However, in the deep Gulf of Mexico the  devastation was hidden 2 kilometers below in the dark depths of the ocean .  

Investigations of the site began just months after the oil spill using a remote operated vehicle. Dramatic losses of deep-sea biodiversity in the immediate aftermath of the spill were documented by Louisiana State University researchers.  Additional surveys continued for one year until the summer of 2011. Meanwhile, ship-board collection of sesdiments monitored the slow recovery of life, noting a 40-90% reduction in diversity, on the deep-sea floor until 2014

…after which monitoring stopped. 

In 2017, Clifton Nunnally and I with a team of scientists revisited the DWH wreckage and Macondo wellhead site for the first time since monitoring ceased in 2011.  Video captured a deep sea unrecovered after 7 years.  Showing a seafloor, marred by wreckage, physical upheaval and sediments covered in black, oily marine snow unrecognizable from the healthy habitats in the deep Gulf of Mexico.

Near the wreckage and wellhead, many of the animal characteristic of other areas of the deep Gulf of Mexico, including sea cucumbers, Giant Isopods, glass sponges, and whip corals, were absent.  What remained was a homogenous wasteland in contrast to the rich heterogeneity of life seen in healthy deep sea.  

Conspicuously absent were the sessile animals that typically cling to any type of hard structure in an otherwise soft, muddy habitat.  Hard substrate in the deep sea is a valuable commodity but at the Deepwater Horizon site metal and other hard substrates were devoid of typical deep-sea colonizers.

Sea floor communities at the impact site were also characterized by high densities of decapod shrimp and crabs.  Crabs showed clearly visible physical defects and sluggish behavior compared to the healthy crabs outside of the impacted zone of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead.  

We hypothesize these crustaceans are drawn to the site because degrading hydrocarbons may serve as luring sexual hormone mimics. Once these crustaceans reach the site they may become too unhealthy to leave in a La Brea Tarpit scenario.

The scope of impacts may extend beyond the impacted sites with the potential for impacts to pelagic food webs and commercially important species.

Our Recommendations:

1. Longer funding cycles are needed to assess the recovery of deep-sea ecosystems.
2. Increased commitment to fund pre-impact baseline surveys.
3. Stronger, more explicit policy to support future monitoring efforts.

Overall, deep-sea ecosystem health, 7 years post spill, is recovering slowly and lingering effects may be extreme. 

In an ecosystem that measures longevity in centuries and millennia the impact of 4 million barrels of oil constitutes a crisis of epic proportions. 

The post Slow Road to Recovery after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for Deep-Sea Communities first appeared on Deep Sea News.

From the darkness emerges a boot. An old leather, steel-toed, work boot. It shouldn’t be there resting on the seafloor nearly two kilometers deep. I’m speachless. Even knowin this was going to be one of the toughest dives of my career, I’m still not prepared.

Seven years prior in 2010, Marla Valentine and Mark Benfield were the first scientist to visit the deep-sea floor after the Deepwater Horizon accident. On 20 April 2010, and continuing for 87 days, approximately 4 million barrels spilled from the Macondo Wellhead making it the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Just months after the oil spill, Valentine and Benfield conducted video observations with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) of the deep-sea impact. Overall, they found a deep-sea floor ravaged by the spill. Much of the diversity was lost and the seafloor littered with the carcasses of pyrosomes, salps, sea cucumbers, sea pens, and glass sponges.

Researchers continued to find severe impacts on deep-sea life. The numerical declines were staggering within the first few months; forams (↓80–93%), copepods (↓64%), meiofauna (↓38%), macrofauna (↓54%) and megafauna (↓40%). One year later, the impacts on diversity were still evident and correlated with increases in total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and barium in deep-sea sediments. In 2014, PAH was still 15.5 and TPH 11.4 times higher in the impact zone versus the non-impact zone, and the impact zones still exhibited depressed diversity. Continued research on corals found the majority of colonies still had not recovered by 2017. However, studies examining the impacts of the DWH oil spill on most deep-sea life ended in 2014.

