-headed catshark. The vast majority of sharks in recent years have been from the more remote pockets of Earth’s oceans, and in particular, from the deep oceans that have barely been explored. This species of Bythaelurus is a “dwarf”, a species that is sexually mature at a much smaller size than most other species in its genus.  The advantage of dwarfism might allow this species to breed at a younger age, thus increasing their overall lifetime reproductive output. Or it could be that being smaller simply means eating smaller prey that larger species of catsharks might miss. This sort of niche-partitioning may explain why there are so many different species of catsharks. The species name tenuicephalus means “narrow head”, a little less imaginative than some names, but descriptive nonetheless.

KASCHNER, C.J. & WEIGMANN, S. & THIEL, R. 2015. Bythaelurus tenuicephalus n. sp., a new deep-water catshark (Carcharhiniformes, Scyliorhinidae) from the western Indian Ocean. Zootaxa, 4013 (1): 120–138.

Bythaelurus naylori, Dusky Snout Catshark
Another year, another catshark on the list.  This species however, has quite an interesting story behind its capture.  Massive trawlers, towing huge nets and pulling up tons of fish aren’t new, but what is new is the trend for these huge vessels to move from depleted fishing grounds in the shallows, and into the relatively untapped fishery resources of the deep sea. In addition to the targeted commercial species that will earn them great sums of money when they return to port, these nets also catch and kill tons of other non-marketable species.  This is what ecologists call ‘by-catch’, but there is a sunny side to such needless destruction.  Commercial vessels are often the first to explore deep-sea zones, well ahead of research cruises that are difficult to fund and even more impossible to sustain over time. If you can get onto one of these factory trawlers, the bounty of the bycatch is yours, and what a paradise this is to shark researchers. Dave Ebert & Paul Clerkin of the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Lab got the invite to board one of these vessels as it sailed south from Mauritius, but with a small catch: they had to stay for the entire three month trawling season. If you haven’t ever had the displeasure of sailing the wild waves and howling winds where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, then you wouldn’t know that it makes The Deadliest Catch look like a Honolulu harbor cruise. Already hardened by the seas of the Gulf of Alaska, Paul made three of these cruises, collecting more than a dozen new species of skates, rays, sharks, and chimeras that will be published in future years. The species name naylori honors Gavin Naylor of the College of Charleston who, through genetic analysis, is compiling a more complete evolutionary history of extant shark species.

EBERT, D.A. & CLERKIN, P.J. 2015. A new species of deep-sea catshark (Scyliorhinidae: Bythaelurus) from the southwestern Indian Ocean. Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation 15:53-63.

And lastly….
Etmopterus benchleyi, Ninja Lanternshark
If you haven’t already seen this sassy new deepsea shark that went viral late last year, check it out here, and here, and here. That makes six new sharks for 2015, but new species will be discovered and described in 2016, so check back next year.
VÁSQUEZ, V.E. & EBERT, D.A. & LONG, D.J. 2015. Etmopterus benchleyi n. sp., a new lanternshark (Squaliformes: Etmopteridae) from the central eastern Pacific Ocean: Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation; 17: 43-55.

The post Meet the New Sharks of 2015 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sub-Neritic Gentrification

For November we will be doing some deep thinking about deep-sea mollusks in an attempt to understand the complex history and adaptations of these animals living in the depths of our oceans. Biodiversity of today’s marine snails can be traced to several different ecological and environmental phenomena, but in the Deep-Water Helmet Shell Galeodea keyteri, it is likely a case of adaptive radiation exploring new realms. The Helmet Shells (Cassidae) are a speciose group of large, shallow-water tropical and temperate marine snails that range among the intertidal coral rubble and sand flats to offshore muds, but as this evolutionarily successful group of gastropods continued to diversity into different niches, several species moved into deep-water to establish new ways of living. At these depths staying alive presents serious challenges with an extremely cold, low oxygen, nutrient-poor, and high-pressure environment, so some deep-water species trended to smaller, slow-growing physiologies like as a way to successfully conserve energy and resources. Since the dark depths lack sunlight needed for algae to grow, most species of deep-sea mollusks are either scavengers or predators, with little resources for vegetarians to survive. Like all Helmet Shells, Galeodea keyteri is a carnivore, specializing on starfish, brittle stars, and urchins. Catching their slow-moving prey with a muscular foot, glands in the proboscis secrete a fluid rich in acids that dissolve the echinoderm’s calcium-carbonate skeletons, while a radula drills into the weakened parts of the body to extract nutrients from their internal organs. A tough environment requires innovative strategies and hardy adaptations for a species to survive. Ain’t natural selection grand?

