I am not sure when this obsession with both small and large things began. One of the earliest photographs of me is in a giant rocking chair. With a big smile on my face, I am dwarfed by the colossal piece of furniture. Sadly, in researching this post I discovered this rocking chair is not the largest. That title is bestowed to a towering rocking chair, a 56.5 feet tall behemoth in Casey, Illinois, not only the world’s largest rocking chair but also the largest chair in all of America. I will of course need to visit, and photograph, myself next to the massive chair. Another photograph to add to my photo collection of myself with oversized objects. The world’s largest Adirondack chair and me…got it. Largest chest of drawers…done. Largest frying pan…visited. Giant 6-foot tall cheese grater…photographed and almost bought. I could go on and on.

I never realized I could get paid for my obsession. I did not at some point in high school realize or declare I wanted a vocation focused on extreme sizes. Nor was such a trajectory flagged as a possibility on those mandated vocational tests. I got flagged for being perfect for cake decorating. No joke. Nothing about decorating tiny or giant cakes. Of course, who would even think you could make a career out of a passion for size, except maybe Guinness World Records? No, I came by it all by accident.

As an undergraduate, I applied for a summer program to conduct research with a biologist. Knowing at the time I wanted to be a marine biologist, I applied to do summer research counting fish on the coral reefs of St. Croix. An unshockingly, popular choice among undergraduates, I did not get the position. My second and third choices were the only other ocean-based projects in the program. When the scientist involved with my second choice project called to invite me to work with him that summer, I didn’t even remember what the project was. I wasn’t really concerned with the specifics of the other projects because how could I not be selected for my first choice, St. Croix, dream project. Opposed to the beautiful tropical beaches of the Caribbean, my destiny would be to work in a windowless lab all summer in Boston. The project didn’t exceedingly interest me at the time as I wanted to be a field scientist and microscopy in the lab sounded…well dull. But working in an air-conditioned lab in the big city sounded better than living with my parents in rural Arkansas working in the intense Southern heat sweating in a factory. So off to Boston I went. Within a few hours of the first day, I fell in love with the project. So much so I asked that scientist, a preeminent deep-sea biologist and expert on the body size of marine invertebrates, if I could pursue a doctorate with him.

In the biological world, size is more than a novelty. How an organism relates to the world around it is determined by its size, and understanding what influences size is key to understanding the diversity of life itself.  That summer I measured the size of 100’s of tiny snails and when I returned to pursue my Ph.D. I measured thousands more. In total I measured 14,278 deep-sea snails. The largest no bigger than Abraham Lincoln’s head on the face of the penny. The smallest the size of his nose. Those snails I measured were collected from off the coast of New England from depths of over 600 feet to well over 18,000 feet, from the shallows of the New England continental shelf to the abyssal plains.

Why would anyone measure close to 15,000 snails? In the late 1800’s Henry Nottidge Mosely wrote: “Some animals appear to be dwarfed by deep- sea conditions.” By the 1970s, Hjalmar Thiel of Universität Hamburg observed that the deep sea is a “small organism habitat.” Increased depth typically translates into less food in the oceans with the deep-sea being a very food poor environment. As you might expect this has profound effects on the body size of deep-sea animals. Thiel’s seminal 1975 work demonstrated that with increased depth, smaller organisms became more dominant. At depths greater than 4 kilometers on the vast abyssal plains where food is extremely limited, you find some of the most diminutive sizes. In a particularly striking example of this, my doctoral advisor Michael Rex and I calculated those nearly 15,000 deep-sea snails I measured could fit completely inside a single Busycon carica, a fist-sized New England knobbed whelk found along the coast. But by measuring all those snails, Mike and I were able to document exactly how size in these snails changes over a 3.5 mile increase in depth. That study was the first of its kind and remains the largest number of deep-sea animals ever individually measured.

But to say that all creatures of the deep are miniaturized overlooks the complexity of size evolution in the deep sea. Some taxa actually become giants. The Giant Isopod, a roly-poly the size of very large men’s shoe, and sea-spiders the size of dinner plates, quickly dispel the Lilliputian view of the deep sea. Although all those deep-sea snails are smaller than their shallow-water relatives, shockingly Mike and I also found that they actually increase in size with greater depth and presumed lower food availability. To further confound the situation, other scientists have reported the exact opposite pattern in other types of snails, whose size decreases with depth. The same appeared to be true in other taxa, such as crustaceans. How can the deep-sea be both a habitat of dwarfs and giants?

