Thus, I am enacting #8 of our Core Values here at Deep Sea News. “Call to Action. We believe that an open dialogue is just the first step, and seek to turn words into action.” We have done lots of talking, but now is the time to start the doing. My friends, the ocean can’t speak for itself on the congress floor, so here are 5 easy ways you can give the oceans a voice.

1) Make it Easy. Make it Fun. Do it Together.

If you don’t make it easy and fun for yourself, you won’t do it. Start by setting aside 1 hour a week to do your civic duties whether that be writing letters, calling your reps, or just making yourself aware of the issues. Use this POCKET GUIDE to keep track of the points you are passionate about and your elected officials contact info. Make it fun by thinking of innovative ways to get your representatives attention or decorating your post cards. Creativity is key to sending a memorable message. Join a group of friends* to hold yourself accountable in contacting your representatives and to open larger discussions about the issues.

*Friends+Wine=Extra Fun

2) Tell Your Ocean Story.

Members of Congress and other elected officials need real life stories to tell to make their case against a policy or budget. Share your stories with them in ways that will grab their attention. Maybe through a video or a photo or artwork. The ocean is a beautiful place, perhaps you send them 50 cards- one with a portion of a larger mural they can staple up in the office. Again I reiterate BE CREATIVE. Use the power of social media to your advantage. Remember Congress goes into recess soon and it’s good to go to your Town Hall meetings prepared.

3) #OurEPA

Join the 500 Women Scientists in their support of the Environmental Protection Agency through the #OurEPA campaign. Send postcards to EPA offices to thank them, but also to Congress to enforce the importance of the EPA and what they do. Find out how here.

If you are a lady scientist, might I even suggest starting or joining a 500WSPod in your area? Or if you have some extra time in your 1 hour a week of civic duties, check out this and this.

4) NOAA

Just in case you were unaware….the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association helps you do you everyday. In the proposed budget, NOAA doesn’t fair too well. You NEED them and right now they NEED you too. Call your reps with the following or put it on a billboard outside their offices. We can’t reiterate this enough….here it is one more time thanks to @southernfriedscience:

“Hello,

 My name is [NAME] and I am a constituent of [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR].

I’m calling to ask [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR] to oppose any reduction in the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA provides essential services to the American people, including weather services, coastal resilience, hurricane monitoring, and fisheries management. Programs like SeaGrant are the lifeblood of coastal communities, providing education, job training, and research grants to fund local development. NOAA’s Hurricane Center is critical for tracking hurricanes. One-third of the US economy relies upon services provided by NOAA. Any reduction in NOAA’s budget would be catastrophic to the United States’ coastal economy.

Thank you.

 **If your livelihood depends on NOAA, consider adding “I am a [FISHERMAN/BUSINESS OWNER/AQUACULTURIST/ETC] in [CONGRESSPERSON/SENATOR]’s district and my livelihood and family depend on the services that NOAA provides.”

If you are feeling extra feisty and passionate, might I recommend sending this same letter to every member of the appropriations committee? Here and Here.

5) #IAmSeagrant

Recently, our own Jarrett Byrnes put a call out for stories from people influenced by the Sea Grant program. This is an excellent way to amplify your message. Additionally, SeaGrant has put out some great letter templates for public use along with fact sheets to send in with your letters. The Sea Grant program “works hard to connect science to communities and address local priorities in water quality, marine ecosystems, STEM education, coastal resiliency, maritime transportation, and much more.”

Sea Grant is completely on the budget chopping block. Many, many people will loose their jobs. Critical research will cease and numerous students and professionals could face significant if not detrimental career set backs. The time to act is now.

BONUS: Choose Your Own Adventure

What have we missed regarding taking action for ocean issues in the current political climate? What innovative ways have you discovered to make your voice heard? Consider this a running document and add your ideas in the comments below. Note our commenting policy. We look forward to the continued dialogue and inspired action.

—

Find your Members of Congress and Senators by going online to:

House of Representatives and search by your ZIP code

U.S. Senate search by your state

The post The Ocean Lover’s Guide to Contacting Your Elected Officials first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If I asked you to picture a predator, weighing over 2 tonnes¹ and capable of travelling the distance of a marathon every day², what would it look like? Would you imagine sleek shapes, immense power or maybe terrifying teeth? What if it could also dive >840m deep³, swarm in huge numbers⁴ and produce over 300 million offspring⁵? Such a creature sounds like the stuff of nightmares, spawning thousands of B movies where people fear to tread water… introducing the ocean sunfish!

Oceanic oddballs

These crazy-looking creatures have hit the headlines again and for good reason… just look at it. The bizarre shape, the enormous size, the permanently surprised expression; sunfish are simply swimming clickbait! Firstly in 2015 Boston Man broke the internet with his idea of catching a ‘baby whale’ (*spoiler, it’s a sunfish) and now a hilarious rant about the “biggest joke played on earth” has gone viral, again with sunfish as the butt (or should that be swimming head?) of the joke. But what is it about these oceanic oddballs that inspires such outbursts?

Well, even someone who studies sunfish for a living like me has to admit they are pretty weird, both to look at and in their habits, but that is precisely why I find them so fascinating. So what do we really know about this strange species? Alongside the jokes, Scout Burns’ comic rant made some pretty fishy claims about sunfish and the scientists who study them, so I feel it’s time for someone to stand up for the funny-looking fish and bite back.

Dishes to fishes and the meaning of life

One of my favourite suggestions from Scout’s blog is that sunfish are “big dumb idiot[s]” made when “God must have accidentally dropped [one] while washing dishes day and shrugged his shoulders” because they have “no purpose… every foot… wasted space”.. Well sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction; the fishes first evolved around 500 million years ago⁶ and despite their somewhat prehistoric appearance, the ocean sunfishes actually represent the new kids on the block (evolutionary speaking)! They appeared ‘only’ 50 million years ago, descended from pufferfish that left for a life in the open ocean⁷. Their strange shape actually represents cutting-edge evolutionary design, honed by selective pressures over millions of year to a life wandering the world’s oceans. As to their purpose, well this is a bigger question… the meaning of life has been debated for centuries from ancient philosophers to Monty Python (of course the answer is: 42). But roughly speaking, their “purpose” is the same as that of all life… simply to exist: to feed, grow, breathe, reproduce and die. Of course, having an interest in biology, we want to know a few more details than that! Which is why scientists (myself included) are trying to unravel the ecology of the sunfish a little further…

Why swim when you could fly?

