Sort of.

On August 21 2017, the moon passed in front of the sun, the sky darkened, the temperatures dropped, and the zooplankton thought it was night. This triggered their daily migratory response and they headed to the surface of the sea. And data from oceanographic buoys off the Oregon Coast recorded all the drama! Leave it to marine scientists to so conveniently deploy OOI, a permanent, highly instrumented, cabled oceanographic observatory, directly in the path of the eclipse.

Bio-acoustic sonars detect particles and zooplankton floating in the water. Like mechanical dolphins, sonars send out a beam of sound that bounces off all the little bits of stuff floating in the water. When the sound returns to the sonar, the signal is decoded and shaped into a vertical map of sound-reflecting stuff in the water. And sound-reflecting zooplankton are part of that map.

In sonar imagery, zooplankton are easily identified as the bright reflecting bands. When the eclipse happened, you can see that band start to rise, just like it does every dusk. Of course an eclipse isn’t night. Within an hour the zooplankton mob realized they had made a terrible, terrible mistake and descended again.

Kudos to Jonathan Fram at Oregon State University for setting up the sonar to watch this awesome migratory spectacle. Was it truly an oceanographic calamity? Only if you were one of the thousands stuck in traffic after the eclipse.

Source:

August 21 Eclipse-Related Data from the Endurance Array

The post What actually happened in the sea during the solar eclipse! 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.

I’ve been lucky enough to see a few live trachymedusae in my lifetime. They’re among the most beautiful jellies I know, with fascinating colors and structures. Why this jelly has two types of tentacles–those facing up and those facing down–is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a way to help it capture prey? But what might that prey be? We really don’t know.

So much left to learn and discover!

The post This deep-sea jelly looks like something from a dream first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Although I was hoping this robotic fleet was deployed for total ocean domination, their true goal was to pretend that they were plankton. Which means they have to act like a plankton. Some plankton are able to move around a little bit, but most of the time are just pushed about by water. For these robots to mimic the movements of plankton, the trick here was to make these Lagrangian floats follow a particular patch of water that is being pushed about by currents and waves. By deploying 16 robots, then you can see how these forces create the plankton patches that have been seen in the ocean.

Which is exactly what this tiny swarm did! And, be still my physical oceanographer heart, the robotic plankton patchiness was caused by internal waves. When the group was in the wave crest, they spread apart! When the group was in the wave through, they clumped together! Exactly as an internal wave should command them.

Let’s not forget the awesome tech that made this happen. Being able to follow a water blob isn’t easy. The robot needs to continually monitor its external surroundings and adjust its buoyancy to stay at a constant depth. And tracking the position of anything underwater? You need to do it with sound. Here they used an array of five sound sources around the swarm that talked to it with special acoustical pings. But to keep the robots small, they couldn’t answer back. They just listened and recorded a sequential round of pings from the sources, which was downloaded later. The location is then determined from the difference in time between when the five pings were transmitted and when they were received. This is some elegant signal processing people.

I only have one suggestion, you hand all the robots over to me and I call them Martini’s Tini Ocean Robot Navy. I shall appear tall, they shall remain small and together we shall drift over all.

REFERENCE

Jules S. Jaffe, Peter J. S. Franks, Paul L. D. Roberts, Diba Mirza, Curt Schurgers, Ryan Kastner & Adrien Boch. A swarm of autonomous miniature underwater robot drifters for exploring submesoscale ocean dynamics.Nat. Commun., 8. 14189 (2017) doi:10.1038/ncomms14189

The post Am I a Robot or am I a Plankter? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This is a giant pyrosome, one of the strangest animals on Earth. Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking with the diver who captured this shot, Devin Leary, and, y’all, there is something very crazy happening in the Azores right now! But first, what are pyrosomes anyway? To quote myself from another article I wrote:

“If the Borg and the Clone Wars had a baby it would be a pyrosome. One long pyrosome is actually a collection of thousands of clones, with each individual capable of copying itself and adding to the colony. And like members of the Borg, which are mentally connected, pyrosome members are physically connected– actually sharing tissues. And while the Borg live in a big, scary ship, pyrosomes are the big scary ship. The whole colony is shaped like a giant thimble with a point on one end and an opening on the other”

Each member of the colony sucks in water from the outside of the colony, filters it for food and squirts the filtered water out into the big hollow space in the middle. Pyrosomes can be pretty freaky looking, but like many ocean giants, they’re actually filter feeders.

I love hearing about large pyrosome sightings because animals this big are very hard to find. One pyrosome sighting like this is incredibly lucky, but oh it gets so much better. Did you know that right now, all around the Azores, right now…did I say right now? There are pyrosomes ALL OVER THE PLACE?! Many are roughly a meter in length, but some are 8-10 meters (~26-33 feet) long! This is the first time I’ve been privy to a mass occurrence of giant pyrosomes in real time, and I’m freaking out! And I’m not the only one: Mr. Leary has been on the scene documenting these gentle giants as they troll through the cool waters, and he’s never seen anything like this. Devin told me on Facebook that in “past years I think I’ve seen one or two but this year we’ve been seeing multiple per week!” Even better, this past Sunday Mr. Leary estimates he saw around 50 pyrosomes!

Devin’s not the only one. Professor João Pedro Barreiros told me by email that, “as far as I remember from more than 30 years of continuous diving in the Azores (and this includes literally hundreds of hours searching vast areas freediving) this is the first year that I’m seeing pyrosomes on an almost daily basis!”

The first time I saw a pyrosome I nearly cried, and that animals was no bigger than a jellybean. I dream of seeing pyrosomes like this. One diver and marine biology student, Pedro Tomás, told me a few days ago by email that “the ones we saw this week, one of them I could fit inside.” OH MY GOSH I WANT TO GO RIGHT NOW. 

But what exactly is happening here? Where are these pyrosomes coming from? Why now? What species? To answer in order: I don’t know, I have no idea, haven’t got a clue, I think maybe it’s Pyrostremma spinosum, but I really have no idea! Mr. Tomás tells me he usually sees a few around this time, but from the sound of it this year is way out of the ordinary.

How long will this last? Nobody knows. The water in the Azores is starting to warm from all the summer sun, so Mr. Leary is concerned he may not see them for much longer. Dr. Barreiros is collecting observations from other divers, and Mr. Leary is working with Dr. Barreiros to take a few small tissue samples, which can hopefully be used to make an ID based on morphology and DNA sequences.

In the meantime, if you’re in the Azores and want a shot at spotting a pyrosome, I’d suggest getting in touch with Devin Leary and his dive shop, Arraia Divers. And if you’ve seen a pyrosome, please post your sighting on JellyWatch.org. Maybe with enough reports we can learn something new about these strange and mysterious creatures!

The post What are these giant tube-shaped animals showing up in the Azores? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The results? You had better put most of your 29 giant plastic scooping machines close to where the biggest litter bugs reside, near coastal Asia. Where you shouldn’t put them? In the center of the North Pacific Gyre.

But it’s not all doom and gloom people, this study lends support for reducing plastic use and just stopping it from getting into the ocean. That’s why I think projects like the Baltimore’s Mr. Trash Wheel and Seabin are so awesome, they are stopping trash and plastic from getting into the ocean right now. And while it’s known that I am not an ardent fan of the Ocean Cleanup, and this is certainly not an endorsement, this study does lend some support for relocating the proposed array closer to the coasts in shallower water which would be easier to design, build and service**. Here’s to hoping the Ocean Cleanup takes the conclusions of this research to heart, but I’m not holding my breath since they are only oceanographers.

*This paper judiciously doesn’t address engineering or even feasibility, but rightfully so. It just assumes that no matter where a plastic sink was put it operates at 45% efficiency (the number put forth by the Ocean Cleanup people), which is all you need to figure out the best place for your ocean cleanup booms.

** This is totally ignoring that when the array is moved inshore, you might not be in international waters anymore, subject to maritime laws of different countries and will now have to contend with much more ship traffic and larger sea life.

REFERENCES:

P. Sherman and E. van Sebille. Modeling marine surface microplastic transport to assess optimal removal locations. Environmental Research Letters, 11(1):014006, 2016.

The post Where is the best place to put your ocean cleanup device? Not where currently proposed. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This rather graceful swimmer is a dinoflagellate. It’s the first cell of its kind to make it onto pondlife. I haven’t seen too many of them as they’re most common in salt water. Dinoflagellates have a distinctive way of swimming, a kind of lopsided twirl that this one enacts beautifully. Many dinoflagellates have complex cell coverings consisting of membranous structures and hard cellulose plates that form a protective layer called a theca. It keeps the cell safe out there in the rough ocean waters. Some don’t have a theca, and they’re ok too.

