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

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

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

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

Are you hungry yet? Cause I definitely am.

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

When we see images like the above it is hard to believe the ocean inspires us. In one of the most striking examples of our connection to the oceans, if humans, any number of us, live within 200 kilometers of a reef there are effectively no sharks.  This is not the behavior and these are not the actions of a species inspired by the blue around us.

In my favorite view of Earth, centered on the equatorial Pacific Ocean, virtually no land can be seen.  Although cliché to say, we do live on a blue planet.  So we must ask, how could the ocean not inspire us?

The environment influences us in profound ways, an argument so well articulated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steal.  For example, Diamond argued that a plentiful supply of food lead to dense populations that in turn supported a division of labor and more complex societies to form.  Another of my favorite examples, one garnered from working on an undergraduate degree in religion, of environmental influences on humans concerns how different cultures view life after death.  In the Abrahamic religions, originating in arid environments, hell is characterized by extreme heat.  In contrast, among Inuits their equivalent of hell involves extreme cold.

Maybe we are just missing the connections

Perhaps we just need to take pause to truly witness the ways our oceans impact our popular culture.  And when we do so, we realized the evidence is really all around us.

A search of Etsy on my favorite organism, the Giant Squid, returns over 350 handmade items—a potpourri of painted, crocheted, stenciled, etched and sewed items inspired by one of the ocean’s largest denizens.  A search for “ocean” returns well over 140,000 items ranging from starfish shaped soaps to a crafted wooden marlin to iPhone cases featuring the beach.

But it is not just arts and crafts we adorn with images of the ocean.  We decorate our bodies as well.  A search for “ocean tattoo” using Google Image yields 54,000,00 images and searching for “ocean life tattoo” yields 12,700,000.  Whereas not all the images appear to be of actual tattoos, there is no shortage of body ink inspired by the ocean and the life in it.  Nor am I convinced that all these tattoos are from marine biologists or of dolphins (doing a search excluding dolphin still yields 52,600,000).

I believe these examples begin to hint at a society where the ocean consumes our thoughts and activities.  Indeed for many the ocean defines our rest and renewal.  I was inspired to investigate this when friends mentioned mid-month about an upcoming trip to the Bahamas.  It was a trip that makes us all envious–a week of relaxing on the beach.  If you use Google Trends you can see an annual cycle where people begin searching for the term “beach” at the beginning of year, peaking late summer, and diminishing until the end of year when the cycle repeats.  Interestingly, searches for “beach” are even more popular (5x) than “ocean”.  Both are more popular than Googling for “Justin Bieber” (nearly an order of magnitude greater).  On Twitter, the hashtag #beach yielded 792,120 tweets in the past month alone.  Some of my favorites are below.

We also must not forget about internet memes, the way we disseminate information (loosely defined) often humorous and frivolous.  LOL Cats must move over for Sad Shark, Shellfish, and the Intertidal.

And another example exists in high fashion.  We need to look no farther than Versace, Mary Katrantzou, and Stella McCartney ‘s Spring/Summer 2012 collections. As Holly mentioned,  “This season the runways were flooded (ha!) with ocean-themed prints and marine-inspired design.”

When my wife and I recently bought our first house, our first major task was to repaint.  For our bedroom we settled, largely under my urging, on Vintage Map, the color of oceans on charts of yesteryear.  However, there exists a multitude of greens, blues, and even oranges (Ocean Sunset) that are inspired by the beautiful hues of the oceans.  And when choosing the colors for furniture, floor coverings, and other essential decorative elements we can continue to draw on the ocean.  Nudibranchs, provide a wonderful palette of colors to choose from, all coordinated by nature herself.

From Jaws, Abyss, Life Aquatic, and Finding Nemo, there is no shortage of ocean themes enlivening our contemporary cinema.   I am admittedly biased but my favorite movie of the last decade was the Life Aquatic inspired by the films and life of Jacques Cousteau.  Nothing is more iconic of Cousteau than the red beanie, worn by the characters in Life Aquatic, and now countless others seeking to connect to the ocean legacy of Cousteau.