This gap in knowledge on the lingering impacts of one of the largest oil spills of all time is why I sit here in this cold, dark, ROV control room staring at a work boot in the abyss. A year prior, I had reached out to Mark Benfield about replicating his ROV methods and locations. I am here seven years after his study beginning to replicate his first video transect.

Within minutes of reaching the seafloor with the ROV, every scientist on the vessel staring at monitors showing live video from remote seafloor knew something was wrong. As Mark Benfield, Clif Nunnally, and I report in a new open-access article, the deep sea was not recovering at the impact site.  The seafloor was unrecognizable from the healthy habitats in the deep Gulf of Mexico, marred by wreckage, physical upheaval and sediments covered in black, oily marine snow.

Near the wreckage and wellhead, many of the animals characteristic of other areas of the deep Gulf of Mexico, including sea cucumbers, Giant Isopods, glass sponges, and whip corals, were absent.  What we observed was a homogenous wasteland, in great contrast to the rich heterogeneity of life seen in a healthy deep sea.

Conspicuously absent were the sessile animals that typically cling to any type of hard structure in an otherwise soft, muddy habitat.  Hard substrate in the deep sea is a valuable commodity but at the Deepwater Horizon site metal and other hard substrates were devoid of typically deep-sea colonizers.

The seafloor at impact site was characterized by high numbers of shrimps and crabs.  Crabs showed clearly visible physical abnormalities and sluggish behavior compared to the healthy crabs we had observed elsewhere.  We believe these crustaceans are drawn to the site because degrading hydrocarbons serve as luring sexual hormone mimics. Once these crustaceans reach the site they may become too unhealthy to leave much like those prehistoric mammals and the Le Brea tarpits.

The ROV dive began with a boot belonging to one of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The dive ended at the wellhead, now capped with a memorial to those workers who lost their lives. A dive bookended with reminders of the human tragedy of the oil spill. The narrative that unfolded between these was an environmental catastrophe. In an ecosystem that measures longevity in centuries and millennia the impact of 4 million barrels of oil continues to constitutes a crisis of epic proportions.

Valentine, Marla M., and Mark C. Benfield. “Characterization of epibenthic and demersal megafauna at Mississippi Canyon 252 shortly after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” Marine Pollution Bulletin 77.1-2 (2013): 196-209.

McClain, Craig R., Clifton Nunnally, and Mark C. Benfield. “Persistent and substantial impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea megafauna.” Royal Society Open Science 6.8 (2019): 191164.

The post The lingering and extreme impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the deep sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Bakken Sea was unlike any ecosystem that exists today. Now, instead of the dry plains of North Dakota, imagine floating on the surface of this sea about 380 million years ago. The evening air is moist and musty, the sinking sun is dipping low, the sunset a wash of muted colors gleaming off crumpled black waves. Algae near the surface collect the last rays of sunlight, combining light with water and carbon dioxide to make organic matter. A strange collection of prehistoric animals feed on these algae (and each other) here at the sea’s surface, but to truly understand the Bakken, we must go underneath.

Standing underwater, on the Bakken seabed, there is no visible life. There is almost no oxygen in the water around you, transforming the seabed into a “dead zone.” You are at the bottom of a large basin—a bowl in the ocean floor nearly 400 miles wide . As the struggles of life play out in the waters above, the old, sick and defeated sink to their graves on the seabed. But without oxygen, they do not fully decompose, and nothing ventures this deep to scavenge upon their carcasses. Instead, billions upon billions of bodies–mostly algae but some larger creatures, too–slowly amass on the seafloor, forming a layer of organic matter known as the ‘lower Bakken.’

Fast forward through geologic time several million of years into the future: the sea level rapidly drops, and the basin becomes shallow with quick-moving currents. Sediment tumbles in from the surrounding mountain ranges. A layer of sandy, porous rock that covers and buries the layer of bodies. This sandy layer is knows as the ‘middle Bakken.’ Fast forward one more time: the sea rises again, and the first stage repeats, blanketing the seabed once more in dead remains, this is the ‘upper Bakken.’

