Living on the eastern seaboard of the US for many years, Dr. M. has no doubt enjoyed the cool, crisp cocktail regionally known as the Gulf Stream. It’s sort of a southern equivalent of the mimosa, which of course is a respectable excuse to begin drinking on a Sunday morning, and not stop until just before dinner. Delicious, yes, but not nearly strong enough to slake the thirst of our leader. With a few tweaks of the original recipe, here is the Atlantic Gyre:
2 oz. Brandy
2 oz. Dry White Rum (10 Cane, Angostura)
1/4 oz. Blue Curacao
6 oz. Lemonade
Champagne
Mix all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker, excluding the champagne; pour into a pint glass filled ¼ full of course crushed ice. Fill and top off with the champagne, garnish with a thin lime wedge & sprig of mint.

 Dr. M. is a complex man, having more facets than the Hope Diamond. Did you know he is not only obsessed by Southern home-made biscuits, but actually worked as a biscuit baker? To blend his love of biscuits with his love of the sea, here is a rich, smooth cocktail called the Sea Biscuit, after the creamy white, delicious echinoderm of the genus Clypeaster.

In a cocktail shaker add the following:
2 oz. Vanilla Schnapps
2 oz. Premium smooth white rum (Plantation Three-Star or Vizcaya Crystal White)
4 oz Horchata*
4 oz Full Cream Milk
Lightly shake the mix and pour into pint, adding ice to top off the drink, with a mild sprinkle of allspice on the top.
*you can substitute the pre-made product Rum Chata for the horchata & white rums

Other than biscuits, Dr. M’s has another obsession that wrestles him in his sleep and grips his thoughts in daytime. It is his White Whale, an archtypal beast of lore that he has been seeking but has yet to find. Being the largest of the large, the Colossal Squid doesn’t disappoint the imagination of what the deep-sea can conjure, nor the reality it’s based on. To Dr. M. and his beloved cephalopod, here is The Colossus:

2 oz. Pomegranite Liqueur
½ oz. Grenadine
2 oz. Dry White Rum (Brugal, Diplomatico, Matusalem)
1 oz. Gin
Juice of ½ lime
4 oz. club soda
Mix all ingredients together in a cocktail shaker with large ice cubes; shake and strain into a large glass. Add a dash of Cherry Bitters for the finish. Feel the cocktail’s tentacles work their way into your brain.

Some people think they are busy, but Dr. M. must drink more workahol that just about anybody I know. He coordinates with grant-writing teams, acts as a managing journal editor, trains his field crews, communicates with the press, writes scientific papers like a madman, and of course, simultaneously pens several different blogs, including Deep Sea News. As a twist to the old and well-haled drink of yore with the well-fitting name of The Wrangler, here is a version scaled-up to meet the needs of our boss. I call it The Commodore:

2 oz. Rye Whiskey
1 ½ oz. Dark Rum
5 oz. Orange Juice
5 oz. Ruby Grapefruit Juice
5 dashes of Angostura bitters
In a shaker put all of the ingredients except the ½ oz. of dark rum; pour into a pint glass and fill with cube ice to the top; add the remaining ½ oz. of Dark Rum as a float on top, garnish with a small sprig of fresh rosemary. Also fights scurvy.

Over the decade, Dr. M. has posted about his deep, somewhat disturbing, passion for Kraken Rum on the pages of Deep Sea News. Not only does this dusky rum shimmer with the darkness of the abyss, bear the piquant tang of the Spice Islands, and a inflicts a burn that would cause any buccaneer to reel, but their neo-Victorian steam punk meets Ernst Haeckel artwork is worthy of endless tattoos. Indeed, rum is often the fuel of creativity, and without the nourishing and enriching powers of rum drinks, Dr. M. wouldn’t be who he is today, so in honor of our leader, here is The Big Kahuna:

2 oz. Kraken Rum
2 oz. Macamadia Nut Liqueur
1 can sugar cane-based Cola soda
Fill a pint glass ½ full with cube ice, add the Kraken Rum and Macadamia Nut Liqueur, then fill the rest of the way with the cola, stirring lightly.

