Cephalopodcast

Now that the thanking and the giving is nearly over, take a look at this Wired article to see what the meal looked like under high magnification. There is turkey, gravy, cranberry, bread, beer, potato, peas.

Wired asked Mike Davidson, a biologist and expert photomicrographer at Florida State University’s National High Magnetic Field Lab, to turn his lenses on the all-American meal. The images aren’t particularly appetizing, and they probably won’t help you keep your gobbler moist this year (try brining), but at least you’ll be more intimate with the stuff that’s making you loosen your belt as you collapse on the couch.

• Wired Puts Your Thanksgiving Feast Under a Microscope

lionfish, by jon hanson

Common names: Lionfish, lion fish, zebrafish, firefish, turkeyfish, red lionfish, butterfly cod, ornate butterfly-cod, peacock lionfish, red firefish, scorpion volitans

Happy Turkey Day for those in the States. Ben Franklin famously suggested that the turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) would make a more fitting symbol for the United States than the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Many derisively scoff at the notion, but if you read this account of his recommendation, especially in light of current events, it’s rather telling we chose the latter bird instead.

But there is another turkey out there that I wanted to mention today. This one won’t end up on too many dinner plates, probably because it’s a venomous fish. more commonly known as the lionfish in the United States, Pterois volitans is also called the Turkeyfish in many other parts of the world. Normally found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean, it has recently been found in increasing numbers off the east coast of the U.S. It is a common and spectacular staple of the live reef fish trade and authorities suspect specimens released from aquariums were the original source of the invasive population.

The Turkeyfish is in the Scorpionfish family and is a predator of smaller fish. Authorities fear that as its range expands into new areas, it will have a disruptive effect on the ecology of these environments.

More Turkeyfish Day links appear over at the Invasive Species Weblog.

• NOAA: Lionfish Invasion Teacher’s Guide
• EISF: Lionfish Invasive Species Education & Outreach
• Invasive Lionfish Species Confirmed in Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary
• Wikipedia: Lionfish

SciVee is about the free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science. Created for scientists, by scientists, SciVee moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater taking advantage of the internet as a communication medium where scientists young and old have a place and a voice. SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

SciVee^alpha is a video sharing site for science. The concept is that a researcher links the PubMed ID or DOI of their paper to SciVee, then records ten minutes of video or audio discussing the highlights and concepts in the article. The site allows the video or audio to be synchronized with figures from the article. The next step involves the SciVee community then commenting on and discussing the new pubcast.

For an example, here is Christopher L. Dupont from Scripps discussing his co-authored work, Modern proteomes contain putative imprints of ancient shifts in trace metal geochemistry from PNAS.

Currently the site is in its alpha release. There does not appear to be any way to embedded SciVee videos on your own blog, a la YouTube. It would also be nice if their was a recommendation scheme, where the site suggested related materials or similar research. But it might be too early to effectively do that with a small database.

In addition to discussions of original research, there are several educational science shorts you can view. In particular, BioMEDIA has snippets from several of their videos on animal diversity (see below). BioMEDIA allows some limited educational use of their content. They are also offering a couple of free posters if folks register with their site.

So what do you think? Can scientist master the art of communicating to an Internet audience? Should they be expected to? Know anyone who has uploaded content to SciVee?

• A Video Overview of SciVee
• BioMEDIA Associates: Biology of Echinoderms (seastars and sea cucumbers)
• BioMEDIA Associates: Biology of Cnidarians (sea jellies)
• BioMEDIA Associates: Biology of Annelids (worms)
• Microbe World: Save the Oysters
• Robert Alan Weiss’ free love Protein Synthesis

Today is Steve Irwin Day. It has been over a year since the charismatic, animal-loving Aussie passed away in a freak stingray encounter. There are a number of ways you can remember, appreciate and celebrate Steve’s influence and ethic. The most obvious one is to wear some khaki pants. Or just get outside and enjoy nature.

Steve Irwin Day on November 15 will be a day for remembering the one and only Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. The day will represent the many things Steve was passionate about; family, wildlife and FUN. You can get involved in a number of ways including visiting Australia Zoo for an action packed day, having a Backyard Campout or donning your khakis for Khaki Day.

