Just a week or two ago, in a Northern California Coast gallery, me and my babe while browsing along admired some polished artsy-fartsy carved wood pieces. They had not only beautiful grain but precisely-carved, curling tunnels bored in them big enough to slide a dime through. The clerk said oh, that's worm wood from sinker logs. Before she could go on I mumbled "Oh I know all about that." You know, logs sank from logging operations long ago in marine estuaries, shipworms (teredos) got into them, drilled holes, and eventually some specialty company got hold of them and milled them into this stuff. Turns out of course that was just the smug semi-informed science writer mouthing off (again). I didn't know squat. Nobody does.
It turns out that some good recent science writing has gone into the topic, at least one from a fellow many tracker readers know, another from a scientist-blogger who also has a decent profile in the trade. Serendipity this morning led to my learning all about what nobody knows about the topic. Shipwrecks and the mysteries of benthic colonization are involved.
First stop:
- Deep Sea News – R. R. Helm: Scientist discovers Bizarre New Deep Sea Ecosystem, Created by Disaster ; Essentially about a recent discovery of the remains of a British Royal Navy ship that sank near Gibraltar 321 years ago, including further discovery that some of its timbers have survived till now, buried in the sediment. Marine archeology at the site has left some of those old pieces of wood exposed to the elements, leading Ms. Helm to speculate in some joy that a new ecosystem should soon bloom upon and destroy them too. For out of the ocean will settle on them not just embryonic teredos and their close kin but of a whole mess of wood-eaters and their fellow travelers whose nature is not yet fully understood. She links to her sources. Chatty, bloggy writing of high caliber and easy digestibility.
By the way, R.R. Helms is a Rachel and she is a grad student at Brown U. There she specializes in jellies. If you want to read her learned take-down of a recently disclosed new Korean proposal for killing jellies in immense numbers in noxious blooms, and doing so rather violently, check this post she wrote for this same site last October. She says the last thing you want to do to control proliferation of jellies is to cut them up and scatter their remains.
Second stop – Helm's first linked citation, a plea for crowd-funding of a sunken-wood research project:
- Experiment.com – Craig McClain: Wood: Is It What's For Dinner? ; The project has, so far as of this morning, raised $3,642 which is close to its $4k goal with a week or so to go. Great video here, and description of effort to find out how many organisms make their homes, and pastures, from sunken wood and also to see how fast they get to work. Logs are being left on the floor of the Monterey Marine Canyon and visited periodically. McClain is a Duke University researcher.
This itself is good reading, but one thing ought be mentioned and perhaps Ms. Helm should have done so. Perhaps she felt this to be a distraction to the reader. But Craig McClain is in a narrow sense her blog boss. As Dr. M, he often blogs form the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke, where he is its assistant director. As himself, his own blogging has gained him some renown for science communication – including inclusion in one of the Open Lab: The Best Science Writing on the Web anthologies that once-great science blogger Bora Zivkovic used to put together. He also is founder and editor of Deep Sea News, where R. R. Helms simply refers to him as "a deep sea researcher." No biggie, it's blogging and all that, but this is high-end blogging/ She ought to have disclosed the connection between her source for her story and the site on which she put it.
Third stop:
- Not Exactly Rocket Science (Nat'l Geo) – Ed Yong: The Second World That Forms On Sunken Trees ; Excellent rundown by the accomplished Mr. Yong, who interviewed the above-listed Craig McClain for much of hte material in his post. R. R. Helms in turn quotes and credits Yong's piece for some of the passages in her account. Young smartly compares the ecosystems that form on sunken, terrestrial wood , or woodfalls, to those that infest the bodies and bones at whalefalls. He also has tons of illus and builds his story largely on the sheer mystery of the rapidity with which these distinctive communities appear in their abodes that have fallen like marine manna from above, into areas where the adult versions of their new occupants are not found. There must be embryos of almost everything floating around out there! Yong also links to a large list, mostly form Deep Sea News and by McClain, providing more info.
The way news gets into circulation is almost as random and mysteriously unpredictable as the rise of a whole vibrant ecosystem out on an abyssal plain desert.
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