To answer that, I turned from the Earth’s largest habitat to one of its smallest—islands. On islands both giants and dwarfs exist. The diminished kiwi and the enormous Moa of New Zealand, the colossal Komodo dragon on the island of Komodo, the extinct pygmy elephants on the islands of the Mediterranean, the ant-sized frog of the Seychelles, the giant hissing cockroach of Madagascar and the giant tortoise of the Galapagos represent just a few of the multitudes of size extremes on islands. In 1964, J. Bristol Foster of the University of East Africa demonstrated that large mammals became miniaturized over time on islands. Conversely, small mammals tended toward gigantism. This occurs with such frequency that scientists refer to it as “Foster’s rule” or the “Island rule.” Big animals getting small and small animals getting large.

My colleagues and I discovered a similar pattern in 2006 between shallow and deep seas. As shallow-water gastropods evolved into deep-sea dwellers, small species became larger and large species became smaller. Interestingly, size did not shift in a parallel manner. Larger taxa became disproportionately smaller sized—that is, both converged on a size somewhat smaller than medium. I’ve since observed this pattern in radically different taxa, such as bivalves, sharks, and cephalopods.

The fact that islands and the deep sea have so little in common represents a wonderful opportunity that allows elimination of several hypotheses. Of course, what the deep sea lacks is food. The absence of sunlight precludes plants.   Thus, for the majority of organisms living there, the food chain starts with plankton, dead organisms and other organic debris descending from the ocean’s surface. Less than five per cent of the total food available drifts to the sea floor, leading to an extremely food-limited environment. On islands, less food is available because the small land areas support fewer plants at the base of the food chain.

In either case, island and deep-sea animals need to be efficient and creative in their acquisition of food. In both habitats, there may not be enough total food to support populations of giants only. Unable to travel long distances to search for food or to store large fat reserves to fast through periods of food scarcity, smaller organisms are also at a disadvantage. If these contrasting evolutionary pressures were equal, size would be driven to an intermediate. However, the selection against larger sizes is greater, leading toward an evolutionary convergence that is slightly smaller than the intermediate size. Thus, differential responses to food reduction by different- sized organisms may resolve the outstanding paradox of divergent size patterns in the deep. In the interests of reaching this ‘golden medium’, some species become giant while others miniaturized.

In that summer of 1996, as a clueless undergraduate, I started my scientific adventure that fueled my obsession with size. Two decades later, I still am excited by the body size of animals. Much of my research, and the students who work with me, is dedicated to understanding how the expansive variety of sizes on Earth from bacteria to blue whales emerged. Did I mention the great selfie I took recently with a giant whale vertebra the size of coffee table?

The post Craig With Big Things (and Small Things) first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Recently, Quarks to Quasar’s on Facebook published an illustration (above) of how massive a Colossal Squid can reach.  The Facebook post was liked by 3,300 people and shared 1,150 times (they have 351k followers).  I am excited that the Colossal Squid is loved by this many people. One problem. The illustration is wrong.  Really wrong.  Although the Colossal Squid can reach, well, colossal proportions, the length of this big squid is grossly exaggerated in the above illustration.

Steve O’Shea one of the world’s leading experts on Big Ass Squids has this to say,

On April 1, 2003 the popular press was first alerted to the Colossal Squid, a.k.a. Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, although this species has been known to the scientific community since 1925, after it was described from two arm (brachial) crowns recovered from sperm whale stomachs (Robson 1925). We have located 11 further reports in which adult and subadult specimens have been described, and are aware of at least 7 further, similarly sized specimens that have yet to be reported. Juveniles of this species are not uncommon from surface waters to ~1000m depth….This species attains the greatest weight, but not necessarily greatest length of all squid species, and is known to attain a mantle length of at least 2.5m.

A newer specimen caught since Steve wrote the above is the Te Papa Museum Museum tank specimen that I’ve seen in person. It measures in at an actual total length of 5.4 meters (17.7 feet).

So more realistic would be

No doubt you have also seen the Amazing Ocean Facts circulating around the web. Overall, I love the concept.  Humor, cartoons, ocean creatures, and some science. Yes more please!  However, I have to speak out against both because I take size seriously.

In the above cartoon the Colossal Squid is stated to be twice the length of school bus.  The average length of your standard school bus is around 45 feet long.  So according to this comic a Colossal Squid is 90 feet long. I mentioned in my other post about the sizes of Giant Squids that the longest recorded specimen was 42 feet long, 3 feet shy of a single school bus.  Now here is the kicker.  Giant Squids are longer than Colossal Squids.

Why does this all matter?

Hat tip to Steve Haddock from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who brought this to my attention. Make sure you check out his page on Facebook Jellywatch.

