Sea Notes

Air! I Need Air!

As if we needed one more reason to act now to reduce our carbon footprint, our colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) warned today that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere could starve deep sea animals of oxygen.

On the good-news front, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared on Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare, opening the door for regulation to limit emissions.

New calculations by MBARI marine chemists suggest that low-oxygen "dead zones" in the ocean could expand significantly over the next century, making it harder for deep sea animals to breathe.

Their predictions are based on the fact that, as more and more carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean, the increases can exacerbate the effects of low-oxygen "dead zones" in the ocean. While some deep sea animals do fine in so-called oxygen minimum zones, most do not.

We've barely scratched the surface in discovering all the amazing life forms in the deep ocean, or learning about their remarkable behaviors.

Let's not starve them of oxygen before we get to know them.

(Owlfish photo, top, and barreleye fish photo, bottom, © MBARI.)

Film Friday: Underwater Senses

For years, scientists working to uncover the secrets of the deep sea and open ocean wildlife have been hampered by something that has hindered us all at some point - battery failure! So the Monterey Accelerated Research System, or MARS, hopes to bring some of those frustrations to an end.

According to MBARI,the system consists of a 32-mile undersea cable that carries data and power to a "science node" 2,923 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay. More than eight different science experiments can be attached.

This week, scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington announced they have each plugged new sensors into the world's longest power strip. One to monitor seismic activity and the other to eavesdrop on the activities of the smallest and largest bay users - plankton and whales, respectively.

Exploring the deep sea by Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is still a very important component of the work done by our sister institute. So this week's Film Friday is a dive to the Davidson Seamount, an underwater mountain off the California coast. Recently added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, this underwater treasure can now be preserved.

Carnival of the Blue 22

It's live -- and lively, courtesy of San Francisco's Rick MacPherson: Carnival of the Blue 22. How can you pass up the best of ocean blogging, especially when it's hosted this month by a blog called Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets?

 As a bonus, you'll find out how to tune in to the first Podcast of the Blue -- a chance to hear from the many contributing ocean bloggers. Click the link and take the plunge!

The Week of Weird Fish

It started with our friends and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute & their video of the barreleye fish with the transparent dome over its massive green eyes.

Then came the psychedelic bouncing frogfish from Indonesia, discovered by researcher Ted Pietsch at the University of Washington. (There are QuickTime videos if you follow the UW link, and more video here; credit David Hall at seaphotos.com for the cool picture.)

Not only does it tumble around the seafloor like a drunken sailor, it has eyes in the front of its head, as do humans, rather than on the sides as is true for most fishes.

 Speaking of which -- and veering out of the realm of science into the world of British tabloid publications -- The Sun runs photos and video of two carp in a pond in South Korea with surprisingly human faces.

Turns out it's more illusion than reality. The "eyes" are spots on the face, and the true eyes are in their usual positions on the side of the carps' heads. That's not the case with the barreleye and the psychedelic frogfish.

All of which brings the Wicked Witch of the West to mind. "What a world, what a world," she observed.

Indeed it is.

The Eyes Have It

Our colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have solved the mystery of a very unusual with exceptional eyes. Called the barreleye or spookfish, it has a transparent casing over two globular, green, upward-pointing eyes --truly an alien-looking being.

Dr. Bruce Robison and his colleagues have figured out that the tiny fish can find food above (likely food trapped in the tentacles of a deep-sea siphonophore -- a jellyfish relative) and can then rotate the eyes to face the same direction as its mouth so it can grab a bite to eat.

Two odd-looking spots on its "face", which look like they should be eyes, are in fact olfactory organs -- the barreleye's nose. The fish itself isn't a new discovery, but figuring out its behavior is the result of many observations in the deep sea by scientists using robotic submersibles in Monterey Bay.

If you're a deep sea news junkie, check out MBARI's site, or our colleagues at the Deep Sea news blog.

A whaley big meal

A few years ago, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) noticed a fuzzy coating on the skeletons of whales that had died and fallen to the sea floor. On closer examination, they found a whole new species of worm, that makes a living on expired whale bones.

Since that time, they have been astonished to find a number of different varieties of these "bone-eating" worms. The mystery was, how did they come to colonize the new fallen whales?

