The Oyster’s Garter is officially on indefinite hiatus, though the archives will remain up. Thanks for reading!

We are planning on letting our panel be largely audience-driven, but we would like to get a feel for what you are interested in. (If you are not attending Science Online, fret not – our session will be either livestreamed or recorded or both – if livestreamed you can ask questions on the web.) I can’t speak for my co-moderators, but I don’t want this session to get too hung up on specific marine debris issues – I think it would be much more interesting to talk about our experience trying to meld real-time science, nonprofit advocacy, outreach, and journalism.

Here are some preliminary questions. Please comment and tell us what you think. This is also posted at the Science Online wiki, and you are invited to comment there as well.

• Why is the media & the public so interested in trash in the ocean? Can this interest be leveraged/created for other issues?
• We are three people with different perspectives on what is important in communication: a scientist, a journalist, and a journalist-artist-filmmaker-documentarian.
  • What were our disagreements? Here’s a few examples off the top of my head: I did not agree with much of Lindsey’s NYT article; Annie had a tough time getting stressed-out scientists (me included!) to work with her while at sea, SIO is an academic institution while Project Kaisei and AMRF are nonprofit advocacy groups.
  • Do we as scientists/journalist/artists have a common goal? Beyond Littering Is Bad? Is loving the ocean enough?
  • If we do have a common goal, what are lessons learned from this summer? What would we do differently next time?
  • Can we offer advice to other scientists/journalists/artists trying to work together?
• How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance “exciting findings live from the field!” with “highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our labwork might contradict”? For example, one thing that is tough with advocacy and education is the scientific emphasis on peer-reviewed publication – the timescale is waaaay too slow for good real-time communication. How can we be accurate, entertaining, and educational?

Here’s some background on our experiences in the Gyre:

Miriam

• SEAPLEX outreach website
• SEAPLEX blog
• SEAPLEX Twitter
• Response to Lindsey’s NYT article
• Video of me explaining SEAPLEX, from before we went to sea

Annie

• Blog from SEAPLEX
• Videos from SEAPLEX (not all in playlist are Annie’s – look for Dive Imagination at the beginning)
• Photos from SEAPLEX
• Google map with more videos
• Dive Into Your Imagination main site

Lindsey

• Spot.us fundraising page
• Blog
• NYT article
• Some blog entries on the Spot.us funding: PBS, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review

The R/V New Horizon

It’s finally time to announce why I’ve been neglecting the poor Oyster’s Garter all summer. This Sunday, August 2nd, the first Scripps expedition to study plastic accumulation in the North Pacific Gyre will depart San Diego. A collaboration between Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the nonprofit Project Kaisei, SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition) aims to quantify exactly how much plastic is a lot, and what effects the debris might have on the base of the food web.

And I’m SEAPLEX chief scientist. Eeek.

But I couldn’t possibly lead a blog-less Twitter-less cruise. And I especially couldn’t work on this issue without giving people a chance to see the problem (virtually) first-hand. So you’ll be able to follow along with SEAPLEX through our blog and our Twitter feed. You can also sign up to receive email updates by joining the SEAPLEX Google Group.

Though our internet access at sea will be limited, we will be able to respond to your questions and comments. We are incredibly excited to go on this cruise and even more excited to share our observations with you. So get your RSS feeds ready – it’s going to be an interesting three weeks.

In science news, I have a very exciting new project in the works (here’s a hint!) that will have a red-hot online outreach component. I’ll announce it as soon as the web parts are ready.

I’ll still be writing for Double X twice a week, and I would absolutely love more feedback over there. You do have to register in order to comment, but it only takes a few seconds. Isn’t it time to expand the glorious world of marine science into lady-blog-land?

Last week, the United States Global Research program released a report on the potential impacts of climate change in the United States. Based on a year and a half of work and a consensus from 13 federal agencies, the 198-page report makes the doom, gloom, and destruction that await us available to all. Still, who reads 198-page government reports? Well, I do.

