Article by @oceancensus.bsky.social highlighting our recent publications! oceancensus.org/new-life-in-...

New Life in Japan's Deep Sea: Dr Chong Chen's Discoveries from the Ocean Census–JAMSTEC Expedition

Among the expedition's most recent scientific outcomes are studies led by Dr Chong Chen, Senior Scientist with Tenure at JAMSTEC.

oceancensus.org

Swima, the "green bomber" worm, swims the deep sea trailing glowing green globes it can detach and drop when threatened, like tossing a flare to distract a predator and flee into the dark. A worm that throws light bombs. 🧪 #WormWednesday #marinelife www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUqY...

Weird and Wonderful: Green bomber worms drop bioluminescent "bombs"

YouTube video by MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)

youtube.com

Good #SciArt does something science needs: it makes size real. "70 cm" or "30 meters" means little until an artist puts the animal beside a human, a car, a diver. Scale art is how we actually grasp a blue whale or a giant trilobite. Art is how size becomes understandable. 🧪 #SciArt #HowToBuildAGiant

Meet the biggest trilobite that ever lived: Isotelus rex, over 70 cm long, longer than your arm, found nearly whole on the shore of Hudson Bay. Most trilobites were thumb-sized. This one was a tennis-racket predator crawling the seafloor 450 million years ago. 🧪 #TrilobiteTuesday #HowToBuildAGiant

WHOA. remember this? there's like 40 snake stars on this coral! Maybe Asteroschema? 1400 m in Wilmington Canyon in the North Atlantic! that's a LOTTA Lovin' by those ophs on that coral! #Okeanos in 2019

300 million years ago, dragonflies the size of hawks patrolled the swamps and millipedes grew longer than your leg. The air was richer in oxygen then, and insects breathe through passive tubes that only reach so far into the body. More oxygen, bigger bug. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant

Heading into Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a few days. Some facts as I go. Start here: this is the most biologically diverse national park in the country. Over 21,000 species documented, and scientists think 80,000+ more are still unrecorded. 🧪

A synallactid sea cucumber at 3700 m seamount B2, Cook Islands, #okeanos showing off its food/guts through its translucent body!

The handoff isn’t just mechanical either. Oral arms can have pretty dense cnidocyte (stinging cell) coverage, so it’s more like a second capture surface than just a conveyor. #marinelife

Rebecca R Helm@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · last wk.

The long frilly ribbons at the center of jellyfish are actually massive stretched out lips, called 'oral arms' which act as a landing-zone for tentacles. Tentacle: sting prey, contract to oral arm, deposit prey onto frilly lips Oral arm: wrap prey in kiss of death, suck it up to mouth to be digested

ACORN WORM in fine form with distinct sediment poop spiral! 5700 m #okeanos #wormwednesday

Coast redwoods top 100 meters, and at that height pulling water up from the roots nearly fails. Their fix: absorb fog straight through their needles. That is why they only grow in California's coastal fog belt. The tallest trees on Earth cheat physics with fog. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants

#Godzilla could never stand up. Square-cube law: scale an animal up and its weight grows faster than its bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building collapses under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant

Syrinx aruanus, the Australian trumpet, is the largest snail alive, a shell up to about 75 cm and 18 kg. Why so big? It hunts giant polychaete worms over a meter long, reaching into their tubes with a proboscis up to 25 cm. Big prey, big predator. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Monday. The papers I did not read yesterday have been joined by new papers. They are forming a committee. I have decided to respect their autonomy and not interfere.

I love this graph but I hate that the Tesla is being compared to the Edsel. I kind of always liked that car as the kid of someone who used to restore antiques.

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)@iwriteok.bsky.social · 2w ago

bloomberg has a fun article today arguing that the Cybertruck is the biggest flop in automotive history. it includes this glorious graph.

Sunday plan: ignore the stack of papers I swore I'd read, refactor an R script for the fifth time because the fourth version was merely functional and not beautiful, and misidentify four birds at my feeder with total confidence. Peak science.