Molluscan Methuselah

While some species of deepwater mollusks are derived from shallow-water taxa that extended into and adapted within deep ocean ecosystems, other taxa of marine mollusks are taxonomic geezers with a much longer history. The Slit Snails (Pleuorotomariidae) are perhaps the oldest still-living lineage of marine snails, extending back in the fossil record more than 500 million years. Named because of its long slit at the aperture allowing for extension of their respiratory siphon, they were abundant in the shallow reefs throughout the world. Between the Late Cretaceous (ca. 90 million years ago) and the middle Eocene (ca. 40 million years ago) is when most modern lineages of shallow-water reef-living gastropods originated and diversified, and also the time when slit shells seem to disappear from that same fossil record. Among paleontologists and malacologists, the general hypothesis is that these modern taxa somehow out-competed the slit shells for food, or perhaps were more adapted to changing marine climates or fluctuating sea levels of the time, forcing the slit shells into progressively deeper and deeper water. This type of ecological displacement and bathymetric submergence has been seen in many other deep-sea groups, including corals, crinoids, brachiopods, and fishes. Today, slit shells are found in depths exceeding 3,000 meters, living the hi-life eating sponges in a cold, dark, lonely, nutrient-poor world.

Die-Hardest

As far as the origins of deep-sea gastropods go, we’ve visited two scenarios: new lineages of shallow-water snails radiating into deeper waters, and those formerly shallow-water taxa that have been out-competed in the shallows and forced into deeper, less productive habitats. But there’s a third group of deep-water snails that are so tough, so extreme that they can live in shallow and deep water. Here is the Checkered Hairsnail (Trichotropis cancellaria; Capulidae), the James Bond, the Bruce Willis, and the Rock all coiled up into one extreme snail that ranges from the intertidal zone to depths of nearly 2,000 ft. (600m). Is it true grit or it’s hard-boiled soul that make it impervious to the relentless cold, pressure, and darkness of the deep sea? Their broad range is more likely the result of two things: (1) a wide and variable physiology that can tolerate the extremes of shallow to deep; and (2) its broad diet that it can obtain at any depth. You see, the Checkered Hairsnail is a suspension-feeder, meaning it feeds on the decomposing bits of animal debris suspended in the water, which it traps by sticky mucous, and that kind of detritus is found in all habitats. However, it’s a sneaky critter. When the floating slurry of decomposition becomes scarce, they will parasitize tube worms by inserting their proboscis down the mouth of the worm and pumping out the contents of the worm’s stomach. Evolution: the weirder the better.

Slo-Mo Snail
Shallow-water gastropods live the good life. Warm water, a sunny sea rich in oxygen, and plenty of food provides them the metabolism to live fast, grow big, and die young, relatively speaking, of course. The flipside in the deep sea is a life of constant near-freezing cold, little available food, and water suffocatingly sparse in oxygen. This shell of the Catalina Turrid (Antiplanes catalinae, Pseudomelatomidae) who lives at depths of up to 4800 ft (1460 m), tells its story of life in this harsh realm. Growth lines, which indicate the increase and cessation of shell development, are seen as wide bands often far apart in curving spire of fast-growing shallow-water shells. In this species, the growth lines are close and compact, showing very slow growth and likely a long life. Their low metabolism provides little extra energy for their minimal growth and reproduction, so these snails probably take the developmental route of the tortoise over the hare. This shell tells another and more concerning story. Once only collected during deep-ocean trawls by research vessels, this species was prized by collectors as a rarity and an oddity. With commercial fisheries abandoning over-exploited fishing grounds along the shallower coasts, fishing has gone into the deep ocean to tap into those fragile resources. This specimen was taken as unintentional bycatch by a deep-water shrimp trawler, and though it wasn’t the target of the fisheries, the sparse populations of these slow-growing snails cannot sustain even the modest impact by commercial fisheries