Scout suggests “scientists even debate how [sunfish] move. They have little control… some say they must just push water out of their mouths for direction…They could use their back fin, except… it doesn’t f****** grow. It just continually folds in on itself.” The image of a giant sunfish blowing water like a kid blows bubbles is a great one! But sadly this simply isn’t the case, we know how they move and in quite a lot of detail. Rather than swim with a strong tail fin (like most sharks and tuna species), the ocean sunfish flaps its dorsal and anal fins like a penguins flippers⁸ to efficiently (if a little ungainly), fly through the water. The funny stumpy tail (or clavus) actually has a vital role to steer the fish, like a ship’s rudder (and for the record it grows like any other body part).

Scout quite rightly mentions that sunfish don’t have swim bladders; however it is not true that “that every fish has [one] to make sure it doesn’t just sink”. In fact, although it might sound strange, many fish don’t have swim bladders, including great white sharks, manta rays and white marlin. There are other ways to provide lift without the issues of containing air internally (which can cause problems with rapid changes in depth). Most fish without swim bladders, including sunfish, have large deposits of fatty lipids in their livers that provide buoyancy, so no swim bladder, no problem⁹.

Unfortunately it’s also not the case that sunfish “get stuck on top of the water… because without the whole swim bladder thing… the ocean pushes over the [fish]”. This idea sounds super funny as sunfish are often seen bobbing around at the surface, but unfortunately is untrue. Sunfish don’t actually need a swim bladder to remain upright (it’s not a life jacket); they are perfectly capable of swimming upright both at the surface and at depth. They “bask” at the sea surface¹⁰, which is a clever behaviour to increase their heat exchange, to communicate with birds for cleaning services and perhaps simply just to rest, before diving back into the depths.

Under pressure…

Of course being a huge fish, there is a certain amount of Hollywood pressure to be a tremendous toothy terror and Scout’s article sounded distinctly disappointed that despite being “so huge” sunfish are not even “decent predators”. Unless you are a prey item of course! The biological definition of a predator is ‘an animal that naturally preys on others’ and so sunfish are oceanic predators. But of course this particular predator poses little threat to people, unless you are unfortunate enough to stand under a breaching sunfish, in which case you may find yourself transformed into a pancake-ified version of a human being. But as a biologist, this doesn’t seem like the best method for classifying predators (although it might win you a Darwin Award).

Back to sunfish as predators, (an area a lot of researchers are working on), Scout says “They mostly only eat jellyfish because [it has] a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it’s so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive. Dumb.” Well, that’s the funny thing really –they really can survive on a crazy diet! Small sunfish (<1 m), eat a wider range of things than their larger cousins, with 40% of their diet made up of seafloor creatures including crustaceans, molluscs and even some fish species¹¹. When they come across gelatinous prey (siphonophores, pyrosomes, jellyfish etc.) the sunfish are surprisingly fussy and are careful to only eat the most calorific parts (no dieting here!) which means gonads… yum. Anything that requires more energy to find or digest than it provides -like jellyfish bell tissue- is rejected. By remaining fussy eaters within their ecological niche (where unsurprisingly, there is less competition), sunfish are able to survive where few others can, something biologists (myself included) are still trying to understand and explain.

Moving on from thinking of sunfish prey to sunfish as prey, and it’s hard to imagine this giant floating head being vulnerable to attack. However, sunfish start life in the plankton as tiny eggs <1 mm⁵. This puts them on the menu for almost every creature in the sea! As they grow, the number of predators able to cope with such an item decreases, but they have been found inside sharks¹² (not a pretty sight) and there is plenty of evidence of attacks by orca¹³ and sealions (although these might aggressive play behaviours, like a cat tormenting a mouse). The main threat to ocean sunfish, the super predator that kills 100,000’s each year is… you’ve guessed it: us. There are markets for sunfish meat across the Far East (Taiwan and Japan in particular¹⁴) and they are captured as unwanted bycatch by fisheries globally¹⁵. It is these enormous catch figures that have led to the ocean sunfish being classified as Vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN Red List.

However the future for this funny fish is becoming brighter; as more people become aware of the oceans weird and wonderful creatures, from funny rants and viral videos, more pressure is placed on governing bodies to reduce bycatch, combat climate change and alter unsustainable exploitation of the seas. Perhaps ranting and raving about strange species can be helpful for conservation, simply by raising awareness and creating a catalyst for change.

If you would like to read more fish facts or learn about the latest sunfish research please check out my twitter page @SunfishResearch or visit my blog sunfishresearch@wordpress.com

References

¹ Roach J (2003) World’s heaviest bony fish discovered? National Geographic. Available via http://news.nationalgeographic. com/news/2003/05/0513_030513_sunfish.html

² Nakamura, I., Goto, Y., & Sato, K. (2015) Ocean sunfish rewarm at the surface after deep excursions to forage for siphonophores. Journal of Animal Ecology, 84, 590-603.

³ Phillips, N.D., Harrod, C., Gates, A.R., Thys, T.M., & Houghton, J.D.R. (2015) Seeking the sun in deep, dark places: Mesopelagic sightings of ocean sunfishes (Molidae). Journal of Fish Biology, 87, 1118-1126.

