Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Another science alphabet doodle. Maybe this will be turning into an Invertebrate Alphabet series. They are fun to do, even though they are a grand procrastination. I enjoy the hand lettering, exploring bits of my past.
As for the infra order Brachyura – these are the true crabs, with short tails folded under their bodies (Brachyura comes from the Greek brachys oura or “Short Tail”). There are over 6000 species of brachyura. Most are marine but there are about 1000 species that live all or a significant part of their lives in either freshwater or on land. They range in size from a few millimeters across to a leg span of 4 meters!
Brachyurans eat just about anything: detritus, seaweeds and sea grasses, mussels, fish, fresh carrion and each other. In turn they are eaten by pretty everyone as well: mainly other crustaceans and fish, but also birds, starfish, sea turtles and of course mammals including us. True crabs are a delicious and economically important food source—1.3 tons of true crabs were commercially captured in 2010.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The Aplacophora are a very interesting group of exclusively marine molluscs. These worm-like creature were once considered to be holothurians (sea cucumbers) but they were later identified as molluscs from their mantle and primitive radula (two key features of molluscs). Most have been found in very deep waters (as in 5km+ deep). Most of the discovered species live their life buried in the mud feeding on detritus and microscopic organisms in the mud. Some prey on cnidarians. Most are tiny (as in a few mm in length) but some tip the tapes in excess of 30cm long. All have no internal or external shell, though they do have calcareous spicules in their mantle. So far ~300 species have been documented. In the Mollusc Diversity Playing Cards the 2 of Spades is the large Aplacaphoran, Neomenia yamamotoi.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Sometimes life gets really crazy. Predictably, the holidays are making my normal level of crazy even more intense! It’s so intense that I actually scrubbed 2 training dives and 3 fish count dives this week. (Which probably only made the crazy worse!)
Going to visit my folks for the holidays is going to be great, don’t get me wrong, but going away for the holidays is also making like more complicated than it needs to be. Or is it that my normal levels of procrastination doing that? Or is it both?
As we get ready to head to Texas and celebrate Christmas with family, I am also in the process of:
- writing up 2 manuscripts,
- trying to put together a grant proposal
- finishing my plan of study
- studying for the General Exams (that will be coming as soon as I submit my plan of study)
- doing quality assurance on the video analysis that my interns did on the Crepidula project
- beginning work on the next set of ScienceDecks.com playing cards
Obviously this will be a working vacation. Gotta make sure that I have all the data files and GIS layers I need on the laptop, on an external drive and uploaded to Dropbox. All of the relevant reference papers are also going up to both Dropbox and Mendeley as well as being on the laptop.
Part of me is screaming to leave it all behind and just enjoy the next week or so with my family, but the realities of deadlines dictate otherwise. Still, I will be limiting myself to only 2-3 hours of focused work per day. 1-2 hours or so right after coffee and the balance right before bed. Maybe a bit of small task type editing during the inevitable downtime during the day when we’re between doing other things.
Edit: See SciCurius’ post on similar issue – Do you love Science? Well, that depends, do you like sleep?
Eric told me about the trouble he and his dive buddy, Joe, are having with the old scooter they’ve been using to collect data for Eric’s thesis. The scooter belongs to their Dive Safety Officer (DSO) and is an older model. They’ve been nursing it along, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to and there are few replacement parts with which to repair it. The propellor is cracked and the batteries are not holding their charge. On the last dive it completely died on them. They had to push it all the way back. A half of a mile is a long way to push a scooter against the current. We’ve also been dealing with a lot of red tape with any funding, which has been frustrating, to say the least. So I thought, enough of this garbage, why don’t we raise our own funds?
The obvious question is, “How?” We barely get by right now. We were forced to live off of our savings and house downpayment a long time ago. The first thought that came to my mind was a bake sale. Why not? Other people have done it. Eric was skeptical and laughed, thinking I was joking. I was dead serious. You don’t know if something will work until you try and regular channels aren’t working. We have to get creative to get what we want.
So I suggested my idea about CafePress again. He’s had an account set up there, but never did much with it. When I was brainstorming for ideas on how to make money to cover our bills if the PhD offer doesn’t come through, I thought of printing our leaf art onto T-shirts to sell. Eric read about other scientists who have turned to the online community for help and thought, “Well, maybe we CAN do it.” And so, Science Bake Sale was born.
Diver on Gray's Reef - Leaf art inspired by research dives on Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary
Eric took pictures of the leaf art Johann and I did while he was at Gray’s Reef last year on a research cruise. Eric told us the animals he saw while they were diving one day: a guitarfish, a leatherback sea turtle, and a cobia. The art project helped us feel more connected to Eric and gave Johann’s mind something to focus on besides missing Daddy. Johann was so excited to show Eric what we had done. Now it is the first design in our
Science Bake Sale CafePress store.
Please go take a look and see if you like what we have so far. We have plans for more CafePress designs and some marine biology and ocean themed original artwork and dyed clothing that will go up on an Etsy Store as well. Our first goal is to buy a replacement scooter, so Eric is sure to be able to complete his research dives.
The past few weeks turned out to be pretty busy for me online (at least compared to the past oh, 24 months), though from this site alone, it may be hard to tell. Since much of my posting has been at other places I thought a quick summary of the months posts (and links) would be helpful for those interested:
- Sergeant Major (Abudefduf saxatilis) – A post at Larval Images about one of my favorite ecosystems and one of the great juvenile fish that are commonly found there.
- Budget Hacking – A post here about the importance of NOAA for the myriad jobs they do, many of which are important for public safetly and economic security in addition to research. A post that I feel is a very important read, especially as the 2012 budget fight may still cut NOAA deeply, including the satellite’s needed to track and predict severe weather events as well as we do. Without NOAA’s work I think it is safe to say the Alabama death toll would have definitely been significantly higher.
- Gulf of Mexico Dolphin Mortality Event – Posted as Scientist in Residence at Deep Sea News – in which I use the data from NOAA to take a more slightly more detailed look at deaths of dolphins since the oil spill in the Gulf, and explain the box and whisker plot.
- Dolphin Whiskers – now only Babies – published a few days later here, to address the concern that there is a higher that normal number of babies washing ashore, but the graph, as presented by NOAA and in the MSM, does not really support that claim. So again come out the box and whisker plots.
- My ‘Seascape of Fear’ – A second posting as Deep Sea News Scientist in Residence, I discuss my recent trip to Belize as a teaching assistant for a coral reef fish ecology class and the arrival in Belize of the highly invasive Lionfish.
- How does a floating plastic duckie end up where it does? – A guest Blog post at Scientific American Part of a four post series on drifting junk in the oceans and how, sometimes, they can help us explore and learn more about the ocean currents. Other posts in the series include a review by Lindsey Hoshaw of the book Moby Duck (I’ll post my own review here later, I liked the book quite a bit more than Lindsey), an interview by David Manly with Moby Duck author Donovan Hohn, and a Matthew Garcia review of Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s bookFlotsametrics and the Floating World about tracing accidental drifters and the information they can give us.
- Is It Time to Relax Fishing Regulations? – Another Scientist in Residence post at DSN, this was a response to fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn’s recent op-ed in the New York Times advocating a relaxation of the current fishing regulations. (Enric Sala, Peter Singer, Daniel Pauly and Mark Kurlansky all replied to the paper.)
- Finally, Reflections, posted here, in which I examine where I have been, where I am and the options going forward.
Hopefully in the next few days we will have a guest posting or two here by Johann. Discussing some of his recent adventures and science from his point of view.
In addition to the postings there are several new YouTube videos I uploaded in the past weeks, mostly of the underwater variety.
