OUTTAKES: PARASITES

In the course of writing DEEP BLUE HOME I followed a long tapewormlike thread about parasites, which consumed my vital nutrients and left me skinny of ideas for days. The thread never made the final cut. Maybe it'll hatch in larval form in a new book. For now, I pass it to you.

"Not all symbioses are beneficial for both partners—what biologists call mutualism. By far the most prevalent and most highly-evolved symbioses are parisitic (Greek para: beside; sitos: food; literally one who eats at another's table). In fact what we refer to as individuals—whether crabs, kelp or humans—are actually mixed-species aggregates sharing the body equitably enough, for the most part, to prevent the death of the host. Healthy sea lions can bear without seeming ill effect five pounds of parasites of at least twenty species. The fin whales roaming the Gulf of California, second largest of all living creatures at up to 88 feet in length, host equally gargantuan nematode (Greek nema: thread) worms reaching 23 feet in length."

Image (top): Formalin-fixed whole mount of a spiral nematode, multiple exposure (160x), Darkfield. / Jon D. Eisenback, North Carolina State University. Courtesy of Nikon Small World, a 1985 runner-up.

 

Image: J. Claire Hoving, Section of female Nippostrongylus brasiliensis (nematode) with eggs (200X), Nikon Small World

BLISS

Pure meditation.



Silversides part 1 from Troy Aitken on Vimeo.

SEX WITHOUT A BACKBONE

This is so fantastically, deliciously weird. Plus it's Isabella Rossellini playing a kinky gastropod. Fantasy symbioses with science.

There's a quiz connected to the video on the Sundance Channel website. Including a photograph of Isabella in a barnacle costume. No kidding. 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PLANKTON RESEARCH

I write fairly extensively about phytoplankton in DEEP BLUE HOME. I feel indebted to them for the multiple ecological services they perform, helping to make and keep Earth habitable... helping to make Earth lovely when seen from afar... potentially informing distant intelligences that there is life on this planet.

The ethereal image of a spring phytoplankton bloom off New Zealand was posted by NASA'S Earth Observatory back in October 2009:

"Cold rivers of water that have branched off from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current flow north past the South Island and converge with warmer waters flowing south past the North Island. The surface waters of this meeting place are New Zealand's most biologically productive. This image of the area on October 25, 2009, from the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the basis for that productivity: large blooms of plantlike organisms called phytoplankton."

We've come a long way since this 1927 plankton article (below, click for larger view) "Remarks on the need for life history studies of marine plankton animals," by W.E. Allen at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography:

W.E. Allen: "In the matter of food relationships alone, it is apparent that every plankton animal is important, and if we are to properly understand marine life, the degree and manner of its influence needs to be traced."

Four years after Allen's call to scientific arms, the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) was launched, using plankton tows attached to merchant ships and ships of opportunity crossing the North Atlantic and the North Sea. In the years since, nearly 300 vessels have been involved in collecting these data, including Greepeace ships, research vessels, passenger ferries, and cargo ships.

The CPR has provided nearly 80 years of data, among the longest running of biological monitoring programs, painting an evolving picture of the spatiotemporal dynamics of plankton. Today the survey is based at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, UK. Here's a map of their network of monitoring routes:

The CPR helps us understand complex issues including climate change, biodiversity, biological invasions, dead zones, fisheries, and regime shifts. 

What's a regime shift? Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies explains:






For an excellent overview of the history and results from more than 900 scientific papers published with CPR plankton-tow data, download the pdf of "The Continuous Plankton Recorder: Concepts and history, from Plankton Indicator to undulating recorders," published in Progress in Oceanography in 2003. It details the evolving scientific lineage of people, technologies, and thought that has steered the interface between marine biology and oceanography in the 20th century. 

Other continuous plankton recorders are now up in running, including one in the Southern Ocean, not far from the curlicue blooms seen in the satellite image off New Zealand.
 

Diatoms (phytoplankton) through the microscope by Gordon T. Taylor, Stony Brook University, for NOAA

RANDOM EXCERPT FROM "DEEP BLUE HOME:" THE TRUTH ABOUT BARNACLES

"Not only are barnacles hermaphrodites, with two sets of genitalia, they are also in possession of the longest penis in relation to body size of any animal on Earth, up to eight times their body length. When the mood is right and the waters begin to warm the tiny creatures snake their appendages out their doors to fertilize the eggs of their neighbors. The favor is reciprocated by the same neighbor, by a different one, or by many. Barnacles living alone fertilize themselves."

DEEP BLUE HOME

Chapter 8

The Unreefed World

Photo by Christopher Neufeld at LiveScience

AQUARIUM DANCE

I find this performance by the Danish group Live Art Installations indescribably beautiful. It speaks to me at the molecular level.

Worth watching full screen and with the volume at 11.


Aquarium from Live Art Installations on Vimeo.

GORGEOUS FEATHERS

Here's one uplifting image of a lovely slideshow compiled from the BirdGuides Photos of the Year 2009 competition and showing on the BBC website. The other image are equally breathtaking.

I wrote fairly extensively about puffins in Deep Blue Home. One of my favorite passages is a memorable excerpt from the legendary ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent, circa 1919:

"I have often seen [puffins] emerge from a wave, fly across the trough and enter the next wave without apparent change in their method of propulsion. Again I have seen them come out of the water flying, only to plunge down into the water and continue the flight below the surface. On the surface they paddle along skillfully like little apoplectic short necked ducks and their small orange red legs are plainly visible."