Although these examples are focused on pop culture and may seem whimsical and fleeting, they are reflective of a very deep seeded connection to the ocean, one that runs the course of history both as a nation and a species.

And thus we are left with a remaining question…

Why can we not turn this deep seeded connection to the ocean into more successful ocean conservation and stewardship?

The post Making The Connection: The Oceans In Contemporary American Culture first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Behind the scenes at Deep-sea News, we get bombarded with gag-inducing PR e-mails about everything whale and dolphin related. Clearly they do not read our blog. They ask us to promote their upcoming movie, website, or exhibit, and we all let out a collective groan. Most recently we were asked to hype up the film Big Miracle:

At this point I’ll also remind you of the poster for a A Dolphin Tale:
Notice any similarities? Yeah, that’s right – both of these are what I call “the money shot”.

Watching A Dolphin Tale was actually disturbing – it was basically a PG version of Cetacean porn. At regular intervals throughout the film, my eyes burned as I watched agonizing, ten minute montages of swimming dolphins, human-dolphin touchy-feelyness, and slow motion underwater footage set to dramatic music. If I re-dubbed the film with a Barry White soundtrack, I’m pretty sure this edited version would be illegal.

There were so many things wrong with this film, I don’t even know where to start. First of all, the film opens with a 10 minute CGI scene of dolphins cheerfully exploring the underwater realm. They couldn’t even get the background scenery correct, because the ocean looks like a fantasy art poster or fish tank display, complete with conveniently placed archways and stone columns everywhere. At one point the dolphins start blowing bubble hoops which hover in midwater (for far too long to be scientifically plausible) and then proceed to swim through them. Midway through the film Sawyer does some nighttime frolicking with the dolphin in the pool – ha ha ha oh so happy la la la – he swims around, then repeatedly grabs Winter’s fin as the music swells. There was a propensity of slow motion underwater dolphin love. The film’s closing montage shows Sawyer and Winter amorously swimming underwater with Winter’s new prosthetic tail, as this song plays:

The movie was full of oscar-worthy lines such as:

“So you’re saying swimming like that is going to KILL her???” (in response to a muscle bulge on the dolphin’s stumpy tail)

Dad: “Every aquarium in the country says it’s hopeless. No dolphin has ever lost a tail and SURVIVED!”
Sawyer: “Well they haven’t met Winter”

“We’re here because of the most amazing friend and animal I’ve ever known…Winter and I are family now. And family is forever”

“That dolphin’s taking us somwhere-we just haven’t figured out where yet”

“I thought dolphins were supposed to be smart. Don’t you understand? If you don’t get the tail your’e going to die. Why won’t you just wear the tail??” (Sawyer speaking to Winter in a sad breathy whisper)

The worst thing about this film was that Mogan Freeman, of all people, starred as the army scientist constructing the prosthetic dolphin tale. WHY DID YOU AGREE TO THIS MOVIE MORGAN FREEMAN, WHY?? 

One laudable inclusion was the decision to show the actual rescue footage at the end of the film – although even in these brief clips you realize how unglamorous the real story was compared to the sugarcoated and shiny Hollywood version. Winter still resides at the Clearwater Aquarium in Florida, and her unique situation has apparently elevated her to “role model” status for visiting amputees.

But not even that fact will redeem this godawful film.

The post As close as you’ll get to legal Cetacean porn first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Among it’s tooth dripping, teeny-2nd-jaw-snapping horror, though, Aliens also has some pretty cool biology going on, especially with respect to life cycles.  There are many parallels between the Alien’s abhorrent life history on planet LV426 and the way many parasitic organisms live here on earth.  Indeed, there are a lot of crazier and more disturbing life cycles that are real and out there, happening every day, on THIS planet.  Let me show you what I mean.

The Face Hugger. Much of the first Alien film centered on the Nostromo crew’s experiences with a peculiar spider like creature that hatches from a 2-foot tall egg and attaches itself to John Hurt’s face while they’re exploring a putative distress beacon from planet LV426.  This creepy headless critter, with its arachnid movements and constrictor-like tail, played on the worst primal human phobias of spiders and snakes at the same time.  Add to that its singular determination to envelop the face of its victims in a vice-like embrace and you truly have the stuff of nightmares.  After a while though, the critter drops off, seemingly by itself, and dies.  Everything goes back to normal until some time later when John Hurt lurches onto a breakfast table and one of the most memorable horror scenes ever unfolds as the alien monster – in its more traditional jaw-snapping form – bursts out of his chest (we’ll come back to that).

