Now I give the eye of disdain to another two fisherman, who found a detached piece of an mooring and have decided to hold it for ransom. It’s not unusual that oceanographic moorings break free and sometimes float to the surface. It’s also not unusual that fisherman sometimes scoop them up. I’ve had that happen twice and both times they were nice and cooperative we got the instruments back. But this is absolutely ridiculous.

Here’s the timeline of events:

January 15th: There was a strong bottom current event during an underwater storm that caused the mooring to detach from its anchor and float to the surface. Other floats also detached during this event which MBARI also chased after and found. These mooring were actually designed to capture and measure these types of underwater storms, which are more like crazy sediment landslide, and they are actually notoriously awesome at ripping moorings from the seafloor.

January 17th:  The broken bit of mooring phoned home and told researchers at USGS it was in Moss Landing.

January 19th: Fisherman tells USGS he has the mooring and demands money for it. They say no. They tell him they want it back.

January 20th: Fisherman drives away with mooring.

And here we are at the current legal scuffle. USGS wants its mooring back and one of the fisherman has his father, an attorney, arguing that the fisherman are now “OWNERS” of the mooring and will “SELL” it back to USGS (their capitalization, not mine).

If you lose something in the ocean, it doesn’t stay yours forever.

I’m just going to file this under arcane misinterpretation of salvaging laws by a lawyer out of his element. It had a homing beacon on it. It was SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND. That’s how they found it on the dock. And it had a tag indicating it was owned by USGS with a phone number because you know, they wanted it back.

I don’t need a million dollars—I just want to be compensated for my days lost

Two words: GHOST NETS. Seriously, if that fisherman wants to be compensated for losing money and time for getting his propeller entangled in a rogue floating piece of rope, then all fishers better pony up and make a fund to reimburse all the other boat owners that have been entangled in discarded fishing nets. I absolutely agree it sucks, but one mooring is literally a drop in the bucket of ALL THE CRAP we throw into the ocean. And this thing was actually designed to be retrieved unlike the majority of other marine debris!

“It’s his rollerskate and he can sell it to whoever or keep it all he wants

YOU GUYS. I’ve always wanted an ocean rollerskate. If that’s the way current salvaging laws work I’m totes headed down to the marina to sit on your boat, claim it as my own and sell it on ebay. But for reals, the mooring was not abandoned so these guys can’t just lay claim to it.

Let’s just summarize by saying that the arguments for keeping the buoy are at boorish and incorrect. Coincidentally or not, it sounds like this fisherman has fired his lawyer dad. What I am really hoping is that these dudes just give the mooring back. I feel for you, propeller entanglements are the worst, but holding public property hostage is just not the way to go.

SOURCES:

2 men take US gov’t ocean science buoy, now want to “sell” it back for $13,000

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2777911/1-Main.pdf

Fisherman who has kept USGS buoy for 10 weeks: All I want is compensation

Fishermen Ransom Uncle Sam’s Sea Gizmo

The post Two California fishermen pretend they are maritime pirates and hold an oceanographic mooring for ransom first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Stop it. Stop staring at me Taonius sp. All the other squids that MBARI featured during Cephalopod week are either cute, athletic, or named after breakfast foods. But you, you just can’t stop staring can you?

I know you are just floating there below 300 m with your arms up in the air water like you just don’t care. Some people may call this the cockatoo position, others may accuse you of doing Snooki impersonations. I’ll argue you are just doing your best Mona Lisa. Cool, calm, collected with an undefinable expression. Having a neutrally buoyant body just allows you to be all serenely floaty like that. Your creepy eyes follow everyone around the room no matter where they go. BORING INTO YOUR SOUL AND DISCOVERING ALL YOUR SECRETS. Of course being a glass squid, you have none of your own. Not even about what you ate for lunch yesterday. That’s staring at me too now. Seriously now, STOP IT.

Shoutout to Susan vonThun at MBARI for uploading the video to youtube!

The post This squid won’t stop staring at you first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Recently we at Deep-Sea News have tried to combat misinformation about the presence of high levels of Fukushima radiation and its impact on marine organisms on the west coast of the United States.  After doing thorough research, reading the scientific literature, and consulting with experts and colleagues, we have found no evidence of either.  In the comments of those posts and on Twitter, readers have asked us about the “evidence” of dead marine life covering 98% of ocean floor in the Pacific as directly attributed to Fukushima radiation.  After some searching I found the main “news” article that is referenced.

The Pacific Ocean appears to be dying, according to a new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California recently discovered that the number of dead sea creatures blanketing the floor of the Pacific is higher than it has ever been in the 24 years that monitoring has taken place, a phenomenon that the data suggests is a direct consequence of nuclear fallout from Fukushima.

Before I discuss this “evidence” further, I want to provide a little background.  I am a deep-sea biologist and over the last several years my research has focused on the biodiversity of deep-sea communities off the California coast.  Like many others, I am also working toward understanding how deep-sea life will respond to increased anthropogenic impacts particularly climate change.  This resulted in a high profile publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.  I mention this background because 1. It explains why I view myself as an expert to comment on this and 2. it explains why I was confounded for a moment when I thought I had missed a paper in a journal I have published in, on a geographic region I study, and on a topic close to my own research.  And to boot from researchers at institution (MBARI) I was formerly employed with.

