As some of you probably remember, there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. You can be forgiven for not remembering it, as our news media hasn’t been talking about it very much lately. In fact, if your only source of oil spill news was the mainstream media, you probably think that the Gulf is doing great! A little over a year ago, CNN ran a story about how the BP oil well that caused the spill was “effectively dead” and was “no longer a threat to the Gulf”. CNBC (and many others) ran stories about how 75 percent of the oil from the spill was gone from the Gulf. Bloomberg reported that the Gulf would recovery completely by 2012. London’s Telegraph celebrated a dramatic recovery after only one year. Whew… things aren’t as bad as we feared, and the Gulf has almost totally recovered! Or has it?
“Yikes! It’s a jellyfish, get out of the water!”
I can’t remember how many times I heard this shriek from my friends as a kid around the end of July, when loads of comb jellies washed ashore, the casualties of their massive breeding efforts. Like most kids with a good poking toe, however, I figured out that these jellies couldn’t hurt me. For a number of reasons, not all jellyfish equal a painful sting.
Furthermore, like many sea creatures, they are symbolic of a beautiful greater ecosystem at work but often lead to squeaks and squeals of fear rather than smiles of appreciation. I’ll go so far to say that jellyfish are a good candidate to be a charismatic creature of the sea.
Few scientific fields generate as much controversy as climate change. Misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and outright lies are common. While environmentalists rightly criticize anti-global warming activists for not being truthful, neither side is innocent. Presented here are five common misrepresentations from both sides and the truth about those issues.
Horseshoe Crabs, Coelacanths, Seven-gilled sharks, hagfish. Throughout the oceans there are creatures whose primitive bodies hearken back to earlier days in our evolutionary history. They possess basal characteristics that are more akin to those of the ancestors of our contemporary phyla. Because we can look into these organisms and learn something about our own deep past, we think of them not as modern descendants, but as living fossils, relics of a primeval state.
This is, of course, a misnomer.
Read More “Misunderstood Marine Life # 7 – The Living Fossils” »
Few things have inspired the human imagination quite like the ocean. The vast, mysterious deep is the stuff of poets, artists, explorers, and scientists. A natural result of this seemingly endless, unfathomable world-beneath-the-waves is the emergence of a broad and persistent ocean mythology, ranging from tales of sea monsters, to near magical healing powers, to … Read More “Welcome to a Week of Ocean Pseudoscience!” »
The National Science Foundation has recently announced the NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative largely in hopes of retaining women in the sciences past their the dissertation years. Most notably, the Initiative allows a year long pause in awarded grants to new parents. This pause matches the pause in the tenure process that most universities offer (but … Read More “Thank You NSF” »
Last week, I previewed the annual NAFO meeting. Two elasmobranch conservation measures (reducing the Total Allowable Catch for thorny skates to the level that the scientific council recommended and requiring fishermen to report the species of the sharks they catch) were to be discussed. That meeting is now concluded, and the results, while not … Read More “Thorny skate protection: NAFO falls short” »
Last September we debuted Ocean of Pseudoscience week with resounding success. We covered issues ranging from greenwashing, to bone-eating creationism, to iron fertilization, to maximum sustainable yield, all while counting down our favorite see monsters (most imagined, some real). We’re a bit late this year (it turns out the beginning of the semester isn’t the best time to … Read More “It’s an Ocean of Pseudoscience Week returns October 3!” »