A video posted by Urban Phycology (@pondlife_pondlife) on Sep 12, 2015 at 6:10pm PDT

My immediate thoughts can be summarized with this GIF:

I can’t even. Dinoflagellate, Y U swim so crazy??? All of a sudden I’m trawling the internet for more information, and stumbled across this 2010 review paper by Tom Fenchel, on “How Dinoflagellates Swim“.

Dinoflagellates have two flagella, oriented perpendicular to each other (a transversal flagellum and a longitudinal, trailing flagellum). When these flagella are flapping at the same time, it means that the Dinoflagellate rotates in a crazy way and swims in a “helical swimming path”. Apparently this is kinetically advantagous – the Dinoflagellates can use the force and momentum of this swimming pattern to align themselves across environmental gradients, such as salinity, temperature, and chemical stimuli.

Based on the Fenchel (2001) paper, it seems like most other protists and microbes are known to swim in a helical path. So next time you’re at the beach, just think – the water around you is full of billions of microbes just spinning, and spinning, and spinning….

So what did I learn? Well, if this overhead image of Dinoflagellate swimming tracks is anything to go by, I learned that they are basically the equivalent of a drunk guy trying to follow the smell of a hot dog cart at 3am:

Reference:

Fenchel, T (2001) How Dinoflagellates Swim. Protist, 152:329-338.

The post Go home Dinoflagellate, you’re drunk first appeared on Deep Sea News.

To be more precise, Phylliroe is a type of sea slug known as a nudibranch, and is about the size of a goldfish. It’s cousin to the much-loved sea bunnies and strawberry-smelling Melibes. Nudibranchs get pretty crazy in both pattern and shape, but in my mind Phylliroe takes the cake. So why does Phylliroe look so fish-like? In order to answer that question, we’ve first got to learn a little bit about this sly slug. Phylliroe’s ancestors long ago left the sheltered seafloor, evolving into open ocean hunters out for blood, or, if we’re being scientifically accurate, out for jelly.

Yep, this fish-shaped nudibranch noshes on jellies, like in the picture above. It likely uses those long horns, called rhinophores, to sniff out the scent of unsuspecting jelly prey. To hold onto jellies, Phylliroe uses a remnant of its old sea-floor slug days: its foot. Most slugs, whether land or sea, have a long slimy body that sticks to the ground. The crawling surface of this body is called the foot, and for most slugs the slow creep of this foot is what propels them forward. But Phylliroe’s body is different; it swims with a fish-like tail now, and its foot is mostly gone except for a little remnant right near its mouth. When Phylliroe tracks down a jelly it uses this tiny slug foot to stick to it, then slurps it up–one helpless tentacle at a time. Once consumed, this meal passes through the digestive tract, which is powered by digestive glands–those white zigzag lines in Phylliroe’s otherwise clear body. And when it’s done digesting? Phylliroe defecates from an anus located in the middle of its right side. Because why not?

Think Phylliroe can’t get stranger? Guess again. Phylliroe glows. It is one of the few nudibranchs known to produce its own light, and apparently this light is exceptionally bright and beautiful, though few have seen it. The ancestors of Phylliroe not only evolved to look and swim like fish, they also developed the ability to bioluminesce, something very few other sea slugs can do.

But the question remains: why does Phylliroe looks so fish-like? What’s the deal? It’s hard to say for sure. Very few people have studied Phylliroe, so we have to make some guesses. Maybe the fish shape is a clever disguise. Maybe lady* Phylliroe find gentlemen* Phylliroe most sexy when they’re most fishy. My personal guess? Both open ocean fish and Phylliroe are fast-moving predators living in a watery world. It doesn’t matter if you start with a slug body or a dumpy guppy body; in this environment if you want to hunt down your prey you gotta get quick. And so over time, in the ancestors of both open-ocean fish and Phylliroe, the slow pokes were weeded out, and all but the sleekest and most agile remained, with streamline low-drag bodies and paddle-like tails. Two different animals, a slug and a fish, living in the same environment and hunting in similar ways evolved similar body types for similar functions. At least, that’s my guess. Functional convergences like these are all around us–they’re fascinating to think about but difficult to test. When it comes to Phylliroe, it’s hard to know anything for sure.

In the first part of this video from OpenBoatFilms, you can see an up-close shot of a Phylliroe, complete with undulating digestive glands. At the end you’ll see a swimming Phylliroe looking very fishy.