⁴ Houghton JDR, Doyle TK, Davenport J, Hays GC (2006a) The ocean sunfish Mola mola: insights into distribution, abundance and behaviour in the Irish and Celtic Seas. J Mar Biol Assoc UK 86:1237–1243. doi:10.1017/ S002531540601424x

⁵ Gudger EW (1936) From atom to colossus. Nat Hist 38:26–30

⁶ Conway Morris S and Caron JB (2014) A primitive fish from the Cambrian of North America, Nature 512, 419–422

⁷ http://oceansunfish.org/evolution.php

⁸ Watanabe Y, Sato K (2008) Functional dorsoventral symmetry in relation to lift-based swimming in the ocean sunfish Mola mola. PLoS ONE 3:e3446. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0003446

⁹ Yancey PH, Lawrence-Berrey R, Douglas MD (1989) Adaptations in mesopelagic fishes. Mar Biol 103:453–459

¹⁰ Cartamil DP, Lowe CG (2004) Diel movement patterns of ocean sunfish Mola mola off southern California. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 266:245–253

¹¹ Syväranta, J., Harrod, C., Kubicek, L., Cappanera, V. & Houghton, J.D.R. (2012) Stable isotopes challenge the perception of ocean sunfish Mola mola as obligate jellyfish predators. Journal of Fish Biology, 80, 225-31.

¹² Fergusson IK, Compagno LJ, Marks MA (2000) Predation by white sharks Carcharodon carcharias (Chondrichthyes: Lamnidae) upon chelonians, with new records from the Mediterranean Sea and a first record of the ocean sunfish Mola mola (Osteichthyes: Molidae) as stomach contents. Environ Biol Fish 58:447–453

¹³ Gladstone W (1988) Killer whale feeding observed underwater. J Mammal 69:629–630

¹⁴ Sagara K, Ozawa T (2002) Landing statistics of molids in four prefectures of Japan (in Japanese with English abstract). Mem Fac Fish Kagoshima Univ 51:27–33

¹⁵ Pope, E.C., Hays, G.C., Thys, T.M., Doyle, T.K., Sims, D.W., Queiroz, N., Hobson, V.J., Kubicek, L. & Houghton, J.D.R. (2010) The biology and ecology of the ocean sunfish Mola mola: A review of current knowledge and future research perspectives. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 20, 471-487.

The post Trolling in the deep: from raging rants to support of the strange first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On December 1st, the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology approvingly tweeted a link to a Breitbart piece claiming El Niño, as opposed to climate change, is to blame for the run of record high temperatures observed in 2015/2016.

Their argument appears to be that, because temperatures are now falling as La Niña begins to kick in (and as summer turns to winter in the northern hemisphere where most of the Earth’s land surface is), that we must be settling back into a climate change hiatus (which doesn’t exist – more on this below). They conclude from this that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity don’t cause climate change.

There are many, many problems with this argument. The main one is that greenhouse gas emissions and naturally occurring climate cycles like El Niño aren’t mutually exclusive possible causes of global warming; rather, they can and do interact and co-occur. In other words, to suggest that global warming must be caused either by El Niño OR greenhouse gas emissions is a false dichotomy.

Another problem is that the Breitbart piece cites this Daily Mail piece as its source, which in turn cites a NASA study: “…on its website home page yesterday, Nasa featured a new study which said there was a hiatus in global warming before the recent El Nino, and discussed why this was so.” The Daily Mail didn’t provide a link to the study, so I went to NASA’s website and found the study. Here’s the problem: the study does not say what the Daily Mail says it does. The study provides strong evidence that the observed slowdown in surface warming was not evidence of a “hiatus”; rather, the heat was redistributed in the ocean. Overall, global warming has not slowed or paused. There is no hiatus.

In summary, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology shared and agreed with a piece on Breitbart (a conservative, white supremacist platform to which the chairman of the Committee is a regular contributor, claiming that a recent temperature drop proves climate change is not caused by human activity, citing the Daily Mail (a conservative British tabloid known for its racist, homophobic, and anti-science tendencies) which misreported the results of a NASA study.

If you agree that the Committee should be listening directly to NASA, and not conservative tabloids who dishonestly twist NASA’s science to support their anti-science politics, you can call the Committee at (202) 225-6371. Ask them to retract the tweet, issue an apology, sever its chairman’s connection to Breitbart, and get their information about climate change directly from NASA and other unbiased government agencies. If your Representative is a member of the committee, you can call them too.

The post An Alarming Tweet From the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When my pal Dr McClain yanked me out of retirement and asked me to pen a quick post on all the hubbub around the televised and much discussed close encounter between world-champion surfer Mick Fanning and a presumed great white shark at the start of the J-Bay Open in South Africa last weekend, I was given no particular reason for his dusting me off as author. Perhaps Craig’s intentions were to approach someone whom he knows is working on shark conservation at the moment to provide a voice on the subject. Or maybe he intended for me to make some sort of connection to shark-human interactions since I spend a lot of my time thinking about this in my work. Or maybe his intention was for me to employ my trademark wise-assery and irreverent commentary on all the bloviating that’s been done since the event.Here’s the thing about intention… How do we know for sure what anyone (let alone a shark) intends?

Thus far I’ve seen narratives surrounding the Fanning event fall into two distinct themes, hinging on whether or not you wish to call this event a “shark attack.” Within the shark attack camp, I’m seeing lots of “”Fanning got lucky,” or “The shark missed,” story lines. Taking this to the absurd and crackpot level, the always reliable Fox News has even begun to make calls that maybe it’s time to “rid the ocean of sharks.”

On the other end of the spectrum are those who perhaps justifiably feel that the words “shark attack,” are prejudicial and loaded (in other words weighted towards an interpretation where the shark has targeted a human with the intent of harm (the consumption of the human being one possible outcome). This language revision camp has been employing a lot of their own “just so stories” that suggest the “shark got tangled in the surf leash,” or the shark was just “curious.” To this reader, a lot of this smacks of apologetics (and to be fair, I realize that sharks have an unfair and undeserved reputation that words like “attack” help to promote).

