Southern Fried Science year-in-review, Palau’s Giant, a new challenge for deep-sea mining, Porgs are Puffins, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: December 25, 2017.

Happy Holidays from the Southern Fried Science Team!

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

• The Saipan Blog’s Angelo Villagomez put together a list of extraordinary Indigenous Pacific Conservationists to Follow on Twitter in 2018. Go. Follow them. Learn what’s really happening in Pacific Conservation.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

• Do-it-yourself science is taking off. A growing movement seeks to make the tools of science available to everyone (including you). I love that The Economist now has a “Punk Science” heading.
• Palau now requires all tourists to sign an environmental pledge when they enter the country. All flights in now feature this delightful short film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhuY8eNLzBM

• Arlo Guthrie was right! Cool short video of bipedal “walking” in gastropods. Clamzo boys, Clamzo!

Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)

• Another big week in deep-sea mining news:
  • Money hungry Nautilus weighs funding options as project challenges mount.
  • Nautilus Minerals is still seeking funding for its controversial seabed mining project Solwara 1 after multiple delays.
  • Sir Julius Chan Reaffirms Stance against Solwara 1 Project.
• It may be the last expedition for the Hawaii-based Pisces IV and V research submarines and support vessel: ‘Devastation’ Discovered In Deep Sea From Industrial Fishing. These two legendary subs are now mothballed in funding limbo. The US is now down to just one deep-diving research submarine.

• Eat invasive species, save the world?
• Porgs are Puffins is the best thing on the internet this year: The Last Jedi’s Porgs Are Just Puffins, Which The Film Crew Couldn’t Get Rid Of and Designing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Part 1: How Porgs Were Hatched.
  • I did a Twitter thing about it:

• No man’s land is ideal habitat for animals.
• Robots Dive Below Antarctica Ice Sheet to Collect Climate Change Data.
• Coast Guard rescues turtle trapped in floating cocaine bales.

• How Sea Shepherd lost battle against Japan’s whale hunters in Antarctic. I’m not saying it’s just racism, failure to understand the cultural context of the space they’re operating in, and an approach to conservation deeply rooted in colonialism, but it’s definitely also those things.
• Discard Studies going dark, being reborn in mid-2018. A great blog and I can’t wait to see the revamp Discard Studies later this year.

Lagan (what we’re reading from the peer-reviewed literature)

• Covelo and friends (2017) First record of a live blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) in the Iberian Peninsula after three decades. DOI: 10.7325/Galemys.2017.N6.
• Wu and friends (2017) Using social media to strengthen public awareness of wildlife conservation. DOI: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2017.12.010.
• Miyazaki and friends (2017) Deepest and hottest hydrothermal activity in the Okinawa Trough: the Yokosuka site at Yaeyama Knoll. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171570.
• Lee and friends (2017) Coelacanth-specific adaptive genes give insights into primitive evolution for water-to-land transition of tetrapods. DOI: 10.1016/j.margen.2017.12.004.
• Hoving and friends (2017) Bathyal feasting: post-spawning squid as a source of carbon for deep-sea benthic communities. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.2096.
• Tully and friends (2017) A dynamic microbial community with high functional redundancy inhabits the cold, oxic subseafloor aquifer. DOI: 10.1038/ismej.2017.187.

Shipping News (academic and ocean policy wonkery)

• Examining the lack of faculty diversity in the UC Berkeley biology department.

A faculty member of more than 20 years, Hayes said that aside from being invited to join the Diversity Committee, he has never been invited to join any review committee that makes decisions that impact the department. As a result, Hayes said, he has experienced many obstacles, including having to pay 10 times more money than any other professor to maintain amphibians in his lab. When he attempted to raise awareness of this issue, Hayes said he was told by former dean of biological sciences and professor of immunology and pathogenesis Mark Schlissel, “You can’t prove it’s because you’re Black.”

source.

Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)

My favorite ocean and science books from 2017:

• Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
• Hook Jaw Volume 1.

• Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution.
• The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA.
• Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

Derelicts (favorites from the deep archive)

The ten most read blog posts on Southern Fried Science in 2017:

• Your car has just been crushed by hagfish: Frequently Asked Questions

• The Trouble with Teacup Pigs
• How to build a canoe from scratch on a graduate student stipend
• 10 fish weirder than the fish in the 10 weirdest fish in the world list
• Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine is a fake documentary
• When I talk about Climate Change, I don’t talk about science.
• 10 reasons why marine mammals aren’t as cute as you think they are
• Speaking out about sexual harassment in shark science
• Six reasons why Menhaden are the greatest fish we ever fished.
• Surviving Grad School: What to expect from your stipend

And the top ten most read blog posts on the site, ever:

• Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine is a fake documentary 
• Mermaids: The New Evidence is a Fake Documentary 
• The Trouble with Teacup Pigs 
• How to build a canoe from scratch on a graduate student stipend 

• No, we didn’t find the Loch Ness Monster with Apple Maps 
• 28 fallacies about the Fukushima nuclear disaster’s effect on the US West Coast 
• 10 reasons why marine mammals aren’t as cute as you think they are 
• Florida Senate fails basic biology, accidentally outlaws sex. 
• Angler gives up world record to release massive shark alive 
• Megalodon: the New Evidence is a fake documentary

Feel free to share your own Foghorns, Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Shipping News, Driftwood, and Derelicts in the comments below. If you enjoy Southern Fried Science, consider contributing to my Patreon campaign to help us keep the servers humming and support other innovative ocean science and conservation initiatives. Patreon contributors this month can get their very own Hagfish Love sticker! Because everybody loves hagfish.