These three layers—the lower, middle and upper Bakken—are then covered by sand and rock, compressed, and heated in a perfect combination of conditions that geologists refer to as an ‘Oil Kitchen.’ Slowly, this kitchen converts the Bakken carcasses into a diverse collection of gases and complex molecules called hydrocarbons–the fossils that make our fuel [2].

The lower and upper Bakken layers are sludgy and dense, difficult to drill into. But as the remains in these layers liquify, their old resting places crack open under the extreme weight and pressure . The bodies of these ancient dead sea creatures, long immobilized in their graves, now move again: the liquids of the lower and upper Bakken layers seep into the spongy middle Bakken layer. It is from this middle layer that, millions of years later, that they will be exhumed.

To harvest fossil fuels from the Bakken reserve, we drill wells thousands of feet down into the middle layer, and then extend them an additional two miles horizontally, maximizing the amount of oil we can harvest (Continental Resources, PDF). A high pressure mix of sand and water, called ‘proppant,’ is pumped in, fracturing the rock and opening small pockets of oil, which ooze through the cracks and are captured in the well.

Before the beginning of this month, this ‘crude oil’ was pumped into trucks or trains, destined for refineries. But as of June 1st, it instead enters the Dakota Access Pipeline–traversing multiple states, eventually destined for national or international refineries. At refineries, the ancient ocean remains of the Bakken Sea will be processed into the oil in your car, gas in your tank, and plastic lid on your morning coffee cup. Transporting oil via pipeline will potentially reduce the risks and costs associated with overland transport. But the 1,172  miles of pipeline raise a suite of new humanitarian and environmental concerns, including possible spills at important water sources like Lake Oahe, and destruction of sacred sites associated with the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Protesters tried to stop the pipe’s construction, or have it move it to a new location. Just today, a federal judge ruled that proper environmental procedures were not followed before the pipeline was approved. But for now at least, this long stretch of pipe will be the primary way these remains march across the plains.

Back in in Williston, North Dakota, business is booming; this small community is undergoing an oil-fueled renaissance. After one last look around at the dry grassy expanse, you get back in your car, turn the key–the gas ignites, the combustion moves the oily gears, and drive away.

Additional information

[1] Depositional Facies And Petrophysical Analysis Of The Bakken Formation, Parshall Field, Mountrail County, North Dakota (http://geology.mines.edu/Bakken/NETL_DOE/DOE-Student_theses/Andrea_Simenson_THESIS.pdf)

[2] http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Terms/o/oil_kitchen.aspx

The post The Ancient Ocean of the Dakota Access Pipeline first appeared on Deep Sea News.

2. One Fish. Two Fish. Red Fish… No Fish.

3. Snow Caps Cones for Everyone.

4. Too Many Lionfish on the Dance Floor.

5. I See Deadzones.

6. No Escape from Plastic Monstas.

7. Where Have All the Coral Reefs Gone and Where are all the Cod?

8. Goodness Gracious, Great Plumes of Oil…and Mercury…and all that other crap we put in the sea.

9. I’m all alone and there’s no zooxanthellae inside me.

10. Fin.

The post 10 Reasons Why the Ocean’s Struggle is Real first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“Even though this is a BRITISH Petroleum spill, it’s AMERICA’S Ocean”

The post Nicholas Cage is making a movie about the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Check out this stunningly, beautiful recap of where we are now and the questions still remaining. This video, featured by onEarth Magazine, was concocted by the one and only Perrin Ireland (@experrinment). Having seen Perrin create exquisite works of science art live, I speak from experience when I say she is nothing short of spectacular.