The Japanese spider crab spans nearly four meters claw to claw, the largest arthropod alive. Why? Cold, deep water lets an animal grow slow and live long, and because water carries a weight that legs on land never could. On land an arthropod this size collapses. 🦀 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Thrilled to share our #NSF award is official: we're heading to the abyssal Pacific to map deep-sea biodiversity using eDNA and ROV push coring. 16 stations, 1,024 cores, one incredible cruise. Huge thanks to co-PI @hollybik.bsky.social for leading this. 🧪 #marinelife

I can identify most gastropods to a genus from a photograph. Any gray bird smaller than my hand is, as far as I'm concerned, the same bird. I don't want to hear otherwise.

Worth noting: over 217 million of those genes came from hadal ecosystems, 6 to 11 km down. The hardest place on Earth to sample turned out to be one of the richest genetic libraries we have. 🧪 #marinelife

Dr Craig R McClain@drcraigmc.bsky.social · 2w ago

A new catalog of deep-sea microbial genes, built from 2,138 samples, added 502 million genes and expanded known ocean gene diversity by 51%. The authors call the deep sea "a unique evolutionary engine driving the emergence of functionally distinctive enzymatic traits." #marinelife

They start life a centimeter or two across. Every one of those two-meter barrels is decades to centuries of very slow accumulation. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Dr Craig R McClain@drcraigmc.bsky.social · 2w ago

The giant barrel sponge gets called the redwood of the reef. Some are over two meters across, and the biggest are estimated to be centuries old. Growth slows as they get bigger, so size down there is mostly a measure of time. #SpongeThursday #marinelife

This is Julia, eight pounds. Across species bigger animals live longer, but within dogs it flips: Great Danes are lucky to see eight years, small dogs can hit sixteen. Meanwhile in the ocean the giants win, Greenland sharks pass 250. Julia likes her odds. #DogsOfBluesky #HowToBuildAGiant

The giant barrel sponge gets called the redwood of the reef. Some are over two meters across, and the biggest are estimated to be centuries old. Growth slows as they get bigger, so size down there is mostly a measure of time. #SpongeThursday #marinelife

A new catalog of deep-sea microbial genes, built from 2,138 samples, added 502 million genes and expanded known ocean gene diversity by 51%. The authors call the deep sea "a unique evolutionary engine driving the emergence of functionally distinctive enzymatic traits." #marinelife

When a tree washes out to sea and sinks, it becomes an island of food on an otherwise starving seafloor, colonized by clams that eat wood. We dropped 63 of them at 2,000 m to test what drives that ecosystem's function. New paper in The American Naturalist. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Abundance and Functional Roles, Not Richness, Govern Wood-Fall Degenerative Ecosystem Function in the Deep Sea | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No 0

AbstractBiological diversity is widely recognized as a key driver of ecosystem function, yet the mechanisms underlying biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships in natural systems, particula...

journals.uchicago.edu

Sticking to worms. Peinaleopolynoe orphanae from the deep sea, an Elvis worm, named for their glittery jumpsuits.

I’ve always loved this piece

Mindy Weisberger@laminda.bsky.social · 3w ago

This was one of the most enjoyable moments on Science Twitter, it was such a delight to see all the tiny cups!

Deep-sea grenadier fish sampled from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone already carry mercury and cadmium levels that would raise alarm bells in coastal waters. 📄 Learn why this science is important to the current #ISA31 discussions in our DOSI Info Sheet: buff.ly/593AfgW

Indian Rock House. The rock is Ozark limestone, built from the remains of animals in a sea that covered Arkansas 350 million years ago. Groundwater ate a cavity into it. People sheltered there. Every layer of that place is somebody’s leftovers. #naturalhistory

New paper out in The American Naturalist. We dropped 63 experimental wood falls at 2,000 m in the Gulf of Mexico and let deep-sea wood-boring clams colonize them. 26,324 clams across 12 species later, the answer to what drives ecosystem function was not species richness. It was abundance.

Abundance and Functional Roles, Not Richness, Govern Wood-Fall Degenerative Ecosystem Function in the Deep Sea | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No 0

AbstractBiological diversity is widely recognized as a key driver of ecosystem function, yet the mechanisms underlying biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships in natural systems, particula...

journals.uchicago.edu