This life history follows the general form  egg hatches –> animal develops –> animal lays embryo in host and dies –> host is killed by emerging embryo.  This is a life history used by thousands of species here on earth and is what parasitologists (those who study parasites) and entomologists (those who study insects) would call “parasitoid”.  Parasites are animals that are smaller than their hosts and live at their expense, deriving shelter and nutrition from the larger host animal.  A parasitoid is a special type of parasite where there is close to a one-to-one ratio of parasitoids to hosts (one face hugger to one John Hurt) and where the parasitoid invariably kills the host (putting the rest of us off eating breakfast for a while).  By contrast, many parasites can occur in large numbers on a single host and they generally don’t kill them – its not in their best interests to do so.  The parasitoid life style has evolved in several different groups but is best known among wasps, where thousands of species make a living laying their eggs on other insects, in which they hatch and then eat the hapless victim out from the inside.  If this is all sounding vaguely familiar it may be because you may have read about this before: Carl Zimmer describes it in his excellent book Parasite Rex.

Alternating Generations. The face hugger is all well and good and scary and creepy and stuff, but there’s another bit of biology going on here too.  On the breakfast table, the creature that bursts from John Hurt’s chest (causing Veronica Cartwright to pass out during filming when she gets a face full of blood – true story!), is not the same type as the one that grabbed his face in the first place.  If you think about it, the human life cycle goes egg –> juvenile –> adult (mating) –> egg, but in the Alien’s case it goes egg –> face hugger (implantation) –> embryo –> juvenile –> adult (mating) –> egg.  In other words, there are two larval stages, egg and stomach embryo, giving rise to two “adult” stages, Face hugger and Mr Two-sets-of-jaws, thus two alternating generations. As, ahem, alien as this life cycle is to us, there are actually thousands of species here on earth that do follow this alternating generations model; the best examples are among the parasitic flatworm group called the Digenea or “trematodes” or “flukes”.

In these marvelous little parasites, of which there may be 60,000 species or more infecting all classes of vertebrates and many invertebrates, alternating generations are universal.  It generally goes like this: Egg –> Larva 1 (miracidium/mother sporocyst) –> Larva 2 (daughter sporocyst/redia) –> Juvenile (cercaria/metacercaria) –> Adult –>Egg.  You can see that in this case there are actually three generations: Larva 1: Miracidium+Mother sporocyst, which hatches from egg and gives rise asexually to Larva 2: Daughter sporocyst or redia which gives rise asexually to the Juvenile/Adult which then lays eggs, completing the life cycle. Larva 1 and Larva 2 generations both live in molluscs, which were the original evolutionary host for this group. Juvenile/adult generation occurs in a wide range of invertebrates as juveniles, and typically in vertebrates as adults.  What’s with all the generations?  Well, it’s all about reproduction.  By reproducing through two generations asexually within the mollusc host, the reproductive potential of a single egg is multiplied exponentially to produce, potentially, thousands of adults.  Those adults lay thousands of eggs, so you can probably guess that digeneans have phenomenal fecundity.  They need it because, like turtle hatchlings braving the open ocean, only a handful of parasites will survive every life cycle step and reach adulthood.

It gets better though, because this general model has been modified an untold number of ways in different groups of digeneans.  Here’s how some researchers at Cambridge tried to encapsulate those variations:

You can see that this is very involved, with any number of possible pathways that the life cycle of any given species could follow.  By comparison, the Alien life cycle is actually pretty straightforward!  A lot of that diversity in life histories has probably resulted from the diversity of hosts and diversity of ecological relationships (especially who eats whom) in the oceans.  That’s because the mollusc first hosts are primarily aquatic and ridonkulously diverse (>80,000 known species), and the greatest diversity of digeneans is focused among the fishes, of which there are perhaps 30,000 species.  Those of you mathematically-inclined can start to estimate how many possible combinations that is, especially if you layer in the other (juvenile) stage (“2nd intermediate host” in the diagram above), which can occur in pretty much anything.

