During annual events, or other occurrences with low-frequency periodicity on the human timescale, it is common to reflect on the interim between the two events.
Wow. I haven’t even started in with the science, and this is already boring.
What I mean to say is that Blowshun Sciences meetings happen every two years, and so when another one comes around, I can’t help but ask myself what has changed in two years. Apparently, nothing. The February meeting during even years is perfectly aligned with my career cycle. It’s right about when my two-year funding is set to dry up and I’ve got no appreciable prospects for continued funding. It’s also known as “panic time”.
You’d think this would be a perfect time to network with colleagues, put my work out there, and find a job. Instead, it just reminds me how many of us are out there and how little money there is to go around. I am reminded especially by the fact that I’m repeatedly not given a speaking slot, just a 4 x 4 space on a poster board. I leave not inspired, but depressed, and my desperate attempts to get noticed during the conference do not help.
On the bright side, you get one-sentence summaries of all the talks I attend. At least we have that. Before I begin, this year’s conference was in Salt Lake, a curious spot for Blowshun Sciences indeed. However, it is where my brother lives, so I spent the preceding weekend with him and his family.
We went to an elementary school Valentines dance / taco night on Friday, where I learned that LMFAO has integrated itself into all sectors of society. They’re not just on super bowl halftime shows. Hawaiian high school girls are dancing school-sponsored routines to “I’m sexy and I know it”, and the song is played at Valentines dance / taco nights at elementary schools in Utah. Wiggle wiggle wiggle, indeed.
The DJ played
Partyrock as well. Twice. I give up.
I also got to take the niece and nephew to the local strip-mall aquarium (motto: Otter-ly Adorable) and buy them each invertebrate toys to try to counteract the effect of the otters and penguins. I lost the battle (that day) but won the war (long term), as Aerohart stung everything in sight with her stuffed jellyfish all weekend, and her little brother hid under the covers at night watching his light-up octopus work its magic.
Monday
Let’s start our week-long journey around the world’s oceans at the bottom.
The Deep Sea
1) My former boss kicks off the session with an overview talk about deep sea conservation. Our activities in the depths, such as mining, trawling, and drilling, interact with our other, indirect activities such as warming, acidification, and oxygen reduction. If we were in a battle against the deep sea, we’d have it right where we want it.
2) Case in point, 16 - 38% of the North Atlantic deep will have acidified by 0.2 pH units by 2100. This is a larger change than any area experienced in the last 650,000 years.
3) This guy studies how Norwegian mines dispose of their tailings, which is by dumping them into fjords. These very deep valleys have been filled, in some cases, halfway up. This has wide-ranging consequences, but may still be preferable to putting in a dam and filling the above-sea level portion halfway up.
4)
The Azores have set aside 5% of their seafloor above 1500 m as marine reserves. That’s a lot. They’ve calculated that 1 year of bottom-trawl fishing equals about the same destructive impact as 2500 years of long-line fishing.
5) This gal had video of the fissures in seafloor mud created by last year’s Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. The video isn’t as impressive as the fact that she has video of this.
6) This lady has watched the re-colonization of a
hydrothermal vent after a lava flow killed all the previous vent fauna. Talk about right place at the right time. The dominant colonizers were different species than those that were previously there, or that inhabited nearby, undisturbed areas. That blows the whole “colonizers come from a regional larval pool” idea.
7) This woman discovered several new deep-sea species, among them a
seven-armed predatory sea star. Now I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I’d like to see the study that demonstrates how seven arms is the perfect number of arms for this environment. I’m guessing this is an arbitrary number of arms that accidentally became fixed in the population. It happens.
8) Our final speaker speculates about deep sea restoration. When we open-pit mine the seafloor, will we be expected to restore the site like we sometimes are on land? I, for one, doubt it.
Climate Change
After the break I decided to check out the status of Spaceship Earth-tanic
1) When you put all the marine studies of climate change together, do a lot of filtering, bias-removal, and interpretation, you get the following statistics: 80% of studies show results consistent with climate change expectations, and those studies average to a change in the timing of any biological event (such as breeding) happening 3 days earlier per decade, and a change in the range where organisms live of about 25-35 km towards the poles per decade.
2) Have you ever wondered about the Arabian Sea? I hope so: The cooling influence of Himalayan summer snowpack lowers the temperature difference between India and the Arabian Sea water, which results in a lower pressure gradient driving Northeast winds, which in turn moderates the amount of upwelling off Somalia and Oman. Now that we get less summer snowpack, the opposite occurs, kicking Arabian Sea upwelling into overdrive, spurring crazy
phytoplankton blooms. We’re talking pea soup. You’re welcome.
