The Oyster’s Garter

There’s a new book out by Kingsley Brown entitled “Co-Ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight The Nation’s Wars”. Oh my! What is this new evidence? Is it from Afghanistan and Iraq, where women are seeing lots of combat? Is it from Israel, where women are actually allowed on the front lines? No, no, that’s too much hard data for Kingsley. Instead, he has turned to…evolutionary psychology. Fortunately, Punkass Blog has provided a handy evo psych bingo card. Ready, everyone?

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In my travels around San Diego County covering the fire, I crossed paths with Sgt. Ricardo Brizuela, U.S. Army, pictured at right. He came up to me while I was shooting pictures of a burnt-out shell of a house in Escondido and asked if the bumper sticker on my car was Serenity. It is. We proceeded to chatter for 10 minutes about the show, the movie, and how sad we both are that Joss killed Wash. Also, he likes that Kaylee went over to Stargate Atlantis. You just never know where you’re going to find another one of The People.

Cheetah misunderstands concept of “litter box.”

Our friend Kirsten Anderson, a professional artist, has recently done a series of illustrations on “Animals of the Sea Bed.” She thought that I was one of the few people in the world who would truly appreciate weird ocean critters (that is what a sand dollar looks like when it is alive), but I think everyone should appreciate an adorable little crab face.
My favorite of Kirsten’s illustrations is this filter-feeding worm, known to the nerdy as a sabellid polychaete. They build little tubes out of individual grains of sand cemented together by mucus, and stick their tentacles out of the end to grab any particles that float by. If they’re disturbed, they can retract completely into their tube.

Other polychaetes have my favorite weird sex adaptation ever. They have specialized butt segments, called epitokes, that are filled with with sperm or eggs.  The worm’s butt then breaks off from the rest of the worm and swims off - by itself - to find other worm butts and mate. Meanwhile, the rest of the worm goes about its business. So much better than being a giant-headed mammal.

By the way, did you happen to notice that southern California is on fire? Eric’s been covering the story for his real job over at San Diego City Beat. He has a full-length story about spending the night at Qualcomm Stadium and blog entries at Last Blog on Earth.

Eric said last night that he thinks the fires are being brought under control, and he is not worried about our neighborhood in the urban center of San Diego. As for me, I view the fires from the ancestral Goldstein home in New Hampshire. For someone who thinks about doom and gloom as much as I do,  I always seem to miss out on actual disasters.

A lot of folks over on Digg were very skeptical of the existence of the North Pacific Trash Gyre. They want to know: why are there no photos of floating heaps of trash? Why can’t you see the giant trash island the size of Texas on Google Earth?

When I learned of the trash gyre, I was equally skeptical, due to common misconceptions that get perpetuated in mainstream media articles. The most common misconception is that the trash pile is like an island, or a dense pile like this one in San Diego Harbor. It’s not packed in as tight as that - it’s more like a dense collection of tiny floating pieces of plastic, most of which are not on the surface. A big container ship or naval vessel going through there would probably not notice much out of the ordinary - after all, there is some degree of plastic trash floating on the surface all over the world.

To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Thanks, Barbeau lab! SIO power!) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce - lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.

Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up - see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents - plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like this one in the NW Hawaiian Islands.

For this reason, the trash gyre would be very, very hard to clean up. The plastic is so small, and so scattered, that it would take high-intensity trawling similar to that for shrimp. And shrimp trawling kills 10 pounds of non-targeted life (sharks, turtles, fish, you name it) for every pound of shrimp gathered. (Yes, Forrest Gump lied to you - for some reason they didn’t want drowned turtles next to Tom Hank’s angelic self.) The mortality caused by trying to remove all the trash in the gyre would probably be similar. We’re just going to have to live with it and try to prevent it from getting any bigger.

*Note: some of these results are from manta trawls intead of bongos - it’s just a differently shaped net.

3D animation of how a baby gets from the uterus to the world. It makes me clutch my ladyparts in fear. Not just because of the ..stretching… (though there is that) but because the music, Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, is forever associated with Master and Commander for me. Childbirth and early 19th century British naval warfare, though perhaps equally un-fun, are NOT meant to go together.

The same medical animation artists also have a supercool video of the antibody immune response.

Via Pharyngula

Wow - my post on the North Pacific Trash Gyre has gotten a huge number of hits today. Is there breaking news of some kind that I totally missed? Hey, searchers, tell me what you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer any questions or direct you to useful resources.

The ocean acts as a huge carbon sponge. Organic matter sinks into the deep and gets stashed away from the atmosphere for a long time. The process is called the “biological pump” and it’s one reason why climate change isn’t already worse. (Iron fertilization attempts to artificially enhance the biological pump.)

Unfortunately, we seem to be breaking the biological pump. Scientific American reports that the ocean (along with terrestrial plants) absorbed significantly less carbon in 2006 than in 2000. Scientists have known of this positive feedback loop for a long time - the main culprit is likely to be increased stratification. It goes like this:

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Baby shrimp! Oh, the unbearable cuteness!

Also, cupcakes most cruelly victimized by vampires.

Via Chaos Theory.