The post Day 1,825 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Just near 6 million liters of oil spilled out of Macondo well in 2010, about 6 supertankers worth of oil. The ramifications of the oil spill are still being documented and far reaching but included aberrant protein expression in fish gills, altered bacterial communities, and a whole suite nastiness in dolphins. At three different sites deep-sea corals appear to be impacted (study 1, study 2). Corals were covered with brown flocculent material and showed telltale signs of stress including excess mucus, enlargement of the skeletal elements (sclerites), and tissue loss. But new work suggests that it was not the oil that leads to unhealthy and dying corals rather dispersant.

Nearly 7 million liters of oil dispersants were applied during the cleanup efforts, 3 million of these in the deep sea directly near the wellhead. Yet little is known how oil and the dispersant, and the mixture of the two, impacts deep-sea corals. New work by Danielle DeLeo and colleagues sets out to address this in three different coral species. The group collected individual corals from the deep Gulf of Mexico using remote operated vehicles. On board corals were exposed to crude oil (collected from Macondo during the spill, dispersant (Corexit 9500A), a mixture of the two, and a seawater control.

All three deep-sea coral species examined showed more severe declines in health in response to dispersant alone and the oil-dispersant mixtures than the oil-only treatments. To restate, the dispersant was more toxic than the oil. Dispersants are known to disrupt the normal function of cell and organelle membranes. This means molecules are not transported normally across the membranes and cells cannot osmoregulate. Dispersant mixed with oil increases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that organisms break down into toxic forms. Basically, the dispersant, as designed, increased the proportion of crude oil compounds that were biologically available.

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The post Given the choice, corals would prefer oil to dispersant first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In real estate it’s all about location, location, location. A cozy home with an ocean view, white-sand beaches, comfortable climate, close to great food, and good neighbors. But that last part is currently giving penguins a problem. Boulders Beach, a suburb of Simon’s Town south of Capetown, South Africa, is a picturesque seaside community with 60,000 visitors a year and a resident population of 2,100 African Penguins struggling to live and breed among the vacation houses and beachgoers.

Penguins led a difficult and ultimately tragic parallel history with humanity in South Africa extending back nearly half a million years. Prehistoric foraging by early humans likely had little impact on the once expansive populations of these seabirds. As early as the 1600’s, penguins in South Africa – numbering perhaps in the tens of millions – were harvested on a large scale by European settlers, increasing through the 1800’s, they were boiled for their oil, and ground into hog feed. Eggs collected for human consumption at the breeding rookeries took the largest toll – over half a million eggs were taken in some years at one island alone, and the practice wasn’t banned until 1968. Mining of penguin guano for fertilizer (the ‘white gold’ of penguin droppings) not only disturbed the birds on their breeding sites, but crushed the burrows the birds needed to escape the South African heat and protect their eggs from gulls and ibises. Moreover, guano is a necessary link in coastal productivity, so less fertilizer that makes it back into the ocean means fewer nutrients for the base of the food chain, ultimately causing a decline in the fish the penguins need. Add to that the usual loss of habitat, impact from invasive predators, over-fishing of their preferred prey, and general human disregard for a very loud, very stinky bird.

Population estimates of African Penguins in the early 1900’s may have been as high as 3 million penguins, sinking to less than 300,000 during the first census in 1956, by the 1990’s penguin populations declined by more than 90%. Surprisingly in the mid 1980’s, a single pair colonized Boulders, with new breeding pairs arriving in following years, and later their offspring returning to breed, by the end of the last century, the Boulders Beach colony grew to nearly 4,000 animals, of those, 2,100 were breeding birds.

Part of Boulders Beach is a sandy-white strand of the Table Mountain National Park reserved just for the breeding birds, with a boardwalk for visitors to cross over the penguins for observation & appreciation. The remaining coastal strip is a jumble of rocks, small beaches, and coastal scrub. It’s this scrub where the penguins find shade from the heat and sometimes build their simple nest. Getting to that habitat after a day’s fishing along the coast means a mad scramble between beach blankets, forced photographic pairings with selfie-crazed tourists, and crossing several busy roads. Death by roadkill is only a recent risk in their evolutionary history, as are the poor penguins seeking a cool respite under a parked car, unknowingly crushed by the driver backing out of a parking spot. A variety of signs warning people of such dangers to the local penguins makes for an oddly comedic experience.

