The individual was found in Japan’s Toyama Bay.  Interestingly, this is the sixteenth Giant Squid sighting in the last year in Toyoma Bay.  In some regards, this is not surprising.  Toyoma Bay serves as the head of a deep canyon axis. The Giant Squid is cosmopolitan in the world’s ocean but as Guerra et al. show the squid appears mostly in areas with submarine canyons that cut across the continental shelf. These canyons provide areas of high productivity including fishing grounds humans and squids alike often exploit.

Why the recent increase in sightings in Toyama Bay?  Seeing a Giant Squid in shallow water undoubtedly indicates the individual is sick or injured.  The Giant Squid’s blood is poor at oxygen transfer making them particularly vulnerable to lowered oxygen, warming, and acidification.  Heat speeds an animal’s metabolism.  Because of their energy requirements and oxygen needs, Giant squid must stick to cooler waters.  Indeed, it is hypothesized their global distribution in the oceans is limited by warm temperature barriers.  Guerra et al. also demonstrate that strandings of Giant Squid in Newfoundland were always associated with rises in ocean bottom temperature.

Nonetheless, the video of the squid, only the third, is the best quality and detail yet of a living Giant Squid.  The individual is probably still young, measuring 3.7 metres (about 12 feet) long, is small.  Most of known individuals of Giant Squids measure well above this.  Indeed, 50% of measured Giant Squids are above 7.5 meters in length, nearly double of the Toyoma Bay individual.

The post New Video of Giant Squid Surfaces first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Recently a friend brought to my attention that the Internet was losing its collective mind over “sea bunnies”. Googling, “sea bunny” I found articles at International Business Times, Metro, RT, Apex Tribune, Weather Channel (wait what?), The Dodo, HuffPo, Geek, Women’s Day (umm), and The Telegraph.

Well gosh darn it! How to I jump on up on this bandwagon? DSN has been suffering from low clickage lately and we could use some of that sweet, sweet tasting clickbate. So bring on a whole damn field of SEA BUNNIES! Because precious few of these websites actually include any information about the animal, I said to myself “I’m gonna science all over this!” So pull up a chair kiddo’s and prepare yourself for an invertebrate biology braingasm. I’ll provide this as a clever top ten list too so I can be super trendy.

1. The sea bunny is actually a nudribranch, aka a sea slug, called Jorunna parva. They are also quite small, less than one inch in length.
2. Jorunna parva is 1 of 16 species in the genus and the only one that looks like a bunny. Some of the other species are little less…dandy, others very post modernist, and some have gills that look like brown wilted lettuce.

3. 

   The furry looks comes tons of caryophyllidia across the back of their bodies, aka the mantle.   Caryophyllidia are fleshy protuberances, papillae, that bear a crown of pointed spicules used for sensory functions.

4. The dark colored bunny ears are not actually ears but rhinophores. As the “rhino” would suggest these are sensory organs on the head used for chemoreception. In the group of nudibranchs that contains the sea bunnies, the rhinophores are particularly “fuzzy” allowing for more surface area for this reception to occur on.
5. The color pattern is crazy variable in Jorunna parva. Very few individuals are actually white with black patches. Most are dark yellow (like a Peep?). Some individuals can even be dark brown (mmm chocolate bunny) surrounded in a band of dark yellow.

6. 

   The famous Japanese scientist Kikutaro Baba named the species in 1934. Baba was a renowned and prolific malacologist, i.e. a scientist who studies mollusks, who described 116 species and has 14 species and taxa names after him.

7. There is some confusion what nudibranchs are and are not actually Jorunna parva. Mollusk geeks, of which I count myself, are unclear whether the extreme color variation actually represents different species. This could mean the difference between the species being distributed throughout Japanese, Northern Australian, and the Indo-Pacific oceans or isolated to a small area. It is worth noting the white fluffy bunny with the dark ears version of Jorunna parva seems to be primarily off the coast of Japan. (see these posts at the Seaslug Forum)
8. Jorunna parva may show some California love. J. parva bears many striking resemblances to J. pardus off the California coast. Some sea slug experts think they may be one in the same.
9. They are hermaphrodites. Well technically, all nudibranchs are. So mating like bunnies is actually much easier since they don’t have to be so choosy. Any other bunny will do.
10. They are very, very hungry. Recent work in my lab has shown for nudibranchs only exist where there is a lot of food. This may be because being a hermaphrodite is calorically expensive, an individual needs to produce eggs and sperm continuously

The post The Science of Sea Bunnies: You’ll Never Believe The Top Ten List We Created To Get You To Visit Our Website. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A recent string of oarfish have washed ashore in California.  And by recent string I mean two.  On October 18th, a pregnant 14-foot long female was found dead on an Oceanside, California beach. On October 13th, an 18-foot dead oarfish was found a by a snorkeler and drug ashore off Catalina Island.