Post-Docs Please Enquire

The curse of working with deep-sea gastropods is how few specimens are in museum collections, and what very little is known about them. That too is the siren’s call of opportunity in deep-sea malacological research. The Japanese Pagoda Shell (Columbarium pagoda, Turridae) has been known to science for close to 200 years, based on relatively few well-documented specimens in museums and private collections scattered throughout the world, yet virtually nothing is known about their ecology. Diet, trophic niche, age, growth rates, reproduction, population structure, predators, parasites, physiology, ecological associations, movements – none of that has been adequately documented. If all mysteries in the ocean were solved, there would be no jobs for future under-paid post-docs or over-worked assistant professors. Those with grant funding, a modicum of workaholism, and access to deep-sea technology could pioneer new directions into a richer ecological understanding of the deep ocean’s marine mollusks. That siren’s call can just as easily dash unfeasible projects on the rocks of financial destitution and lead to deep regret of one’s research program and entrée into a life of constant self-medication and personal validation. These mysteries await the bold, but favor the wise.

The post Malacology Monthly: Going Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

It started in 1996 with a bright green bucket. Chris Griner, an able seaman at the United States Coast Guard, stopped by with a few gallons of deep-sea mud. Having walked by Joan’s studio a few times, he wondered if she could use the seafloor mud to build pottery. Joan stuck some mud in the kiln spyhole, and it melted into a glassy puddle, catching her completely off-guard. In her quest to learn more about the mysterious melting properties of this deep-sea mud, Joan met staff members at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who gave her little samples of sediment from all across the globe. And each one melted into a different pattern on the clay. Some sediments fired soft green, others a crackly brown. And so she went to work.

“I never thought the sea floor was as muddy as that” Joan tells me as we walk through her studio. Today she has an impressive collection of ceramics and sea-floor muds, including a small bag with deep brown mud from the Marianas Trench–the deepest place on Earth. This mud is precious, and she uses it more as an accent rather than as a whole glaze. But that’s not the only unique sample she has. Rather than the deep sea, how about the deep past? A cup glazed with sediment from the K-T boundary layer, perhaps? This sediment is from a literal line in the sand separating the age of the dinosaurs from the age of mammals. Or maybe you prefer a more recent history? Pick up a vase glazed with sediment from an 8th century BC Phoenician Wreck. And for the ocean lovers, Antarctic bowls, hydrothermal vent tea cups and mid-Atlantic Ridge mugs pepper her shelves. Can’t decide? Get a little of all seven seas with one of her mixed-mud pieces. Really, it’s an art-nerd-meets-science-nerd paradise.

The best part for me is that all of this work represents a collaboration of science and art–all of the sediment Joan uses comes from scientists who donate leftover mud. And in the words of one scientist, “you don’t know what it’s like to work with material 20 or 30 years, never expect this, and then see it in this form.” It’s a way to transform the remote far-away places into something beautiful and tangible that can fit in your hands.

Joan’s work isn’t exactly cheap, though in other ways it’s priceless. It took me about a month to build up the nerve and income to drop $90 on a mug made with a bit of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The muds she uses are from all over, and unlike commercial glazes they are not chemically well-characterized. For muds with lots of heavy metals, like hydrothermal vents sediment, Joan only glazes the outside of cups. Other muds she’s less concerned about, though it’s something to keep in mind, especially if you intend to use it daily with hot or acidic liquids (like wine). Though my new mug is something I intend to treat with care, I also fully intend to use it.

I may never visit the Mid-Atlantic ridge, or see the Havre Seamount in real life, but like Joan and her green bowl, I now get to wonder at these mysteries a little bit every day. And that’s not a bad way to start the morning.

To check out more of Joan’s work, or snag one of these beautiful works for yourself, visit her website:

http://www.thesoftearthspeaks.com/

And online store:

http://store.thesoftearth.com/

The post How to hold a piece of the deep sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Bivalves: clams, scallops, oysters, cockles, and mussels, have rich lives and complex evolutionary histories far beyond the deep-fryer. Here are vignettes of four bivalves that provide a small glimpse into their world. So next time you order the frutti di mare linguini, ponder for a second what you are about to eat.

