Eclectic Echoes

I’m so close to being done with the semester. I have one last exam. It’s for a great class, but the final exam is killing me. It’s a take home exam, which means it’s far harder than what we would be subjected to in an in class exam. Well, except maybe the Marine Reaction and Transport exam…that one really HURT! Of course the three extra credit questions rocked for me at least… the answers were SRV, Deep Purple and the Stones. Most of the younger students had no clue. I hope he does similar extra credit when I take his Marine Geology course.

This morning while procrastinating over my take home exam, I read and summarized a new bit of research from the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers there worked with a brittle star that is common in the north sea sediments to determine how it would react to short to mid term exposures to a more acidic ocean. This is highly relevant since the ocean has been growing slowly more acidic, and a large number of marine invertebrates, including many commercially important ones, have shells, or exoskeletons of calcium carbonates. As the ocean pH goes down, those creatures will be stressed trying to maintain their shells.

Who is going to be affected? The list is long and distinguished – Corals, lobster, crabs, shrimp, oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, pteropods, sea stars, sea urchins, snails, conch, crinoids and lots more.  What’s more many of these creatures are very important because they are bio-engineers creating habitat (corals and oysters) or they filter the water and sediments to keep them clean (oysters, clams, mussels).  Many are also key species in the diet of other commercially and ecologically important species. Understanding how these organisms will react to acidification is important if we are going to have any hope of protecting the ecosystem we rely on for so much of our food let alone recreation and other uses. Check out the discussion at The Other 95% (that’s all the world without a backbone).

I have also added a critical review of Franklin’s The Most Important Fish in the Sea. It is a significantly shortened, readers digest version of a critical review submitted for one of my classes.

Edited: Replaced that wimpy hacked version of SRV’s Texas Flood with the full cut from the same concert that runs 9:34