This, ahem, pattern is causing people to ask, “Why are so many oarfish washing ashore?” In the words of @para_sight on Twitter, “Two is not a trend.”  To put in a nerdier statistical way, like you would expect anything less from DSN, you can fit a regression line to two points and get a great fit, but it’s questionable since the degrees of freedom is ONE.  To give you an example, my dog has taken a dump in a field of wildflowers twice this year.  Should the public infer my dog only leaves fecal deposits near wildflowers?

Let’s take a step back. Regalecus glesne is the longest of the bony fishes.  The longest confirmed specimen was 36.09 feet (11 meters) in length.  A more common length is around 9.84 feet (3 meters). The Giant Oarfish is also typically a deep-sea fish found between 200-1000 meters and found in all of the major oceans.  Giant Oarfish feed on krill, small fish, and squid.  They spawn late in year and oarfish larvae can be easily found at the surface.  The Giant Oarfish was described in 1772 and the scientific name refers to “belonging to a king” and the farm at Glesvær (not far from Norway’s second largest city of Bergen) where the type specimen was found.

Undoubtedly the length, odd appearance, and their deep habitat make them of great interest to the public and scientists alike. However, oarfish washing ashore is not exactly a rare event. On September 24, 2013  a “mysterious creature”, more than likely an oarfish, washed ashore in Spain. May 13, 2010 in Sweden. February 25, 2009 in England. January of 2012 in Florida. I’m going to stop here but let’s just say I could keep going for a while. There are literally hundreds of such cases.

So while two oarfish washing ashore (say that 10 times really fast) in California within a week of one another is interesting it doesn’t demand we search for a reason.  But, the media is searching for an answer for this pattern.  And in drudging around someone hit on what has to be the worst idea.  In Japanese folklore, the oarfish is known as the Messenger from the Sea God’s Palace and appears on beaches to predict earthquakes.  Of course anytime something washes ashore in California, someone want to tie it to earthquakes.

First, I cannot seem to find any references to the original sources of this myth.  Hopefully someone in the comments below can provide a link to something other than the mass media hysteria.

Second, the evidence given for this phenomenon is the unusual numbers of oarfish that washed ashore in December 2009 to March 2010 off Japan. According to LiveScience,  “Shortly before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami [March 11, 2011] struck Japan, about 20 oarfish stranded themselves on beaches in the area.” The evidence of the oarfish washing ashore can be found in a piece in the Telegraph before the tsunami. But only a few were actually washed ashore.  Most were caught in nets…not even close to the same thing.

“The science and study just isn’t there. There’s a big difference between suggesting something like that and proving it. What did an animal sense that maybe we didn’t that told them about a coming event?”  In other words, there is no systematic study that exists that finds a link between oarfish strandings and earthquakes. None, zip, zilch, zero, nadda. 

Fourth, what about all the sizable earthquakes and tsunamis that have occurred without any warning from our oarfish friends?  1/10 is really shit odds. Of course that is just major earthquakes.  I guess they can’t be trusted for anything less than 8.0 magnitude.  You suck oarfish.

Fifth, earthquakes happen all the time in California. Where in the hell were the oarfish in May during the 5.7 quake at Canyondam or the 4.8 quake at Isla Vista?  I mean sure they are minor quakes and I don’t expect an oarfish to kill itself on a beach for me every time but surely an oarfish has the time to tweet at me?  So basically oarfish are doing a crappy job of predicting California earthquakes. 

Sixth, as put by HJ Walker, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, “If there is a enormous giant earthquake beneath the sea, other fish would be affected – not just one or two oarfish.”

Seventh, there are better more plausible explanations.  Disease, sudden environmental changes, currents, anything is more plausible than an earthquake.  Kim, a highly trained physical oceanographer, makes a great case for abnormal currents. Giant squid strandings increased when there are rises in bottom temperature. Or as my friend, a trained ecologist (h/t to S.V.T), mentioned animals are distributed patchily across the planet.  Basically, you don’t find a species everywhere and where you do find there is usually more than one.  Where one oarfish is there are bound to be others nearby.