The post Five New Delicious (and Fittingly Strong) Cocktails in Honor of Dr. M. 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.

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.

Superheroes?  Who gives a heck.  I was too busy reading marine biology text books than to waste my time with the imaginary – and usually blatantly contradictory – special powers of comic book superheroes.  In the real world, becoming invisible is an easy task for an octopus:
Maybe you are caught unaware.  No problem, just blend into whatever looks good, like a strand of red algae:
Maybe your cloak of invisibility is not enough to hide from a predator, what to do?  Get really angry, very large, and look tough enough to scare them off. Bluffing is 9/10 of survival (something I learned in that Turkish prison):
Becoming invisible (or looking really pissed off) requires three simple things: (1) you will need an excellent sense of vision to relay your local environment to your brain to modify your (2) layers of stacked pigment cells called melanocytes to expand or contract, varying the color & shading of your body to re-create the color of your surroundings, and (3) relaying the physical aspect of your environment to tiny muscle fibers that instantly change to texture of your skin to mimic your substrate. Boom, gone (but still in plain sight).
 One layer of specialized cells, iridiophores, glam up the octopus with iridescent blues & greens.  These aren’t pigments, but cells that contain specialized components which take in ambient light and refract only the blue spectrum.  What lame-ass superhero can even bend light like that?  None. Moreover, this little Blue-Ringed Octopus has some nasty venom, so the pulsing blue rings warn a potential predators, but may also be irresistable to little kids poking around in tide pools.  Oops.

Having the superpower to flash colors & textures and immediately change shape aren’t just for fighting super-villains, but in this fast-paced world of evolution, cephalopods have come up with some excellent ways of just staying alive by a quick color change and expansion of muscles. Our friend the Mimic Octopus uses what’s called a ‘startle behavior’ in an attempt to scare off a potential predator (in this case, the underwater cinematographer):
The Mimic Octopus brings up its game by using the ability to quickly change into other sea animals. Here it looks like the feathery striped fronds of the vemomous Lionfish’s fins, and the black & white banding pattern of a highly-venomous sea snake, the Banded Sea Krait:

Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish all share highly muscularized tentacles, basically specially modified divisions of their boneless foot.  Octopus have suckers with an impressive ability to grip, and an amazing level of fine dexterity to solve problems like this:
Squid tentacles may have a combination of suckers alone, or suckers with piercing hooks or sharp saw-toothed edges to grip and maim their prey, as seen in these Humboldt squid: Octopus move with jets of water squirted through their siphon, and the intensity and direction of the blasts accelerates and steers the animal as smoothly as a hoverboard.
Squid aren’t that different from a personal spacecraft in those sci-fi comics, and these have a certain similarity to George Jetson‘s space car (but without George). With their siphon blasting jets of water and the fins along the side of the head undulating in waves that steer them, they can hover in place and instantaneously dart in any direction, and use their tentacles for streamlining, signaling, or attacking:
Now take this these concepts of color change, tentacles, and a personal hover-suit, and turn your little cephalopod body into some crazy disco predator. Using a neural network that coordinates the melanocytes and iridiophores into pulsating waves of light visually confuse – or possible mesmerize – prey enough to give you a split second to shoot your incredibly elastic predatory tentacles right in their face and pull them into your sharp killer beak. This is why the marine world is better than any comic book.
Ok, so maybe you want to be seen.  You’re a hot, sexy, ripe squid with gametes a-plenty and it’s the season for love.  But in the deep, dark ocean it’s hard to find the right mate. No problem, some squid have specialized bioluminescent cells in your skin where a tiny internal chemical reaction emits light energy in little glowing spots.  Your species may have a special pattern that identifies the right mates for you.  Not interested in love?  Those same light spots may attract prey that you can feast on until the moment is right for that special copulatory embrace:

