Cephalopodcast

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.