Southern Fried Science

Decoding the Superpowers of the Great White Shark

February 25, 2019February 26, 2019 Chuck Bangley

Uncategorized

Sharks are often thought of in terms of superlatives, and perhaps no species has racked up as many “mosts” as the Great White Shark, Carcharodon carcharias. This is the star of “Jaws” after all, and probably the species most people who aren’t devoted to being familiar with fish visualize when they hear the word “shark.” Thanks to new research by Marra and friends (2019), we’re becoming familiar with the White Shark on the most basic level of all: the genetic level.

Not every species has had its entire genome decoded, and the White Shark is one of only a handful shark species to get this level of attention. The Whale Shark and the Elephant Shark (actually a species of chimera) have also had their genetic codes mapped, providing a couple of fairly closely-related species for comparison. By comparing the full genome of the White Shark with these other shark species and other vertebrates, the authors were able to identify specific mutations that have stood the tests of time and natural selection. Many of these genes are associated with the very traits that have made sharks such incredible survivors for going on 450 million years.

Wonder Shark, what is the secret of your powers? Image by Andy Murch.

Live from the International Seabed Authority, sand strikers, strange typhoons, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 25, 2019.

February 25, 2019February 24, 2019 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

Weekly Salvage

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

We’re live from the 25th General Assembly of the International Seabed Authority. Watch here!
Update your indices. This marine worm is called the Sand Striker.

This is the Sand Striker
[source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/26598370@N00/5205585822]

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

This is very much not normal. An Extremely Rare February Typhoon Is Approaching Guam.
US Coast Guard Officer Suspected Of Terror Plot Faces Charges.

Nodules for sale: tracking the origin of polymetallic nodules from the CCZ on the open market.

February 22, 2019February 22, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

[This article originally appeared yesterday in the Deep-sea Mining Observe r. ~Ed.]

You can buy a 5-lb bag of polymetallic nodules from the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone on Amazon, right now.

Depending on your vantage point and how long you’ve participated in the deep-sea mining community, this will either come as a huge surprise or be completely unexceptional. Prior to the formation of the International Seabed Authority, there were no international rules governing the extraction of seafloor resources from the high seas. Multiple nations as well as private companies were engaged in exploration to assess the economic viability of extracting polymetallic nodules and tons of material was recovery from the seafloor for research and analysis. Some of that material almost certainly passed into private hands.

The search for an inexpensive, field-ready 3D printer continues: Anet A6 (review)

February 21, 2019November 15, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Reviews and Interviews

One of the reasons 3D printing exploded seemingly overnight a decade ago has a lot to do with the RepRap project, an initiative to build a fully open-source and largely 3D-printable 3D-printer. The idea of a machine that could replicate itself was pulled straight from the pages of science fiction, and yet, here were machines–janky, kludgey, barely functional, machines–assembled from parts clearly fabricated by those same machines. They were conceptually impressive, but not a particularly awe-inspiring sight to behold.

And then came Josef Průša and the Prusa Mendel.

Affectionately known as the Ford Model T of the 3D printing world, the Prusa Mendel was the first of the open-source 3D printers that was designed to be easily mass produced. It looked good and it ran great. Released under an open-source license, it was replicated and iterated on a massive scale. That didn’t prevent Průša from building a successful company. The current Prusa i3 MK2 is among the most successful desktop 3D printers in the world, and certainly one of the best.

There are a lot of Prusa i3 clones.

Clocking in at $197.69, the Anet A6 is the most expensive printer in this review series. It’s also the biggest, with a massive 220mm by 220mm by 250mm build area. It’s an upgraded version of the popular Anet A8, with a larger build volume and a better user interface, but not much else. From reviews, this printer seemed like a solid representation of what you can get at the top end of the menagerie of sub-$200 Prusa i3 clones. It (and its smaller A8 brother) certainly have the fan-base and hacking community to support its reputation.

This acrylic-framed beast ships as a kit, so expect to spend half a day putting this printer together.

If you’re going off of dollar per cubic millimeter, this is the best bang for you buck by a wide margin. And that’s about the extent of the good things I have to say about this machine.

For an explanation of our testing protocols, please see: We’re gonna beat the heck out of these machines: The search for the best dirt-cheap 3D printer for fieldwork.

Deep-sea gator falls covered in isopods, more struggles for the Ocean Cleanup, a robot lost in the cold (but not the one you’re thinking of), and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 18, 2019

February 18, 2019February 17, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Weekly Salvage

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

What do you do if you find yourself at the helm of a major Louisiana marine science institution? If you’re Dr. Craig McClain, you plant the first experimental Alligator falls in the deep Gulf of Mexico!

Photos courtesy Dr. Craig McClain via Deep Sea News.

On the other hand, if you find yourself at the helm of a US Navy destroyer, you might want to review this incredible and exhaustive accounting of the USS Fitzgerald disaster and how training deficits, exhaustion, and poor decision making compounded to create a deadly situation.

The search for an inexpensive, field-ready 3D printer: Monoprice Mini Delta (review)

February 13, 2019November 15, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Reviews and Interviews

[NOTE: Please see our update regarding this printer: Finding the best dirt-cheap, field-tough 3D printer for science and conservation work: six months later.]