So it’s been a while since the squid love-fest, and now your life is taken up with caring for the kids.  Sure, most squid just mate then dump a fertilized egg capsule on the ocean bottom and let those li’l squidlets hatch on their own, but not with Gontaus.  She may not be the world’s best mom, but unlike other squid, she carries her egg mass around to protect her little brood until the time they hatch.  When they do, she pulsates the eggs gently kicking them out into the big dark world below, like shaking sand off a beach blanket.  Once they are out, they are on their own and she has nothing more to do with them: Again, not the greatest mom, but better than most:

Next up, cephalopods have the highest cute factor of any invertebrate, more than flatworms, more than gastropods, and even more than those fancy-pants Peacock Spiders. I enter into evidence this contest between two little squid tucking themselves in for the night.  Looking like they were designed by a Japanese toymaker, the Pyjama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) and the Tropical Bobtail Squid (Sepiadarium kochi) will burow into your hearts:
Don’t need any fancy bed because the sea floor is soft enough? Well then dig right in with a few blasts of water.  No turn-down service required:

Most of all cephalopods just want to be left alone.  When color changing, jetting away, burrowing into the sand, or impersonating more dangerous sea creature doesn’t work, there’s always just losing your shit and kicking ass:

The post Cephalopods: Masters of W.T.F? – Enough GIFs to Kill a Kraken first appeared on Deep Sea News.

1) Cockles got feet, and they know how to use ’em. This isn’t a tongue, or some other fleshy pink appendage, but rather a foot, and a long, distensible, and flexible one at that. When in the sand, this foot extends deep into the sediment, and as it contracts, it pulls the shell down into the sand beyond the eyes of its predators. When you dine on cockles, this is what you eat.

2) Trippy aquatic castanets? Ghost shell from a Japanese horror movie? Nope, this is a scallop doing what scallops do for much of their life – trying to get the heck away from a predator. Unlike cockles that hide beneath the sand, the muscular adductor that snaps the shell shut creates a jet of water that moves them in short, jerky blasts through the water. While their escape plan isn’t all that great, it may just be good enough to get out of the path of slow-moving starfish, their most feared predators.

3) You can almost hear the thumping oonce oonce oonce rave beats where the disco clam lives. It’s not really a clam at all, but a very flamboyant bivalve called the Electric Flame Scallop. Their light show pulsates within the fleshy mantle, making small mesmerizing blasts of light. Unlike most respectable sea creatures, they don’t generate bioluminescence, instead they reflect ambient light through a thin layer of silica microspherules embedded in their flesh, making the light appear as electrical currents in that outer layer of skin. The hot-pink feather boa of tentacles may give them additional glam-rock cred, but they also contain distasteful sulfur compounds, so the blinking lights may give potential predators a fair warning for the subsequent mouthful of regret.

4) Octopus are (literally) cold-blooded killers, and they’ve got a whole toolkit of ways to subdue different kinds of prey. With clams, they grasp the shell with their tentacles, and using a sharp tooth-studded tongue, drill a small hole through the shell and inject a paralytic venom. The drugged clam relaxes its grip and they octopus can easily pry the shell open. With the former tenant now lunch and just a fading memory, the octopus takes over the clam’s home and uses the thick shell for protection from its own predators, keeping one eye open for danger.

5) Squee Alert! Bears and clams rarely meet, but when they do the results can be sickeningly adorable. Grizzly bears along the Pacific Coast often forage for marine invertebrates at low tide, and have even been seen pawing through the sand for clams. This young grizzly is learning the art of clam digging, yet hasn’t perfected the technique, and now has a huge cockle clamped to one of its claws. You’re Welcome!

