Because my other post today is just a wee bit ranty, here a tranquil set of awe-inspiring videos for your consumption.  The ribbon eel is the only species in its genus, meanings it is pretty unique, in the larger family of Moray eels.  The ribbon eel, Rhinomuraena quaesita, is found among the lagoons and reefs throughout the Indo-Pacific oceans.  If you note the snout on these critters, you will see the flared nostrils.  This is usually the only part sticking out from burrows.  Apparently, the ribbon ells use these to attract small prey, clamping down on the unsuspecting food with their strong jaws and retreating into their burrows.  In addittion, all ribbon eels begin life as males and then ultimately become females.  This is called sequential hermaphroditism.

The post Ribbon Eel Video Roundup first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Today is legendary! Why, you ask? Well, we are celebrating TEN YEARS of DSN posts. That’s right – if you go wayyyyyyyyy back in the archives you will note that the proto-Deep Sea News empire began with a little post by Dr. M on December 13, 2006.

What were we all doing in 2006? Well as for myself (this is Holly speaking), I was just starting my PhD research in good ol’ London towne. I was listening to a lot of Pussycat Dolls, and Christina Aguilera was going through that weird jazz phase. I was smoovely fixing nematodes on glass slides to the tune of Chamillionaire, and I had just signed up to this cool new website called Facebook.

As you can fathom, a lot has changed in 10 years. The DSN crew has moved forward and onwards in our careers, many of us metamorphosing from wee little student trainees into Real Scientists. Our list of contributors has changed and evolved. We write different types of posts now (should we remind Dr. M that he used to use DSN as a cruise blog?). In light of recent world events, our message and mission has become increasingly urgent.

But other things haven’t changed – our Core Values, although not formalized in writing until 2011, have always been a fundamental part of Deep Sea News. The passion, enthusiasm, and dedication of all of our past and present writers will never change. And of course I still listen to the Pussycat Dolls (because how can you NOT?)

So in celebration of our site’s 10 year anniversary, here we present you with our Top Ten (and then some) posts in DSN History:

2006 

Wetting my toes

Kim: Do I need to explain that the very first post on DSN is also that years highlight? It’s real, it’s sweet and it kicked off ten years of online shenanigans!

2007 

Just Science Weekend: They Eat Their Young

Jarrett: I <3 DSN in 2007. You can feel the online science world trying to figure out what it was. DSN was a more news-y place, with a heavy dose of reportage on the deep sea, like this awesome interview of sub pilot David Guggenheim. But amidst that, DSN was also figuring out who it was going to become – and this gem of a piece from Peter Etnoyer epitomizes the future, showing us that not only are deep sea fish all around us in our everyday lives, but man, do they sure like to cannibalize their babies. Mmmmmm….babiez.

2008

Dumping Pharmaceutical Waste In The Deep Sea

Rebecca: 2008 was a year or short-and-sweet posts, punctuated by long and well-researched articles on everything from coral age to deep ocean waves. DSN found a unique voice in being a place not just to report on the latest news, but also provide a scientist’s perspective on the way news about the ocean is reported in the press. This was also a year of raising awareness, with Dr. M’s post on pharmaceutical dumping in the deep as a perfect example of how blogs can call attention to unique and important stories that the press might miss.  

2009 

Holly: My favorite thing about 2009 is the epicness of Kevin Zelnio, best summarized with these two posts:

TGIF: TOTELY AWSUM SEE KUKUMBR!!!11!!!!11!

This post is a HILARIOUS animated video about a very boring sea cucumber, complete with rock guitar soundtrack. I think I just re-watched it like five times.

Thank You for Caring About Ocean Education!

(the more serious and dedicated size of Zelnio, where he coordinated a campaign at DonorsChoose.org and raised over $4800 from our readers. This campaign funded Ocean Education projects in K-12 classrooms around the country!)

2010 

All the coverage of the Deep Water Horizon Spill

Kim: Let’s be real, the Macondo well blowout sucked for the Gulf. But in terms of science, DSN was on it providing weekly updates and posting readable summaries of technical reports. The entire archive is here folks.

How To Cuddle Your Lady Right, by Smoove A

In this epic post, Miriam describes how one microscopic crustacean makes all the right moves and makes the mating happen. All biology textbooks should be written like this.

2011

From the Editor’s Desk: The Giant Squid Can Be A Panda For The Ocean

Holly: First of all, I love the 2011 Editor’s Desk posts because Craig very epically summarized himself with a minimalist icon of his bald head and beard. Second, the Giant Squid is WAYYYY more awesome than those damn dolphins and whales that everyone keeps going on about. And I prefer my cuddly mascots with lethal beaks and suckers, thank you very much.

From the Editor’s Desk: The Future of Deep-Sea News

This is the post where we formalized our now infamous core values – they were the brain child of the very first DSN retreat at the Georgia Aquarium, a weekend of meeting rooms and champagne in a rotating sky hotel. One of those things turned out better than the other.

