Deep Sea News Conveys Deep Sadness

Deep Sea News-I hit marine science blog pay dirt! http://deepseanews.com/
Thanks to Southern Fried Scientists, a trio of graduate students who have aggregated an outstanding list of credible oil spill blogs and twitter sites found at http://www.southernfriedscience.com/ I found Deep Sea News.

Hosted by Craig McClain National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the blog is a finalist in the "Funniest Blog" category for the 2010 Research Blogging Awards given by Seed Media Group. But these awards were made in February before the spill. I doubt that Deep Sea News would be entered in the same category next year.

McClain, or Dr. M as he is identified, launched his blog with the intent to post abstracts of recently published papers. But as he began to add more news, Dr. M realized that his blog could be a channel to deliver deep-sea science to the public. Today’s post offers a link to Scientific American’s story on the “mass murder” (blogger’s characterization) of sea cucumbers near the oil leak site. There are two photos, one aerial in which you can see an expanse of water dotted with floaters and another close up of the sea cucumber. Thousands of these sea-bottom feeding creatures died and floated to the surface of the Gulf. The team of researchers who reported this huge fish kill was actually in the Gulf to measure methane levels, estimate the size of the spill and come up with ways to remove the methane from the water. The Deep Sea News blog cited this story as another of the “ecological disaster manifesting itself.”

The next post for June 22, proclaims that is has been “64 magical days and 160 million gallons (or so) since the Deepwater Horizon smack down,” and then follows with a long list of links to the most arresting stories to “make you feel nauseous.” Reading these recent posts written by scientists who know all too well what is being lost, you are exposed to their feelings as well as their knowledge. They don’t need to express their feelings in sensational terms, the facts they choose to highlight and explain along with random sarcasm convey their discouragement.

A Mental Organizer for Ecological News from the Gulf

I’d never thought much about brown pelicans until the explosive wipe-out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Now I want to rescue them (turns out you need to have training to rescue oiled wildlife). No question, I feel bad for the fishermen and others suddenly out of work and struggling with economic loss—but I worry more about the fate of the wildlife and have been moved to tears by media coverage showing oil-drenched marshes and dead and dying creatures. Still, the majority of mass media reports seem to focus on the present and typically on one angle. Missing is a "big picture" schematic to outline both current and future deleterious impacts.

In an article posted on Deep Sea News, Miriam Goldstein, a doctoral student in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, identifies the five leading impacts of an oil spill on wildlife and habitat—direct oiling, indirect oiling, reproductive failure, habitat destruction, and long-term chronic effects—explaining in layman’s terms what each one is and why it is critical to keep in mind. Goldstein calls her article an “anatomy” and this is apt because she offers a structural framework with which the ecological reverberations can be more fully understood. Her own area of research on the impact of plastic particulates on marine invertebrates—the largest garbage dumps on earth are actually floating at sea—attunes her to the challenges associated with studying vast, ever-changing, complex events with multiple causes and consequences.