This new suburban environment is a strange place to survive. Where penguins once feared predation from brown hyenas and leopards, or egg loss from genets and mongoose, today they fear off-leash dogs, feral cats, and the hundreds of gulls lured to the beach by leftover food strewn on the shore that find an unguarded penguin egg too tasty to pass. Curious children chase the birds, hoping to cuddle these cute animals. But unlike the animated critters they know and love, cranky African Penguins pack a serious defensive bite, sort and twisted by a pair of sharpened pliers.

I was once bitten by an African Penguin named Elvis at the California Academy of Sciences, so I know the intense pain they inflict. These penguins are more ‘street’ than Happy Feet. Even though warning signs are posted, and a fine for touching a wild penguin is 500 Rand (about fifty U.S. bucks), penguins are harassed every day by a few idiotic tourists. But that’s just one downside of the neighborhood. In other areas of South Africa, large oil spills have made a huge dent in some populations, and even rescued oiled birds only have a 50% chance of survival after cleaning & rehabilitation. Locally, the less obvious but far more numerous small oil leaks from commercial and pleasure boats kill dozens more penguins each year.

While humanity can be an annoying and often fatal drag on the penguins, the bigger problem is the loss of their local marine cuisine. Their preferred prey are delicious, high-fat sardines, virtual Twinkies of-the-sea, that fatten both parents and chicks. Once the sardine fishery was over exploited a few decades back, leaner and smaller anchovies moved in to occupy their ecological niche. But their lower fat content made them less than ideal for raising a family, and penguins needed to spend more time catching more anchovies, causing an energetic drain on the birds. As a second-choice meal, anchovies still provided penguins with abundant food.  In more recent years, the anchovies have also become a targeted commercial fishery, and data show a direct correlation between increase in commercial take of anchovies, and a reduction of nest success and adult survival of penguins. The bad news: African Penguins are on the decline again. Current estimates suggest that about 2% of the population from a century ago still survives.

Every so often I get the chance to teach a month-long university field course on wildlife biology & conservation in South Africa, and I take my students to Boulders Beach, mostly because it’s beyond awesome to snorkel with penguins, but it’s also a great way to engage students in the complexity of current-day conservation issues. Invariably one asks “why are all the penguins are here with the people?”, and I flip the question around: “why are people here with all these penguins”? It’s the monetization of the wildlife experience, and a unique one at that. The town knows the financial draw the penguins have, so it’s in their best interest to preserve them. Mo’ penguins, mo’ money. Working with the residents, local schools, and visitors, the National Park and non-profit groups are better educating visitors on penguin etiquette, providing more helpful signage, and creating the accommodations the penguins need. Currently, the local population of penguins at Boulders are still hanging on, but projected impacts from climate change, fisheries trends, increasing marine plastics, and coastal development don’t bode well for other populations throughout South Africa. The deeply-ingrained sense of conservation among South Africans, buoyed by the cooperation of government, researchers, non-profit organizations, and dedicated citizens, provide hope that African Penguins may not be totally lost.

The post Penguin Problems first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve got something important I want to share with you that is not getting the attention it should from press or the authorities.  As regular #DeepSN readers will know, I work a lot with whale sharks in Yucatan Mexico as part of the research program at Georgia Aquarium and through association with the Mexican government and Mexican Conservation NGOs like Blue Realm/Ch’ooj Ajauil AC and Amigos de Isla Contoy.  Over the last few years many folks associated with these efforts have worked extensively to understand the largest aggregation of whale sharks in the world,  and we have begun to move towards conserving the extraordinary biodiversity of the marine realm of northern Quintana Roo, from Cancun to Cabo Catoche.  But, there is now a clear and present threat to marine life in this area.