What of the chest burst, does that have an equivalent in nature?  You betcha.  On the diagram above, that arrow from the “1st Intermediate host” box to “cercaria” means burrowing out through the flesh of the mollusc to the outside, a task that’s achieved by secretion of all sorts of nasty enzymes, plus a bunch of wriggling.  In some senses it’s not as dramatic as the chest burst (these parasites are, after all typically <1mm in size) but in other ways more so, as it’s not usually one that’s coming out, but thousands.  You can imagine that this is not good for the mollusc.  What the hell, they’ve been sterilised anyway. Oh, I didn’t mention that these parasites castrate their mollusc hosts?  Cos that’s kind of important, especially for the mollusc…

One important difference between what Giger’s Alien does and what nature does is that, despite the alternating generations, the Alien life cycle is still what parasitologists would call “simple”.  In this context “simple” means “involving only one host to get from egg to egg”.  By contrast, “complex” means “involving multiple compulsory hosts to get from egg to egg”.  Simple/complex is one of those situations where scientists in one particular field have a modified and specific meaning for a word in common usage.  Thus the Alien life cycle is simple, despite appearing complex.  Clear as mud, right?  Another important difference is that only one of the Alien generations is parasitic.  The Face Hugger is a parasitoid, but the adult Alien adult is a predator (as the marines discover only too quickly!).  In the Digenea, all generations are parasitic at some point.  They are rarely predatory, except for some redia larvae, which can actively prey on other parasites that invade the same mollusc host (but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post).

The Aliens might have one sinewy, taloned leg up on digeneans when it comes to being social.  The adult Aliens display classic social behaviour like ants, bees or naked mole rats.  There’s a queen Alien tended by soldiers and drones, and the queen is the only one who gets to lay eggs.  This is not typically the case for digeneans, BUT, they do occasionally diversify roles, and perhaps they are socially organised and we just haven’t realised yet.  Consider Hirudinella, a huge digenean that lives in the stomach of wahoo fish, Acanthocybium solandri; it’s usually found as a pair of mature worms, with occasional juvenile hangers on.  How does this come about?  How do the two adults prevent the maturation of other worms that colonise the fish’s stomach?  No-one really knows.

The digenean life cycle is really a marvel of nature and proof positive that real life (in the biological sense) is often more diverse, startling and amazing than humans can imagine and portray in moving pictures.  Some have even looked at the complexity of digenean life cycles as evidence of intelligent design (pffthtt!).  If only they had acidic blood or could throw out snappy lines like “They mostly come at night, mostly” or “We’re in some pretty shit now, game over man, GAME OVER!“, perhaps digeneans might one day garner a little more respect in the pop-culture milieu.  In the meantime, Netflix yourself the extended version of Aliens (the one with the bad-arse robot sentry guns!), make yourself some kettle corn, and impress your friends with tales of parasitoids and the alternation of generations.

The post This is clearly an important species we’re dealing with first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Thanks to io9 and Garrett G, I just might have found the ultimate movie for the First Annual Deep-Sea News Film Night. Behold the glory of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Yarr, ye stop-motion laddies! Also I ENTIRELY approve of David Tennant as Charles Darwin – because evolution is pretty much just wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey…stuff.

Hugh Grant, starring in his first animated role, is the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain – a boundlessly enthusiastic, if somewhat less-than-successful, terror of the High Seas.  With a rag-tag crew at his side (Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, and Ashley Jensen), and seemingly blind to the impossible odds stacked against him, the Captain has one dream: to beat his bitter rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) to the much coveted Pirate Of The Year Award.  It’s a quest that takes our heroes from the shores of exotic Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London.  Along the way they do battle with the pirate-hating Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) and team up with a young Charles Darwin (David Tennant), but never lose sight of what a pirate loves best: adventure!

The post Ultimate movie for First Annual DSN Film Night? first appeared on Deep Sea News.