Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- Good job, everyone! NOAA Budget Proposal Hits Rough Waters in Congress.
- Tool Foundry expands access to science by promoting tools for discovery: Luminary Labs initiative launches four-month accelerator to help inventors bring better scientific tools to more communities
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
Photo: Jenna Judge
- How Miami’s realtors lie to themselves, each other, and you about climate change in America’s largest sinking city: Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years.
- The Video of Giant Isopods Eating an Alligator in the Deep Sea You Must Watch!
Southern Fried Science loves giant isopods. There are few deep-sea animals more iconic, more charismatic, more weird and wonderful, than the deep-sea isopod. The biggest of the deep-sea isopods, the giant deep-sea isopod, Bathynomus giganteus, is a quintessentially American beast. It dwells in the deep Gulf of Mexico. The bulk of its known range falls within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone. It was first collected by American scientist Alexander Agassiz (though it was formally described by his colleague and collaborator French zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards). Tough on the outside, soft on the inside, fiercely independent yet able to work in massive aggregations to consume the bloated carcass of a whale, alternately terrifying and adorable, I can think of no better animal to represent the deep water of the United States better than our own Bathynomous giganteus.