MarBlog

So these last couple of days I have attended WKMOR - a workshop on understnading and quantifying mortality in pleagic, early-life stages of marine organisms.

Don’t let the title put you off – this is interesting stuff. To put it in lay-mans terms – every fish or other marine animal that we enjoy eating throws out millions of eggs every year to reproduce. Only a tiny fraction of these survive, but with the big number you’re talking about, even a relatively small change in the survival of these eggs through their various larval phases into adulthood, can mean a huge change in what we are able to harvest. More over – the ability to harvest one species of what we regard as foods, may have a significant impact on other species in the foodweb – so, as ususal, it is not straight forward.

However, this workshop aims at addressing one of the issues that has been a hard nut to crack for decades – namely mortality – how many of the eggs and larvae die – why, how, and what drives it.

So far, ideas range from the downright depressing – “we don’t know anything”, to the “We’re getting there”.

One of the major complexities is that for small critters swimming aorund in a soup of plankton, the critical issue has been assumed to be able to grow fast so you have less predators eating you. While this idea still reamins valiud, there seems to be a shift towards the idea that just realising growth may not be enough – the predators will still get you if you aggregate, or if you are particular successfull in surviving in high numbers. In addition, once these larvae has made it to the end of their free-floating planktonic stages, it may simply be that there is only room for a limited number to settle to the seabed, which means that the number of survivors is limited no matter what.

Opinions still differs, and it is an areas that will require increased attention. Certainly one things is clear – the ability to model larval fish and their intricate prey feeding it noteworthy, but not enough!

Image courtesy of NASA

It’s hitting the news today that NASA found an amphipod while lowering a down below an ide sheet, reaching a depth of about 200m. According to the article, it’s quite a large amphipod (certainly compared to the ones i see in plankton nets in the North Sea) of about 7-8cm long. Whiel retracting the cable, the researchers also saw what they believe to be the tentacle of a jelly fish, although no footage was caught of this.

What makes this finding interesting is the depth of the ice sheet. This hole was drilled ~20km inland from the sea, and was only 8 inches wide. To catch an animal in there is either a complete fluke, or there’s quite a high concentration of them down there (only repeated drillings and observations would verify this). And what’s evenly intriguing is that these amphipods must feed on something. Typically the food chain in the sea relies on light or in extreme cases some area of chemical synthesis driven by e.g. temperature or presence of nutrients in high concentrations (like deep sea vents).

In this video from TED, Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates a few examples of the amazing work that can happen very rapidly when data is released. The examples does not exactly fall into the marine science category, but they are powerful examples of the ways in which other people might turn your data upside down and use it in new ways.
Obviously, there are also examples of this working less well, when data is taken out of context or misinterpreted because insufficient documentation of laziness has led to quick and dirty flashy maps without real informative content – but it’s perhaps a risk worth taking when you consider the potential gain in the examples in this video.

First post upon installation of WordPress is Hello World, and I thought it was a reasonable title to retain for this first post on MarBlog.

In the time to come, I will post on a variety of topics in the world of marine science. The two closest to my job is likely to get the most attention, namely ecology and data accessibility.

Ecology is increasingly becoming central in Marine science – going from being a rather loose term with vague and poorly quantified mechanisms to a central role in policy and legislation for the management of the marine environment. Obviously, ecology encompasses a wide array of information, all of which may not have been necessary to join together previously for single species or stock issues in fisheries for example. Now we’re faced with a situation where a broad raft of data from very different science disciplines are having to be merged and contribute to more common goals. It is a challenge being addresssed on many levels currently from individual univiersities, and other organisations fighting to bring together years or decades worth of scientific effort to national and international bodies creating large systems and databases to gather it all under one umbrella.

These are some of the issues I will be blogging about on this site in the time to come, although there will hopefully also be room for a few stories that are just about the fascinating marine life that still serves to amaze and capture me!