So in an attempt to bring some amusement to a dark situation, I’ve summarized the main points of the climate change report using five different literary (ok, quasi-literary) styles. Each vignette is set in the year 2100 under the “higher emissions scenario,” which is a conservative estimate that presumes some kind of international reduction in emissions.

Read the rest here!

I live in San Diego, so I visit our famous zoo a couple times a year. My favorite part is a lush, leafy canyon lined with tigers and tropical birds and tapirs. It’s a little piece of the Asian forests on which it’s based, an idyll untouched by the downtown skyline or nearby highway. Sure, the path is lined by earnest plaques about poaching and logging and the dire peril of endangered species, but I’m there for a pleasant afternoon stroll and I’ve never read them.

That’s the fate of most earnest attempts to educate zoo-goers about environmental peril. Nobody (except perhaps attendees of environmental film festivals) wants to pay $50 to be depressed and guilt-ridden. But the Vienna Zoo has a different vision. As covered by the landscape architecture blog Pruned, the Vienna Zoo has inserted the nasty side of the human world right into the animals’ enclosures.

More here.

It roams the ocean floor, always ravenous, always ready to kill. When it finds its prey, it pulls it apart with hideous strength and then eats it while the prey is still alive. What is this fearsome beast? Is it a shark? A kraken? The Loch Ness Monster? Nope. It’s a starfish. The most common starfish species on both the East and West coasts, beloved by millions of beach-going children, are actually mighty predators.

More here!

On Sunday, NPR reported that more than 2,000 coyotes were living in Chicago, many inside the city’s highly developed downtown Loop. That’s not unusual. Since the elimination of wolves and the advent of suburbs teeming with tasty prey, coyotes have made their homes in cities from Los Angeles to Boston. According to the NPR story, urban coyotes are actually faring better than their rural counterparts, free from hunting and able to dine upon a bounty of rats and goose eggs. Though it seems counterintuitive for people with visions of roadrunner-chasing Wile E. Coyote, urban coyotes actually protect city-dwelling birds.

More here. With bonus naughty Coyote stories!

In honor of Pride Month, I’ll be hosting the LGBT edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival on Tuesday, June 30. (I’m pushing back the deadline due to travel the week before.) Send me anything you like about LGBT issues in science – for example, profiles of historic or modern scientists or issues particular to LGBT people working in science – and I will craft it into something delightful. Personal stories are welcome, but you certainly don’t need to identify as LGBT  to participate! If I don’t receive enough submissions the Carnival will consist largely of epic poetry praising the sparkly sequined cowboy hat I got at NYC Pride a couple years ago. You don’t want that, trust me.

The deadline is Sunday, June 28th. Submit via this handy form or just send it directly me via theoystersgarter at gmail dot com. Be sure to include URL, author, and a few sentences of summary.

The point of the campaign is to show people that science is hip, and cool, and sexy, and [insert other adjective here], but in each shot the scientists are fawning over the musicians.  The message this photo campaign sends is, “Yeah, being a scientist cool but, if I could be, I would really want to be [insert rock star name here].”  Thus, people looking at this campaign aspire to also be rockstars.  Not scientists.

And (via Isis), Bora scooped GQ back in 2006:

In this day of mass communications, it is logical to use modern technology to further your aims, so popularization of science should do the same. Turning some scientists into radio personalities, talk-show hosts, TV stars, movie stars and Internet stars (MySpace and blogs, for instance) should be a part of a multi-prong strategy to spread the scientific reasoning and rationality, as well as excitement for knowledge about the natural world.

What do you think? Could scientists become as famous as rockstars (and get featured in US Weekly – “Scientists! They’re Just Like Us!”)? Will this help change the perception of scientists as boring and science as a high-status but low-income career path? And frankly, do we actually need more scientists when there’s few decent jobs for the PhDs that we already have?