Monoprice is an interesting organization. They’re a rebadging company that seeks out unbranded or off-brand products, makes a few tweaks, and then sells them to secondary markets under their own brand. They made their mark in the early 2000s selling good, cheap cables and have expanded from there. You can find headphones, cookware, cables, computer accessories, and, of course, 3D printers, under the Monoprice label. But that doesn’t mean their products are cheap knockoffs. Monoprice has a reputation for finding quality equipment.

The Monoprice Mini Delta is a rebadged Malyan M300. From the specs, it doesn’t look like Monoprice changed anything but the logo, and that’s a good thing. Malyan printers have a great reputation.

This is a delta printer, which means rather than having independent X, Y, and Z-axes, three identical stepper motor arrays work in tandem to control the position of the extruder while the bed itself remains stationary. It uses a Bowden-style extruder that keeps the weight on the printhead down. It has an aluminum frame with steel structural elements. The relatively small circular print area is 110 mm diameter by 120 mm height. Controls are integrated into the printer and it allegedly has WiFi capability through an app.

The Monoprice Mini Delta is available on Amazon for $159.99.

We’re going to make this little printer suffer.

For an explanation of our testing protocols, please see: We’re gonna beat the heck out of these machines: The search for the best dirt-cheap 3D printer for fieldwork.

The next generation open-source, 3D-printable Niskin bottle has arrived!

February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Oceanography for Everyone, Science

The Niskin bottle, a seemingly simple device designed to take water samples at discrete depths, is one of the most important tools of oceanography. These precision instruments allow us to bring ocean water back to the surface to study its chemical composition, quality, and biologic constituency. If you want to know how much plastic is circulating in the deep sea, you need a Niskin bottle. If you need to measure chemical-rich plumes in minute detail, you need a Niskin bottle. If you want to use environmental DNA analyses to identify the organisms living in a region of the big blue sea, you need a Niskin bottle.

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It's ready! The next-generation open-source, 3D-printable Niskin bottle is here! What do you want to sample? #ocean #oceanography #opensource #3dprinting #ecology #conservation

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Niskin bottles are neither cheap nor particularly easy to use. A commercial rosette requires a winch to launch and recover, necessitating both a vessel and a crew to deploy. For informal, unaffiliated, or unfunded researchers, as well as citizen scientists or any researcher working on a tight budget, getting high-quality, discrete water samples is an ongoing challenge.

Remembering Walter Munk, a photo on a flash drive in a pile of poo from a seal at the bottom of the sea, lucky vikings, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 11, 2019

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019 Andrew Thaler

Weekly Salvage

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Walter Munk, World-Renowned Oceanographer and Revered Scientist has died.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

So many mesmerizing videos from Deep Sea News! Experience the Life of the Deep Gulf of Mexico in 20 Videos.
This is a staggeringly beautiful image: One Great Shot: The Guillemot and the Iceberg.

Carsten Egevang goes looking for seals in Greenland and finds a photogenic guillemot instead.

Did you lose a flash drive? NIWA might have it. They were defrosting leopard seal poo…you won’t believe what happened next!

This photo of a sealion on a Southland beach was found on a USB stick swallowed by a leopard seal. Credit: unknown

Fun Science FRIEDay – Life is Inevitable

February 8, 2019February 8, 2019 Kersey Sturdivant

Uncategorized

Why does life exist? Its an age old question that has been debated for centuries with popular hypotheses crediting celestial interference, a primordial soup, or a colossal stroke of luck. However, a relatively recent and provocative hypothesis suggests luck has nothing to do with it, and that instead, life is an inevitable consequence of physics.

The author of the concept, Jeremy England – professor of biophysics at MIT, suggests, “the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

Logs from a majestic pit of acid: Diving Belize’s Blue Hole with Erika Bergman.

February 5, 2019February 21, 2019 Erika Bergman

Uncategorized

In November of 2018 Aquatica Submarines shipped a three person submarine, Stingray 500, across frosty North America on the back of a truck then over the rolling winter seas of the Gulf of Mexico to Belize aboard the R/V Brooks McCall. Our destination was a site located 7 miles into Lighthouse Reef – a perfect sinkhole in the ocean known as the Great Blue Hole. We traveled to this UNESCO World Heritage site to explore and document a geologic phenomenon in support of conservation science and to conduct outreach. Our mission was two fold, map the Great Blue Hole using high resolution sonar and take people worldwide on this journey with us on broadcast TV. Everything we collected, from CTD data and dissolved oxygen content, to video footage and experiential data, gives us the fodder we need to tell a story about an unusual place on our planet most people have never seen, until now.

Geology from not-a-geologist

Over the past 14,000 years the polar ice caps, formed during the last glacial maximum, have thawed and raised sea level in steps. These defrosting events are captured in a stone record of an oceanic sinkhole in Belize. The aptly named Great Blue Hole is a collapsed cave, filled with stalactite caverns, and built up from layers of fine limestone and rougher calcium carbonate walls. The stepped rise of sea level can be seen in the form of terraces carved deeply by erosion into the otherwise vertical rock walls. Straight vertical stretches of wall are free of erosion because sea level rose rapidly during a few brief decades between each step. As each melting event took place sea level rose dramatically, as much as 100 feet in 100 years, followed by centuries of stability. Preserved from the disturbance of time, and isolated in the darkness, the hole holds clues to a very natural part of our planet’s life cycle. It’s these terraces and stalactites we set out to map.