Phylliroe, simply put, are elusive creatures. And this makes them difficult to study. Tracking down a Phylliroe requires advanced submersibles, or brave scuba divers willing to search in the open ocean (often at night). And there may be other factors making Phylliroe difficult to find. One of the most well-studied species, Phylliroe bucephala, lives a pretty odd life indeed. Adults of this species have relatively few young, only about 240 eggs–a small number for nudibranchs. Worse still, young P. bucephala prey on a single species of jellyfish. Each young P. bucephala–tiny miniature of an adult–sticks to a jelly many times its own size and slowly eats it alive, like a moving edible house. No jellies, no Phylliroe bucephala. At least, that’s one guess for why they’re rarely seen [1].

I do know one thing: I now desperately want to see a Phylliroe in the wild. And in the meantime? Well, my car just got a new nickname.

*Phylliroe bucephala (and possible many other Phylliroe) are simultanious hermaphrodites, meaning they’re both lady and gentleman Phylliroe at the same time. 

References

[1] Lalli and Gilmer (1989) Pelagic Snails. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California. *Nearly all Phylliroe facts in this article came from “Pelagic Snails”. This book is packed full of awesome biology, and not just on Phylliroe. A surprisingly wonderful must-read for those interested in open ocean life.

(And check out Phylliroe’s close cousin, the eel-like Cephalopyge)

Special thanks to Susan VonThun at MBARI for this awesome video!

The post Meet Phylliroe: the sea slug that looks and swims like a fish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Many descriptors have accompanied the emails, texts, and Facebook messages that have recently flooded my cellular device, all describing one unique ocean beastie…

Exhibit A.

With Spring alterations in wind patterns, hoards of blue, planktonic sailors known as Velella velella have raided the Western seaboard of the United States by the billions. Though commonly confused as jellyfish, Velella are actually upside floating ships of doom of hydroids. Think a colony living under one Pringle-shaped roof, rather than an individual.

Though Velella do sting, you will not necessarily feel their harpoons of death, aka nematocysts, pierce your skin. (However, No promises if you were to try to lick one….) Last year, our very own RR Helm even posted an amazing video compiled by the masterminds of MBARI perfectly describing the secret lives of these colonial creatures.

The one question that remains unanswered…what in the heck are we going to do with all of them now that they are here?! Summer is coming and we can’t very well have the beach looking like this when all the tourists come!

The only viable answer I could come up with…

I know what you’re thinking. An army of bright, blue, squishy, ocean pokemon might not seem like a viable option. And to that I label you a dream crusher. In fact, these aeolid nudibranchs, known as Glaucus atlanticus, LUURRRVVVEEEE to nom all the Velella they can eat! They even steal the Velella‘s super stinging powers and make them their own. And what’s better than getting ANOTHER even crazier alien-like ocean creature to do your bidding?

Needless to say, this half-hatched “Velella Clean-up Plan (v 1.0)”  is still in the Development Stage as Glaucus don’t typically make their way here to the Best West Coast. They are often found in more tropical regions destroying those Velella. We could plausibly use the pelagic snail Janthina as our master villain too…but the tagline “Release the Janthina!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. For now we are just brainstorming….but for precautionary measures DSN has begun recruitment of our very own Glaucus army. Be afraid.

The post Release the Glaucus! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

So perhaps I have been living under a rock, but I don’t know how I haven’t seen this website till now. I recently stumbled upon a stroke of ocean science video magic known as, “The Plankton Chronicles.” In association with the Tara Oceans Expedition and the Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer (OOV), marine biologist Christian Sardet and his team at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Paris University have created stunning educational compilations on many of our oceans gelatinous friends. Devoted to a global study of plankton in all oceans, Sardet initiated the Plankton Chronicles project to combine science and art in conveying the diversity and beauty of plankton. From adorable pteropods to carnivorous ctenophores, this ever-expanding collection of films has something for everyone.

WATCH THEM ALL RIGHT NOW!!!

If you just can’t get enough plankton from the Chronicles site (really who can?) you are in luck! Sardet recently compiled the book “Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World” set to release May 2015. At first I was actually pretty sad as I thought you could only get this in French and I thought I was just going to have to buy it for the pretty pictures alone. Turns out, it’s in English too, so if you would like to make a donation to my copy or the DSN library, we accept all major forms of credit card, travelers cheques, doubloons, diamonds, etc.

Christian Sardet, along with his Tara Oceans Expedition colleague, Michael Sieracki, will also be gracing the halls of the NMNH on April 3rd to share in their adventures on the expedition and wow attendees with the awesomeness of plankton through stunning photographs and short videos.

Whoever gets to go…I am super jelly of you. Pun intended.

The post The Plankton Chronicles first appeared on Deep Sea News.