Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
Hat tip to Deep Sea News. Pretty much sums up how we all feel right now.
The structure of the science blogosphere is changing. That much is apparent to anyone who follows any of the many talented writers who sail under the flag of ScienceBlogs. Several of the most popular writers have left, gone on strike, or are in the process of deciding their fate. I don’t need to rehash any of that, Bora has done that for us.
The following is a repost from the old Southern Fried Science WordPress blog. The original can be found here.
It was a story that could very easily have been written as science fiction. Gorgonian (sea fan) corals of the Florida coast were turning black and dying. The infectious culprit was something no one working on the reefs had encountered before. It was totally alien. The black rot spread across the Caribbean, decimating coral populations. By the time the contagion had been deduced, more than 50% of total sea fan tissue had been eradicated in the Florida Keys. It was one of the worst coral epidemics in recent history.
The culprit was indeed an alien, though certainly not extra-terrestrial. In fact, it was very terrestrial. Aspergillus sydowii, a globally distributed saprophytic soil fungus was the nightmare creature. Aspergillus causes a variety of diseases in humans and birds, but had not previously been recognized as a marine pathogen.
Over the last week or so, we’ve been expanding the blogs covered under the .southernfriedscience domain. Check out our newest additions – Ya Like Dags, covering all things dogfish related, and Mammoth Tales, discussing the history and science of the noble mammoth. And don’t forget to visit our new mainpage, The Gam, where posts from … Read More “Check out the two newest blogs in our network” »
This panel discussion is definitely worth watching in it’s entirety, but if you can only watch one bit, this section where Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about UFO’s and the arguement from ignorance is marvelous. ~Southern Fried Scientist
Last February we introduced Bomai Cruz as the second blog in the Southern Fried Science Network and the first to operate under the blog.southernfriedscience.com format. Our plans to expand the network lay dormant after that first launch, for many reasons, not the least of which was that I had just moved Southern Fried Science to … Read More “Changes afoot” »
The above commercials were produced by the Dominican Navy, the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo, and the United States Coast Guard to deter illegal sea exits. They were part of “The Sea is History” exhibition at Duke University Library.
The following is a repost from the old Southern Fried Science WordPress blog. The original can be found here.
I finally got the chance to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog last week. After watching and enjoying, I started thinking about something. We have our heroes, the stalwart defenders of whatever, mostly absolute in their righteousness; often torn by by their duties, their beliefs, their past; sometimes high and noble, sometimes darker and more base; but almost always connected in some primal way to our own sense of self. We love our hero’s because we see some of who we could be in them.
But then there are the villains. Sometimes twisted by a painful life, torn by lost loves, driven by revenge, and corrupted by power. Often they are deeper, more complex than the heroes; capable of great evil, but sometimes redemption. We hate them, fear them, sometimes empathize with their plight. They are what we could become, if we allow ourselves to fall from grace. Most of them have PhD’s.