Any or all of these explanations might sound plausible and could be correct. But unless someone has suddenly discovered the ability to mind-meld via television with a great white shark, how are any of us to know what was the intention of the shark?

So what do we know about the Fanning incident? We know the time of year, day and hour the incident occurred. We probably have some physical/oceanographic data (water temperature, tidal state, meteorological conditions, etc). We know what Fanning was wearing (color, patterns) and the color and shape of his board. We know that particular stretch of South Africa is home to a lot of seals, and a lot of seal predators. And we seem to know (or presume) that the shark in the video of the incident was a great white shark (there have even been some preliminary back-of-the-envelope calculations of size of the shark).

As far as the intention of the shark, I can offer no compelling accounting that doesn’t load hints to my personal agenda or Panglossian spin. Was the shark targeting the surfer or board for an exploratory bite and Fanning got lucky? Was the shark planning a bite and got distracted after getting tangled in the leash? Was the shark just curious and got spooked by the leash or Fanning’s movements? Did the shark seek out Fanning in search of hugs, and then—after a punch from the surf champion—add more salty tears to an already full ocean?

Well for sure, science gives us some pretty useful approaches to begin to get to the bottom of animal intent. We can (and do) systematically study sharks and are beginning to get a good sense of their behavior. For many species, we are able to document prey as well as behavior around prey. As we spend more and more time in close proximity to sharks, we are learning that they (even those species on many of Shark Week’s “Most Dangerous Sharks” lists) don’t seem to regard us as food when we are in their company. I’ve personally been inches from hundreds of bull sharks on numerous dives and have lived to type out this post with all 10 fingers.

On the one hand, I’m not a fan of language policing. I think it’s hard to define in practical, every-day usage a way to describe a human-shark interaction that results in blood-loss or bodily injury as NOT an attack. I say this in full recognition that the blood-loss or bodily injury may have been an accident or the shark may have “mistaken” a human for something else (whatever that unpacks to mean). In the Fanning incident, maybe the shark was trying to explore Fanning’s board or body as food. If it did, and Fanning were injured, maybe it would leave the scene convinced it was the “wrong” food. Maybe not. But as my friend and colleague WWF-Pacific’s Sharks Manager, Ian Campbell, recently commented, “Sharks do attack people. Doesn’t mean that their populations aren’t in trouble.”

When I personally see all the “don’t say attack” rhetoric being used, I wonder what we should be calling those incidents when dogs or grizzly bears have unfortunate run-ins with humans. In the case of bears, while we’ve comparably decimated their populations and restricted their range, we still seem to be able to co-exist without language policing.

Which makes me consider the other hand, my policy and conservation-focused hand, that words have power and influence. As researchers Chris Neff and Robert Hueter have correctly noted, “Few phrases in the Western world evoke as much emotion or as powerful an image as the words “shark” and “attack.” We have a visceral reaction to each word. Together they conjure our worst nightmares. But globally, sharks are in trouble. Estimates suggest 100 million sharks die each year from fishing alone. This may be twice as fast as shark’s ability to replenish their numbers. Getting people to care about the conservation of sharks hinges on their ability to care about sharks. The legacy of Jaws is not helping in this regard. The science we are amassing is painting an altogether different picture of shark behavior than what has been culturally ingrained my Hollywood. They are not mindless killing machines, but graceful, intelligent predators. If some judicious word policing can help in steering public perceptions and attitudes towards conservation, how bad can that be?

And as to the shark alarmist trend that seems to occupy a lot of public bandwidth (and Fox News) these days, maybe we can look to the grizzly bear once again. When we enter bear country, we take precautions. The chance of a bad human-bear outcome is very low, but there is a risk. When we choose to explore habitat shared by grizzlies, we might wear bells, sing, clap, or even carry pepper spray. In extreme situations, guns might be appropriate. We haven’t demonized grizzlies (or at least we don’t anymore). But we recognize that we are entering an ecosystem that may not have us as the toughest organism around. Want to be 100% risk free? Don’t enter bear country. Perhaps we can apply some of this common sense to our relationship with the ocean as well, and let’s just let sharks be sharks.

The post The Tension of Intention: A Surfer, A Shark, A Fox, And A Grizzly first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The following post is authored by Leo Gaskins as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size

1. They are sleek yet functional.

The aesthetics are impeccable, and signal just how well designed these sharks/smartphones are. Blackberry is one of the most easily-recognizable brands out there, and not for nothing. Its streamlined body and keyboard allow it to fit comfortably in a hand and allow the user maximum typing speed.  Great Whites are also instantaneously recognizable, with a signature body shape.  Their two-toned shading isn’t simply a fashion statement, but serves as a cloaking technique. Called countershading, their darker upper half makes them harder to spot from above, and their white lower half makes their outline less distinguishable from below.

2. They are lightning fast.

They have the physical or processing power to get the job done. Their goals may different, but their pace is legendary. Those cute seal pictures you got form your friend? Blackberry, on 4G LTE, has it downloaded in seconds. That cute seal out swimming in the ocean? Great White Sharks, moving up to 40 kilometers per hour, with 18,000 Newtons of bite force, rip those seals to shreds in seconds.

3. They are addictive.

Remember in the mid 2000’s when the phrase “Crackberry” was common slang? People were glued to their smartphones then as they are today. Having the ability to email or bbm your friends with the press of a few keys, from anywhere, was a total luxury. Great Whites, on the other hand, are addictive to us in a different way. They pique our curiosity about the unknown. Shark week shows don’t change all that much each from year to year. It’s not as if there are hundreds of new stories of people getting killed or mauled annually by our cartilaginous friends. Yet each year, we find ourselves on our couches, completely captivated for a week, hearing about the same narrow escapes from the jaws of the most powerful ocean predator.

4. Their populations are in decline.

The IUCN Red List categorizes Great White Sharks as vulnerable.  They are threatened for several major reasons. They are by-catch in commercial fishing, illegally hunted for jaws and teeth, are experiencing habitat destruction in their nursing grounds, and are killed before they reach sexual maturity.