The reason I am unfamiliar with a study providing evidence of  “Dead sea creatures cover 98 percent of ocean floor off California coast; up from 1 percent before Fukushima” is because no such study exists.  Here are the details of the actual study.

Ken Smith’s group at MBARI has monitored a deep-sea abyssal site called Station M off the California coast continuously since 1989 (24 years).  Their work has lead to many major findings.  A majority of deep-sea animals are completely reliant on the sinking of food from the surface, i.e. marine snow. One of the most important findings from Smith and colleagues’ work is that rhythm of deep-sea life is intrinsically linked to the production of phytoplankton at the oceans surface. Thus El Nino/La Nina cycles and other such meteorological/oceanic events leave a deep-sea signature.  Ken’s research has been paradigm shifting for deep-sea research.  We have moved from a belief of a stable and climate-buffered view of the deep sea to one of a dynamic system intimately related to seasonal, annual, and decadal changes in surface production and ocean currents.

This group’s newest paper

Smith, K. L., H. A. Ruhl, M. Kahru, C. L. Huffard, and A. D. Sherman. (2013). Deep ocean communities impacted by changing climate over 24 y in the abyssal northeast Pacific Ocean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1315447110.

reports findings that large and episodic pulses of marine snow occur.  These large blizzards are met by hungry deep-sea animals that quickly gobble the meal.  The amount of food these blizzards deliver are huge equaling years, if not decades, of normal marine snow.  But the amounts and frequency of both normal marine snow and the blizzards are changing.

From 2003 to 2012 the amount of phytoplankton production, fodder for marine snow, was higher than years prior.  After 2006, the frequency of spikes in marine snow, i.e. blizzards, also increased.   In the summer of 2011, the first of three dramatic blizzards occurred.  During this event a large number of diatoms bloomed at the surface and sank rapidly to the seafloor.  The second event in the spring/early summer of 2012, was triggered by a major bloom of gelatinous salps. As mentioned in the press release of the paper, “These salps became so abundant that they blocked the seawater intake of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, located on the California coast east of Station M.”  When these salps died, as they do after a bloom, they carpeted the seafloor.  In September 2012 another plankton bloom occurred and this combined with fecal pellets from salps (who hungrily munched on the algae) again carpeted the floor with marine snow.  In addition the greatest amounts of marine snow and consumption by deep-sea life (as measured by respiration rates) occurred in the last two years of the time series.

What caused these recent changes in marine snow?

From the paper,

The abyssal area surrounding Station M is influenced by the California Current, which is experiencing increased wind stress, resulting in increased upwelling of nutrient-rich subsurface waters, contributing to increased primary production. With increasing primary production there has been a corresponding increase in POC flux and detrital aggregate accumulation on the sea floor over the past several years.

And from the press release,

The researchers note that deep-sea feasts may be increasing in frequency off the Central California coast, as well as at some other deep-sea study sites around the world. Over the last decade, the waters off Central California have seen stronger winds, which bring more nutrients, such as nitrate, to the ocean surface. These nutrients act like fertilizer, triggering blooms of algae, which, in turn, sometimes feed blooms of salps. The fallout from all of this increased productivity eventually ends up on the seafloor.

Nowhere does the paper or the press release mention radiation or Fukushima. Nilch, negatory, nadda, never.

But this is not good enough for staff writer Ethan Hunt and others outlets that continue to recycle this story.

Though the researchers involved with the work have been reluctant to pin Fukushima as a potential cause — National Geographic, which covered the study recently, did not even mention Fukushima — the timing of the discovery suggests that Fukushima is, perhaps, the cause.

MBARI today also issued a press release addressing the “several misleading stories [that] have been in circulation on the internet.”  The press release points out the obvious.

1. MBARI research actually showed evidence that there were MORE algae and salps living in California surface waters during 2011 and 2012 than during the previous 20 years.
2. Salps are small gelatinous animals that eat single-celled algae. They are known to experience large blooms in their populations. Large populations of salps have been periodically documented in California waters since at least the 1950s.
3. Blooms of gelatinous animals (including salps) and single-celled algae are a common occurrence off the California Coast. They come and go, running their course when they use up their food and nutrients.
4. Animals and algae that live in the surface waters eventually die. If they are not eaten in surface waters then they sink to the deep sea. This is the main food source for deep-sea animal and microbe communities.
5. Soon after the salp bloom and die-off at the surface in 2012, the deep seafloor at the researchers’ study site was littered with dead salps. This was observed at one location, and salps were the only dead animals observed in large numbers.
6. There is no indication that any of the events in this study were associated with the Fukushima nuclear accident.

