Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

• Ocean policy news breaking this week. We’ll have a comment template ready to go when it does. Please check back. We can’t announce until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.
• Still time to register for OceanDotComm! Science Communication folks! Are you ready for OceanDotComm? Register now!

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

• This is an amazing piece about the importance of awe in deep-sea conservation. Unless we regain our historic awe of the deep ocean, it will be plundered.

Wine bottle found in the deep North Atlantic. Laura Robinson, University of Bristol, and the Natural Environment Research Council. Expedition JC094 was funded by the European Research Council.

• The Vaquita are going extinct and with them comes an importance lesson on the value of social science to conservation research:

My wife, on the other hand, is a social scientist who works on development here in Mexico. When we first started dating, I used to tease her for being a soft little scientist in her soft little science. I now understand that helping a community pull itself out of poverty is more complex than brain surgery or quantum physics.

There is no magic equation for community organizing but she begins by understanding that “the community” isn’t some monolithic creature that thinks as a unit. There are complex politics and power dynamics at work that can either aid or destroy all her efforts.

I now understand why the vaquita is going extinct. They sent too many people like me into the region and not enough like her.

source.

• Would you like to play a game? Last week David and I unleashed Twitter Ocean Chess upon the internet and the results are in: it’s the only valid use of 280 characters.
  • Marine biology nerd chess is the only decent justification for 280-character tweets
  • Here’s what happened when two marine scientists played emoji chess on Twitter
  • Emojis + Marine biology triva = OCEAN CHESS 🐬🦀♞

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