3) On the contrary, Climate Change is predicted to increase the
stratification of the ocean overall, which prevents deep water nutrients from reaching the sun-drenched zone where all the action happens. So global ocean productivity could decrease, which lowers the amount of carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere, which in turn accelerates climate change. It’s called a positive feedback loop, which almost always results in something negative happening. Kind of like how constructive interference is normally destructive (see
Narrows Bridge, Tacoma). Anyway, according to this lady, the global prediction holds more true for the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, due to predicted increased winds in the southern hemisphere breaking down the stratification. Did I say one sentence per talk? I’ll try to do better.
4) Next is a model to try to predict when
coral bleaching events will occur. The first one was 15% accurate, and the next one 40%. They’re working on it.
5) Guess what? The larvae of squid do not do as well in an acidified ocean (0.5 pH units lower).
6) Costa Rican Leatherback Turtle time - and a cool model that combines ocean conditions with beach nest conditions. Future beach conditions turn out to be more important, believe it or not, and I learned the word “
Gigantothermy”.
7) Guess what? It’s not just the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean, it’s the size structure.
Lunch time. I grab a sandwich and catch the end of the National Blowshun Policy town hall meeting. It’s as interesting as you are imagining.
Larvae of Large Vertebrates
I’d much prefer to hear about the larvae of large invertebrates, but beggars can’t be choosers. 90% of the talks here are about physical oceanography. So take your interesting talks with actual animals as you can get them.
1) I doubt you remember this, but during the meeting two years ago, I described the talk by
the tagging lady that went into double overtime. This round, the organizers have wisely given her two consecutive timeslots to avoid the overrun. She can tell when satellite-tagged tunas are mating just from their position, diving behavior, and temperature. Like many animals, tuna heat up when spawning.
2) Climate Change is everywhere. The Gulf of Mexico spawning / larval development habitat for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is likely to get worse in the future, but might improve for tropical tunas.
3) This gal’s trying to develop a satellite tag that will stay on tiny turtles so we can figure out where they go for 5 - 10 years after hatching. Yep, we still don’t know that. She gets a tag system to work pretty well thanks to a collaboration from “Marybeth at Simply Nails in Boynton Beach, Florida” (names changed). Turtle shell is made out of fingernail, FYI.
4) Another gal is trying to tackle the same problem, but Hank style, but fingerprinting the trace elements in their shells. Lead isotopes from North America, Europe, and Saharan dust are all different.
5) This nurse shark biologist apologizes for not studying great white sharks. I don’t think biologists should ever do this. I’m plenty interested in nurse sharks. Own it.
6) I can tell I’m reaching daily burnout stage (a microcosm of conference burnout stage). This guy talks about fish eggs and larvae in the North Sea. It looks like species’ spawning grounds are remaining pretty stable over time - I think.
7) Big Finish! Nonlinear Population Dynamics! She wants to know if time series of larval fish abundance have more nonlinear dynamics than adult fish time series. Maybe they do. She uses terms like “state space reconstruction” and “ghost variables”. That means it’s time to get a beer.
The best thing about Blowshun Sciences poster sessions is the free beer. And this year, there seems to be a lot more of it. Like as much as you can drink. As a cruel joke, they have combined the free beer with a poster hall laid out in indecipherable fashion. These numbers make absolutely no sense, and are unrelated to several other sets of important numbers. Just stagger around and see what you come across, I guess.
Afterward I had pizza with my brother and family. It was delicious. Unless you chewed it for a while and then held your mouth open with a distressed look on your face until your parents said you could spit it out if you had to. Repeatedly. I won’t name names.
Tuesday
I didn’t have a good target for the morning session, so I decided to let fate decide. I walked down the hall between presentation rooms during the first time slot, looking in the open doors to the screens. The first room that didn’t happen to have a giant equation projected on the screen when I happened to look, I would enter. Good news: it only took me six tries. I’m not making that up. Effing Physical Oceanographers. Why do I even come to these things?
Bad news: the session without equations was something like Chemical signals that mediate interactions between microbes and their hosts, n stuff.
1) You know those zooplankton-associated bacteria? No, you don’t? Well, they are in higher abundances that free-living bacteria, just so you know.
2) It’s possible that phytoplankton share photosynthesis products with bacteria, and in turn
those bacteria convert Fe III into Fe II for them, which they prefer. N stuff.
3) Non-physical oceanographers at this conference like to pretend that they are the only ones here. They address the audience as if there are 100% physical oceanographers attending. I like it. This lady introduces her experimental animals as “the things that fly around the boat while you are doing your CTD casts”. You mean
sea bats?
She does mean sea bats! That’s a picture of a Leach’s Storm Petrel. Her talk is actually pretty cool. She studies how sea bats are attracted to and identify each other using scent. You know, scent moderated by the
major histocompatibility complex. Mhc influences mate choice in many animals, including “undergraduate humans”. Watch out, though - she is funded by the FBI, who is interested in being able to identify everyone using scent.
I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead on this session.