If there were IUCN Phone List, Blackberry would be listed as critically endangered. The reasons for its decline, however, would be a misjudgment of demand coupled with overproduction of products, a store missing prominent and popular apps, and inability to compete with similar products.

5. They are irreplaceable.

The bottom line is that, for both to have survived and flourished for these intervals, they had to have characteristics that made them distinctive. For Blackberry, their incomparable keyboard and messaging systems were the hallmarks of their success. For Great Whites, their unparalleled adaptations, such as their ability to detect even incredibly sensitive electrical field pulses, intelligent stalking and capture of prey, and overall unrivaled strength and agility, are the hallmarks of their success as a species.

But as we’ve already seen with Blackberry, the population can crash in a relatively short time span. With quickly shrinking resources and support, this brand is losing its footing quickly, and no one seems to be stepping in to save it. Its loss signals the end of keyboard phones in favor of touch screen, and imitators couldn’t properly fill this vacuum. The same is true with Great White Sharks. They fill an important niche, as the apex predators of the ocean, and without them, there will be a ripple effect throughout the food chain.

We all know Blackberry well. We understand exactly what is being lost, and how to cope and compensate with alternate strategies. But with Great White Sharks, we would be losing an object of unknown and limitless importance, and like the virtual keyboard, the second best thing would never be quite the same.

It’s been nice knowing you, Blackberry.

Resources:

Austin, RA. “How Fast Can a Shark Swim?”. ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research. Retrieved 2013-10-01.

Fergusson, I., Compagno, L.J.V. & Marks, M. 2009. Carcharodon carcharias. In: IUCN 2013. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.1. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 02 October 2013.

Gottfried, M. D.; Fordyce, R. E. (2001). “An associated specimen of Carcharodon angustidens (Chondrichthyes, Lamnidae) from the Late Oligocene of New Zealand, with comments on Carcharodon interrelationships”.Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 21 (4): 730–739.

The post 5 Reasons Why Great White Sharks are the Blackberry of the Seas first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The following post is authored by Catherine Chen as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size

Sixty million times. That’s really big, but just how big?

• 60 million kilometers is almost half the distance from the Earth to the sun.
• 60 million times bigger is a baby born at 7.5 pounds growing to 450 million pounds
• … or $60m is a measly 0. 00035% of America’s debt. Hah. Anyway.

So 60 million is big enough that it’s hard to conceptualize (and as it turns out, provide interesting examples for) and doesn’t seem all that relevant. Except…

Enter the ocean sunfish (Mola mola, Latin for millstone), possessor of what must be one of the derpiest faces in the animal kingdom. Heck, it’s not even only the face. Just look at the dang thing:

It’s been called the Eeyore of the ocean, which I think is a bit of an insult to Eeyore, because at least he’s got a proper tail. But turns out that for all its silliness, the mola manages to grow a whopping 60 million times its original size during the course of its lifetime. That’s one freaking big Eeyore.

Mola actually start as small bizarre-looking tiny 2.5mm long larvae, although it’s been estimated that the eggs are approximately 1/20^th of an inch, or 1.25 millimeters. The little Molas have a long way to grow.

That cute little guy can become this:

Whoa.

And although the lifespan of a wild Mola is unknown, that’s still an awful lot of growing in not all that much time. In captivity, a young Mola grew a staggering 823 pounds (373kg) in a little less than three months, before its keepers rightly decided it needed to be released while they still had the ability to transport it safely to the ocean.

The biggest ocean sunfish ever found was an unfortunate fellow who hit the steamship the SS Fiona in 1908 with a “violent concussion.” (One can only imagine that the fishermen aboard the boat were rather alarmed at the giant thud that must have occurred.) After being towed to shore, the fish was measured to be 3.1 meters in length, 4.26 meters tall, and supposedly weighing 4927 pounds. Molas have consequently been graced with the well-deserved title of the world’s largest bony fish by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Their large size leads to some interesting results. For starters, how on Earth do creatures this big control their buoyancy? That is, why don’t they sink like rocks? After all, they lack the swim bladder that so often controls that job in other fish. The Mola has developed its own method (of course, because this fish isn’t special enough as is) for avoiding the fate of permanently sinking into the depths: a thick layer of gelatinous tissue surrounds the whole fish. This subcutaneous layer has been found to be as thick as 0.21 meters and to make up as much as 44% of the Mola’s  body mass.

Their huge bulk has also led to a rather unexpected consequence: viewed from a distance, a Mola swimming along is sometimes mistaken for a shark, (why you gotta be so sneaky mola?) with their large fins and bodies. However, any matter of time spent watching that fin approach is likely to replace the vague fear you feel with amusement instead. The way that the sunfish move their bodies along is uh, distinctive, and really, their swimming just looks so wrong (especially if you’re expecting a sleek shark).

Instead, you get this:

The synchronous movement of the dorsal and anal fins manages to propel the mola along at a decent clip of 0.4-0.7 meters per second, similar to the speed of other large fishes such as salmon and marlins. Who woulda thunk? Biologists used to believe that their shape meant that molas were slow awkward swimmers, but now those darn creatures have gone and proved everyone wrong.

It’s okay, at least we’re still way better looking.

• To read the original article that first suggested the figure of 60 million, check out Gudger’s appropriately titled “From Atom to Colossus.”
• The first aquarium to keep Molas in the United States was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the mola that grew at an astronomical rate was kept. Read the original story in A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer by David Powell (2001).
• Interested in the speed of the sunfish and its gelatinous layer?
• For a great overall review of what we currently know about the Mola mola, refer to Pope et. Al 2010.
• For more Mola entertainment check out my twitter @catherine_chenn

The post Ocean Sunfishes: The Eeyore of the Sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The following post is authored by Caroline Schanche as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size

For those who have seen elephant seals up close and personal, there is no questioning the fact that elephant seals are not afraid to put on the pounds. This guy surely doesn’t seem to mind his blubbery appearance:

In other words, there is a whole lot of fat on them. However, the word fat does not do them justice, so I took the liberty of looking up some synonyms (from thesaurus.com). Therefore we can also call elephant seals bulging, bull, butterball, chunky, heavy, hefty, heavyset, husky, meaty, plump, distended, solid, stout, swollen, beefy, brawny, burly, gargantuan, and my personal favorite: jelly-belly.