The post Five Mind-Blowing Bivalve GIFs That Will Blow Your Mind – Your Blown Mind Won’t Believe #6! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Tongue that Bites

Take this shell for example, so smooth it’s hard to tell if it was even in focus when photographed, is that of the Flamingo Tongue snail (Cyphoma gibbosum, Ovulidae). With satin pastel hues of pink and orange, the shell is worthy of a Miami Art Deco speakeasy, but the mantle that shrouds the shell adds a flair of early 1960’s cubist psychedelia. Most are barely

longer than an inch in length as adults, but size doesn’t matter since what they eat are the tiny, succulent coral-like polyps that make up the colonies within a sea fan. In the warm, shallow Caribbean Sea, a Flamingo Tongue Snail will graze on a sea fan, scraping and plucking out polyps, leaving a stark, lifeless trail behind. In areas where mollusk-eating fishes have been eliminated, the absence of their natural predators causes the snail population to explode, wreaking long-term and widespread damage to the slow-growing sea fans and the habitats they create.

Oyster Shooter

Who doesn’t love oysters? Ok, except vegetarians, and sure, those with shellfish allergies, but slurping down a raw oyster with a dab of Tabasco sauce and a squeeze of lime followedby an ice-cold lager is a marine biologist’s equivalent to a dose of Ativan. This water-worn little shell, less than two inches long, also loves oysters, but eats them in an entirely different way. The Japanese Oyster Drill (Ocenebra inornata, Muricidae) is far too small to eat an entire oyster, and too weak to pry open the shell, so it tries an entirely different method, one that you would expect in some freaky David Cronenberg film. The radula that in most species of snails are used as a rasp to scrape food off a

substrate, say algae off a rock or bits of meat off a dead fish. In this species, the radula is developed into an abrasive augur-like structure that can literally drill through the shell of other mollusks, and in particular, the sedentary oyster. Secretion of acidic enzymes through the proboscis containing the drill softens up the shell to make drilling quicker. Once the shell is perforated, the snail will then suck out the oyster’s fluids and soft tissues. Even more interesting, the evolution of a drill-like radula has been achieved independently in several different unrelated

lineages of predatory snails. But too many oyster drills can wreak havoc in an oyster bed, and this species in particular has been accidentally introduced into ecosystems far outside eastern Asia, proving them to be a serious invasive pest in regional shellfish industries.

Neritic Nosferatu
If you thought that a marine snail with an auger-like set of teeth drilling into an oyster to

suck out its juices was weird, I’m going to up the ante. As you’ve read in various postings about marine gastropods, you know the tooth-studded radula is a diverse and effective organ to acquire food. But scraping and drilling are just a few of the adaptations among marine snails, and this ruggedly handsome Cooper’s Nutmeg snail (Cancellaria cooperi, Cancellariidae) has another trick. Its sharp, almost scalpel-like teeth bite a small slit into their sleeping prey, and when the prey begins bleeding, their proboscis is pressed against the wound to casually sip the flowing blood. A vampire snail on its own seems earn

enough weirdness points, but it doesn’t stop there. Cooper’s Nutmeg seems to be an ectoparasite specializing on the California Electric Ray (Torpedo californica), a fish with high enough voltage to knock out any potential prey and foe alike, but somehow it doesn’t seem to detect the snail. Experiments in aquarium settings, as well as observations in the wild, suggests this snail specializes only on electric rays, with some observations showing over a dozen snails feeding simultaneously off a single ray, and has yet to be documented feeding on any other species of fish.

Cone of Silence

Last up in our series of marine gastropods and their strange adaptations for feeding is a good candidate for the next campy horror film. You may remember from past episodes that

