The Oyster’s Garter

Gorgeous photos from 1920s Japan depicting ama, women who dove without any equipment for seaweed, abalone, and clam. (NSFW because the ama dove topless.) The ama are almost gone now, a casualty of SCUBA, overfishing, and invasive species.

Via Metafilter

Priapulids have nothing on this HIV/AIDS prevention poster (REALLY, REALLY NSFW). This ocean scene is a highly disconcerting combination of gorgeous and Legend of the Overfiend. (Though how could a phallic ocean not include those epically well-endowed barnacles?)

Meanwhile, it’s BOOOOBS INNNN SPAAAAAACE (STILL NSFW) for the hetero lads. The theme for both posters? “Explore. Just Protect Yourself.”

The posters are put out by AIDES, a European HIV/AIDS NGO. What is with those Europeans and the sexy science? I’m never, ever, going to look at a turtle the same way again.

Via Boing Boing

Mieke sent me this lovely photo of Australian nudibranchs a while back. My first thought was, “OMG! Koosh balls of the sea!” My second thought was, “They are TOTALLY doin’ it!” (See the loop of orange eggs in the upper right?)

Nudibranchs are sea slugs - just like land slugs, they are molluscs that have lost their shells. Since they don’t have any hard parts to protect them, they tend to be incredibly poisonous - they are pretty and colorful to advertise DO NOT WANT. Nudibranchs’ chemical defenses are usually stolen from their prey, the toxic compounds or stinging cells serving to protect the nudibranch long after that unfortunate sponge or anemone is but a tasty memory.

Like the mighty banana slug, nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites and can both fertilize and be fertilized. They can be tender, stroking each other’s tentacles, or debauched, mating in chains (who wants to be in the middle?) or snacking on their partner. (Apparently, unlike their banana slug relatives, nudibranchs do not engage in apophallation. Aren’t you disappointed?)  Sadly, the sexy time comes at quite a high cost - most nudibranchs are semelparous, meaning they die shortly after mating.

With the help of Sea Slug Forum and Nudibranchs of Australia, I think Mieke’s nudibranchs in flagrante delicto are a species of Okenia, possibly Okenia stellata. Want more nudibranchs? National Geographic has stunning photos, videos, and even nudibranch puzzles.

SeaWeb and Project AWARE are sponsoring a Depressing Ocean Photo Contest. Ok, they’re calling it Conservation Photography, but depression is what they’re aiming for:

We challenge you to enter your most engaging environmental photos that illustrate the pressing marine issues and the solutions that aim to reverse the rapid decline of our ocean’s health. Beautiful wildlife imagery is abundant and often implies that our oceans are healthy. This contest is a unique opportunity for you to illuminate the challenges our ocean faces. Photo entries may depict environmental issues including, but not limited to: unsustainable fishing practices, pollution and debris, ocean dumping, oil spills, global warming and climate change, the effects of sea level rise, coastal development, endangered and threatened ecosystems.

Along with fame and fortune, they’re offering swanky prizes.

• Seven nights accomodations at the Plaza Resort Bonaire with six days of unlimited shore diving for two, with Tuesday night beach BBQ and round-trip airport transfers — a total package worth approximately US $1,700.
• A $250 Gift Certificate to Backscatter Underwater Video and Photo.
• A signed copy of “Wild Ocean” by authors Dr. Sylvia Earle and Wolcott Henry.
• Carbon Offsets through NativeEnergy from your home and car for one year plus carbon offset for one round-trip air flight valued at US $192

OMG! Signed by Sylvia Earle! And a trip to Bonaire to see invasive tunicates coral!

Because of all the traffic on this post, I wanted to clarify that I am completely convinced that there is lots of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, and that it is a serious environmental problem. My issue with the plastic:plankton ratio is that it doesn’t accurately measure the amount of plastic.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation is great at raising awareness of the problem of trash in the North Pacific Gyre. They’ve tirelessly lobbied for political change, coined terms like “plastic soup,” worked in the schools, and are sailing the Junk raft to Hawaii as we speak. However, as part of their quest to make the enormity of the plastic problem understood, they’ve been claiming that there is six time more plastic than plankton in the North Pacific Gyre. The 6:1 ratio has appeared in PBS, The Seattle Times, and has been repeated all over the internet.

Though I admire Algalita’s work, the 6:1 plastic:plankton ratio is deeply flawed. Worse, it is flawed in a direction that undermines Algalita’s credibility: It may vastly underestimate plankton and overestimate plastic. Here’s why, based off the methodology published in Moore et al’s 2001 paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

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Pepjin Koster, the brilliant inventor of lol oshunz, has collected all the entries. I’m rather partial to the fish-scorning penguins. Wudda!

