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

Here’s the timeline of events:

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

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

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

January 20th: Fisherman drives away with mooring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCES:

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

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

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

Fishermen Ransom Uncle Sam’s Sea Gizmo

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

Send that data right over.  The absolute coolest gadget to hit deep-sea science is is the Benthic Rover, the deep-sea equivalent of the Spirit and Opportunity.  The Benthic Rover, the brain child of deep-sea biologist Ken Smith, and brought to life by engineers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, is approximately of small compact car.  The rover slowly creeps (3 feet per minute to minimize kicking up sediment) across the seafloor taking photographs of the animals and sediment in its path. Every three to five meters it stops and makes a series of measurements on the community respiration (i.e. oxygen consumption) of organisms living in the seafloor sediment. The rover is also totally tricked out with an optical sensor that can scan the seafloor to measure how much food has arrived recently from the surface water. Why? To try to understand of how deep-sea organisms acquire enough food to survive…a favorite question of mine as well. In the words of the press release

Most life in the deep sea feeds on particles of organic debris, known as marine snow, which drift slowly down from the sunlit surface layers of the ocean. But even after decades of research, marine biologists have not been able to figure out how the small amount of nutrition in marine snow can support the large numbers of organisms that live on and in seafloor sediment.

A series of foam packs make the 3,000 pound vehicle semi-bouyant at just 100 lbs in seawater, to prevent the rover from sinking in the soft oozy mud that dominates the abyssal plains. Tank-like treads keep the vehicle moving across the sediment and custom-made titanium pressure spheres house the computer and electronic needed to drive the vehicle.  Best yet the bad boy is programmable.  Here’s your mission, come back to me when you have some data!

However, during this summer the Benthic rover was tethered to newly created Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), an underwater observatory that provide power and data link to the vehicle. “Hooking up the Rover to the observatory opened up a whole new world of interactivity. Usually when we deploy the Rover, we have little or no communication with the vehicle. We drop it overboard, cross our fingers, and hope that it works.” In this case, however, the observatory connection allowed MBARI researchers to fine tune the Rover’s performance and view its data, videos, and still images in real time. Sherman recalls, “One weekend I was at home, with my laptop on the kitchen table, controlling the vehicle and watching the live video from 900 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay. It was amazing!”

An now for the rover in action!

The post Benthic Rover, Benthic Rover first appeared on Deep Sea News.