submarine
Coral reefs lose their champion, which laptop is really the greenest, new sea slugs, and an octopuses garden in the sea. Monday Morning Salvage: November 5, 2018.
Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- Help the Victims of Typhoon Yutu.
- Ruth Gates dedicated her life to saving the world’s reefs and training the next generation of reef scientists. The Fight for Corals Loses Its Great Champion.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
The newest members of the nudibranch family. (H. iba comes in 2 color morphs.)
Photo: California Academy of Sciences
- Palau Becomes First Nation to Ban Sunscreens That Harm Corals.
- The tiny sponge that could help preserve our deep oceans.
A close-up photo of the sponge that is being studied. NHM.
Jellyfish sleep, shark-sucking bots, mole crab parasites, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: September 25, 2017
Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
- The fight for our Marine National Monuments isn’t over. We now know of the contents of Zincke’s monument review memo, and it is not good. 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. 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)
- Jellyfish sleep. Mind. Blown.
- Our Pacific Monuments are also extremely important scientific sites. Commercial fishing could jeopardize decades of research efforts in the remote Pacific. Scientists pan proposal to open pristine Pacific islands to fishing.
Palmyra Atoll. Erik Oberg/Island Conservation/Flickr
Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine is a fake documentary
Shark Week has done it again with their Shark of Darkness nonsense. This show goes after everyone, from the whale watching industry, to shark cage diving, to South Africa as a country, and literally broke my heart to watch.
As always, a brief and vague disclaimer appears during the show.
The fake-u-mentary is supposedly based in Hout Bay, but continually shows a map of Dyer Island and Geyser Rock and refers to Shark Alley that are all in Gansbaai, ~100km to the east. So why would they say Hout Bay? If you google “boat capsized in Hout Bay”, you will find that there was a boat which capsized outside of Hout Bay in 2012, killing 2 passengers onboard. This boat was capsized by heavy swell in the middle of the day and had nothing to do with a shark, let alone a mythical one. So I can only assume that Discovery Channel chose to include this very real tragedy in order to somehow legitimize their fake-u-mentary. This is horribly insensitive. Read More
The communist, feminist, utopian revolutionary who Kickstarted the first submarine
Ictineo II. Image by wikimedia user Cookie.
A curious vessel sits atop a few struts in the Barcelona harbor. Passing tourists could be forgiven if they thought the small, wooden craft was a prop from the golden age of film or a quiet monument to the work of Jules Verne. It is neither. This ship, built from olive wood and clad in copper, is perhaps the most remarkable seagoing vessel of its time. She is Ictíneo II, the first true submarine.
Narcís Monturiol i Estarriol was a Catalonian revolutionary, utopian iconoclast, and proto-feminist writer who argued that the government, rather than the church, should oversee marriage licenses. He founded several newspapers–which were often shut down after a few issues–including La Madre de Familia “to defend women from the tyranny of men” and Spain’s first communist newspaper, La Fraternidad.