cone snails (Conidae) have a highly-specialized harpoon-like radula and associated venom gland that makes them highly toxic predators. The Geography Cone (Conus geographus) is a slow, silent hunter on the midnight reefs where it seeks out sleeping reef fishes (yes, fish do sleep) by their acute sense of smell. Once within close range of a fish, the large mouth, really an expandable funnel-shaped shroud, releases a complex cocktail of nearly two dozen different paralytic toxins called the “nirvana cabal” including insulin that causes the prey to become lethargic by creating hypoglycemic shock, like the knock-out gas in an old James Bond movie. When the dazed fish is engulfed by the mouth, the harpoon is fired into the fish, quickly killing them. One look at the aperture of the shell shows an opening much wider than most other species of cone snails, and this allows the snail to swallow the entire fish into the main chamber of the shell. While their venom is primarily used for prey capture, it can be turned defensively on their predators. In fact, the Geography Cone is regarded as one of the most venomous of marine animals, and is responsible for no less than 30 documented cases of death in humans, though the actual number is likely much higher since traces of the venom are difficult to detect and effects of the toxins may mimic other more common causes of death, like heart attack.

The post Malacology Monthly: It Eats Whaaaat? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

At the heart of downtown Oakland, San Francisco’s stereotypically grittier and unpolished sister city across the San Francisco Bay, lies an urban lake that is experiencing a remarkable rebirth. Lake Merritt isn’t so much a lake as it is a contained, urbanized arm of the Bay itself. It is a brackish-water lagoon divided from the cement sphincter of sky scrapers and apartment buildings by narrow strips of oak-studded parkland. I’ve lived by the Lake for the greater part of three decades, and while it hosts a flotilla of migratory ducks in the spring & fall, it was a figurative dead-zone devoid of the rich marine life in the Bay, and sometimes a literal dead-zone when bodies were dredged out of the muck. While making a picturesque and relaxing place to hang out on a warm summer night, the summer days often stank of rotting invasive algae and sulfur-producing bacteria.

In precolonial times, expansive shellmounds around the slough attested to the abundance of shellfish and game that allowed the native Ohlone peoples to thrive. Even with the influx of settlers into the mid-1800’s Lake Merritt was still a functioning part of the San Francisco Bay Ecosystem, The Lake was a vibrant tidal slough that brought migrating salmon to Oakland’s creeks, with historic records of river otters, harbor seals, and enough ducks to host several hunting clubs. Encroaching urbanization morphed scattered clusters of Gold-Rush farms, factories, and merchants into a bona-fide city, forcing changes to the Lake. A cement lining replaced the muddy banks of the slough, and a gated dam was placed at the connection with the Bay in an attempt to mediate the flooding from heavy seasonal rains. In 1870, Lake Merritt was declared the nation’s first wildlife refuge, but such a title didn’t guarantee special protection. Urban runoff carrying sediment and pollution produced a shallow, mildly toxic environment that often became too warm and anoxic in the summer, and too laden with fresh water in the winter, to maintain any real biodiversity. With more residents came more waste. For several decades in the mid and late 1880’s, Lake Merritt was the sewage system for much of downtown Oakland, causing such a literal stink that the federal government intervened to correct the health concerns associated with floating islands of waste and banks caked with human excrement.

Despite this, Lake Merritt remained both a source of civic pride and a focal point for many of Oakland’s social and municipal events. It’s not surprising that in 2002, bond measure DD was approved by more than 80% of Oakland voters, creating a fund of almost $200 million that would renovate much of the city around the Lake from its urban creek headwaters to its connection with the San Francisco Bay, restoring Lake Merritt into a functional ecosystem. Pots of money from this initiative restored the crumbling infrastructure of the Lake, placed trash filters that caught litter carried by curbside gutters, and provided more public education about the health and ecology of the Lake. More importantly, dredging the Lake and modifying the canal that connected it to the San Francisco Bay flushed fresh ocean water with every tide, feeding cool, oxygenated, nutrient-rich water into the Lake.

It took a decade after public approval of the bond measure to begin full implementation, but when it did, results were quick and dramatic: schools of silverside and jacksmelt boomed, feeding growing numbers of terns, herons, and kingfishers. Young steelhead salmon were seen for the first time in decades, as were California Bat Rays feeding on the growing clusters of native and non-native mussels. River otters were spotted for the first time in a century. The real testament to the ecological invigoration of the lake were the lush and diverse gardens of marine algae, and the giant sea hares they fed.