Smart Scallops
Edward ‘Doc’ Ricketts, renown marine biologist and friend to full-time novelist and part-time alcoholic John Steinbeck, once stated: “next to the octopus, the scallop is the ‘cleverest’ of all the mollusks”. While I don’t entirely agree with that remark, I do concur that scallops are perhaps the most interesting of all the bivalves, like these polychromatic Noble Scallops (Mimachlamys nobilis). What makes scallops (Pectinidae) unique among the bivalves are their

baby-blue eyes, ones that would give a Frank Sinatra a run for his money. Surrounding the open-end of the shell in upper and lower rows as a vigilant arcade, these simple peepers can detect changes in light and perceive basic movement, warning the scallop of advancing predators. Their response is to flee by snapping the two sides (valves) of their shell like crazy zombified castanets, scurrying in zig-zagging movements away from the imminent threat by forcing out strong spurts of water every time the shell snaps shut. While these sudden movements may not be guided in a specific direction, the main goal is to get the scallop way from what may hope to eat it, which usually propels them far enough from harm’s way.

Adaptations for this snap-and-zag escape consist of a wide, flexible hinge at the back end of the shell, and a single adductor muscle that can quickly pull the two halves of the shell together. It is this muscle, making about 20% of the soft tissue inside the shell, that one eats as the ‘scallop’ in a seafood platter, with most of the remaining flesh discarded. Most other non-western countries relish the extra innards of the scallop, especially the swollen and succulent gonads during the scallops’ mating season, but those in the more industrialized nations can afford to waste what is perfectly edible. And ironically, while the tasty adductor muscle may be the key in a scallop’s escape from a predator, it doesn’t work so well when trying to flee the path of a 30’ beam trawl dragged along the bottom of the sea.

Boring, Boring, Boring…

Clams can be boring, really boring. No, really, boring. Some species bore into packed mud and some bore into wood or even whale bone, but the Warty-necked Piddock (Chaceia ovoidea) can actually bore into solid rock. Larval piddocks settle into small cracks or existing holes in the rock, and as the shell grows, the posterior portion of the shell develops rows of rough ridges that act as a rasp, and the clam uses it’s muscular foot to bump and grind, literally drilling into the sandstone, shale, and limestone on the ocean floor. As the clam continues to grow in size, it’s burrow becomes an inverted funnel, with the original hole opening to the outside, and a larger interior den that increases in size as the clam’s shell grows and constantly scrapes and remodels the inside of its home. Though it can never escape its clam cave, it lives a simple life of a filter feeding bivalve by extending two large fleshy

siphons out the front door that look like a tunicate. The larger incurrent siphon (the gazin) sucks water and suspended food into the body for filtering, and the smaller excurrent siphon (the gazout) flushes the filtered water outside of the clam’s shell. While their means of feeding isn’t impressive, their bivalve superhero ability to literally drill into solid rock should convince some of you that boring clams certainly aren’t boring. But what about sex? Celibate clams cloistered in a stone cell?  Easy, fertilization is external, with males & females releasing sperm and egg simultaneously during particular spring tides.

Motherly Love
For Mother’s Day, we in the Malacology Monday team honor all those mothers out there, present and past. I experienced much too recently the impermanence of one’s mother and the void it leaves in the heart, so perhaps this True Heart Cockle may fill that hole for those of us who have lost their mother. This heart is full of motherly love. The genus name Corculum means ‘darling heart’ in Latin, and the species name cardissa is the Greek word for ‘female heart’. Their family of bivalves is the Cardiidae, meaning ‘heart’ in Greek, and they are a member of the larger taxonomic group Veneroidea, stemming from the Latin venereus, derived from Venus, the goddess of love, which is most likely how you were conceived by mom in the first place. But Corculum cardissa is not like most mothers. The True Heart Cockle is a hermaphrodite, not an uncommon method of reproduction in the invertebrates, but a rare method of producing young among the bivalves. As Corculum expels an egg, it is carried away by the currents and rapidly develops over the next two days into a miniature copy of the mother it will never see again. In the meantime, mother has an adopted family of her own microscopic dinoflagellate algae living in her tissues. Her semi-transparent shell acts as a tiny greenhouse protecting these adoptees who pay their respects by manufacturing food through photosynthesis that supplements what other food particles she strains from seawater through her gills. What she lacks as an absentee mother for her own spawn, she makes up for as the caretaker to hundreds of tiny dinoflagellates.

