By Craig McClain, on April 26th, 2012
Busy few months! Cameron completed a manned dive to the Marianas Trench. Along with Sylvia Earle, I discuss this feat on NPR’s Talking Points (you can listen here). In contrast to the positiveness of this story, io9 also features my blog post on the death of deep-sea science.
The lack of knowledge surrounding the oceans’ depths isn’t particularly surprising when you realize that funding for deep sea research has been dwindling for years. And according to Craig McClain — chief editor at Deep Sea News, and a deep sea researcher, himself — more cuts to deep sea funding are imminent.
But what do we have to gain from deep-sea research. Much. From my latest article at io9 What the deep seas tell us about life on other planets
On the brink of Cameron being only the third person to ever visit the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, I’m reminded how much exploration and scientific inquiry of the deep sea continues to challenge our perceptions of life and how life works. Insight gained form observing and investigating deep-sea life forced us to redefine and reexamine our theories of life…Life — and the conditions necessary for life to emerge — may not be as rare as we think.
And if this wasn’t exciting enough my long awaited article discussing noodling and evolution is out (finally!) at Mental Floss.
Lincoln Sadler eyes one of his favorite fishing spots, Great Rock, from a distance, but times his approach around an oncoming boat so as not to reveal the rock’s secret location. He has already hiked two miles in the boiling heat of an August North Carolina day followed by two miles of swimming and wading in the Pee Dee River.
Lincoln can wait a moment longer.
He reaches below the water and extends his arm into a dark cavern under the boulder. Enthusiastically wiggling his fingers in a dark underwater hole, Lincoln hopes a catfish bites him. Once Lincoln’s fingers are in the catfish’s mouth, he jerks the beast to the surface.
Near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border where I’m from, we call this noodling. In the Carolinas, the term is hand grabbling. Either way, it ends in a Greco-Roman grappling match where noodlers across the South, like Lincoln, wrestle very large catfish from their underwater holes. But this fishing story started long before Lincoln Sadler began his pilgrimage to Great Rock that August morning.
By Craig McClain, on February 24th, 2012
A marine giant is found and Craig McClain is to the rescue to dispel myth from fact!
Have you seen this picture? Apparently it’s been floating around on the internet for a while now, but has experienced something of a comeback as of late, usually with some version of the following caption:
The Lions Mane Jellyfish is the largest jellyfish in the world. They have been swimming in arctic waters since before the dinosaurs (over 650 million years ago) and are among some of the oldest surviving species in the world.
The largest can come in at about 6 meters and has tentacles over 50 meters long. Pretty amazing when you think these things have been swimming around for so long.
Well, I hate to break it to you guys, but you’ve been deceived (on the Internet, of all places). Over on Deep Sea News, Craig McClain gives a good rundown of why this photo is clearly a lie
By Craig McClain, on February 24th, 2012
I’ve been busy late 2011 and early 2012.
McClain, C.R., J.C. Stegen, and A.H. Hurlbert (2012) Dispersal, Niche Dynamics, and Oceanic Patterns in Beta-Diversity in Deep-Sea Bivalves. Proceeding of the Royal Society, B, online early
McClain, C.R., P. Unmack, J. Jackson-Ricketts, and T. Gullet (2012). Increased Energy Promotes Size-Based Niche Availability in Marine Mollusks. Evolution, online early
Thaler, A.D., K.A. Zelnio, A. Freitag, R. MacPherson, D. Shiffman, H. Bik, M.C. Goldstein, C. McClain (2012). Digital Environmentalism: Tools and strategies for the evolving online ecosystem. In D. Gallagher (ed.) Environmental Leadership: A Reference Handbook. SAGE Reference (Preprint pdf).
Three papers in just a few months. Really proud of the paper in Evolution as it represents the first scientific paper for my previous undergraduate researchers Taylor and Justine!
By Craig McClain, on February 24th, 2012
My new paper is out!
Craig R. McClain, James C. Stegen, and Allen H. Hurlbert Dispersal, environmental niches and oceanic-scale turnover in deep-sea bivalves Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences published online before print December 21, 2011, doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.2166
I discuss it over at my other website, Deep-Sea News.
In the food poor, homogenous mud flats of the deep sea, how can so many species coexist? The answer is snow…The deep-sea floor is essentially a patchwork quilt of different small habitats. I began this yearby publishing a study addressing how heterogeneity in marine snow of distances of just a few yards can lead to completely different communities of organisms. At the end of this year, just today in fact, I with coauthors show this same pattern over several thousands of kilometers.
This paper also got coverage at io9, Wired, and Discovery.
By Craig McClain, on July 25th, 2011
By Craig McClain, on May 16th, 2011
 Man has this month been busy! As reward a paper I coauthored sees the light of day. The elevator pitch of the story?
A key event in the Earth’s history, the first appearance of life, is not recognized as a major time boundary. This has lead to numerous scientific inaccuracies and inefficiencies. In the paper we propose that in recognition of the importance of life in the Earth’s history and the efficiency to divide the geological time scale into two informal supereons: Pregeozoic (the abiotic supereon) and Geozoic (the biotic supereon).