Sea hares, specifically the California Sea Hare (Aplysia californica), are large slug-like gastropods that lack a shell, but make up for this minor shortfall in sheer slimy bulk. As California’s largest gastropod, they can measure two and a half feet long, and weight up to 15 pounds. This year Lake Merritt hosted a population boom of the animals for the first time in my recorded memory of observing the lake. Promoting a natural tidal cycle created a cascade of new colonization. The saltwater influx from the Bay improved conditions and nutrients that produced abundant algae growth, and also brought tiny larval sea hares into the Lake to settle and feast on this algae. This year, their population got a bit of a boost with warmer El Nino waters bringing even more larvae than usual into the Bay. As the sea hares grew into their brown, tan, purple, and green super burrito sized adult stage, they mingled in large orgiastic masses of mating and egg-laying. Being simultaneous hermaphrodites, the sea hares piled into groups of two to two-dozen, exchanging sperm and egg with each other, and leaving behind long strands and woven clusters of neon-greenish yellow eggs.

On a particularly sunny July Saturday, the Lobos Marinos and I hosted an informal community-based interpretation of more than 171 sea hares along the eastern bank of Lake Merritt, where hipsters, hip-hoppers, yuppies, young families, and old couples wanted to know what the heck these things were. The main question was “can you eat them”, to which I relied “yes, you can eat them, so long as you don’t mind their poison glands”, but the no-fishing policy at the Lake actually prohibits the take of sea hares. Some people thought them interesting though a bit disgusting, while others, after learning how Oakland citizens voted to restore Lake Merritt, felt a little more of that Oakland pride. For me, an Oakland taxpayer, renewing the Lake back into a vital ecosystem was worth the money. Today, more than three months later, the boom of sea hares is over. The last breeding adults are at the end of their short lives, with those before them leaving behind decaying masses of mucus. Winter rains will reduce the salinity of the Lake, yet this surge will flush the newly-hatched larvae back into the Bay. Lake Merritt’s restoration will continue for several more years, but with the next summer, the sea hares will hopefully return.

The post How Urban Renewal Gets You Giant Sea Hares first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Are you old enough to remember the show MTV Cribs, where a camera crew invades the home of a filthy-rich celebrity and takes annoyingly jumpy quick-shots of how awesomely decked-out and unnecessarily opulent their ‘crib’ is? Think about that approach, but with a Malacology Monday twist. Firing up a band-saw and with the warnings of my old school shop teacher “you’re gonna cut your thumb off” echoing in my head, our team will show you inside the ‘cribs’ of Malacology’s most interesting species.

High-Rise House
First up, the aptly-named Screw Turritella (Turritella terebra: Turritellidae) with a tall, twisting spire. For gastropods, the shell is a home that offers protection to withdraw into when needed, and as the muscled-mass of the snail grows, so too must the shell. The opening – or aperture – of the shell is the front-door, and new shell material is excreted by the fleshy mantle around the edge of this opening. As the door gets bigger, the shell wraps around itself as a twisted, ever-widening tube. What you see in the cross section is a ‘crib’ that starts off tiny when the snail is just a wee one, and gets larger with age. While not ostentatious enough to make it on MTV, it’s still a cozy and versatile home.

Cute as a Button
A peek inside the Commercial Topshell (Tectus niloticus, Trochidae) shows a low, tightly-twisting whorl, making the whole shell as a compact stout cone. The thick internal walls also provide strong structural support. Such a shape offers good architectural resistance from strong waves in shallow shores, and from shell-crunching fishes & crabs. From larger specimens, round shell disks are drilled to make buttons, hence the name Commercial Topshell, not that it is especially good at banking or international commerce. Since only a few buttons can be drilled from each shell, this species is heavily collected in the Indo-Pacific region where it lives, and since its meat is delicious, it has been fished-out in much of its range. Several countries are developing captive-breeding facilities to raise them commercially, and other programs employ captive hatcheries that release the young back in the wild to supplement the natural population. In many areas though, the main way to promote the population of the Commercial Topshell is to kill off their wild predators, like porcupine fishes, wrasse, bat rays, and crabs. Not such an ecologically sound approach especially since a single darned coconut can make more buttons than a dozen shells.