I thought lolstats and lolthulhu were the pinnicle of lolosity. I was wrong, so very wrong. Behold my contribution to the lol-oshunz-conservashun meme. This is Killick, who is half of the official Oyster’s Garter feline support team. She’s a natural oshunz spokeskitty, being named after Capt. Aubrey’s grumpy steward in the Patrick O’Brian novels. (The original meaning of “killick” is a big rock used instead of a metal anchor. Killick the cat also strives to embody this spherical, heavy ideal.)

If this lolkillick doesn’t make any sense, read this.

The town of Skowhegan, Maine has an old jail to sell. They’re building a new jail, and they figure maybe some developer will be able to make use of the old one. But it wasn’t a developer who answered the call, no no - it was PETA! Yes, that’s right, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals want lease the jail so they can build a Lobster Empathy Center.

From the letter they sent to the Skowhegan commissioner in charge of this stuff:

The center will also feature interactive exhibits that will give visitors the opportunity to experience the horrors inflicted on lobsters caught by humans. The first room that visitors enter will be a large replica of a lobster trap. Visitors can have their fingers wrapped in large rubber bands, which will be left on for the rest of their visit. At that point, they can be moved to a small, filth-strewn glass tank where they will be crammed together and confined for up to an hour. (Lobsters, by contrast, are often confined to supermarket tanks for weeks before being killed.)

The interactive experience won’t be completely realistic–visitors won’t be boiled alive, of course.

Wait, what? They won’t put the visitors into boiling water? Seems kind of half-assed to me. I sent this story to Miriam, and she had a number of suggestions for how PETA could make the experience more detailed:

Will they feed their visitors tasty rock crab for total reality? (Rock crab is a common bait, but is also good to eat for people, just a lot of work.) Will there be an escape hatch for children? Will they notch the ears of pregnant women? Can people “molt” by taking off their clothes and putting on bigger ones, then gaining a lot of weight so they fit?

Myself, I noticed that Skowhegan is near the geographic center of Maine, a good 50 miles (and 90 minutes driving) from the coast. The people who do most of the lobster catching don’t live there, and the people who do most of the eating live far, far away (like Bristol Rhode Island, say, or San Diego) and are unlikely to experience the pains of lobster catching via the Lobster Empathy Center.

Of course, I recognize that the center will probably never come into being. PETA likes to scare up a lot of publicity by making these ridiculous proposals, and far be it from The Oyster’s Garter not to give to them. But it’s also important to be aware that in fact, lobsters seem to be one of the most environmentally sound fisheries in the world. Lobstermen notch the females and throw them back in, so they can keep reproducing, and the traps are designed to let small ones escape. Heck, University of New Hampshire researchers have found that lobsters like the traps so much, trapped big ones keep out the small ones.

Lobsters are most decidedly food, not friends. If a person-sized lobster ever found me scuttling along the ocean bottom, it would eat me in a second.

[Major shout out to the Lunch Bunch List, who pretty much supplied all these links]

So the trouble with all the news about the North Pacific Trash Gyre — and I do mean all of it — is that it stems from a single source: the Algalita Foundation. Captain Charles Moore and his team have done cruise after cruise, taken all sorts of photographs, and written a lot of reports. They’ve hosted reporters from all over the world, including the Los Angeles Times and Vice Magazine. But they’re still a single organization with limited scientific expertise. So I was pretty pleased to learn back in November that NOAA would be organizing a full-scale research cruise out to the gyre using snazzy new unmanned planes, too. Science AND technology – my favorite!

Unfortunately, that’s not really what NOAA is doing. I called Holly Bamford, the program director for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program yesterday, just to see how everything was going with preparations (Bamford was quoted in the original San Francisco Chronicle article I read). She said they’re engaged in a two-fold plan, only one part of which has to do with the trash vortex directly. The first part is actually a test of the unmanned planes. In April they conducted a test flight in which the drone launched form a ship and flew 100 feet above the water looking for ghost nets. When it saw a big piece of debris, it took a picture, recorded the location information and transmitted the data back to the ship. But Bamford freely admits this technology won’t do much to add to our knowledge of the gyre because much of the gyre’s plastic debris is pellet-sized or smaller, and it often sits below the surface. And although the ship itself was doing a great deal of additional research, none of it was gyre related.

Bamford told me they’re not planning a cruise to assess the gyre at the moment. What they are doing is co-hosting a conference this fall (no date set) with the University of Washington-Tacoma.

“NOAA is going to host a workshop some time in the fall, bring together the best scientists across the world,” Bamford said. “These are scientists from Japan, Europe, America, and they’ll discuss the occurrence of micro-plastic in the ocean, what are the impacts by uptake of organic pollutants, and other questions. This is a big question, we want to investigate the overall problem. We are doing that.

In the meantime, I also have a call in to the engineer managing the test of the drones. I’ll report back if I learn something interesting.

Carnival of the Blue is one year old! Check out Carnival of the Blue #13 hosted by its daddy, blogfish. (Somehow TOG got scorned, but it’s ok. I have a voodoo doll of Mark Powell riiiight here.)