Snot Bots for whale health, critical dolphins, lobster considerations, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: January 15, 2018.

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Screen cap of linked tweet.

Ice balls and slush waves.

Paul May via Storyful.

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Bone-eating zombie worms, octopus overlords, old wooden ships and new woes for deep-sea mining. It’s the Monday Morning Salvage! January 1, 2018.

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • Stop. Breathe. Take a step back. This can all be incredibly overwhelming. Pick the fight that matters most to you and take a few days deciding what success looks like, what strategies will work, and what tactics are available to you. And then hoist your flag and get to work.

  • And when you meet someone fighting a different fight, remember to support them. There are already enough fronts to advance without taking friendly fire from our flanks.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

The frilled giant Pacific octopus. Photo Courtesy D. Scheel

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Farting oysters, bombing sea lions, and a new trash island? It must be the Monday Morning Salvage! November 20, 2017

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • It’s Native American History Month. Southern Fried Science recognizes that our servers are housed on the occupied land of the Timpanogos people while the majority of our writers live on unceded Powhatan territory. This November, Try Something New: Decolonize Your Mind.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

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A shark for all floods, Crowdfunding scams, old fish, bold fish, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: September 18, 2017

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • The fight for our Marine National Monuments isn’t over. We finally know *some* of the contents of Zincke’s monument review memo, and it’s not great. The DOI wants to see commercial fishing return to the Pacific Remote Islands and Rose Atoll Marine National Monuments. Longline fishing in these regions has historically been conducted by foreign fishing fleets which have been documented using slave labor. Many ecologists believe that maintaining these protected zones serve as a refuge that boost populations of many important commercial fish and improve the overall health of the fishery.
  • Here’s the good news: Any change to monuments created under the Antiquities Act must be approved by congress. You’ve got a lot of reason to call you representatives this week, so why not add “I opposed the reintroduction of ecologically and economically destructive commercial fishing to the Pacific Remote Islands and Rose Atoll Marine National Monument.” to your script?

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • Hero Shark, the shark who shows up to every flood, ostensibly to save us all from our own hubris, has a long a fascinating history. “Shark in flooded street” wasn’t even the first time that photo was used for fake news.

Photo by Thomas P. Peschak.

GOES-16.

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Deep-sea Disco, Giant Icebergs, Pokémon Go, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: April 24, 2017

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • Still time! The EPA is seeking public input on the new administrations approach to environmental regulations. They are required to seek public input. They are required to respond to public input. Go tell them how you feel. Public comments close May 15. Here’s the docket with instructions on how to comment: Evaluation of Existing Regulations.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

  • This deep-sea mining Disco video is something.

Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web) Read More

Monday Morning Salvage: February 20, 2017

For all our US-based Readers: Happy President’s Day! For everyone else, this is the reason none of you USian colleagues are answering e-mails. Unless they are, in which case, *grumble grumble grumble* *something about work-life balance*

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

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Release the Karaqan! How does Aquaman’s latest foe stack up against real ocean giants?

Aquaman #27. DC Comics.

Aquaman #27. DC Comics.

It’s been more than 2 months since we last discussed the patron saint of Southern Fried Science, the one and only Aquaman. The Atlantean übermensch has a new lead writer, Jeff Parker, who’s teamed up with Aquaman veteran Paul Pelletier to produce an engaging and visually stunning story. After the epic conclusion to Throne of Atlantis, Aquaman is off on an entirely new adventure. Unfortunately, this new quest puts our hero in the path of a gargantuan guardian of ancient Atlantis, the Karaqan!

The Karaqan is big, but just how big is it? How does the Karaqan stack up against living sea creatures? Could an arthropod ever get as big as the Karaqan? Most important, if Aquaman does successfully slay the Karaqan, just how much Old Bay would we need to steam it?

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Return from the Cayman Abyss: cruise post-mortem and some thoughts on media coverage

AndrewThumbAt 7 AM EST on Monday, February 25, the ROV Isis rose from the depths of the Cayman Abyss, bringing to a close the 82nd cruise of the RRS James Cook. During JC82, we explored two recently discovered hydrothermal vents fields in the Cayman Trough: Von Damm, named for the late marine geochemist Karen Von Damm, and Beebe, named for the 20th century explorer William Beebe. By any measure, JC82 was a massive success. The samples and videos we’ll bring back will provide ecologists, geologists, and chemists with new insights into fundamental ocean systems for years. The images alone, some beautiful, some heart-breaking, have already inspired.

bacteriamatssmall

Eyeless shrimp, dancing anemones, and a garden of filamentous bacteria. I’m a pretty good writer, and I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful this is. Photo Credit: NERC

Since I last updated the blog on our adventures exploring the Cayman Trough, we’ve had a steady stream media coverage, most of which has been excellent, some of which has been… strange. It’s been fascinating watching the articles come out, seeing what different media outlets consider the story, and, most important to me, getting a chance to share our adventure with a wide audience. Now that the #DeepestVents cruise is officially over (and we’re in transit to yet another, equally exciting bolt on cruise to investigate submerged lava flows off the island of Montserrat), I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on the cruise, the story, and how the media shaped it.

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This Week in the Deep

New and noteworthy publications in deep-sea science for the week of January 21, 2013.

Geobiology: Did life originate from a global chemical reactor?

Many decades of experimental and theoretical research on the origin of life have yielded important discoveries regarding the chemical and physical conditions under which organic compounds can be synthesized and polymerized. However, such conditions often seem mutually exclusive, because they are rarely encountered in a single environmental setting. As such, no convincing models explain how living cells formed from abiotic constituents. Here, we propose a new approach that considers the origin of life within the global context of the Hadean Earth. We review previous ideas and synthesize them in four central hypotheses: (i) Multiple microenvironments contributed to the building blocks of life, and these niches were not necessarily inhabitable by the first organisms; (ii) Mineral catalysts were the backbone of prebiotic reaction networks that led to modern metabolism; (iii) Multiple local and global transport processes were essential for linking reactions occurring in separate locations; (iv) Global diversity and local selection of reactants and products provided mechanisms for the generation of most of the diverse building blocks necessary for life. We conclude that no single environmental setting can offer enough chemical and physical diversity for life to originate. Instead, any plausible model for the origin of life must acknowledge the geological complexity and diversity of the Hadean Earth. Future research may therefore benefit from identifying further linkages between organic precursors, minerals, and fluids in various environmental contexts.

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