God forgive me, but some search-engine bait is just too delicious to pass up. In the eyeball-snatching tradition of PETA's nude-stars-against-fur campaign, a British outfit called Fishlove has launched a series of ads featuring stark-naked celebs from Lizzy Jagger to Sir Ben Kingsley cuddling with aquatic animals - yes, including large-if-not-technically-giant squid - to draw attention to the problem of overfishing. The results are a lot more appealing than you'd expect, as you can see at this slideshow put together by the good folks at Fast Company. The campaign, as FastCo summarizes, is ... Read More
Is the Global Ocean Healthy? We Can Answer That Now
August 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
There are very few moments in science where years of work by dozens of people produces a single outcome, at a single moment in time. The "Eureka!" event for the Ocean Health Index project—which makes its public debut today in the journal Nature—occurred last spring when a global score emerged from a thicket of data. More than a year ago we started writing a series in this magazine about the process of developing the Ocean Health Index, hoping to offer a window into the challenges of a complex research project that tackles big, pressing questions. In this case, we are trying to ... Read More
LOST at Sea
July 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Besides its unfortunate acronym, LOST, how else can you explain the perpetually doomed status of the United Nations Convention Law of the Sea treaty? LOST, first adopted in 1982, would create a uniform set of laws for the sea—governing fishing, piracy, territory, and mining—and an international regulatory body, and has been ratified by 161 countries, leaving the U.S. in the company of 35 naysayers that include North Korea, Iran, and Burundi. It’s unlikely we’ll be joining the rest of the world this year—earlier this month two more Republican senators joined the group of ... Read More
Future Ocean Habitats Built on Plastics?
May 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
In the last 40 years there has been a 100-fold increase of plastics in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, according to a study in Biology Letters. These plastics don’t only poison and strangle sea creatures—one of the findings of our “Swimming With Nurdles” graphic in May/June—they might re-weave the web of life, the study says. The increase in plastic bounty has been an excellent breeding ground for Halobates sericeus—a type of water skater that typically lays its eggs on naturally occurring flotsam like wood, pumice, and sea shells. Lead author Miriam Goldstein and her ... Read More
Ocean Garbage Patches: A Scientific Sifting
April 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Our oceans are filled with trash. Oceanographers, environmentalists and biologists have been working for years to better understand the problem of, and solutions to, marine debris. In the current issue of Pacific Standard we highlight the problem of, and some possible solutions to, marine debris in “Swimming with Nurdles” (PDF). Add to that: Marine debris is easy to think of as an environmentalist’s problem. But, according to an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation report, marine debris cost Pacific nations’ fishing, shipping and marine tourism industries $1.27 billion in ... Read More
How Marine Spatial Planning Calms Choppy Waters
March 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Imagine starting to build a house by first deciding where to put the kitchen sink, suggests scientist Benjamin Halpern. The placement is first class — for a sink — and helps the next project on your list, determining a good place for the downstairs bathroom. Over time, each addition of a room or a feature slowly completes the structure. In the end, this sink-centric home might turn out to be a perfect house, but that seems a stretch and, as Halpern insists, no one would approach the project that way. Instead of a house, let’s say you wanted to place some windmills offshore to generate ... Read More
20,000 Robots Under the Sea
January 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
If you’re a scientist who wants to study animals in their natural habitats, the process is simple enough: get a pair of binoculars, find a shady spot to sit, and watch the critters. But what if your quarry lives deep in the ocean — and is so tiny it’s barely visible? Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks he’s got a solution. With the help of a few million dollars in National Science Foundation funding, Jaffe is developing an army of small, networked, underwater robots that will drift ... Read More
San Francisco Bay Model Is Flush With Life
December 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Earlier this month, Janice Sinclaire reviewed the history of the San Francisco Bay Model, a mammoth physical representation of the estuary at California’s Golden Gate in which water sloshed around emulating the 24-hour tidal flow. While still open to tourists, it was dried out in 2009, but this week, we learned the model is up and running once again. The U.S. Corps of Engineers built the hydraulic model in the 1950s to test out a proposal to rebuild San Francisco Bay to better serve commerce and national security, a plan of almost Stalinist hubris that the finished model in part shot ... Read More
Ocean Health Index: The Audacity of Necessity
December 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“It’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous.” Noted journalist Malcolm Gladwell made this observation recently about the U.S. News and World Report college rating system. But the same could be said of the Ocean Health Index, which will debut early next year. It represents an enormously ambitious effort to quantify ocean health for every coastal country on the planet — reporting on everything from biodiversity to artisanal fishing to cultural uses to carbon storage and sequestration. We assert that when it comes to the ocean such ... Read More
The Fitness of Physical Models
December 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Ranger Thomas Downs leads a group of visitors to a point above San Pablo Bay in Sausalito, California. Gesturing toward the Pacific Ocean, he clearly enjoys himself as he exclaims, “There's the Golden Gate Bridge!” The kids in the group grin at a California gray whale breaching in the distance. The four main bays that make up the San Francisco Bay estuary can all be seen from here: San Pablo, Suisun, Central and South Bay. The entire San Francisco Bay, including its famous bridges, is visible, and the whale is spectacular. This view is possible from only one vantage point on Earth: ... Read More