Last year in cooperation with the Mexican national parks agency CONANP and Amigos de Isla Contoy, we (including DSN’s Dr. M!) installed an AIS receiver on the observation tower at Isla Contoy National Park, an incredibly picturesque island north east of Cancun.  This device relays signals from transmitters that are compulsory on all ships over 300 tonnes; signals that indicate ship ID, location, heading, destination and so on.  Our goal was to monitor commercial ship traffic in waters to the east of the island, where the majority of whale sharks gather these days, which is close to a big shipping lane at the western entrance to the Gulf of Mexico.  On July 6, however, we noticed in the data stream a ship doing some weird maneuvers, a ship which eventually came to a stop in the area immediately north of Isla Contoy.  The AIS data showed the ship to be a 300ft long bulk chemical tanker called Atlantic Sun and that she was anchored in less than 10m of water inside the bounds of the Whale Shark Biosphere Reserve, a marine protected area established in 2009 to conserve whale shark habitat.  The area is fedeally protected and anchoring is not allowed without special permitting.  It is certainly NOT appropriate anchorage for a 300ft chemical tanker.

Working with colleagues in Mexico we sent an aerial survey to confirm the presence and disposition of the ship and showed that yes, it was anchored in the protected area.  I contacted CONANP by email to urge an investigation, but to the best of my knowledge the ship remains today anchored in the MPA, some 2 weeks later.  Reports from contacts in Mexico suggest that the ship is either mechanically disabled or out of fuel, or both, and that the company that operates the ship may be in financial difficulties, which may be why they have not summoned a tug to move the ship to a more appropriate anchorage to await repairs or refueling.  There are reportedly six people on board – 5 men and 1 woman – and they are running low on supplies.  We are told that the cargo tanks are empty, which is good, but the ship itself represents a significant risk to healthy reef patches and adjacent bottom habitats, especially if it is disabled.  The potential anchor damage alone is significant.  Oil/diesel leakage and the risk of fuel spill from at-sea refueling should also be considered.  The best course of action is an immediate tow to the nearest safe harbour.

The maddening thing about this is that we warned about the risks of this some time ago.  Oh, and think about what could happen to a crippled tanker in shallow water if THIS continues on its current trajectory…

If you share our concern for the health of the Isla Contoy National Park, and for the whale sharks, manta rays, coral reefs, turtle mating/nesting areas, flamingos, manatees, dolphins, sailfish and frigate birds of northern Quintana Roo, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues in Yucatan Mexico, because so far there has been no press coverage in Cancun (or anywhere else) of this potential environmental disaster and little action from the regulatory authorities.  Marine protected areas and National Parks exist specifically to conserve extraordinary natural assets, but what good are they if we don’t use the provisions that they afford to effectively protect such critical habitats when they need it most?

You can email CONANP at  remolina@conanp.gob.mx

The post The Atlantic Sun is a potential environmental disaster first appeared on Deep Sea News.

• Fukushima radiation leak
• Starfish wasting disease
• the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• California oarfish “mortality event”
• Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy
• the “great Pacific garbage patch”
• the current Atlantic dolphin UME
• the collapse of various fisheries, exemplified by the Long Island Sound lobster fishery

So what’s wrong with debating these fascinating topics?  Well nothing, as long as the discussions are based on reason, information and, frankly, reality.  Also nothing, as long as there actually IS a debate, which isn’t always the case.   Here are some examples of the sort of reasoning that we have seen in comments, emails and tweets about the above examples:

• Starfish wasting disease. Starfish are melting. Radiation leaked into the ocean at Fukushima. Therefore Fukushima caused the starfish melting.
• Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy.  Hurricane Sandy happened. Then dolphins began dying on the Atlantic coast. Therefore Sandy caused the Atlantic dolphin UME.
• The “great Pacific garbage patch”.  There’s a giant patch of garbage out there.  If we could just sort of scoop it up, that would be good.  Someone should invent something to do that.
• The Long Island Sound lobster fishery. “They” sprayed insecticides in the tri-state area to control mosquito populations.  Around the same time, lobsters died.  Therefore insecticide spraying killed lobsters.