Heavyweight Champion of the Bivalve World

The Malacology Monday team was recently on expedition deep into tropical malacology. The highlight of our explorations along the Great Barrier Reef were dives with the giant clam (Tridacna gigas), from wee ones smaller than an Oreo cookie, to some massive old guardians of the reef that were near record size. This clam is the largest bivalve alive today, with their shell reaching over 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) wide and weighing a whopping 331 kg.(730 lbs). While they are indeed clams, they live more like corals, housing symbiotic photosynthetic zooxanthellae in their large, brightly-colored fleshy mantle, which look like Mick Jagger’s swollen lips after being decked by an enraged Bianca. But these lips, like the mantle of the Heart Cockle (above) house the millions of

tiny algae that convert tropical sunlight into food energy, sharing it with the clam and supplementing the clam’s diet of filtered detritus and plankton to keep it alive. For that reason, these clams must live in the warm and intensely light shallows of the tropics where they can be abundant enough to be the dominant component of some reefs, even exceeding coral in biomass and coverage. While the giant clam population around the Great Barrier Reef appears stable, with even the largest clams seemingly abundant, pollution, sedimentation, dredging, and collecting clams directly for food or sale into the curio trade, giant clams elsewhere are declining or even wiped-out entirely. Australia, however, has been pioneering the aquaculture of giant clams, and have successful long-term projects to re-populate reefs in the South Pacific with these massive mollusks.

The post Malacology Monthly: A Look at Bivalves, From Both Sides Now first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Extra Crispy

Behold, the Crusty Nautilis (Allonautilus scrobiculatus), a name so great it could become your next secret agent moniker or CB handle. The tempura-like coating on its shell is a thick periostracum, the outer layer that protects the inner shell, that can get even more crusty with the addition of small marine organisms that sometimes grow on the periostracum. All modern-day nautiluses are related to another group of shelled cephalopods called the Ammonites, once an abundant, widespread, and morphologically & ecologically diverse group that numbered in the thousands of species but suddenly became extinct about 65 million years ago. But the Crusty Nautilus is a survivor, and is the most ancestral or “primitive” of the living nautiloids, having evolved more than 100 million years ago and squeaking through the mass extinction that wiped-out their Ammonite cousins.

Crusty Nautiluses live in deep-waters off eastern Indonesia, New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. Their shells, empty ones washed ashore after the decomposition of their dead owners, were known to early scientists since the 1700’s, but is wasn’t until 1984 that whole living Crusty Nautiluses were captured, allowing scientists to study their soft anatomy and leading to the understanding of their deep antiquity on the cephalopod family tree.

In Nautilus, you live inside shell, in Spirula, shell live inside YOU! [pronounced with your best Yakov Smirnoff impersonation]

While driving on New Zealand’s 90-Mile Beach I came across a drift of hundreds of these tiny curled shells, not more than a couple of centimeters wide, piled between two sand dunes. They are the inner shell of a squid so distinct that they constitute a single species in a single genus in a single family, in an entirely unique order of cephalopod, the Spirulidae. The Ram’s Horn Squid (Spirula spirula) is a small deep-sea predator with an internal shell divided into gas-filled chambers that act as an internal floatation device as they rise and fall each evening in the Deep Scattering Layer far offshore. Eaten by seabirds, dolphins, porpoises, fur seals, and fishes, the undigestible shell is defecated or regurgitated and rises to the surface of the water, floating atop the ocean until they wash ashore on a beach.

The function of the shell in the body of this 4 centimeter-long squid is a not a mystery – the shell float holds the squid upright in the water – but the large bioluminescent organ atop its head is quite a puzzle. Unlike light-emitting organs in other deep-sea squid, it doesn’t seem to attract prey (as it points light away from the mouth), it doesn’t illuminate the feeding tentacles, and it doesn’t seem to provide the invisible cloak of countershading that balances the downwelling light above with the darkness below. Few live Spirula have been caught and studied in captivity, and there are virtually no studies of them in the wild. There are still mysteries in the sea, and plenty of projects for future graduate students.

 

The Tentacle That Rocks the Cradle

The Brown Paper Nautilus (Argonauta hians) is actually a small sea-going octopus, and like all octopus (octopi, octopuses, octopods, octogenarians, whatever) it has neither an internal nor an external shell. Yet, the female produces this beautiful shell-like structure that is essentially a maritime baby buggy. Her care-free childless year ends after mating with a male that only breeds once before dying, then this merry widow secretes a thin, light, boat-like spiral shell that she fills with a cargo of her eggs. She hops in and pilots this stroller as it floats from the ocean’s surface to hundreds of feet down into the sea, adding and expelling air as a buoyancy mechanism, scooting backwards with jets of water from her siphon.