All proceeds raised from these activities will go to Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors Worldwide.

Back in February I cheekily proposed a new Internet adage called Gorton’s Law. It was an allusion to the more well-known Godwin’s Law and is the notion that in any discussion of sea life, no matter how rare, strange or repulsive, some knucklehead will quickly sour the conversation by asking how well it goes with lemon or butter. An addendum to this is that it will usually happen within the first 10 comments and that they might also propose some other condiment.

My intent was to highlight how prevalent the attitude is that sea life is there merely for us to “harverst.” That the primary purpose is for our consumption and not for any intrinsic value or ecological roles those flora and fauna may contain.

Deep-Sea News has now officially formulated this notion into an actual equation.

Gorton’s Measure states that the time for someone to ask “Can you eat?” when discussing a marine species is directly proportional to the rareness, strangeness, and repulsiveness of the species.

where theta=time for someone to ask “Can you eat?”
t=total people in room
alpha=species’ rareness
sigma=species’ strangeness
delta=species’ repulsiveness

This is related to Gorton’s Constant (Gamma) that states that the question “How well does it go with lemon and butter?” will occur at a very high percentage approaching infinity despite relative changes in audience size (n).

My thanks to Craig for working out the maths. Of course, now that it is officially formulated, I regret a little going for the more amusing Gorton’s Law and not the more eponymous Robertshaw’s Law. At least that way I would have been know for something. Oh well.

See also:

• Another most excellent World’s Fair meme. Give us your personal scientific eponym.
• HOW TO GET YOUR OWN SCIENTIFIC EPONYM, AND, INTRODUCING THE ARBESMAN LIMIT

This is a test to see how easy or difficult it is to use Wordpress via iPhone. Verdict: pancakes.

The Best of Ocean Blogging

The idea of a blog carnival is to highlight the best blog posts on a specific theme during a given period of time. Someone collects all those posts and turns them into one uber-posting called a “carnival.” Thus the Blue Carnival is a community of ocean-related blogging and bloggers representing the other 70% of our planet. It was kicked off on World Ocean Day 2007 by Mark Powell (blogfish).

The Cephalopodcast

I am pleased and honored to host the Carnival of the Blue here at the Cephalopodcast Web Site this month. I started this little blog and podcast back in 2005. The site is mostly about science, especially marine science, and science education, particularly in the K-12 arena. It’s also about how technology is changing the way we gather and understand information about the world around us. And it’s about cephalopods too, of course. The actual podcasts are produced irregularly as time and tide permit. More details here, including an exciting colophon and disclaimer.

Any errors or omissions in this entry are my own. For corrections or additions, please contact me at pulpodcast [at] gmail . com.

On With The Show

The first entry was sent in by the annotated budak, and takes us on a night out at a sandy/seagrassy shore on the east coast of Singapore and a walk through the Sungei Buloh mangroves and wetlands. Some of the imagery seems more like verse than prose. And the tidepool photos are wonderful.

An underbelly of worms, larvae and living crawlers

There is a serenity in this swamp that lies between the narrow sea and the fetid heartland. Beneath their toes of lignin, the stilted trees bind the outpouring of inland soils, holding fertile wastes in trust and dispensing the interest in servings of nutrition too minute for turbid exuberance. Serving two masters, they form a living levee against the encroachment of saline floods and host the fruit of the sea whose unripe bounty shelter in their protective shade. More…

Surfing on over to the Daily Kos, Mark from the Biomes blog contributes an entry from his excellent Marine Life Series, this one devoted to mole crabs.

If you’ve ever visited a beach on the East Coast, you most likely have encountered mole crabs without even knowing it. Perfectly camouflaged, if exposed by a wave, a person’s foot or a child digging at the surf’s edge, it will dive back under the sand before your eyes can even register that it was there. More…

Like the mole crab, I’ve taken an interest in the intertidal recently, but confine my collection to the uninhabited castoffs of the critters there. Unfortunately, Rick from Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets reminds us that there is a rather robust trade in marine life as curiosities, both living and dead.