Among these sorts of comments and communications dwell many types of formal and informal logical fallacies, that is, flawed reasoning.  A common one is Arguing from Ignorance which is not meant as an insult, but is defined as “assuming that a claim is true because it has not been proven false”; this can be seen as a facet of Arguing from Silence, where a cause is assumed based on absence of evidence.  For example, the LIS lobster fishers made an erroneous connection between insecticide spraying and lobster mortality back in 1999 because there wasn’t another explanation at the time and it seemed reasonable (to them). A big problem is that you can make this sort of logical fallacy in the blink of an eye – it’s basically intellectual laziness – whereas the sorts of controlled and rigorous studies required to build a good theory for any environmental disaster can take a really long time.  In other words, fallacy is instantaneous but truth works at the speed of science, which is, unfortunately, often pretty gastropodal.  Not enough time has yet elapsed to reveal the true cause(s) of the starfish melting syndrome, for example, but in the case of the LIS lobsters, science showed pretty unequivocally that the mortality resulted from a multifactorial suite of environmental problems, particularly chronically elevated temperatures and persistent hypoxia, probably exacerbated by some fishery-related factors.  Pesticides didn’t enter into it.  And yet, if you ask the average Joe on the street in Hicksville, they are more than likely to say that the pesticides killed the lobsters in ’99, because that message – wrong as it was – was widely disseminated in the heat of the crisis, whereas the truth came out quietly in scientific papers and agency reports years later when the crash had long since faded from The News.

A related problem is that in the time between when people first propose a fallacious cause, and when the true cause is revealed through reason and research, the fallacious one can become ingrained like an Alabama tick.  Once people get an idea in their head, even if it’s wrong, getting them to let go of it can be bloody hard.  Indeed, there’s a term for this; it’s called “the Backfire Effect”: when confronting someone with data contrary to their position in an argument, counter-intuitively results in their digging their heels in even more.  In this phenomenon, the media has to accept a sizable chunk of responsibility because, as the lobster example shows, the deadline-driven world of media agencies is more aligned with the rapid pace of the logical fallacy than with the slow and deliberate pace of scientific research.  Many media outlets are often quite happy to give airtime to ideas that haven’t yet been critically evaluated, especially if there isn’t much other information to report (yet) about a given crisis.  I’m pretty sure some folks I know are going to totally jump down my throat for saying that.  They will doubtless point out that journalists are the defenders of the One Truth, but this is my editorial soapbox, so go ahead fellas.  Besides, John Stewart calls CNN out for this sort of stuff practically every night, and if it’s good enough for him…

Perhaps the most common flawed thinking we see in the comments and back channels of #DeepSN is the false correlation, or causality inferred from coincidence; formally, this is called post hoc ergo propter hoc.  This was the fallacy that Jenny McCarthy committed when she decided that the MMR vaccine had caused her sons autism, simply because the latter followed the former closely in time.  Well yeah, 100% of car accident victims ate breakfast that day too, but you don’t see people ditching their cheerios do you?  McCarthy’s willingness to shout her ignorance from the rooftops (and Oprah’s couch) has done untold damage to the public health, especially as it now turns out that her son didn’t have autism anyway.  The point is, logically flawed thinking of this kind is not trivial or a private deficiency; it can cause real harm to the thinker and to others. The recent kerfuffle on Chris Mah’s excellent post debunking a link between the Fukushima disaster and the starfish melting syndrome on the US Pacific coast is a perfect example of post hoc thinking.  Fukushima happened -> Starfish wasting happened -> therefore Fukushima caused starfish wasting.  As Chris pointed out, though, starfish wasting started before the Fukushima event, so even before any research has been done on the true cause of the syndrome, we can comfortably discount Fukushima radiation as the primary contributor.  If, as an academic exercise you apply post hoc thinking in light of Chris’s point, flipping the first two premises in the above syllogism, you could just as easily argue that Starfish wasting caused the Fukushima event!  That’s obviously absurd on its face and just serves to reveal the fallacy for what it is.  It may be more plausible that the radiation caused the starfish melting rather than the other way around, but that doesn’t make it any less fallacious.  Another aspect of the post hoc phenomenon is that it doesn’t seem to happen in the good direction, only the bad.  Fukushima must have caused the starfish melting syndrome, but no one is jumping up and down saying that the record numbers of whales in California waters this year are a pleasant and unexpected side effect of Fukushima, even though it’s happening at the exact same time as the starfish problem.