Mother Paper Nautilus wields a strange pair of tentacles that look like fleshy tennis rackets made by Salvador Dali. These organs secrete the minerals that increase the size of the shell, and she can actually expand these elastic organs to encompass the entire shell, and quickly withdraw them back into the shell of she senses danger. With mom taking up so much space in the crib, most of the young that hatch find the shell too crowded and leave to begin their pelagic larval existence, but a few may hang around for several days, and by then, the female sheds this vessel and begins another year as a free-swimming octopus. During this time she will feed on small invertebrates and baby fish, look for a new mate, and avoid the tuna, dolphins, albatross, and other ocean predators that feed on her kind. In the meantime, the discarded shell floats atop the ocean and may be cast ashore, like the one in the photo, and found by a lucky beachcomber.

Polly Wanna Kraken?

The age-old connection between cuttlefish and parrots may seem strange, but through a long convoluted history of humans, birds, and mollusks, it’s perfectly normal for parrots to chew the living heck out of the dead endoskeleton of a cuttlefish.Cuttlefish, not a fish at all but a family of cephalopods (Sepiidae) more closely related to squid than to anything else, contain what is functionally an internal life jacket. The cuttlebone is a hard oblong structure that spans the length of the body cavity of the cuttlefish, and made of a calcium carbonate structure microscopically infused with tiny air cells. This personal flotation device counter-balances the weight of their dense flesh and tentacles and makes them neutrally buoyant in the water. Lessened of the tethers of gravity, cuttlefish can do what they do best: levitate around seagrass beds or reefs like psychedelic, pulsating zeppelins, zapping small prey with lightning-fast elastic tentacles and living a complex social life with other cuttlefish worthy of a Mexican telenovella.

While that makes perfect sense, here’s where parrots come in. Humans have held parrots captive since Egyptian, and later, Grecian and Roman times, likely traded up along the Nile from eastern Africa or even from western Asia. Caged birds have needs that domesticity can’t deliver like their wild habitats and diets used to. But cuttlefish, an esteemed seafood by their human captors for centuries, brought cuttlebones for entirely different uses. The crunchy mineral nature of the cuttlebone acts like an abrasive emery board for parrots to file down their ever-growing beak. It also provides a much-needed calcium supplement for regrowth of new plumage and for formation of eggs in breeding females, and the satisfying feeling by a frustrated parrot driving its beak deep into the cuttlebone is the avian equivalent of us popping sheets of bubble-wrap. Cuttlebones are a multi-million dollar global industry, with cuttlebones shipped from the Mediterranean, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India to pet shops around the world for those jailed parrots that need that little hunk of a dead cuttlefish to keep them healthy.

The post Malacology Monthly: Cephalopod Compendium first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You already know that Deep Sea News provides expert reporting, in-depth analysis, first-person research, and sarcastic mockery of contemporary topics relevant to our ocean world. Unlike other popular science sites that can be wildly imaginative and dangerously inaccurate, DSN’s crew of scientists cut through the pop-science b.s. and re-posted misinformation to deliver ocean news that you can trust.

But did you know the DSN Facebook site provides even more delicious science nuggets each week for your inquiring mind to chew and savor? Beginning this week, as a premium for our Facebook friends, each and every Monday from now until eternity* will feature the shell of a different marine marine organism in an ongoing DSN internet event called Malacology Monday.

Dipping into the vast marine science collection from the Lobos Marinos International Marine Science (& Cocktails), we will bring you the dazzling array of evolutionary innovations, complex architecture, and endless aesthetics that sea shells deliver. For each species featured we will also communicate bona-fide scientific information and curious facts about the ecology and adaptations of extant and extinct mollusks, as well as the long human history with marine shellfish and their impact on our own culture.

If you like mollusks, and in particular malacology, this is a much-need intravenous drip of taxonomic enlightenment and morphological bliss, and if you aren’t yet in the cult, Malacology Monday will be the digital gateway drug to a soul fulfilling and mind expanding appreciation of our underwater world. So start each week with a stiff shot of mollusks on Deep Sea News’ Facebook Page.

*Eternity not exclusive of time away for expeditions, conferences, vacation, last-minute pre-deadline grant-writing, finals week grading, benders, mandatory time at the honor rancho, amnesia, malaise, or the untimely demise of the concept’s host.

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The post Malacology Monday first appeared on Deep Sea News.