Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- Yale study: Newspaper op-eds change minds and The Long-lasting Effects of Newspaper Op-Eds on Public Opinion. Scientists and conservationists, this May, make an effort to publish a Letter to the Editor or OpEd in your local paper. If you’ve done so, please leave a link to it in the comments.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Immediately after college, my backup plan if I didn’t get into grad school was to go to work as an underwater welder doing saturation diving. After reading this, I’m pretty glad I didn’t go that route. The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver.
- Walking the talk in Vanuatu, the first country in the world to ban plastic straws.
- We’ve been saying this for a awhile now. Cryptocurrencies that rely on ever increasing processing power to resolve transaction are an environmental disaster. Alarming Study Suggests Bitcoin Consumes an Astonishing Amount of Energy and It’s Only Getting Worse.
The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)
- Stitching Hope for the Coast is still accepting contributions from knitters around the world. Join the fun!
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
- Big Momma: bigger fish are better moms from our friends at oceanbites. David and I wrote a paper about this a few years back.
- In the annals of great headlines, this has to stand among the greatest: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.
- Alien Waters: Neighboring Seas Are Flowing into a Warming Arctic Ocean.
- This week in Deep-sea mining:
- Good. So what are they going to do to stop it: Investors Worth $2.5 Trillion Don’t Want Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
- Why Iceland is set to resume whaling despite international opposition.
- And now, at least, a touch of good news: Rigs-to-Reefs: Giving Oil Platforms a Second Life for Conservation.
- Warming seas may scramble North America’s fishing industry.
- A local perspective on the value of large open-ocean marine protected areas: Marine Reserves Protect Our People.
- The High-Stakes Battle Over Obama’s Atlantic Ocean National Monument.
- Hong Kong mega bridge is a death sentence for rare Chinese white dolphins.
- Maybe just avoid plastic for a while: The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics.
- Today in Hagfish news: Could hagfish provide another fishery for Southeast?
- So, that abdominally exceptional fisherman that went viral last week for catching (and likely killing) and endangered hammerhead shark went so viral that NOAA had to issue a press release to let everyone no that no, despite what he claims, he does not work for or represent NOAA.
- This week in “the world is more and more like A Deeper Sea everyday”: Ukraine’s dolphin army in ‘patriotic hunger strike’ after Russian capture.
Lagan (what we’re reading from the peer-reviewed literature)
- Morley and friends (2018) Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196127.
- de Vries (2018) Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem. DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.04.016.
- Lee and friends (2018) Effects of sandfish (Holothuria scabra) removal on shallow-water sediments in Fiji. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4773.
- Note for the confused: sand fish are sea cucumbers.
- Loiola and friends (2018) Invaders among locals: Alien species decrease phylogenetic and functional diversity while increasing dissimilarity among native community members. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.12986.
- Parker and friends (2018) Adapting the bioblitz to meet conservation needs. DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13103.
- Januchowski-Hartley and friends (2018) Knowledge sharing about deep-sea ecosystems to inform conservation and research decisions. DOI: 10.1139/facets-2017-0037.
- Woodgate (2018) Increases in the Pacific inflow to the Arctic from 1990 to 2015, and insights into seasonal trends and driving mechanisms from year-round Bering Strait mooring data. DOI: 10.1016/j.pocean.2017.12.007.
Shipping News (academic and ocean policy wonkery)
- In which science twitter had some fun: It’s No Illusion: Field Biology Is Just Like Arrested Development.
Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)
- Our newest writer, Angelo Villagomez, just published an anthology of his father’s letters from the time when the Northern Mariana Islands were debating joining the United States as a Commonwealth. Hafa Gachong: Letters to the Commonwealth.
Derelicts (favorites from the deep archive)
- Bring the trench to the bench or bring the bench to the trench? The future of deep-sea exploration.
- Protect Our Oceans: from the ground in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
- Bioshock Oceanographic: How deep is Rapture?
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 our Patreon campaign. For just $5 per month, you can support the SFS Writers Fund, which helps compensate your favorite ocean science and conservation bloggers for their efforts.