Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
- 2018 is almost certainly going to be a record year for FOIA requests. Learn how to do them right and get results thanks to Pro Publica: I’ve Sent Out 1,018 Open Records Requests, and This Is What I’ve Learned.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Dr. Michelle LaRue is off to Antarctica and you can follow along through the magic of Twitter. #AccioAntarctica!
- The Cinematic Legacy of Jacques Cousteau: The man, the myth, the legend, and his persistent influence on screen.
- Lake Michigan’s Latest Ice Ball Outbreak Was Incredible. Earther has the best GIF game in town.
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
- Underwater robots had a a pretty good week: The Scientists, Robots Cracking the Mysteries of the Southern Ocean and Robot subs are uncovering what makes underwater volcanoes blow.
- Shameless plus for my Instagram account, where you can see lots of fresh adventures with OpenROV Trident.
- ‘Eco-colonialism’: Rift grows between Indigenous leaders and green activists. Conservation has a colonialism problem, and it needs to get it’s shit together.
- Connecting Conservation and Culture in Oceania: The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument promotes biological and cultural connectivity between Micronesia and Polynesia.
- It Snowed in the Sahara and the Photos Are Breathtaking.
- More deep-sea mining news: Nautilus Minerals arranged a bridge loan to keep it solvent for a few more months. The protest blogs have a slightly different take: Failing seabed miner Nautilus Minerals continues on life support. EMTV, Papua New Guineas major news station, covered the developments around the future mine site: Solwara 1 Hydrothermal Vents: Sources of Riches from the Deep Blue Sea.
- Space Kelp! Or Kelp from Space! Something Kelpy, something spacey. Deep Sea News.
- Dolphins are, unsurprisingly, deep thinkers. And they’re plotting against us, every single day.
- Climate Change Turns One of Largest Sea Turtle Populations Female. Turtles and reptiles have temperature based sex determination. That’s bad news in a warming world.
- Sea Level Rise Is Unlocking Decades-Old Pollution: Salt water creeping upland could release legacy fertilizer into the Chesapeake Bay. Related, obviously: Toxic Thaw Syndrome,
melting permafrost carries unknown dangers for Arctic marine life. - I’ve been trying to come up with a better dad joke than Ocean’s Oil-leven, but I just can’t. Singapore Uncovers Large Oil Heist at Shell’s Biggest Refinery.
- Meanwhile: Environmental Disaster Looms as Oil Tanker Burns Off China’s Coast.
- Switzerland Outlaws Boiling Lobsters Alive. Consider the Lobster.
- Feathers on birds of paradise contain light-trapping nanotechnology that makes some of the deepest blacks in the world.
- Save the galaxy, eat a porg. The Last Jedi’s porgs may be a serious threat to the galaxy’s ecosystems.
Lagan (what we’re reading from the peer-reviewed literature)
- Pirotta and friends (2017) An Economical Custom-Built Drone for Assessing Whale Health. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00425.
- Bergshoeff and friends (2017) Using underwater video to evaluate the performance of the Fukui trap as a mitigation tool for the invasive European green crab (Carcinus maenas) in Newfoundland, Canada. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4223.
- Miller and friends (2017) An Overview of Seabed Mining Including the Current State of Development, Environmental Impacts, and Knowledge Gaps. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00418.
- Vic and friends (2017) Dispersion of deep-sea hydrothermal vent effluents and larvae by submesoscale and tidal currents. DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr.2018.01.001.
- Esposito and friends (2017) Exceptional discovery of a shallow-water hydrothermal site in the SW area of Basiluzzo islet (Aeolian archipelago, South Tyrrhenian Sea): An environment to preserve. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0190710.
- Kamat (2017) Dispossession and disenchantment: The micropolitics of marine conservation in southeastern Tanzania. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2017.12.002.
And one final one, just for fun:
- Bartneck and Moltchanova (2017) LEGO products have become more complex. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0190651.
Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)
- Are you considering the lobster? Have you considered considering the lobster? Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace.
- Take an extended trip to the South Pole. South Pole Station: A Novel by Ashley Shelby.
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.
