Carnival of the Blue #8: Food, Sex, Death, and more!
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But first, beer.
From SeaNotes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, news that New Belgium Brewing Company is selling its wastewater to create farmed fish feed. That's right, no more tedious beer-battering. It's all in the fish already, folks.
For more on beer battering, be careful what that fried little lobster bite you're munching into is! As reported by Zooilogix, it just might be hermit crab.
Strangely, I'm still hungry.
But perhaps not for long! Sheril from The Intersection writes and piece in Wired magazine where she brings back the infamous projected 2048 fisheries collapse story from the Worm et al. paper. Over at The Intersection she blogs about the piece, and provides some commentary. Still a powerful message.
But for those of you worried this might but a crimp in your Omega-3 lifestyle, Jennifer Jacquet at Shifting Baslines urges you to stop and think - omega 3's don't mean that you need to gorge on just seafood and empty the oceans. Remember the words of Michael Pollan. "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much."
On the Pollan front, yet another piece by him in the Times has gotten me thinking about fish farms, changing marine diversity, and disease. I'll have that salmon with extra sea-lice, please!
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All of this seafood mania may have one wondering, however, just what this economic drive for tasty fish will do to the oceans. As always, Emmett Duffy has the answer over at The Natural Patriot, and it's not rosy. If there's one article from this carnival that your read (farewell to meat!) this should be the one.
After all of that seafood, what is left over? Miriam Goldstein at The Oyster's Garter brings up the rear on the seafood front with her series on ...poop! Some of it is worth reading just for Mark Powell's comments!
Speaking of, Powell shows us some past contentious issues in the ocean - namely, the old clash over whether a whale is a fish and it's economic consequences.
Also from the waters of the open ocean, the 10,000 birds blog tells of a voyage recording sighting of birds at sea off of New York.
Not all of which are faring well, as pointed out by Jon of the DC Birding blog. He sites figures of tremendous seabird moralities in the Northern Atlantic possibly linked to multiple causes.
So take a step back, and think about some of the more special places in the ocean. The Saipan Blogger gives us two. First, a Forbidden Grotto that haunts his dreams, and secondly a video of the new marine management area in the northwestern Hawaiian islands.
Marine reserves are a tricky subject. How to make them interesting...how about tunicates and porn! Ah, yes, good old T&P. From Kevin Z at The Other 95% we get a slightly more risque view of our closest invertebrate living relative.
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And if tunicate porn doesn't really put you in the new year holiday spirit, then let's finish up with marine animals getting into the Christmas Spirit - Zooillogix and blogfish both cite an electric eel lighting up a christmas treein Japan.
And with that, the last gift of the winter season is a brand new blog from Wallace Nichols.
Enjoy, and have a happy new year, all!