So sit back, relax and enjoy, as elephant seals show us the benefits of being a butterball.

1. Stay toasty

Elephant seals are the largest of all seals. The southern elephant seal Mirounga leonina can grow to be 8,800lbs and 20 ft long. In adult males, up to 50% of this mass comes from blubber, which is a thick layer made up of fat which has a dense system of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels. Since it is a thicker layer and contains more blood than normal fat layers, it provides a ton of insulation and is one of the main methods for thermoregulation. In other words, these elephant seals will stay warm and toasty all year long. More blubber means more thermoregulation, therefore bring on the brisket because its time to eat. Interestingly, some humans actually do need to do something similar when travelling to extremely cold places such as Antarctica to maintain warmth and to not become severely underweight, although hopefully they don’t get to super-sized conditions.

 2. Get them Ladies

Larger elephant seals get more girls. It really is that simple. When the seals arrive at a beach for mating season the males all battle it out to find out who’s the boss: the alpha male, or the beach master. Elephant seals are known for this fighting and it usually goes a little something like this:

The beach master is the one who gets to copulate (not my favorite word) with the most females, which is exciting for him I guess. Does this apply to us? Is it always the biggest (read: chunkiest) guys who are more likely to get lucky? ehhhh, I’d have to go with no. If we’re talking muscle it might be different, but in this case the seals are a whole lot of blubber. Not my thing, but maybe its exactly what a female elephant seal wants.

3. Dive Deep into the Blue

Elephant seals dive very deep down to get to their favourite food sources of skates, rays, squid, octopus and eels. They can spend almost 90% of their entire day underwater and can swim down as deep as 300m! How can they do this? Well, all those blood vessels in the blubber as well as an unusually high blood volume along with higher levels of haemoglobin and myoglobin allow them to have a very high oxygen storage capacity. Kind of a cool thing to be able to do.

4. Be Your Own Buffet

All that blubber is good for a lot of things, but one of the best is that the seals can live off of it for months during mating season. Although at the end of it both the males and the females can have lost as much as a third of their body weight, they are still living the life if they don’t even have to worry about food. They have a specialized metabolism with water as a byproduct, and can live off the food stores in their blubber all mating season long, giving them time to focus on… other things.

I know I can get lazy when it comes to making food sometimes and it could be nice to have a fat store to keep you from getting starved, however with us it doesn’t really work that way. Getting fat doesn’t keep you from eating, although I wish it did.

 5. Do the BlubbrBounce

Elephant seals clearly need their blubber so that they can present this masterpiece to the world:

6. Get away with being an scumbag

All week I have been tweeting about the scumbag elephant seal (shameless plug: @carolinetime9), because their large size and certain things they do could be considered particularly “scumbaggy” (see below).

However, no matter how much of an scumbag you are, nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to try to mess with you if you look like this:

Therefore, their size and intimidating (read: ugly) appearance means they can do whatever they want (at least the alpha males can) because very few can take them on.

To conclude, I think Elephant seals clearly make their mass work for them, and are arguably one of the species that can pull off such a great amount of blubber. They have good reasons for their bodacious, unlike us humans. Some might disagree though:

References

Haley, M.P., C.J. Deutsch, and B. Le Boeuf. “Size, Dominance and Copulatory Success in Male Northern Elephant Seals, Mirounga Angustirostris.” Animal Behaviour 48 (1994): 6. Print.

LeBoeuf, Burney J. Elephant Seals: Population, Ecology, Behavior, and Physiology. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 1994. Print.

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=1115

https://sites.google.com/site/elephantsealnotes/physical-characteristics

Battle of the living instrument platforms: Elephant Seals vs Narwhals

The post Six Reasons to Supersize first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The following post is authored by Caroline Schanche as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size

Would you convert to a diet of cucumber? Could you do what the leatherbacks have done?

None of us can really imagine surviving solely on foods such as cucumber or celery. They are about 95% water, and come in at about 8 calories per 50 grams. In order for an adult to consume the recommended 2,500 calories a day on a diet based solely on cucumber, they would have to consume 15.625kg of it every single day. Yummy. Considering a cucumber weighs around one kilo, you would have to consume almost 16 cucumbers a day, and nothing else. Seems like a lot of work doesn’t it? Well the leatherback sea turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, is the largest living sea turtle and gets to its massive size on a similar diet composed of a mainly water-based organism: jellyfish.

Although we consider eating mainly water-based foods as the road to losing weight, eating jellies is what makes these gorgeous giants able to obtain their impressive size. Starting off as tiny hatchlings at about 3 inches, they must then gain enough energy and nutrients from these jellies to grow to be on average 4-6 feet, as well as to support their high energy demands as a highly migratory species. Leatherbacks are actually record holders in migration, as they travel over 10,000 miles a year. How can they have enough energy to support this migration when all they eat is jellyfish? If I don’t get my carbs and protein I get very grumpy very fast, and I would certainly not be in the mood to cross the Pacific Ocean.

Jellyfish are mainly made up of water with a few proteins and some minerals, but not much else other than those nasty nematocysts (stinging cells). Still, the largest leatherback ever recorded weighed around 916kg. How do these giants eat enough jellies to grow to such incredible sizes? Their secret lies in their esophagus.

Our friend the leatherback has an awesome esophagus for two reasons (never thought I would refer to an esophagus as awesome, but I give credit where credit is due). The first is that it is unusually long. The esophagus of a leatherback is not a straight tube directly to their stomach as ours is, but rather it keeps going past the stomach all the way to the rear of the turtle before looping back up to connect to the stomach which still lies closer to the front. This long tube provides extra storage for jellies before they even reach the stomach, and so there is a continual supply of food being pushed into the stomach for digestion. Sort of like a storage conveyor belt of food.

The best part about having jellyfish as your main prey is that they are not very difficult to catch. All the leatherbacks really need to do is find the jellyfish to feed on them, as they will never evade an attack due to their slow nature.  Lion’s mane jellies are found in big groups in Canadian waters in the summer months, so finding them is not an issue. This, plus their conveyor belt-like esophagus ensures the leatherbacks are able to pack in around 73% of their own body weight, which is several times more than they actually need to survive, according to one study (Heaslip 2012).

However, wouldn’t you think there would be some issues in eating jellyfish in general? Some people do make dishes containing this mushy creature, but I plan to hold off for now. The second adaptation of the Leatherbacks’ esophagus is aimed at helping them hold onto the jellies, as well as to protect them from their stinging juices. This adaptation takes the form of esophageal papillae, which are prongs made of cartilage that line the mouth, throat and entire esophagus of the turtle. These papillae hold the jellyfish in while the sea turtles expels salt water from its throat, as well as making sure the nematocysts do not harm the turtle. Pretty cool stuff.

WARNING: If you want to maintain your image of sea turtles as the cute and cuddly, peaceful and graceful creatures we all know and love, you may want to scroll through these pictures with your eyes closed, as their papillae tend to make the leatherbacks mouth look a little like the mouth of the Kraken. Stuff of nightmares right here:

When I first saw this picture, it left me kind of like this:

And a little like this:

Overall, Leatherback sea turtles have figured out some very interesting ways of obtaining and maintaining their massive size on a diet of a mainly water-based organism. However, its particular diet is also part of why this critically endangered animal is in serious trouble. Trash in our oceans has become a huge problem, and floating plastic bags that resemble jellyfish can be a real threat to this impressive creature. Thankfully, several organizations have started campaigns about ocean trash; one specifically about plastic bags has gone viral (pictured below from medasset.org), and I encourage you to check out their organization and the important work they are doing to preserve this amazing species.

Hopefully the future of this gentle (but sometimes scary-looking) giant takes a positive turn and we get to keep the Leatherbacks around for a little (a lot) longer.

Heaslip, S.G., Iverson, S.J., Bowen, W.D., & James, M.C. 2012. Jellyfish Support High Energy

Intake of Leatherback Sea Turtles (Dermochelys coriacea): Video Evidence from Animal-Borne Cameras.PLoS ONE 7(3): e33259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033259

Ruckdeschel, C., & Shoop, C.R. 2006. Sea Turtles of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States. Species accounts: Leatherback (pp35-51).Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

http://www.seeturtles.org/1895/sea-turtle-migration.html

Sea Turtles! Part 3: Leatherbacks, Loggerheads, and Greens.

The post Growing Large on Jelly first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The following post is authored by Catharine Chen as part of the Sizing Ocean Giants project. This post originally occurred on the Story of Size

Adapted from Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.

Long, long ago, there was a Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus) who ate everything in the ocean but a small fish. Fearing for his life, the fish hid behind the Whale’s ear and said, “Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted Man?”

“No,” said the Whale. “What is it like?”

“Nice. Nice but nubbly.”

Wait, what? Jane Austen taught me that folks in the 19^th century all have elegant and dignified speech, but nubbly sounds like gibberish. A word a two year-old would babble out. Alright, fine, the dictionary says it means “coarse or knobbly in nature,” but I, as a member of H. sapiens, am for one certainly not nubbly. For real nubbles, just check out our lovely blue whale protagonist:

Ick. Now that’s knobbly and just generally kind of gross looking. Technically those lumps are skin lesions, or as we more commonly refer to them, sunburns. Poor fellows; it’s pretty hard to protect yourself from the sun when you’re hanging out on the surface of what’s essentially a really huge pool. However, it turns out that blue whales have come up with a pretty good strategy for dealing with that problem.

The scientists took photos of the whales’ epidermises, and calculated the total area of each of the grey dots, or the melanin. They found that when the whales migrated south to the sunny Gulf of California, their melanin amounts increased, and when the whales moved back to their northern feeding grounds, the melanin correspondingly decreased. The researchers also found that the higher the melanin amounts, the less the whale’s mitochondrial DNA was damaged, and the fewer skin lesions it had. And what does a melanin increase lead to? Darker skin! Essentially, blue whales protect themselves from UV’s harmful effects by getting tan, just like us. And Snooki.

Besides opening the door to endless bad “beached whale” puns, this finding not only proves that blue whales have a way to protect themselves from UV damage, but also raises the questions of what levels and intensities of UV could overcome this defense and become the lesions we saw, and when those lesions would in turn lead to cancer. With increasing UV hitting our whales – and us! – should we be concerned?

Tumors and nubbles aside, let’s return to our tale:

The fish gave the Whale directions to find a Man: “Swim to 50N and 40W, where you will find a man sitting on a raft in the middle of the sea.”

The Whale hurried to the point, where a man named Henry sat upon the water, wearing a new pair of blue breeches, suspenders and holding a knife. The Whale opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed Henry whole.

But Henry was clever: he began jumping and leaping and dancing and hitting the Whale from the inside. The Whale groaned and moaned and hiccuped. (Despite being titled “relaxing,” that sounds an awful lot like hiccupping to me.)

The Whale opened his mouth:

“Henry, won’t you come out?”

“No!” said Henry. “I’ll come out if you take me to the shore.”

So the Whale swam as quickly as he could. He rushed onto the shore of Henry’s home, and opened his mouth. However, as the Man left, the Whale was very rudely surprised indeed.

Henry had cut his raft into little pieces, tied them into a grate with his suspenders, and as he walked out, jammed the contraption into the Whale’s throat!

From that day on, the Whale has had a blocked throat, and wants to eat people – but can’t!