Cross-shelf transport
Now we’re talking. How water moves across the continental shelf is not an obscure topic, when you think about it from the perspective that we’re all on one side, and the ocean is on the other, and, well, we actually care about how all sorts of shit goes one way or the other.
1) Our half-hour introductory lecture begins with Sputnik. No joke. He wonders if we need an Apollo program for the ocean.
2) How about transport across coral reefs? Meh. It’s diurnal and thermally-driven.
3) Unless you’re talking reefs on Moorea. Then you’ve got to consider
Stokes Drift, and that overall flow will most likely be set by friction with coral heads on the back reef.
4)
Turbidity currents. They can be slower than you previously thought. Like from the slumping of an undersea canyon wall.
5) What oceanographers consider “nearshore” and what you might consider nearshore are most likely different. In this model, larvae reach their shoreline habitat when they get within 10 kilometers of the coast. 10 kilometers is a long way for something that’s smaller than a tic tac.
You’re right, maybe cross-shelf transport mechanisms are kind of obscure. You know what’s not obscure? You know what’s timely? The meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after the Japan Tsunami. This conference only happens every two years, so we’re all about Fukushima and the Deepwater Horizon this week.
Fukushima
1) You can tell your regular Cesium from your Fukushima Cesium by the isotope ratio. A month after the accident, seawater from the area jutted due east. Aerosols, however, went northeast. The levels were high, but not crazy high. Like right around the EPA drinking water standard high. You shouldn’t be drinking seawater anyway.
2) They didn’t get the first arrival of Cesium in Korea (upwind) until March 24th. Levels were back to below detection limits by April 19th. They got a 10th of what went east.
3) Independent laboratories detected radioactivity at right around the same levels that the Japanese government reported. This will contrast with U.S. Government reports about the Deepwater Horizon disaster (see below). Right now 2% of Japanese seafood is above the radioactivity limit, although they are thinking about dropping the limit, above which 10 - 20% of the seafood would lie.
Over lunch I went to a teaching/learning workshop. We did an experiment seeing if ice cubes would melt faster in salt water or freshwater. What do you think? Why?
The take-home message I got was that we spend too much time teaching students formulas and not enough time teaching them when to apply formulas. They do well on the quizzes (which test whether or not you can apply a formula) and bomb the final (where you have to decide which formula to use).
I dropped in on the education/social media session to catch my artist friend’s talk from last summer’s Sea Wagon expedition.
1) She opens with a portrait picture I took of the Ming Dynasty Watch. Niiiiiice. I enjoyed her comments questioning the utility of making art from marine debris.
Let’s finish the day looking forward, in the session Oceanography in 2030
1) This talk advocates that oceanographic exploration should get more cash than space exploration because the oceans are the life-support system for the “whole damn planet”. Preaching to the converted, buddy.
2) In 2030, the “
Northeast Passage” should be ice free most of the summer, allowing for a savings of 17 days and $300,000 per trip between Europe and East Asia. We’re still going to need excellent ice / weather forecasting to prevent all sorts of Costa Corcordias as ship captains decide whether or not to make “one last run” before the fall.
Submit your screenplays as soon as possible for Liam Neeson is … Icebound …summer 2014. You can be certain he will punch a polar bear.
In the evening I’m feeling distinctly margarita-y - which is probably because my body knows it’s Blowshun Sciences Jam Session night, where careers are made or dreams are crushed. To prepare I start with a couple margs, and then switch to bombers of a Czech beer I’ve never heard of. It’s a big night.
You most likely recall the
debacle of two years ago in Portland. This time is a whole different animal. I’ve got the benefit of experience, but lack my muse Suffragette or key support staff such as the Bard. If I’m going to go it alone, with a borrowed instrument, what song(s) should I perform for my colleagues? How will it be received? Will shaky-shaky man and wrong-key-harmonica guy join me on stage again?
Find out in the next installment of You Need to Know Whether or Not Squid Are Deaf, when the solo spinoff of “Give Us Post-docs” takes the stage as “Give Me a Visiting Faculty Position”.
Also, are squid deaf?
So I’ve read it, then? No, but I’ve seen the movie. Would I like to read it? Would I like missionaries to drop off my very own copy of the book at my house? I feel pretty good about my experience with the movie, so no thank you. This spurs a long discussion about watching a movie vs. reading the book. Everything they say is correct and not subject to much debate. Why wouldn’t you want to read the story from the original source, instead of hearing someone else’s interpretation? Even on points I might enjoy arguing, I try to concede, because I feel like arguing will only prolong the debate. However, I sense that my concessions are only giving them the impression that they are making progress.
Normally at this point you could close your front door. Unfortunately I am in their living room, underneath their beautiful mural of the solar system. So they aren’t going anywhere. I guess it would be up to me to go to another part of the campus. But they want that, too. They want to show me around their impressive digs. I just want to stay right here and center myself under CMJ’s patient gaze.