Home Security
Next we burst into the home of the Strawberry Conch (Strombus luhuanus: Strombidae), one of the smallest but most abundant conch species in the Indo-Pacific. Here we see the shell growing tightly around most of the body, leaving very little of the spire exposed. The aperture of the shell is very long and narrow, but since the resident snail has no internal hard parts, it can flatten its foot, head, and mantle to squeeze through that skinny opening. Such a thin front door is an adaptation against large predatory crabs, nature’s home-invasion robbers. In shells with a larger openings, crabs don’t politely knock, but hold the shell tight with one claw, and with the other, they jab it into the aperture and break the opening away. As the snail withdraws deeper into the shell, the crab just keeps turning and breaking the whorl of the shell until it reaches its prey. With the Strawberry Conch, their security system consists of this narrow opening that prevents a crab from inserting its claw in the first place, and the thickened lip around this opening provides extra strength to prevent the initial breakage of the aperture, keeping the snail safe inside

House of a Hundred Rooms
In this, our last visit through the dwellings of mollusks, we visit the palatial estate of the Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilus; Nautilidae), with a grand array of ever diminishing luminous pearlescent back-rooms. As we saw during our tour through the rather Spartan dwellings of gastropods, the living chamber for the snail is a continuous tube that spirals around an axis, increasing in length and diameter as the animal grows. While the Chambered Nautilus develops in a somewhat similar way, the living chamber holds the mass of the tentacled landlord, but as the shell grows, the previous back-end of the living chamber is walled-off with a shiny layer of nacre. These rooms are connected by a spiral tube, the siphuncle (use that term in your next Scrabble match) that balances fluids, salts, and gasses, ultimately making each empty room an internal flotation device. Gastropods slowly drag their home along the sea floor like low-class campers, but the Chambered Nautilus uses blasts of water from its siphon to push the shell through the open water like a sporty, speedy, jet-powered blimp. In deeper water, the wall between each chamber strengthens the shell, preventing a disastrous implosion. Chambered Nautilus, I like your style.

The post Malacology Monthly: Inside-Out first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Scorpion Without a Sting

This leggy shell belongs to a group of gastropods called the Spider Conchs, and this particular species is the Scorpion Spider Conch (Lambis scorpio), which can neither bite nor sting. The group gets its name from the leg-like extensions along the edge of the expanded opening of the shell (aperture) that serve no function in locomotion. Living in the intertidal and shallow subtidal mud, sand, and coral rubble where the surge of waves can be intense, researchers believe these spines serve to prevent the snail from rolling on the bottom. As an added benefit, long, thick spines could make it more difficult for mollusk-eating fish to eat the Scorpion Spider Conch. But as nobody has ever conducted any field studies or laboratory simulations of how these spiny shells actually function, they are untested assumptions. If scientists knew everything, there would be no work for graduate students.

Spiny Shield

Limpets rarely get much respect among malacologists, let alone shell collectors, yet they have a subtle magnificence. I bring you the Bearded Limpet (Scutellastra barbara; Patellidae). Mollusks that live in the intertidal zone are the cage-fighters of the invertebrate world. You’ve got to be extra tough to withstand tons of force from a crushing wave, survive the hot and dry exposure from low tide, and have sure-fire ways to avoid being eaten by predators both on the land and in the water. This shell has a series of strong ridges that radiate out from the crest of this pyramid-like shell to the outer margins of the shell. Architecturally, these ridges act as girders not just strengthening the shell, but directing the power of a breaking wave to the outside edge of the shell. This causes the power of the wave to be divided across the shell along these girders, but since these ridges end in spines that are in contact with the rocks, the wave force actually causes the shell to be pressed against the rock, holding it in place as the wave is breaking around the shell. Further, the bumpy, spiny edge of the shell could also make it harder for limpet enemy number one – the African Oystercatcher – to eat it. The bill of the oystercatcher is shaped like the flat end of a standard screw driver, and the oystercatcher wedges this sharp edge under the shell and pries it off, flips it over, and scrapes out the fleshy tidbits. The uneven spiny edge makes it much more difficult for the oystercatcher to slip the bill underneath the shell, and theoretically a few more Bearded Limpets survive to pass on this morphology to the next generation.

Twice the Spines, Twice the Fun

The Spiny Oysters (Spondylus: Spondylidae) such as this dandy Spondylus foliaceus, are a widespread group in tropical and subtropical waters, shallow and deep seas, with a diversity of colors and shapes, but they are all united in the spines, thorns, and prickly bits that cover their shell. The function of these spines, as imagined by unimaginative malacologists, it to protect the oyster from piscine predators, but that’s what they always say. Three other possible ways that could potentially increase the survival of the spiny oysters are as follows: (1) these spines could act to deter the settling of barnacles, anemones, and even other oysters on their shell. Acting as a figurative layer of barbed-wire the spines keep other large invertebrates from plopping-down on their shell and growing on them, weighting them down, and competing for food; (2) the expanded surface area these spines provide could promote the settlement and growth of other small marine organisms. Algae, bryozoans, and encrusting sponges, could provide a natural camouflage to better conceal these oysters on the sea floor; and (3) these spines could act as a ‘baffle’ to slow water flowing around the clam. As you all remember from your hydrophysics courses, moving water carries objects (sand particles, plankton, delicious detritus, etc.), and the faster the water moves, the larger particles and the greater number of particles the flow can carry. If there are impediments to water flow, such as dozens of spines on an oyster’s shell, the water slows and drops its particles. So, the spiny oyster’s spines may act to slow moving water around it, and that water would drop its suspended detritus and plankton right around the edge of the shell where the oyster is drawing in that water to filter out a meal. Or maybe it’s just to deter fish from eating them after all.

Shell Superstar

Behold the Japanese Star Turban shell (Guildfordia yoka; Turbinidae), a flat and radially spiny gastropod from the western Pacific Ocean that looks like a nasty weapon hurled in a kung-fu movie. One hypothesis concerning their spines is that it helps to distribute the weight of the snail outward so that it doesn’t sink into the soft deep-sea muds where it lives. Where broad, flat spines might accomplish this feat, their thin, narrow spines would seemingly cut into the soft mud, offering no real support for the weight of the shell in the center. But dang it if those spines don’t give up clues themselves; because they often show signs of breakage and regeneration, like one of the spines seen in this shell, they are likely for protection from predators. If the spines don’t actively repel foraging deep-sea fishes by a painful jab in the roof of the mouth, the spines may simply make the snail too big to even swallow in the first place. When the Japanese Star Turban survives a potential attack with a few spines broken, the snail will repair or regrow the protective spines to live another day.

Spines Fit for a Goddess

Sorry that I didn’t mention there would be a final exam for the end of this post, so sharpen that No. 2 pencil. Spines on shells, much like a Swiss army knife, can serve one or many functions. They deter predators, strengthen the shell, and support the animal in various ways. But this gastropod shell, the Venus Comb Murex (Murex pecten; Muricidae) is the most glorious example of spines. As the name might suggest, it is the natural comb that keeps a sexy Roman goddess’ hair smooth and manageable. After all, as legend has it, Venus was born of sea foam, and you can imagine what ruin the tides can do to her hairdo. But no, none of the ancient texts or depictions in paintings, mosaics, or bas-reliefs show Venus using this shell as a styling tool. So then, what evolutionary, ecological, and/or morphological function do you expect the spines to serve? Watch the video below for some clues:

The post Malacology Monthly: Spines and How to Use Them first appeared on Deep Sea News.