The post How Big Is A Colossal Squid Really? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Why should I give a flying flip about how big they get?

Let’s just say it’s about more than bragging rights. Precise, accurate, and quantified measurements matter at both a philosophical and pragmatic level.  Saying something is approximately “this big” while holding your arms out to indicate your full arm span just won’t cut it.  This is science not a fishing story recounted over brews with the buds.  And just like knowing whether you’re meeting your buds at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. determines how you pace those brews, knowing the size limits of an organism makes a huge difference as well.

Given their size, both the whale shark and giant squid are surprisingly elusive.  These behemoths lead predominantly solitary lives in the open, and often deep, oceans far from human sight.  Finding a specimen to measure is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.  So, why pursue it, right? Because this seemingly impossible task offers a huge payoff, duh.

From accurate measurements of size we can infer much about an organism. In some aspects this is basic physics.  The mass of an object dictates friction, acceleration, force, and so on. The metabolism of an organism, telling us how much oxygen and carbon an animal consumes, is a function of size as well.  Indeed, we have precise mathematical equations, based on studies of closely related species, that can tell what the metabolism of such giants would be.  Knowing whether a whale shark is 10 tons, 15 tons, or 20 tons lets us know whether a whale shark uses 868, or 1176, or 1,460 light bulbs worth of energy every day.  It doesn’t stop with metabolism either.  In spite of errors and exceptions, heart rate, speed, growth, lifespan, population size, lifetime reproductive output, and many more things can all be estimated from body size.  This provides a substantial advantage when trying to understand organisms we know virtually nothing about.

Changes in size over time can also tell us when a species, including our whale shark and squid, is in trouble. Researchers working on Nigaloo Reef off Australia found that the average length of whale sharks decreased by nearly two meters in the last decade. The most likely culprit is overfishing pressure the whale sharks encounter during other parts of their migration.

So, How big do Whale Sharks get?

Beer Google version:  If you search around the internet you will find varying answers.  This Whale Shark FAQ places the upper estimate of length at 21.4 meters (70.21 feet).  A YouTube video claims that a filmed individual is 18.29 meters (60 feet).  The conservation organization Oceana suggests the upper size is 20 meters (65.6 feet).  Compare that to what you find in the scientific literature. Martin in 2007, “1 of only 10 sharks that routinely attain lengths of more than four metres [13.12 feet],” and Coleman ten years prior,  “Most specimens reported in the literature are between 4 and 10 m [32.8 feet].” 

The Sober Truth:  According Coleman in 1997 the largest scientifically, i.e. accurately, measured whale shark was 12 meters (39.37 feet).  Newer work on the Nigaloo Reef whale sharks also reports the maximum size at 12 meters.  During my work with Al Dove on the estimating sizes of whale sharks at the Afeura (with lasers!), we found the maximum length to be 10 meters (32.8 feet).  And although we’ve only measured just a few individuals so far, the length is far cry from the 20 meters so often reported.  UPDATE: Simon Pierce commented below that it may be that one of the reasons we tend to measure smaller sharks in aggregations in coastal zones is that they are predominantly juveniles. He also notes that a “20 meter specimen was reported in the scientific literature from the Taiwan fishery in the 1990s and an 18.8 m specimen was reported from the Indian fishery (summarised by Rowat & Brooks 2012, JFB).”

What about the other big ‘un, the giant squid. How big do they get?

Beer Google Version:  Getting a handle on how large another colossus of the ocean, the giant squid, can grow is equally vexing.  In this video the reporter claims Giant Squids can reach 50 feet (15.24 meters).  Marinebio.org claims that Giant Squids can reach 18 meters (~60 feet).  Indeed the idea of a 60 foot Giant Squid appears to be part of the lore of the media (CBS, National Geographic, Discovery, Santa Cruz Sentinel to name just a few of many).

The Sober Truth:  Does the 60-foot giant squid actually exist?  No.  As Steve O’Shea, giant squid expert, published at TOMNO,

“the largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach, Lyall Bay (Wellington) in the winter of 1887. It was a female and “in all ways smaller than any of the hitherto-described New Zealand species”, according to Kirk (1887), the gentleman who described this very specimen. Apparently it measured 55 feet 2 inches in total length (16.8m), but this simply cannot be correct, and this length almost certainly is a product of imagination or lengthening (stretching like rubber bands) of the very slight tentacular arms, as it mantle was only 71 inches long (1.8m). We know that it was not measured with a conventional tape, but was paced, as Kirk says so in his publication. A comparable-sized female (ML 1.8m) measured post mortem and relaxed (by modern standards) today would have a total length of ~32 feet (9.8m)…Of more than 130 Architeuthis specimens that the authors have examined, none has attained total length [exceeding] of 13m (42 feet). “