I will also note the Fukushima disaster occurred in March 2011, five years after the researches begin to see changes in surface production.   To reiterate the statements points, there is evidence of more life recently in California waters. The supposed “die off” is a common feature of any bloom of short-lived invertebrates. The “die off” was experienced at one location and with one species.  The entire Pacific seafloor is not littered with dying organisms.  I would also point out that these massive food falls of marine invertebrates are a common occurrence. For example, in 2002 a massive deposition of jellyfish was seen in the deep Arabian Sea.

As I write this post on this cold Saturday morning, my attitude matches.  I have wanted to write about this paper for a while here at DSN.  And I’m sorry I did not.  I shoudn’t be defending great science against propaganda and poor journalism.  I should be writing about how this paper answers a major question about the deep sea.  Previous studies have noted that the energy requirements of deep-sea animals could not be met by normal and minimal marine snow.  Research over the last decade or so set out to determine how this deficit is made up.  Smith and colleagues’ work solves this riddle.  Deep-sea animals simply wait for a sporadic feast.  Smith’s work suggests this is likely linked to climatic events.

If anything the paper is a cautionary tale of climate change not radiation.

The post Is the sea floor littered with dead animals due to radiation? No. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has just posted better footage of Deepstaria,

The scyphomedusa Deepstaria is certainly odd, with its bag-like appearance, and bell that can open more than a meter wide. Speculation on the identity of a mystery blob of has become a YouTube sensation, sparking heated and entertaining debates over its identity. That video of Deepstaria reticulum (described by Larson, et al., in 1988) looks especially unusual because the medusa is being blown around by the thrusters of the Remotely Operated Vehicle, and eventually turns completely inside-out. In this video, we showed some more natural-looking specimens of Deepstaria reticulum and Deepstaria enigmatica, along with other related species from the deep sea

The video is STUNNING.  An expert on everything pelagic, Steve Haddock narrates the video and provides tons of great and interesting information.  Thanks goes to MBARI and Steve for providing more footage and explanation of this gorgeous creature.

The post Better and New Video of the Enigmatic Placental Jellyfish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute…In the ocean, there are places where it looks like it is snowing. These magical places are near undersea volcanic activity. The snow particles are clumps of bacteria that use chemicals to make food. Chemicals they use include hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to virtually all other life. Most other ecosystems on earth depend on organisms that require sunlight to create food. Vents release hot water, minerals, and chemicals from beneath hardened lava. The fluid is almost 30 degrees F warmer than the surrounding water. The bacteria live beneath the seafloor and are also released from the vent. These tiny one-celled microbes provide food for many animals. A thick mat of white bacteria builds up; little worms and crustaceans feed on it. Nearby, “black smoker” vents may form when vents spew minerals in water up to 750 degrees F. In time, an amazingly robust community with thousands of animals flourishes here. This video was recorded 480 km (300 miles) west of the Oregon coast at 1,516 m (4,974 ft) depth with remotely operated vehicle Doc Ricketts.

The post TGIF: Marine Snow first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post The Deep: Home of BIG TEETH first appeared on Deep Sea News.

By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called “true” jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.

To report sightings of jellyfish and other marine organisms, go to http://jellywatch.org

The post There’s No Such Thing as a Jellyfish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post TGIF: Let’s Get Together first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Shannon Johnson and colleagues describe two new species of this strange new AWESOME BONE SNAIL! Rubyspira osteovora (bone devourer – though they should have translated ‘boneworm devourer” instead…) and Rubyspira goffrediae (named after the talented microbiologist Dr. Shana Goffredi) lives near the whale falls in Monterrey Canyon. They appear to be closely related to other deep-sea snails, including hydrothermal vents ones. Interestingly, there are in the Abyssochrysoid group which has fossil members that were found to be in association with marine reptile and mysticete bone remains and fossil cold seeps.

While taxonomically very similar and living close together, the two new species of Rubyspira differ in their microhabitat and how they acquire nutrition. R. osteovora lives in the sediment near whale bones and has a very short, but broad, radula, possibly to scrape up bone fragments from the sediments. On the other hand, R. goffrediae lives on the bone and has a long, spiky radula, thought to be able to break apart intact bone.

Bone fragments and minerals were also found in each species guts. Furthermore, stable isotope signatures of carbon and nitrogen also match a diet based upon whale bone, including the bone-eating worm Osedax, which have a ‘root’-like system that can rapidly degrade bones, using the lipids as a nutritional source. While there is little direct evidence of feeding on Osedax roots, the lipid rich bone fragments containing the organic remnants of the Osedax ‘roots’ may have been the niche the bone snail was looking for.

Johnson SB, Warén A, Lee RW, Kano Y, Kaim A, Davis A, Strong EE, & Vrijenhoek RC (2010). Rubyspira, new genus and two new species of bone-eating deep-sea snails with ancient habits. The Biological bulletin, 219 (2), 166-77 PMID: 20972261

The post Move Over Boneworm, the Bone Snail is Taking Over first appeared on Deep Sea News.

via YouTube – Ghostly critters of the deep sea; Cirrate octopus.

The post Ghostly critters of the deep sea: Cirrate octopus first appeared on Deep Sea News.