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A new Gulf oil spill, opposition to deep-sea mining, DIY drop cameras, and more! Massive Monday Morning Salvage: October 30, 2017

Posted on October 30, 2017October 29, 2017 By Andrew Thaler
Weekly Salvage

I’ve been away for 2 weeks, so it’s a super-massive edition of the Monday Morning Salvage!

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • There’s still an unimaginable amount of work to do in Dominica and across the Caribbean. Support the Rebuild Dominica Hurricane Relief fund or any of the other funds from our list: How to help our island colleagues in the wake of total devastation.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • This is such a cool story: A Trail of Rocks Traces Historical Steamship Routes. We can track old steamship routes from rocks scraped out of the furnaces and tossed overboard.
  • Former Papua New Guinea Attorney General attacks deep sea mining project. They always pick pictures for these articles that don’t show how much life is right around the vents.
Sampling SMS under the sea Photo: Nautilus Minerals
  • Whose ecological footprint is bigger: Medics, economists, or environmentalists? Spoilers: conservationists still have an impact, but they sure ain’t number 1.

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

  • There’s a fresh oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s pretty darn huge:
    • Coast Guard Responding to 300,000 Gallon Crude Oil Spill in Gulf of Mexico.
    • Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill May Be Biggest Since 2010.
    • New Estimate Doubles the Size of Last Week’s Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Some fun from Deep Sea News: When real-life marine biologist and mom goes to sea, she takes the octonauts with her.

  • This is fine: Report on U.S. Marine Sanctuary Oil Drilling Sent to White House, Not Released to Public. This is totally fine: Trump Administration Proposes Largest Oil and Gas Lease Sale in U.S. History.
  • Alaska’s Oyster Farmers Are Filling an Acidification-Driven Void. The state’s oyster farming industry is gaining ground as growers elsewhere struggle. From Hakai Magazine, which is great.
  • Nature is one of the most under-appreciated tools for reigning in carbon. From Anthropocene, which is fast becoming my favorite environmental print magazine. Sorry, Orion.
  • Thousands of penguin chicks starve in Antarctica.

Hey, Andrew, how about you give us at least *some* good news today? Ok, fine.

  • North Atlantic Winds Could Power the Whole World. And the audio clip is great.
  • I will never not get tired of watching videos of massive ocean hardware doing massive ocean hardware things. Watch the USS John S. McCain Loaded Aboard Heavy Lift Vessel.
  • Radioisotopes from Fukushima power plant stay in sand for years, from our friends at oceanbites.
  • More on the Jones Act: House Bill Seeks 5-Year Moratorium of Jones Act in Puerto Rico and Why the U.S. Embraced the Jones Act a Century Ago.
  • Scientists are using museum specimens to track climate-related pollution.
  • Industrial Whaling’s Incredibly Long Tail. For some whale populations, even 100 years is not long enough to recover. Almost like long-lived, slow to maturity species need more than two or three generations for populations to recover.
  • How cool is this?! Steve Haan has been adapting our OpenCTD system to incorporate time-lapse video in the deep-sea. Those sea pens are delightful!
  • By training the next generation of fishers through a hands-on mentorship program, scientists and fishers hope to feed the world for many lifetimes.
  • The Fisheries Blog on Coming to ‘terms’ with species invasions.
  • Small but mighty: the importance of forage fish to larger marine creatures. Spoilers: They’re important.
  • First Nations Test the Political Water with Fish Farm Protests. First Nations’ occupations of fish farms are rooted in a deeper conversation about Indigenous land rights.
  • Your worldview: how values influence support of renewable energy.
  • The overlooked potential of second-growth tropical forest from Brandon Keim.
  • Second only to massive ocean hardware doing massive ocean hardware things is my fascination with massive ships doing the wrong thing: Cargo Ship Sinks in Persian Gulf.

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

  • Kahan and friends (2017) Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing. DOI: 10.1111/pops.12396 (I may have shared this one before, but it’s probably the most important #SciComm study of 2017, so read it again).
  • Munoz and friends (2017) ecolottery: simulating and assessing community assembly with environmental filtering and neutral dynamics in R. DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.12918.
  • Carman and friends (2017) Species–specific crab predation on the hydrozoan clinging jellyfish Gonionemus sp. (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa), subsequent crab mortality, and possible ecological consequences. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3966.
  • Rice and friends (2017) Keeping Humans in the Ecosystem. DOI: 10.1093/icesjms/fsx130.
  • Dallas and friends (2017) Species are not most abundant in the centre of their geographic range or climatic niche. DOI: 10.1111/ele.12860.
  • Coutellec (2017) Mollusc shells as metagenomic archives: The true treasure is the chest itself. DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.12716.
  • Olsoy and friends (2017) Unmanned aerial systems measure structural habitat features for wildlife across multiple scales. DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.12919.
  • Stevenson and friends (2017) Leveraging natural capital to solve the shared education and conservation crisis. DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13039.
  • Nava and Figueroa-Camacho (2017) Rehabilitation of damaged reefs: Outcome of the use of recently broken coral fragments and healed coral fragments of pocilloporid corals on rocky boulders. DOI: 10.1111/maec.12456.
  • Seyle and friends (2017) The long-term impact of maritime piracy on seafarers’ behavioral health and work decisions. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2017.10.009.

Shipping News (academic and ocean policy wonkery)

  • Shelter from the Storm: Tulane University is offering free enrollment for students from Puerto Rican universities whose year has been disrupted by Hurricane Irma. I love it when institutions pay it forward.

Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)

  • Does It Fart?: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence by Dani Rabaiotti, Nick Caruso, and Ethan Kocak (who also drew the awesome Monday Morning Salvage logo above!).
  • Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.
  • From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty.

Derelicts (favorites from the deep archive)

We dug up and revised some Aquaman favorites from the past:

  • The horrifying physiological and psychological consequences of being Aquaman.
  • The importance of being Aquaman, or how to save the Atlantean from his briny fate.

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.

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Related

Tags: Aquaman biogeography carbon Caribbean Conservation crabs death deep-sea mining Dominica ecological footprint ecosystems fart fish farms fishers forage Fukushima futurism habitat invasions jellyfish Jones Act molluscs natural capital oceanography for everyone octonauts oil drilling Oil Spill OpenCTD oysters Papua New Guinea penguins pirates political information processing predation Puerto Rico R reefs renewable energy science curiosity steamships Tulane UAVs whaling wind

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❮ Previous Post: Reducing seabird bycatch, rescuing vaquita, and cod comebacks: Thursday Afternoon Dredging: October 26, 2017
Next Post: Seagrass restoration, seabirds, and sea turducken! Thursday Afternoon Dredging: November 2, 2017 ❯

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