The post Oarfish Can Supposedly Predict Earthquakes, Apparently They Suck At It first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post TGIM – Pufferfish can sculpt, what’s your excuse? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 Japanese documentary film directed by David Gelb. The film follows Jiro Ono, an 85 year old sushi master and owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, on his continuing quest to perfect the art of sushi and his elder son Yoshikazu’s struggle with living up to the legacy of his father. The film briefly contrasts this with the younger son Takashi running a mirror-image restaurant, except with a more relaxed feel.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi debuted in the US in 2011 at the Provincetown International Film Festival[2] and was an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival[3] in the same year. [Source: Wikipedia]

If that’s not convincing enough, you can’t argue with the trailer:

The imagery is amazing – Gelb is an expert at interweaving music and striking camera angles as he details Jiro’s moving story.  This film boasts an impressive score to accompany the gorgeous cinematography, including music by Phillip Glass, Mozart, and Bach.

Are you hungry yet? Cause I definitely am.

The post Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and so do I first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Video by Nori Sakamato on G+. Used with permission. Ribbon eel (Rhinomuraena quaesita) is from 50m deep in Kume Island, Okinawa.

The post Okinawa Ribbon Eel! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“[…] The 5-member selection panel recognized Duffy for his pioneering work in marine ecology and biodiversity, with special mention of his discovery of “eusociality” among shrimps. Eusociality—most familiar among ants, bees, and other social insects—refers to life in large, cooperative colonies. It is marked by living with extended families in which only one or a few “queens” reproduce, and by cooperative care and defense of young. Duffy was the first to discover a case of eusociality in a marine animal, the sponge-dwelling Caribbean shrimp Synalpheus regalis. His subsequent work has identified several other eusocial shrimp species in this group.

Duffy’s recent work has focused on the importance of biodiversity in marine ecosystems. He is the lead scientist on a 3-year grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to establish a global experimental network for studying how nutrient pollution and changes in biodiversity impact ecologically and economically important seagrass beds. […]”

The post Emmett Duffy Wins Inaugural Kobe Prize in Marine Biology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Follow along with Fukushima researchers first appeared on Deep Sea News.

[Nicholas] Fisher [of Stony Brook University] is leading the effort to study how marine life takes up radionuclides into its tissues. Because 3 months have passed and most isotopes, particularly the short-lived iodine-131 with an 8-day half-life, have decayed considerably, he doesn’t expect to see any toxicity. However, there will still be detectable levels in organisms such as brown seaweed, which can store iodine at 10,000 times the concentration in the water. Such a measure might help researchers understand how the isotopes move through the food chain, even up to seafood-eating humans.

Meanwhile, Japanese researchers continue to keep a close eye on the water close to the plant. Calculations by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) in Cherbourg have calculated that, close to the Fukushima plant, there is a risk of harm to marine life, particularly to animals born in the spring. Fisher hopes that by directly field-testing the water in the area, more precise measurements can be added to their calculations.

*Update, 3 June…in addition to the well-known isotopes iodine-131 and cesium-137, the cruise will measure the spread and bioaccumulation of rarer isotopes such as plutonium, strontium, and tritium, about which little is known. The extensive data set he expects to gather could take up to a year to analyze.

Read the full story on Science Insider.  And cross your fingers that they don’t find any 3-eyed fish.

The post Tracking radiation effects off Fukushima first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A report that the Japanese government will scrap all research whaling has been dismissed as a hoax. The report, tracked back to a US fake news website, coincided with Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s trip to Tokyo – her first since the Japanese whaling fleet was forced to pull out of the Southern Ocean early.

source via Southern Fried Science

“Effective immediately, Japan will no longer conduct scientific research on whale populations which require capture and dissection,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Makoto Inoue, speaking at a press conference in Tokyo. “The Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has revoked all permits for whaling research.”

Asked about the motivation behind the sudden announcement, Inoue said, “It cannot be denied that that whaling severely and unnecessarily damages the image of Japan in the international community, due to the strong sentiment against whaling in many countries,” speaking through an interpreter. “There is no longer any economic need for Japan to obtain protein from the whales, so it would be irrational and pointless to continue catching whales.”

source via Southern Fried Science

The post The end of whaling in Japan? first appeared on Deep Sea News.