My new article about a few of my favorite things–the south, evolution, heat, and of course roaches–is now up at Scientific American

The sticky Southern summer heat makes me slightly insane.  It’s an agitation that grows deep within me as the season ripens, and the humidity and temperature rise in equal fashion. This heat has been both a blessing and a curse throughout my life.  The giver of swims in the local creek and refreshing mint juleps is also the giver of 20-pound sweat drenched t-shirts and late summer landscapes browned and brittle as death itself. As Mrs. Pearson states it’s a “pregnant heat.” No doubt ready to burst forth with “lost dreams and wayward souls.”

This intense steamy heat, so taxing for me, is a dream for another wayward soul–the cockroach…

From the abstract:

The island rule, a pattern of size shifts on islands, is an oft-cited but little understood phenomenon of evolutionary biology. Here, we explore the evolutionary mechanisms behind the rule in 184 mammal species, testing climatic, ecological and phylogenetic hypotheses in a robust quantitative framework. Our findings confirm the importance of species’ ecological traits in determining both the strength and the direction of body size changes on islands. Although the island rule pattern appears relatively weak overall, we find strongest support for models incorporating trait, climatic and geographical factors in a phylogenetic context, lending support to the idea that the island rule is a complex phenomenon driven by interacting intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms. Overall, we find that different clades may be evolutionarily predisposed to dwarfism or gigantism, but the magnitude of size changes depends more on adaptation to the novel island environment.

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NSFW features some choice quotes from me on why Giant Squid’s aren’t larger.

In June, I wrote at Deep-Sea News how an ancient coastline through the south is reflected today in the voting patterns through a linkage of plankton, soil, cotton, slavery, and demography. A little teaser:

Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart.  Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American.  The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less.  Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg.  And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time.  These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections.  Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline.

Robert Krulwich discusses this pattern and my story this week at his NPR blog.

These same counties went mostly blue in 2004 and 2000. Why? Well, the best answer, says marine biologist Craig McClain, may be an old one, going back before the Civil War, before 1776, before Columbus, back more than 100 million years to the days when the Deep South was under water. Those counties, as he writes here, went for Obama because trillions and trillions and trillions of teeny sun-loving creatures died there. He’s talking about plankton. That’s why the Republicans can’t carry those counties. Blame plankton.

My first lead author paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science!

McClain, C.R., A.P. Allen, D.P. Tittensor, and M.A. Rex (2012) The Energetics of Life on the Deep Seafloor.Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, U.S.A. online early

With frigid temperatures and virtually no in situ productivity, the deep oceans, Earth’s largest ecosystem, are especially energy-deprived systems. Our knowledge of the effects of this energy limitation on all levels of biological organization is very incomplete. Here, we use the Metabolic Theory of Ecology to examine the relative roles of carbon flux and temperature in influencing metabolic rate, growth rate, lifespan, body size, abundance, biomass, and biodiversity for life on the deep seafloor. We show that the relative impacts of thermal and chemical energy change across organizational scales. Results suggest that individual metabolic rates, growth, and turnover proceed as quickly as temperatureinfluenced biochemical kinetics allow but that chemical energy limits higher-order community structure and function. Understanding deep-sea energetics is a pressing problem because of accelerating climate change and the general lack of environmental regulatory policy for the deep oceans.

At Deep-Sea News I discuss the paper, “The Great Recession of the Deep Oceans”

Why am I convinced that millions of people are wrong and “Dr. M” is right? Simple, he’s a geek and he did his homework

Which will now (and must) become a new byline for this website!

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.

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

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!

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.

• Gonzalez, R.T. (2012) The ocean floor is like a rainforest where feces and dead animals rain from the sky. io9 Jan-10
• Keim, B. (2012) The bounty of species in a single scoop of mud. Wired Science Jan-6
• Reed, C. (2012) A penny for your bivalves. Discovery News Jan-27