2012 

#IamScience: Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science

Jarrett: This post embodies DSN at it’s best. Kevin Z. takes us on his deeply personal and emotional journey into science. It’s a kind of story rarely told, and one that so many need to hear.

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

In this post, Craig connects American history with geological history, and ties it all together to understand how both impacted the 2012 presidential election. This post exploded the internet.

2013 

Kim: 2013 was just so awesome, I couldn’t just pick one!

10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are A$$holes

Do I even need to explain?

A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons we lack diversity.

When Miriam left DSN, she went out with a deeply important and thoughtful list. If you are an ally and want to see marine science grow, read this piece.

How many people does Kaiju need to eat everyday 

Sure we love all the creatures of the deep, but we also love Hollywood’s imaginary beasts as well. Craig answers some serious questions regarding the metabolism of the monsters in Pacific Rim.

The 60 foot long jet powered animal you’ve probably never heard of

In case you didn’t know what Rebecca’s niche in the online ecosystem, this is it. Someone found a giant gelatinous tube in the sea, she identifies it, and the internetz go wild. Rebecca, helping jellies go viral since 2013.

True Facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster 

SPOILER ALERT: unless you live within 100 miles of the reactor, radiation from the Fukushima Disaster is still not harmful. This post was meant to be a guide to understanding radiation in the ocean. It ended up being one of most shared posts ever and the one we received death threats over.

2014

The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production

Beth: Where Craig discusses the body size characteristics of godzilla over time, and the logical implications this would have on the millions of gallons of urine that massive godzilla would generate. This post has the thing that makes me love DSN – using scientific reasoning to explain a totally ridiculous thing. And it features Craig’s weird obsession with the size of things.

Runner up:

Sex, snails,sustenance…and rock and roll 

Where Craig uses great metaphors to explain some cool scientific studies on how snails reproduce based on food availability, featuring inappropriate references to rock stars and sex, and with a bonus soundtrack!

2015 

Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach

Alex: It’s like we all wrote a blog post… together. And then published it for realsies.

2016 

On Being Scared.

Alex: In which Craig verbalizes the place we have all been. I love and admire the vulnerability in this post and that he ended it so positively… that even when shit hits the proverbial sea fan, we get to choose how we respond. We get to choose how we show up.

Runner up:

The Twelve Days of Christmas: NASA Earth Science Edition

Alex: When you get retweeted by NASA… you get a spot on the list.

(Runner up #2)

The worst ocean environments to catch them all

Rebecca: When you love Pokémon but hate crushing barometric pressure.

The post A Decade of Deep Sea Decadence first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I am on a ship 950 miles away from the nearest landmass. Here, in the middle of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, our team sends a remotely-operated vehicle 2.5 miles down to the flat abyssal plain. As deep-sea biologists, we get to see some pretty AH-MAZING sights and this time is no exception: an anemone-like animal with 8-foot tentacles that billow across the seafloor. This creature, Relicanthus sp., is so different from other anemones it was recently moved to a new order.

As incredible as seeing this tentacled beast was, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sadness. It’s difficult for a marine biologist working in an area that may be forever changed within the next two decades. As the demand for metals increases, humans are seeking resources in ever more remote places and the next frontier of mining will likely take place in the deep ocean.

So what are countries after 3 miles deep in the central Pacific Ocean? Potato-sized lumps of metallic ore laden with cobalt, copper, nickel and other rare metals known as polymetallic nodules. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone has the most valuable beds of these nodules that sit like cobbles on a street and form at a rate of a few millimeters per million years. As the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is in international waters, it falls under the mandate of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). So far, there have been 15 mining exploration areas allocated, each up to 75,000 km² or roughly the size of Panama.

Let’s be honest, nodule mining is going to do some damage. Nodules will be removed resulting in local extinctions of the many animals (corals, sponges, bryozoans, polychaetes, nematodes etc.) that call these nodules home and leaving no possibility for their re-establishment in the future. Machines, similar to combine harvesters, will disturb and compact large swathes of sediment, kicking up sediment plumes, which will travel for kilometers before depositing elsewhere. Further entombment of the seafloor will occur when tailings are discharged into the water column. Not to mention other possible impacts that include light and noise pollution from machinery, and major changes to the geochemistry of the sediment, food webs and carbon sequestration pathways. The cumulative impacts of these operations aren’t yet understood but will likely be long-standing and ocean-wide.

Despite this looming threat, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is critically underexplored. We know little of what species live there. It is mandatory that contractors undertake baseline studies of the biology living at the seafloor before EIAs and mining can begin. The ABYSSLINE Project, which I work on, is doing just that in the easternmost claim area leased to UK Seabed Resources Ltd (UKSRL). My research is trying to find out what megafauna (the awesome charismatic animals over 2 cm in size) live in the UKSRL claim, how abundant and diverse they are, and what ranges they occupy, not only within the claim but also across the entire Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Over the last two years, ABYSSLINE scientists have spent over two months out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sampling the seafloor with a menagerie of oceanographic equipment (plankton pumps, fish traps, a remotely-operated vehicle, an autonomous underwater vehicles, sleds, corers etc.).