O’ yes I just helped name a new supereon.
By Craig McClain, on May 16th, 2011
  My new article at Miller-McCune is out today! I discuss the Darwin Day Road Show, an experiment in evolutionary outreach from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
A posse of evolutionary scientists traveled to the heart of America to share their excitement about science on the birthday of Charles Darwin. This is their story.
Head over to read more.
By Craig McClain, on April 8th, 2011
 My new article is out at Paleobiology! What caused the Mesozoic Marine Revolution? More food!
Seth Finnegan, Craig M McClain, Matthew A Kosnik and Jonathan L Payne (2011) Escargots through time: an energetic comparison of marine gastropod assemblages before and after the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Paleobiology: Spring 2011, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 252-269.
The modern structure of marine benthic ecosystems was largely established during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (200-100 Ma), a transition that has been termed the Mesozoic Marine Revolution (MMR). Although it has been suggested that the MMR marks an increase in the average energy consumption of marine animal ecosystems, this hypothesis has not been evaluated quantitatively. In this study, we integrate body size and abundance data from the fossil record with physiological data from living representatives to estimate mean per capita metabolic rates of tropical to subtropical assemblages of shallow-marine gastropods—a major component of marine ecosystems throughout the Meso-Cenozoic—both before and after the MMR. We find that mean per capita metabolic rate rose by  150% between the Late Triassic and Late Cretaceous and remained relatively stable thereafter. The most important factor governing the increase in metabolic rate was an increase in mean body size. In principle, this size increase could result from secular changes in sampling and taphonomic biases, but these biases are suggested to yield decreases rather than increases in mean size. Considering that post-MMR gastropod diversity is dominated by predators, the net primary production required to supply the energetic needs of the average individual increased by substantially more than 150%. These data support the hypothesis that benthic energy budgets increased during the MMR, possibly in response to rising primary productivity.
By Craig McClain, on March 31st, 2011
 My new paper is now online early at the Biology Letters.
Abstract: Consensus is growing among ecologists that energy and the factors influencing its utilization can play overarching roles in regulating large-scale patterns of biodiversity. The deep sea—the world’s largest ecosystem—has simplified energetic inputs and thus provides an excellent opportunity to study how these processes structure spatial diversity patterns. Two factors influencing energy availability and use are chemical (productive) and thermal energy, here represented as seafloor particulate organic carbon (POC) flux and temperature. We related regional patterns of benthic molluscan diversity in the North Atlantic to these factors, to conduct an explicit test of species–energy relationships in the modern day fauna of the deep ocean. Spatial regression analyses in a model-averaging framework indicated that POC flux had a substantially higher relative importance than temperature for both gastropods and protobranch bivalves, although high correlations between variables prevented definitive interpretation. This contrasts with recent research on temporal variation in fossil diversity from deep-sea cores, where temperature is generally a more significant predictor. These differences may reflect the scales of time and space at which productivity and temperature operate, or differences in body size; but both lines of evidence implicate processes influencing energy utilization as major determinants of deep-sea species diversity.
By Craig McClain, on March 31st, 2011
 Virginia Gewin writes about scientists fostering online personas for Nature. The article is well researched and discusses a variety of scenarios from a variety of online personalities.
Online media offer researchers unique ways to express their interests and goals, foster collaborations and garner invitations and opportunities. But even scientists who don’t blog or tweet have an online presence that evolves apace — with or without their intervention. Auto-generated profiles from citation databases, Wikipedia entries, even photos from college can, by virtue of a simple Google search, paint an unwanted portrait of a scientist. If unedited, that portrait can cloud a researcher’s work, mar scientific relations and even cost them potential opportunities.
Some quotes from me are also included
Many scientists also use blogs as a part of their research programmes. Craig McClain, assistant director of science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina, says that he has gleaned research ideas from writing reviews of publications, found collaborators, opened up new opportunities to write for mainstream media and even received book offers. McClain started his award-winning blog ‘Deep-Sea News’ in 2005 as a way to reach the public. “Unless you are at a place with a great media-press office, it is hard to reach the public to explain science,” he says.
McClain uses irreverent humour in his blog. In one of his posts, McClain capitalized on the public’s interest in a video being shared over the Internet that depicted a life form living in a North Carolina sewer by attempting to identify it — and to therefore dispel the notion that it was “a mysterious alien creature here to suck out our brains”. The humorous style was intentional. “The public has a very narrow view of how scientists act, look and behave, and I wanted a blog that helped dispel the staid stereotype,” says McClain. It worked. His blog gets, on average, 2,000–3,000 hits a day, a lot for an independent blog site. “If people are entertained, they come back for more,” he says.
|
Craig R. McClain
Assistant Director of Science
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
2024 West Main St., Suite A200
Durham, NC 27705
919-668-4590
cmcclain AT nescent DOT org
dr_m AT deepseanews dot com
|
Comments are closed 