Dust for your pleasure

The international shell and ocean curio trade places a tremendous pressure upon tropical coastal resources. Much of the shells, sea stars, and other ocean life that appear in markets (from specialty shell shops to megastores like Walmarts) are sourced from the Philippines…Honestly, if I were to think where I’ve seen the most sea stars in my life, the answer would probably be in miscellaneous friends and families bathrooms. More…

Originally, the saying may have been “happy as a clam at high water,” suggesting that a clam at high tide was pleased to be safe from aquatic predators. But not so for the quahog that Mark describes over at blogfish. New research suggest that these creatures might be the oldest living animals on earth. And you may have unwittingly eaten them in your chowder.

The real fate of the world’s oldest animal is missing from the news. Everyone’s talking about one old clam, without noticing that we eat these little buggers. Scientists found a 405 year old ocean quahog in the ocean off Iceland, from a depth of 260 feet. This “Shakespeare” clam, alive when the bard was still writing plays, was only about 3 1/2 inches long. More…

Taking another look at this matter is Kate Wing, from the NRDC Switchboard. In her entry, Harder, vaster, older, longer, she also shows us how to think about tiny things becoming big things in the sea.

For both the clam and the garbage patch, persistence is a matter of small, constant steps, which aggregate into a larger achievement: a really old clam, or an enormous soup of waste. It’s part of the magic of the ocean that through currents and gyres and sheer tenacity it can transform the tiniest particles into something much greater, for better or for worse. More…

Mike from 10,000 Birds takes us on a different wing with the Siren Song of the Seawatch

The truth is that the ocean is teeming with birdlife. To take in the pelagic birds like tubenoses, jaegers, skuas, and alcids, you usually have to cruise out beyond the continental shelf. But if you stake out the right stretch of seashore, you can spot all of those birds and metaphorical boatloads of others. What is a seawatch? It’s nothing more or less than watching birds at sea. More…

It’s easy enough to grab a pair of binoculars to observe and appreciate your favorite megafauna. But if you are interested in looking at some of the many little things in the sea, you need different technology, as discovered by Hugh Powell from surf.bird.scribble. He wrote about how scientist have recently captured micro-flotsam in holographic action movies.

…imagine my surprise when I learned today that far from being a passe (and possibly cheesy) method of listening to classic rock, laser holography is totally brand-new. And you use it for watching killer plankton hunt down their prey inside a drop of water. More…

As mentioned earlier, these micro-flotsams are the beginnings of much bigger things in the sea. This notion was framed rather well by Carl Safina from the Blue Ocean blog. On a recent trip to Alaska, he had a unique opportunity to observe for himself how small changes can make a big difference.

As ice melts earlier, the whole marine ecosystem is changing. Rich spring plankton blooms used to happen when ice melted around April. At that time there was enough sunlight for photosynthesis by single-celled plant plankton (phytoplankton) but it was too cold for tiny animal “zooplankton.” The plant-plankton bloomed and sank, taking nutrients to the bottom, creating rich seafloor populations of shrimp-like amphipods and shellfish that were heavily relied on by Gray Whales, Walruses, diving ducks, and others. More…

Miriam Goldstein’s Oyster’s Garter is a new entrant to the carnival this month (tagline: Science, technology, and shellfish gone wild. Set in horrifically sunny San Diego). Echoing some of Carl’s concerns about cliamte change, Miriam wrote about several schemes to manipulate algae growth on a massive scale.

• A series of tubes: Good for the internet AND global warming!
• The return of the son of the spawn of iron fertilization
• Carbon export is dead stuff and poop, and so are Planktos’ arguments

Sheril Kirshenbaum, co-blogger from the Intersection sciblog and the PBS/Wired Correlations blog also had some filings from the field of iron fertilization. But a more ironic topic she covered was new research suggesting that small scale fishermen are actually having a bigger impact on loggerhead sea turtles than industrial factory fleets.