Preliminary results show that the UKSRL claim area is rich not only in metals but also in life. The seabed, at a first glance, appeared to not have much living there. Taking a closer look, we realized that there were small animals everywhere: tiny white corals, pink and purple sea cucumbers, bright red shrimp and strange unicellular animals that create sedimented homes the size of your fist. On our first expedition, we sampled an area the size of Hong Kong (30 x 30 km) and found 170 tentative species of megafauna and that’s likely an underestimate! These levels of biodiversity are the highest in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and are comparable to many other abyssal regions worldwide. We also collected 12 megafauna species and half of those were new to science, including some of the most commonly seen, reiterating how little we know of the abyssal life in this region.

The post Megafauna and Minerals on the Pacific Abyss first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The largest recorded size for M. mola is 3.3 m in length, 3.2 m in height, and 2,300 kg from an individual that washed ashore at Whangarei Heads in New Zealand (10.8 ft, 10.5 ft, 5070 lbs).  However the video below posted in early 2014 shows an individual that may be largest ever seen.  Just eyeballing, the size of this individual (Dat thing is big Jay. What is that thing?) makes it a juvenile.

The post Oh my god, what the @#$% is that bro? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

New spectacular video of a enigmatic jellyfish is going viral across the internet (see below).  Although first collected in 1901 and scientifically described in 1910, the giant jellyfish,Stygiomedusa gigantea, is rarely collected or seen.  A paper in 2010 by Mark Benfield and William Graham found that only 110 observations of the species had been made from 1899 to 2009.  However while rare, Stygiomedusa gigantea is found in every ocean except the Arctic.  The lack of this large jelly in the Arctic likely reflects a lack of deep-sea exploration there as opposed to a true absence.

This jelly is likely one of the largest invertebrate predators currently in the ocean.  Current size estimates put the bell diameter around 0.5-0.75 meters (1.6-2.5 feet). The species actually does not have tentacles as we associate with other jellyfish. Instead what you see dangling down are oral lobes which can reach ~10 meters (32.8 feet) in length.  Benfield and Graham found two individuals in the Gulf of Mexico clinging to underwater structures and hypothesized the jelly uses its long oral lobes to hold on to and trap prey.

Although not all fish appear to be simply food for this giant jelly.  Drazen and Robison found that the small fish Thalassobathia pelagica swimming continuously swimming around the bell of Stygiomedusa gigantea. Interestingly, nematocysts of another jelly, the common moon jelly, could sting the fish but it was unharmed by the those of S. gigantea.

The latest video. I’m not sure what is up with the music.

The post Rare Giant Jellyfish Caught on Video first appeared on Deep Sea News.

To join in on all the fun I stumbled upon this little video floating around on the internetz. Let the cuteness overwhelm you.

Also, if you have yet to read Chelsea’s and Miriam’s recent plastic posts. Do it now. Soooooo goooood.

The post The Majestic Plastic Bag first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Answer: Not much.

Barotrauma can be a real beezy. Luckily we, and those fabulous little rockfish, can get down with our bad selves and the help of this most epic video montage. The following Rockfish PSA was concocted by the masterminds of California Sea Grant and NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

I give it two fins. Way way up.

Side note: I found Dr. M’s doppleganger. (@7:29 fisherapper with hat on)

The post Rockfish Recompression. (because sometimes gas just happens) first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This past month, these giant black beasties have been spotted back off the coast of California. Though they don’t yet appear to be in the same numbers as seen in 2010, the summer is still young. Likely, they might just be here to celebrate our newest Deepling Rebecca’s arrival…Woot! Woot!

Either way, check out this breathtaking video freediver Chris Thompson snagged last week while adventuring through the Point Loma kelp forest. (For the full effect: Play this simultaneously)

“This beautiful cnidarian looks like a big piece of candy, but probably tastes like a light socket.” -Chris Thompson

Good, not to mention valid, description.

The post Back in Black first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sci Starter is a directory of citizen science projects around the world – scientists are looking for data, and they’re asking everyone to help out. Some projects require you to buckle up your bootstraps and head out into the field, while other projects (my kind of research) let you curl up with your coffee and laptop.

Digital Fishers is one such project that lets you do science from the comfort of your desk – computer algorithms can’t analyze video footage very accurately, so researchers employ citizen scientists to watch 15-second clips and answer basic questionnaires.

So what are you waiting for? Turn off Angry Birds and start doing science!

The post TGIF: Procrastinate, watch deep-sea videos, help science! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For your Friday viewing pleasure, a great video of the Dalai Lama’s recent lecture at UC San Diego, where he discusses the need for humanitarian values and universal responsibility in responding to the impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems. Climate scientists Richard Somerville and Veerabhadran Ramanathan from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography join him onstage for the symposium.

The post TGIF: The Dalai Lama on Climate Change first appeared on Deep Sea News.