The Oyster’s Garter

This post rewritten because it was wrong in a couple of ways. However, the frogs still have an extra limb.  

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Accounting of Scientists says that agricultural run off is indirectly causing leopard frogs in Colorado to grow with either missing or extra limbs. The real culprit is a really complicated parasite. The fact that this little bastard even evolved is amazing. First it grows inside fresh water snails. The snails then eject the parasite when it gets big enough to become bothersome. Then the parasite infects the tadpoles of the frogs, causing the deformities. Meanwhile birds eat the frogs and then excrete the parasites back into the system where they infect the snails again.

Where do the nutrients kick in? Well, the runoff causes an algal bloom which the snails eat. More snails means more parasite, whihc means more three legged froggies.
The kicker to this whole story is that he first deformed snails were found ten years ago by some school children in Minnesota. Yick.

Make sure your space fish are thoroughly cooked - salmonella bacteria become more virulent in space.

This isn’t because they are happier floating about in zero-g - though I bet their tiny little sensory organs are as delighted as they can be. It’s because they are free of fluid shear, the mechanical force of fluid around a cell. This is pretty rough on a tiny little cell, so bacteria like to congregate in low-shear environments, like cracks and crevices and intestines.

Clearly, we require technological breakthroughs so that we may safely have space sushi.

Real estate seems to be a poor investment these days anyway, but you may want to especially avoid San Joaquin county (CA) and all of southern Florida. And that crawdad-eating retreat you were planning in the LA bayou. It will all be underwater, even if the magical CO2 fairy made all our power plants and cars disappear today.

[EDIT: If you're looking for a photo of the North Pacific Trash Gyre, go here.]

The ocean is really, really big. This may be obvious, but it gets brought home especially hard if, say, one happens to be a marine biologist who kinda accidentally misplaces one’s study site and has to spend three hours swimming around underwater looking for it. Hypothetically, of course.

The Pacific is not big enough, however, to hide all the plastic crap that comes pouring off North American and Asia. Many of the broken flipflops, lost plastic bags, abandoned waterbottles, and so forth collect in the North Pacific Gyre, which is essentially a big slow gentle whirlpool. But instead of sucking the trash down, it just collects at the center, forming a floating trash heap the size of Texas.

Capt. Charles Moore accidentally sailed through the gyre a few years ago and was so shocked by vast vistas of trash that he formed the nonprofit Algalita Marine Research Foundation, based in LA. They’ve got a research cruise sailing through the gyre right now, trawling and categorizing trash - read more on their blog. Here’s a great photo of a barnacle-encrusted life jacket that they found floating by.

Read more about the North Pacific Trash Gyre:

- “Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas”, part of the excellent & incredibly depressing LA Times series Altered Oceans.
- Jean-Michel Cousteau visited our brand-new national monument, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands
- Metafilter thread with lots more links

1497: King Henry VII of England sent John Cabot in search of a northwest route to the Orient.
2007: Arctic melts, northwest passage opens.

And here’s why I am skeptical of using adorable polar bear cubs to promote action on global climate change: even under the IPCC’s best case scenario, we’re going to have about twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere as compared to preindustrial times. That’s about 550 parts per million. Though nobody really knows what that means for climate, the Northwest Passage has opened, and we’re only at about 350 parts per million. I strongly suspect the polar bears (and Steller’s sea lions, and walruses, and belugas) are in for a really, really bad century.

At least you can sing the Northwest Passage shanty! Here’s a YouTube montage.

Baby fish are orbiting Earth right now! The inner ear development of these Mozambique tilapia are being studied in zero gravity in order to figure out how balance develops. Fish inner ears are pretty similar to human inner ears, so perhaps free-floating fishies will give insight into balance and vertigo disorders.

Between being underground, on Mars, and in orbit, it’s an exciting time to be a tilapia! (Though I bet the ear-research fish meet much the same end as the fish-stick fish.)

Check it out:

• Those little hobbit people they found in Indonesia are definitely a distinct species. Apparently their wirst structure isn’t as finely developed as ours. Just goes to show that the limp wristed are more evolved.

• Velociraptors had feathers. Further proof that the dinosaurs are not extinct - they’re birds.

• Sea turtles have a special clubhouse for their children. Apparently sea turtles have long had a cave in which to raise their young, and marine biologists only just found it. Rumors of marine Wii systems remain unconfirmed.

Miriam adds: A cave? More like a floaty open-open clubhouse. One where you really, really hope not to end up like this from tuna longline fishing. Save a turtle - eat space tilapia!

And you thought we had no breaking news at the Oyster’s Garter, now didn’t you? A press release in my email box says that San Diego’s major airport will now offer free WiFi throughout its three terminals. The release says download speeds will be capped somewhere between that of a dialup modem and DSL, to keep any one user from clogging the pipes with intensive tasks. Sounds reasonable to me.

And here I thought the most ridiculous thing on daytime TV was the soap plots. The new host on the talk show The View is unsure whether or not the earth is flat.

Well, clearly we must teach the controversy, as the creationists like to say. So NASA, if I’m hired as an astronaut, I will investigate the biology of Great A’Tuin, the star turtle that carries the four giant elephants that support the flat, flat world.

Eric adds: She also said she doesn’t “believe in evolution, period.” 

Via Pharyngula

NASA has put out a job posting looking for new astronauts. You have to have a background in science or engineering, and K-12 teachers will get preference. The hell with that. They need a journalist to go up and describe the experience for the people. I’m gonna go put in my app.