Saving Seafood

How Ultra-Black Fish Disappear in the Deepest Seas

July 16, 2020 — Alexander Davis admits that he can be a glutton for punishment. He staked part of his Ph.D. on finding some of the world’s best-camouflaged fishes in the ocean’s deepest depths. These animals are so keen on not being found that they’ve evolved the ability to absorb more than 99.9 percent of the light that hits their skin.

To locate and study these so-called ultra-black fishes, Mr. Davis, a biologist at Duke University, said he relied largely on the luck of the draw. “We basically just drop nets and see what we get,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to pull up.”

When he and his colleagues did cash in, they cashed in big. In a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, they report snaring the first documented ultra-black animals in the ocean, and some of the darkest creatures ever found: 16 types of deep-sea fish that are so black, they manifest as permanent silhouettes — light-devouring voids that almost seem to shred the fabric of space-time.

“It’s like looking at a black hole,” Mr. Davis said.

To qualify as ultra-black, a substance has to reflect less than 0.5 percent of the light that hits it. Some birds of paradise manage this, beaming back as little as 0.05 percent, as do certain types of butterflies (0.06 percent) and spiders (0.35 percent). A feat of engineering allowed humans to best them all with synthetic materials, some of which reflect only 0.045 percent of incoming light. (“Black” paper, on the other hand, returns a whopping 10 percent of the light it meets.)

Read the full story at The New York Times

Prolonged government shutdown could spell trouble for coral reef in Gulf of Mexico

January 8, 2019 — As the days of the federal government shutdown increase, so, too, do the chances of an emergency happening on the coral reef system 100 miles off the coast of Galveston.

And if an oil spill or a major mortality event occur during the shutdown, those who work in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary office will be powerless to mitigate it.

“If some sort of emergency occurs … the staff will have limited capacity to respond and basically the response would occur by the Coast Guard,” said Adrienne Correa, a Rice University researcher who serves on the sanctuary’s advisory council. “But the staff have a different type of knowledge of the reef … the Coast Guard lacks the tools and place-based knowledge.”

The sanctuary is a network of federally protected coral reef systems in the Gulf of Mexico. And at a time when a quarter of coral reefs worldwide are considered damaged beyond repair, it’s home to some of the healthiest reefs in the region.

Scientists say it’s because of its location: 70 to 115 miles off shore and 55 to 160 feet deep.

But the sanctuary has had problems in the past: 2016 brought the worst bleaching year for the sanctuary in more than a decade when 2 percent of the reef, inexplicably, died.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle