DAILY SCIENCE City life may suit the world’s largest octopus species, according to a new study from researchers in Seattle. The study is a rare look at how urbanization affects marine organisms. It suggests that the sea, too, has its synanthropes – wild species that live in, and even benefit from, human-dominated landscapes.
Wade sez, “This cartoon appeared in U.S. Money vs. Corporation Currency, ;Aldrich plan’ by Alfred Owen Crozier, published by The Magnet company in Cincinnati, Ohio.” *I have one (1) delicious knuckle-sandwich here for the first wisenheimer to engage in octopi/octopuses pedantry. “Octopuses Wall Street?” Really? (Thanks, Wade!)
This lovely piece of art, by graduate students Laurel Hiebert and Kira Treibergs with artwork by Marley Jarvis, made the rounds last week. We are thrilled to have been given permission to post it on Deep Sea News!
Connor and I walked over to the Newtown Creek Nature Park and spent an hour there talking about the creek, industry and remove…what an amazing respite from the rest of the city.
whale creek inlet
Facing Queens from the steps that mislead you to think of walking into the Creek.
They’re designed a bit like the ghats in India.
this guy ran out of gas and was paddling to the put-in with a hose on a stick. he works for bridge safety.
and this is an incredible odd sculpture along the Greenpoint Ave side of the Wastewater Treatment Facility. It’s not an entrance to the building, but a strange inside/outside overbuilt water feature.
I’ve been more disorganized than I thought I’d be on my residency in Houston! That’s by way of saying, I don’t have any extensive reports, but more generally, I’ve been working two prongs: one, learning more about port operations and sidling up close to big ships and black boxes; two, jellyfish – learning about them, conceptualizing a world dominated by these “global citizens” and figuring out inventive ways to eat them.
I had the honor of spending a day with Juli Berwald, a science writer spending a lot of time thinking about jellyfish.
But this post is primarily a link to Monterey Bay Aquarium’s live jellyfish cam, featuring sea nettles (Chrysaora fuscescens).
jell hell. Credit: Dauphin Island Sea Lab In the Gulf of Mexico’s densest jelly swarms, there are more jellyfish than there is water. More than 100 jellies may jam each cubic meter of water.
To kick the jellies off, I found on the NSF site a great primer on jellyfish:
Gulf of Mexico
THE BIGGEST DEAD ZONE IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
The white sands and sparkling emerald waters of the Gulf of Mexico’s beaches belie a dirty little (open) secret: a huge Dead Zone that is devoid of almost all life except jellyfish is expanding in the Gulf of Mexico. During the summer of 2008, the Gulf’s Dead Zone covered about 8,000 square miles, about the size of Massachusetts. It is expected to soon reach about 10,000 square miles.
CREATION OF THE DEAD ZONE
The Gulf’s Dead Zone is produced every summer by tons of fertilizer, sewage and animal wastes that are continuously dumped into coastal waters by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. These pollutants do their dirty work by fertilizing huge algae blooms that decay through a process that robs Gulf waters of oxygen. Most sea creatures flee or suffocate to death in the Dead Zone’s oxygen-starved waters, leaving highly adaptable jellyfish to proliferate unrestrained by predators and competitors and to gorge on the Gulf’s bounty of plankton.
GROWING JELLYFISH POPULATIONS
The most abundant species of jellyfish in the Gulf are the sea nettle and moon jellyfish, which typically swarm over hundreds and perhaps even thousands of square miles each summer. Studies show that these species became significantly more abundant and expanded their ranges during the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, since 2000, the Gulf has hosted invasions of several non-native jellyfish species, including the Australian jellyfish.
Signs that the Australian jellyfish is satisfied with its adopted Gulf home include its tendency to swell from its usual fist-size to the size of dinner plates in the Gulf. In addition, the Gulf’s population of Australian jellyfish is steadily growing and expanding its range; this species recently reached North Carolina.
