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.

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