Some of these mysteries are now being revealed with the help of one our own husbandry staff, here at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Senior Aquarist Chad Widmer, who spends much of his time figuring out how to display new types of animals - especially jellies - has found ways to keep these worms in a laboratory setting. Chad explains, "I’ve been out several times with the MBARI group collecting bone eating worms.  Mainly I just want to pick through their trash because it is covered with jellyfish polyps! But I also figured out the husbandry requirements for keeping bone worms alive in captivity. In fact I developed the methods used by most bone worm researchers today. They used to be able to keep them for a week or two at the most.  And now they can keep them indefinitely."

The latest research "Queen of Decay" is editor's choice in this week's edition of Science magazine.

 

Carnival of the Blue 19

Sarah and the great folks at Water Notes are hosts of Carnival of the Blue #19, the December roundup of the best of ocean blogging. Enjoy!

Sea Grapes A Go-Go

A single-celled organism that researchers disparaged as "doo-doo balls" is forcing deep sea scientists to reevaluate their understanding of the evolution of life on Earth.

Turns out the inch-long balls, known as Bahamian gromia--a grape-shaped animal--can roll about on their own, leaving tracks in the mud similar to those in the fossil record that have long been attributed to multi-celled organisms.

It's the first time that any single-cell organism has been shown to leave animal-like tracks as it moves.

"We now have to rethink the fossil record," said biologist Mikhail V. Matz of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the authors of a paper appearing Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

“The discovery throws into doubt when people believe multi-cellular life began,” said Professor Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland, Australia, a co-author of the paper.

My favorite quotes are from Duke University researcher Sönke Johnsen:

"At first, we assumed they were snails, because they had trails," Johnsen said. But after sucking up a few with the tools aboard the NOAA research submarine Johnson-Sea-Link and having a look, the research team figured the soft, nondescript blobs were simply some kind of elaborate poop.

"We called them doo-doo balls," Johnsen said.

Scientists are still puzzling about why they're moving, at a rate of about an inch a day. One theory that Texas' Malz put forth: They're pulling sediment in one side and pushing "pseudo feces" out the other.

Added Australia's Marshall: "It really just shows the nature of science how we can stumble upon these things. This really shows the importance of going to places where people have not been before.”

 

Ocean Mysteries Revealed

The multi-year Census of Marine Life aims to document what used to live in the ocean, what lives there now and what will live in the ocean in the future. This week, the scientists with the Census are sharing some of what they've discovered.

It's pretty amazing stuff.

For some time now, we've been telling the story about white shark migrations to the "White Shark Cafe" between Mexico and Hawaii -- research conducted by the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) team, led by our colleagues at Stanford University. It's research in which our white shark project team has played a part.

Other scientists in the 82-nation effort have discovered that all the world's deep-sea octopuses may be descendants of a single species that originated near Antarctica and began spreading its tentacles (so to speak) 30 million years ago.

Many more details will emerge this week during the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Valencia, Spain. And the Census itself has another two years to go.

Who knows what else they'll discover before they're done? Meanwhile, you can learn more about TOPP's good work, and white sharks in general.

Death of a Deep Sea Explorer

The weekend brought the sad news that Jacques Piccard, one of only two people ever to explore the deepest part of the ocean, died at the age of 86.

In January 1960, Piccard and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh piloted the bathyscaphe Trieste -- designed by Picard's father, Auguste -- to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench off the Pacific island of Guam. While unmanned submersibles have made the trip since then, no humans have duplicated their voyage. It's a story I tell often during live broadcasts of deep sea research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute that we present daily at the aquarium. I met Don Walsh once during a visit to the aquarium, but never encountered Piccard except by reference in telling the Trieste story.

That dive apparently helped inspire a ban on dumping of nuclear waste in the deep ocean, when Piccard and Walsh found life at the bottom of the sea -- seven miles below the surface.

The Piccards are an amazing family altogether. Auguste developed a pressurized aluminum gondola for hot-air balloons and set a world altitude record (23,000 meters) before turning his talents to submarine design.

(He and his twin brother Jean Felix Piccard, a U.S.-based chemist, engineer and inventor, reputedly were the inspiration for Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry when he created the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.)

Jacques' son, Bertrand, won the race to be the first person to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he's designing a solar-powered, long-range glider that can do the same.

Of his father, Bertrand said: "He passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown."

What a legacy to leave a child. What a gift to give the world.

(Thanks to Deep Sea News for tipping me to the story before it hit the papers.)