Cute. Too bad the blue whale’s huge plates of baleen didn’t really come from an encounter with a man, but they are pretty cool in their own right.  Blue whales are actually a type of mysticetes, or “moustached whale,” who all use baleen to filter their food from the water.

The real baleen is far more sturdy than raft parts tied together by suspenders. It is made up of keratin, the same material as our fingernails, and looks something like this:

Not this:

Blue whales use their baleen to feed on krill, and employ an extremely energy intensive method. They dive deep beneath the water, quickly lunge upwards with their mouths open, and then push the water in their mouths through the baleen, leaving only the krill behind. By performing this behavior in areas with extremely high concentrations of krill, this lunge-feeding pattern becomes sustainable for the whales. So Henry aside, we really wouldn’t have to worry anyway:  if blue whales lunge-fed just for one measly human, the payoff would just not be worth it.

So, as Kipling said, “that is the end of that tale.”

For more check out:

• Whales Use Distinct Strategies to Counteract Solar Ultraviolet Radiation on whale tanning
• Mechanics, hydrodynamics and energetics of blue whale lunge feeding: efficiency dependence on krill density on blue whale feeding behavior
• And the original How the Whale Got His Throat (1902) from Rudyard Kipling

The post The Nubbly Bits of Blue Whales first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Fifteen years ago we didn’t know they existed. In 2002 a handful of deep-sea invert experts playing with some underwater robots discovered the females gorging on bones of dead whales at the bottom of the sea. It was several months later before they found the males*— tiny, glorified sacs of sperm, one hundred thousand times smaller than the female, living in enormous harems inside her tube. Dozens of species have since been described, all showing giant females with a fetish for microscopic males…until now.

A new study by Rouse et al., (star detectives of the continued Osedax chronicles) adds another twist to the mind-blowing bizarreness and total radness of bone-devouring zombie worms. In this latest episode, hordes of enslaved dwarf males everywhere may gain a ray of hope: we now know there is at least one species of Osedax who has escaped the clutches of tiny-tude—rejoice, for the independent male Osedax has been found!

Meet Osedax priapus, from the Latin “os” for bone, and “edax” for devour, the species name “priapus” stems from the Greek god of procreation and “personification of the phallus.” Oh yes. These males are not only independent, they likely use their manly trunks as a penis to directly transfer sperm to the females. Say hello to the bone-devouring-I-am-my-penis worm.

Proposed motto: why have a penis, when you can be a penis?

To recap for those of you not up to speed on the overarching awesomeness of Osedax, theirs is a life straight out of a B-grade alien flick. These annelid tube worms lack mouth or gut, so they can’t eat. Instead, taking a play out of the plant book, adults grow root-like structures with bulbous ends that protrude into decaying bones of dead animals on the seafloor. The roots dissolve the hard parts of the bone and then the remaining protein or fat is passed through the skin to symbiotic bacteria inside the roots. The worms then use the bacteria for food. Bonus bizarreness: these “roots” grow out from around the ovisac—it’s like a fibrous network of fallopian tube food-factories.

This ain’t your garden variety earthworm.

In addition to that, the females were known for this strange sexual obsession with stunted males. The current theory is that the first larvae worms to arrive to a whale fall develop as females; later worms settling onto female-covered bones transform into males, likely responding to a cue put out by the females. It’s a kind of environmentally controlled sex determination (ESD).

But these males aren’t just mini-me’s of the female. The trigger to become male halts the development of all adult features, except for the testes—those bad boys are fully grown, pumping sperm through a long gonadal duct from the back to the front end of the body, where it’s released through a pore just above the brain. Osedax males are basically larvae with gigantic testes that ejaculate out of the their heads.

Except for Osedax priapus. This species has large, free-living males, approaching the size of the females and capable of attaching to bones with that crazy root-structure.   What’s especially impressive about this find is it shows evolutionary reversal of extremely complex characters. When your ancestors are all dwarf paedomorphs, it’s not easy to be a root-bearing giant phallus living the free life.

Yet, after running multiple phylogenetic analyses, Rouse et al. conclude that the most likely ancestry of O. priapus, is a species with extreme sexual dimorphism, aka, dwarf males. With its size, symbionts, and trunk structure, O. priapus represents one of the first times a reversal from paedomorphism has been documented in an animal (and it raises the question of the potential role of genetics in sex determination).

Although O. priapus has made giant strides away from a parasitic life, it is not completely free of its past. Like dwarf males of other Osedax species, O. priapus males still have free swimming sperm that shoot out from the top of their head. Free swimming sperm work well if you are a dwarf male living inside the female. Your sperm swim down the oviduct right to the eggs in the ovary. But free sperm don’t swim so well in seawater. Rouse et al. speculate that O. priapus males overcome this challenge through the use of their remarkably flexible trunk, reaching in to fertilize nearby females, much like the impressively extendable penis of some barnacles. Prehensile penises are a marvel.

Why and how O. priapus changed course from dwarf to free-living male remains a mystery. One hypothesis is that dwarfism benefits species with extremely limited resources: larger females would be able to produce more eggs, but they would monopolize the resource, making a dwarf male lifestyle advantageous. In O. priapus, the females are some of the smallest of any Osedax species, which means that there might be more room for males to squeeze in on the bone-devouring. Rouse et al. also note that O. priapus females make the smallest eggs of the genus. Since dwarf males rely on egg yolk as the energy reserve for fueling sperm production, tiny egg yolks might mean too few sperm for males to be successful as dwarfs. Feeding on the bones like a female could have allowed for greater sperm production.

From two deep sea species named in 2004 to almost two dozen today found in nearly every ocean, from the depths to the shallows, Osedax are proving to be rather cosmopolitan members of the ocean community. No doubt these sexual extremist scavengers will continue to break the bounds as more of them are described. Stay tuned.

The post All Female Bone-Devouring Worms Fancy Dwarf Males, Except One first appeared on Deep Sea News.