Today for our lab meeting we are reading about dolphin falls and I'll admit I'm. sucker for a good photo mosaic #marinelife www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A genuinely informative watch. @drandrewthaler.bsky.social continues to be one of the clearest, strongest voices advocating for the deep sea and sound science.

Maxine Dexter Decries 'Concerning Lack Of Transparency' In Deep Sea Mining Permitting Process www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLY2...

Dragon in the deep. 🐉⁠ ⁠ Dragonfish (family Stomiidae) are cunning predators. Although they are strong swimmers, they prefer to lie in wait and ambush unsuspecting fishes and crustaceans. This black dragonfish (Idiacanthus sp.) was spotted at 527 meters (1,729 feet) in Monterey Bay.

Visited the Natural History Museum London last week and honestly: collections like this are the backbone of everything we think we know about the ocean. Absolute treasure trove.

The mammal hall at @nhm-london.bsky.social gives a wonderful example of the scale of life. Here a full size elephant display is against a back drop of a replica full size blue whale. The blue whale is so large I cannot even fit it into the frame.

Got to see two bucket item animals today at the @nhm-london.bsky.social the extinct dodo and ivory-billed woodpecker

Need to up my deep-sea display collection in my lab, look at this amazing specimens in the Glover lab.

Having a great week in the UK. First part with @tomjwebb.bsky.social continuing collaboration and then second half at @nhm-london.bsky.social with Adrian Glover

Today I feel like going with deep-sea textures. How about bumpy (bumpy snailfish) + gelatinous (sea slug) + spiny (spiny king crab) + fuzzy (yeti crab) #marinelife

YES! Seals are marine mammals and so share common bone structures! #neiltheseal #science #biology Loving all the questions! 🦭🧪🦑

Can’t wait to read this paper coauthored by @sethf.bsky.social

Here is what you need for your Monday.

Across America and the world, people are realizing it’s not possible to appease America’s dictator. The only way to deal with him is to stand up to him — and the only way to stand up to him is by joining together against him. It's time for a massive general strike across the country.

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone. The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets. We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

Brief break from my usual deep-sea content to highlight the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus (LPSO), a species known for mating and social behaviors that differ markedly from most octopuses. www.youtube.com/watch?v=niuf...

The deep sea runs on mucus... Marine snow, larvacean houses, feeding nets, even snail armor...slime is infrastructure down there.

*laugh* a FASCINATING observation of this sea cucumber, Paracaudina from Australia doing.. something. Blowing bubbles? A great big "WHAT?" #echinoday www.inaturalist.org/observations...

The balloon worm looks nothing like a typical worm because it doesn’t live on the seafloor, it floats in the deep midwater. With a gelatinous, bag-like body for buoyancy, it drifts and feeds on sinking organic particles. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5KG... #marinelife #wormwednesday

“ZOOPHYTES Pl. 1” Hand-colored illustrations of echinoderm species from ‘Dictionnaire Universel d'Histoire Naturelle’ by French botanist Charles d'Orbigny, published in 1849. Zoophytes is an antiquated term for plant-like invertebrate animals. Coin for scale. 🦑

Ocean heat content keeps smashing records, but don’t worry! Someone will definitely invent a new graph before they cut emissions.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Shipworms aren’t worms. They’re bivalves that eat wood with the help of symbiotic bacteria turning wooden shipwrecks into functioning ecosystems. #MolluscMonday Fantastic image from seahistory.org/sea-history-...

Many deep-sea bivalves don’t rely on feeding at all. They host bacteria that turn chemicals like methane or sulfide into food. Sunlight optional. #MolluscMonday 📷 ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/d...

Some deep-sea snails reinforce their shells with iron sulfide. Not metaphorical armor. Literal metal. #MolluscMonday

FYI cowrie biology is quietly wild. Their living mantle completely envelops the shell, repairing damage, maintaining that gloss, and even controlling color patterns. There are likely well over 300 species, many rarely seen and still poorly studied. #molluscmonday

Life in Extremes — Cold Seeps of Argentina | 4K ROV Highlights

Feeling very grateful today to be part of this big, thoughtful collaboration. New open-access perspective on deep ocean seascape ecology lays out where the gaps are and how we actually move from concept to practice. Huge thanks to an incredible group of coauthors. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Being good at science and being good at navigating academia are two very different skill sets.

This is your reminder that Hungarian-Jewish scientist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. He then left the dissolved solution on his shelf and fled to Sweden. (After the war he un-dissolved the gold and the prizes were re-cast.)

What looks like a peaceful marine snail inching across a soft coral is actually the result of an evolutionary battle. In this ongoing “arms race,” soft corals evolved powerful toxins to ward off predators, but the flamingo tongue snail developed genes and proteins to neutralize those toxins.

Hallucigenia ate comb jellies www.newscientist.com/article/2511...

Osedax worms dismantle bones molecule by molecule, no spectacle, no force. Long-term change often looks boring if you don’t understand the process.

The Hidden World of Cold-Water Corals Rises to the Surface With These Glass Sculptures That Are Resurrecting a Lost Craft #marinelife www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu... #marinelife

Meet Duobrachium sparksae: a newly described comb jelly that looks like a glowing hot-air balloon drifting just above the deep seafloor. Transparent, delicate, and unmistakably transfixing, it reminds us how much biodiversity is in the deep oceans. www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-stor...

Blue buttons jellies float at the oceans surface, like little animal flowers, living between sea and sky. There are millions of them out there right now, and most will live their whole lives without even being seen by a human. Despite the hard things, the world is still wondrous.

This is what 9300m looks like in the deep sea. Small, free-moving bristle worms swim through dense fields of slender tube worms. The bristle worms are only a few centimeters long, while the tube worms grow tubes up to 30cm, creating a crowded, living landscape on the deep seafloor.

Deep-sea sponge appreciation post: Bolosoma is a glass sponge that builds vertical structure in the deep sea, creating habitat for a whole host of life. IN 2025 on dives in Papahānaumokuākea, some had heads nearly a meter wide. 📷 NOAA Ocean Exploration, 2025 Beyond the Blue

Look at this amazing image “Squid (likely an Illex coindetii) observed During Dive 07 of the third expedition of Voyage to the Ridge 2022 at 631 meters (2,070 feet) in depth...” from NOAA you can use as a desktop image oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/s... #invertebrate #ocean

Just a reminder that NOAA releases monthly desktop screens with calendars featuring deep-sea animals and its reminder right now that at least some in government are still wholesome oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/c...

Deep-sea animals have two modes: absolutely unbothered or deeply committed to chaos.

Groups collect over 60K petitions, letters opposing deep-sea mining near the Mariana Trench

Deep-sea thing I think about more than is reasonable...yeti crab dancing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PES...

Related to high pressure, @ibudin.bsky.social and Jacob Winnikoff led a study which showed that a particular lipid headgroup (PPE) is more abundant in membranes of deep #ctenophores. 🧪🦑 What was amazing was when they put PPE into bacterial membranes, the bacteria became more pressure tolerant!

Some deep-sea facts for you! High pressure changes protein folding, requiring specialized enzymes to function at depth. Deep-sea life isn’t just tougher. It runs on proteins that often stop working at surface pressure. europepmc.org/article/med/...

Trenches deeper than 6,000 m host species found nowhere else, with strong depth-restricted endemism. Hadal trenches aren’t just deeper abyssal plains! They host species found only at extreme depths. www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...