One last example of flawed thinking that inhibits reasoned debate about ocean science issues is false pattern recognition, or simply “leaping to conclusions”.  The 2013 case of “oarfish mortality” is a great example.  Last year precisely two oarfish washed up in California, within a couple of weeks of each other.  Oarfish are rare, so when two of them washed up in quick succession, many folks were quick to assume that the two events were related and that we were at the start of an oarfish mortality event.  Of course, it was just a statistical anomaly; a rare event that nonetheless happens inevitably if you wait long enough.  TV and radio media are some of the worst offenders when it comes to leaping to conclusions this way (print media outlets tend to be a bit more rigorous).  One of the ways they justify this is through posing a question.  Rather than framing the piece as “Oarfish mass mortality underway”, which would require fact checking, they go with “Are we at the start of an oarfish mortality event?” and support it with a few quotes from bystanders asked to wax hypothetical about their experiences.  By framing the story as a question or hypothetical in this way, journalists abdicate somewhat the responsibility to substantiate the claims made.  It may appear to editors to be a harmless practice that stimulates conversation around an interesting topic, but it often causes a significant amount of work for those who make it their business to try to inject a bit of science into the public conversation.  This is especially the case when the truth (statistical anomaly) is a lot less interesting than the alternative, that 30ft oarfish are going to start washing up all over the place!

There are a whole slew of other related phenomena collectively called “cognitive biases” (of which the Backfire Effect is one example), that come into play during heated debates about events like Sandy, Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima.  I am not even going to scratch the surface on those here, because this post is long enough already and we hope to have some experts on these phenomena comment here soon. In the meantime, perhaps one way we can help move the conversations in more helpful directions would be a checklist that people can consult to check their logic.  After all, awareness of a problem is half the solution, amIright?  Scientists often have some form of this kind of thinking ingrained as a part of their training, but not always, so it can’t hurt for all of us to think consciously about our thinking, me included.   To that end, I offer the following, non-comprehensive list of things to consider before you hit “Reply” on that cleverly crafted response.  If you have additional suggestions I invite you to add them in the comments.

• Am I seeing a pattern that could just be a statistical rarity, and leaping to a conclusion?
• Am I connecting two events causally, because they occurred close together in space or time?
• Am I inferring a cause in the absence of evidence for any other explanation?
• Am I thinking inductively “It must have been such and such…”
• Am I framing the issue as a false dichotomy (debating only two possible causes, when there may be many others).  In other words, am I framing the issue as an argument with two sides, rather than a lively discussion about complex issues?
• Am I attacking my “opponent” and/or his/her credentials, rather than his/her argument?
• Am I arguing something simply because other/many people believe it to be true?
• Am I ignoring data because I don’t want to lose face by conceding that I may be wrong?
• Am I cherry picking data that support my position (a cognitive bias)

Deep Sea News seeks to raise awareness through scrutiny, not negativity.  By that we mean that we try our best to stick to the facts and then deliver them in our usual style of “reverent irreverence“.  For those who favour the ad hominem attack: we’re not paid to blog and we don’t all work at the same place (in fact, we all work at different places, all educational or non-profit).   We’re just 7 scientists who love what we do and want to share that passion with everyone else.  We relish vigorous discussion about the subject we all love, marine science, so with a bit of luck and a bit of effort, I hope we can improve the conversation by keeping it reasoned and scientific, so that DSN stays fun and informative, and doesn’t become a hive for trolls and a battlefield for flame wars.

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