For my own work, I have compiled every known scientific measurement of a giant squid (these don’t include Steve’s unpublished data).  Below is a plot of how many individuals of different sizes are known to date.  The three largest washed ashore in Spain in 2003 are 36.4, 39.1, and 39.4 feet long (11.1, 11.97, and 11.99 meters).  However, as Steve mentions most giant squids rarely reach this size. Most are between 10 and 30 feet almost half of the super giant squid purported at 60 feet.

Why do we make a “big fish” out of everything?

Frankly, humans are crap at eyeballing size. We suffer from what is called size constancy.  Psychologist Irene Sperandio explains it like this:

Humans also have the tendency to tell distorted stories either for simplicity or just plain good entertainment value. In one study, participants labeled 61% of their retellings as distorted (containing exaggerations, omissions, minimizations, or additions) and 42% of their retellings as completely inaccurate (pdf is here and gives a great overview of this area of research).  The accuracy and recall of details gets even worse if we are telling a story for entertainment as opposed to accuracy. Of course, accuracy can be altered by who the audience is and how attentive they are and by the accounts of other eyewitnesses.

Humans also seem to focus on extremes.  Stephen Jay Gould acknowledged this tendency when he slammed the idea of Cope’s Rule (that size of animals increases through the fossil record and through time).

“Our strong and biased predilection for focusing on extremes (and misconstruing their trends as surrogates for a totality), rather than documenting full ranges of variation, generates all manner of deep and stubborn errors…We should remember Little Buttercup’s admonition to Captain Corcoran in H.M.S Pinafore, that ‘things are seldom what they seem,’ while we must shun the allure of bigness, for ‘bulls are but inflated frogs’.”

In short (pun intended), size does matter.  And, whale sharks and giant squids are large enough without humans helping them along.

The post Whale Sharks and Giant Squids: Big or Bu!!$hit? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This Wired piece on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs also made me want to smash some test tubes. It’s a stunningly inane list of animal adaptations that the author thinks are weird, uncontaminated by even the most basic knowledge of evolution.

And the eight days since reading the Wired piece, I have yet to become less irritated by it. Miriam goes on to state at least one problem…

It isn’t cool enough that a cow-like mammal has evolved into a denizen of the open sea? It isn’t neat that dolphins have evolved amazing echolocation, and that humpback whales use their air-breathing abilities to hunt? (Not to mention that only cetaceans—whales and dolphins—have blowholes. Other sea mammals, like seals and manatees, just stick their noses in the air.) Evolution is all about using the tools at hand, and if something works it’s good enough. Whales can’t evolve gills out of nothing, but they can move their nostril to the back of their head and be successful. Kangaroos can’t suddenly evolve a placenta, but being a marsupial works fine.

So as expressed by Miriam the post misses key concepts in evolutionary biology

• As Miriam states, future evolution is constrained by the past.  Once an organism starts down a genetic road, it can always veer off and take a slightly different direction, but don’t expect to make it to Tokyo on the road to Tulsa.
• Not all features of an organism are adaptive.  Some features are hitchhikers, remnants of the past no longer needed.
• One cannot examine singular features in isolation.  An organism should be examined in totality where organismal features represent a balance of environmental constraints.  For example, evolutionary miniaturization of organisms often results in loss of organs or organ systems.  Instead of saying “Gee is sure is stupid that that fish has no circulatory system”, one should be in awe that organism can lose an entire organ system, question why the organism would need to become small in the first place, and contemplate the evolutionary marvel of solving this problem by organ loss.
• On the same line of thought as the above, features themselves can represent a balance of selective pressures.  Back to organismal size again, my personal forte, size can represent a balance of  life history constraints, metabolic constraints, space availability, predator/prey relationships, and energetics (food foraging area, fasting potential, food availability).  Each of these may select for opposing sizes and the eventual size represents one solution to a complex evolutionary equation.
• Value judging an organism’s features is ridiculous in itself.  I personally find that “A few shark species have live births (instead of laying eggs). The Jaws juniors grow teeth in the womb. The first sibling or two to mature sometimes eat their siblings in utero.” to be an excellent, fascinating, and brilliant example of how to both reduce sibling rivalry for resources but increase your own energy consumption prebirth!

The post Worst Evolutionary Designs? No! Brilliant Solutions to the Complexity of Nature and Constraints first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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