Never underestimate the impact of the little guys…at least when it comes to fishing practices and North Pacific loggerhead sea turtles…small-scale operations are a greater threat to the survival of loggerheads than large industrial practices. This finding comes after 10 years of research and what makes it interesting is the result is not quite what we’d expect… More…

Conservation of a different kind was on the mind of Kevin from The Other 95% blog. He spent some time trying to figure out the economics of Indonesia swapping national debt for reef protection

…Indonesia is promising greater coral reef protection in exchange for forgiveness of portions of its national debt. Congress is expected to approve…Will bribing Indonesia to protect [it']s reefs work? Indonesia has the financial incentive to protect its reefs without any additional rewards. I think this reflects the lack of long-term thinking in politics. More…

And Jennifer from the Shifting Baselines blog co-created this video for your consideration:

Last year 417 manatees in the U.S. were killed, most of them by motorboats. It’s enough to make your heart explode. Literally. Watch this contribution from Shifting Baselines.

Cephalaneous Items

A couple of entries for this month’s carnival don’t fit the format, but they’ve got cephalopods, so sucker it.

First up is my entry for the carnival. The biggest day in Cephalopodcast history happened this past month. On October 8, 2007, visits to the blog more than quadrupled for Cephalopod Awareness Day. The idea was kind of like a mini-carnival, with folks blogging about and celebrating cephalopod diversity. My thanks go out to PZ Myers and the +50 others who contributed posts. It was a lot of fun, and I hope to have an even bigger, more coordinated effort next year. So start planning now!

Also, even though it is a little old, I like the entry from Chris of the Ouroboros blog.

I’ve always considered cephalopods (specifically, octopuses) fascinating from a neuroscience perspective, ever since I found out that they could get depressed…Do cephalopod brains suffer from neurodegenerative diseases as a function of aging, and do they share with mammalian brains the greater sensitivity of neurons to protein aggregation? More…

Finally, Lise kindly pointed me to the Cephalopod Along Web site. It’s a knit along party for folks who like to create cephalopods. Everyone needs a little tentacle in their lives. It’s the kind of project that can get under your skein.

Dive in Again Next Month for Carnival of the Blue #7

Carnival of the Blue #7 will be hosted on Natural Patriot blog. Send your submissions to Emmett Duffy (jeduffy [at] vims . edu) or Mark Powell (mpowell [at] oceanconservancy . org). Remember to include: post author, URL and a brief description.

Also, if you are interested in hosting the Carnival of the Blue on your Web site, contact Mark for available slots.

Blue Carnival LIVE event, 01/19/08

A couple of Blue Carnival clowns regulars will be hosting a panel discussion at the NC Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008. The topic will be: Real-time blogging in the marine sciences. Please join us in North Carolina if you can, or join the conversation online. More details appearing soon at the wiki.

Previous Blue Carnivals

• Carnival of the Blue #5: Shifting Baselines
• Carnival of the Blue #4: The Saipan Blog
• Carnival of the Blue #3: Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets
• Carnival of the Blue #2: blogfish
• Carnival of the Blue #1: blogfish

The Carnival of the Blue Web badge is available under a Creative Commons license in a variety of sizes and a couple of colors.

The Byford Dolphin Accident

I am hosting the Carnival of the Blue today, Monday, the 5th of November. I thought it would be interesting to check Wikipedia to see if there was anything especially nautical or oceanic that happened on this day. What I found was rather grim.

The Byford Dolphin is a semi-submersible Norwegian oil exploration rig converted from a diving rig. It floats in the North Sea to find and drill crude oil deposits.

As a drilling rig, the Byford Dolphin is near the top of its class. It is equipped with advanced drilling equipment and has to meet very high levels of certification under Norwegian law. However, the rig has suffered some serious accidents, most notably an explosive decompression accident in 1983 known as the Byford Dolphin diving bell accident that killed five workers and badly injured one more.

At 4:00 AM on November 5, 1983, four divers were in a Decompression chamber system attached to a diving bell on the rig, being assisted by two dive tenders. One diver was about to close the door between the chamber system and the trunk when the chamber was explosively decompressed from a pressure of 9 atm to 1 atm in a fraction of a second. Five of the men were killed; the other was severely injured.

If you want to read what happens next, click the link. It’s pretty grisly. And a reminder of the risks that diving and exploration entail.

• Wikipedia: Byford Dolphin

The Circus of the Spineless is a blog carnival celebrating the diversity of invertebrates. This month’s festivities are hosted over at the Other 95% blog. I submitted my What The Shell #2 for your consideration.