Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- A fish scientist’s 10 tips for surviving a hurricane: Lessons learned from Puerto Rico from our friends at the Fisheries Blog.
- Commentary: For Hurricane-Hit Puerto Rico, an Insider’s Guide to Disaster Management by gCaptain.
The Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) arrives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Oct. 3, 2017. U.S. Navy Photo
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
- oceanbites with another bite of science: Local disturbance and global warming unite to make seagrasses taste better to predators.
- Mutant Sea Stars Can Take the Heat. A mutation conferring higher heat tolerance is common among survivors of sea star wasting disease.
- Rolls-Royce to Use Google Machine Learning in Quest for Autonomous Ships. Apparently today we’re just posting stately pictures of large boats.
A conceptual design by Rolls-Royce of an 1,000 TEU unmanned feeder vessel. Image credit: Rolls-Royce
- Your cheap seafood was probably handled by slaves, and in some cases profits the DPRK. North Korean workers prep seafood going to US stores, restaurants.
- What Went Wrong With the Right Whales? They were killed by ship strikes and entanglement. In other words, we killed 1/20th of the remaining North Atlantic Right Whales this year.
- How the Squid Lost Its Shell.
- Metal Shark Wins U.S. Navy PB(X) Patrol Boat Contract. Metal Shark is a great name for a boatbuilder. Look! another stately ship picture.
image via gCaptain.
- Cool, cool, cool. Mysterious Soviet buoy surfaces in South Florida.
- More deep-sea mining news: Papua New Guinea Contests Experimental Seabed Mining and Nautilus finally admits ‘limited benefits in Solwara One project’. One more boat, the make it an even 4.
Image via Nautilus Minerals.
Lagan (what we’re reading from the peer-reviewed literature)
- Vad and friends (2017) Assessing the living and dead proportions of cold-water coral colonies: implications for deep-water Marine Protected Area monitoring in a changing ocean. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3705.
- Tissier an friends (2017) Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3861.
- Taboada and friends (2017) Mitochondrial genome and polymorphic microsatellite markers from the abyssal sponge Plenaster craigi Lim & Wiklund, 2017: tools for understanding the impact of deep-sea mining. DOI: 10.1007/s12526-017-0786-0.
Shipping News (academic and ocean policy wonkery)
- Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at noted scientist. I’m glad to see that the the university appear to be taking this seriously, for once.
- A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money and was fed up with academia. Academia is broken, but this is a hell of an interview:
Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)
- Fieldwork Fail: the Messy Side of Science by Jim Jourdane, Featuring a delightful whale shark story by Deep Sea News’s Al Dove!
Derelicts (favorites from the deep archive)
- Herring Wars: Quotas, Conflicts, and Climate Change in the North Atlantic.
- What hybrid sharks mean (and don’t mean) for climate change and evolution: fact-checking the media coverage.
- Playing against the slaughter rule.
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.