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My little corner of the DoubleX universe has been silent for the past month. In the tradition of caddish sailors everywhere, I left without even saying goodbye. It's not that I don't care about you, it's just that preparing to lead a scientific cruise to the middle of the North Pacific takes a lot of time and concentration! And then we didn't have Internet at sea! I still love you, DoubleX readers, I swear!

I've been off exploring the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, better known these days as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The North Pacific Gyre is a natural rotation of the ocean formed by the trade winds and the jet streams. It acts like a big, slow whirlpool, turning clockwise and trapping floating material in the middle. This is the doldrums, so it's not often visited by sailors or even cargo ships. (They tend to go north where the circumference of the globe is smaller.)

The SEAPLEX expedition, led by yours truly, spent three weeks at sea deploying oceanographic instruments to catch and measure marine life and associated plastic. We were really in the middle of nowhere, floating between California and Hawaii 1,000 miles from land. In 20 days, we only saw two ships. (You can see our cruise track on Google Maps.)

Though we didn't find a giant floating garbage dump or a vast garbage island, we did find a lot of plastic bits. Little plastic pieces smaller than a fingernail came up in every single one of our surface net tows for over 1,700 miles. We also found lots of bottles, buckets, and unidentifiable bits inhabited by crabs and barnacles. For more on the SEAPLEX cruise, check out our expedition blog and website.

I'm back in the lab now and getting ready to spend months in the lab sorting through my samples. I've got hundreds of jars of plastic and animals that I collected while at sea, and I now have to go through them all to understand how much plastic we found, and what animals it was associated with. But fear not, gentle readers, the Oyster's Garter will remain my go-to place for a refreshing blogging break. Will you take me back?

Photograph via Scripps_Oceanography's Flickr.

Tags: North Pacific Gyre, oceanography, Science, trash

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The modern equivalent of blaming Eve for the fall of mankind may be blaming Stone Age societies for today's gender relations. Sharon Begley has a nice summary of this attitude in her recent Newsweek story on evolutionary psychology:

Men who were promiscuous back then were more evolutionarily fit, the researchers reasoned, since men who spread their seed widely left more descendants. By similar logic, evolutionary psychologists argued, women who were monogamous were fitter; by being choosy about their mates and picking only those with good genes, they could have healthier children. Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree.

So if all of this is true, it should be true for all humankind. It should especially be true in modern hunting and gathering societies. Unfortunately, as Begley details in her article, the evidence rarely bears out the these theories. (I am aware that not all evolutionary psychologist are obsessed with cavemen sex, but here I have chosen sensationalism over dry talk of spandrels. Sorry.)

One of the strongest trends in modern mating is women's preference for taller males. In post-industrial cultures, there are far fewer women married to men that are shorter than them than would be expected by statistical chance. Are women hard-wired to think that taller men would kill way more giraffes than shorter men, thus providing a luxurious Stone Age lifestyle? How better to test this than to look at a society that actually hunts giraffes?

The Hadza of Tanzania are among the few hunter-gatherer people left on earth. Despite threats from agriculturalists, diminishing game, and an Emirati land grab, the Hadza have maintained their traditional lifestyle. To see if actual hunter-gatherers had height preferences in their mates, Rebecca Sear and Frank W. Marlowe examined mate selection in the Hadza. They also wanted to see if the Hadza married people that had similar physical characteristics to themselves—for example, did tall, thin Hadza marry other tall, thin Hadza?

The Hadza proved to be far less judgemental about height than the Western press. There was no evidence of height preference: About as many women were married to shorter men as would have been expected by random chance. There was also no correlation between the couples' height, weight, BMI, or percent body fat. Sear and Marlowe concluded that "mating is random with respect to size in this population."

Why don't the Hadza care about height? Sear and Marlowe speculated that since the Hadza live in small, homogenous communities, they could make decisions based on the entire health history of a potential partner, obviating the need for height as a proxy of health. Or height might actually be a disadvantage in a food-limited society, since large people require more food. Though this study doesn't explain why Westerners value male height so highly, it does illustrate the peril of assuming that human preferences are set in Stone Age stone.

Photograph of a tall couple by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: gender, Science, what men want in a mate, women

Samantha Henig just reported on the Museum of Sex exhibit on the Sex Lives of Animals. I like gay giraffes and well-endowed lady hyenas as much as the next person (OK, probably more), but the list struck me as shockingly mammal-biased. Vertebrates—and that includes non-fuzzy critters like fish—comprise a mere 5 percent of the world's species. The spineless have kinky sex, too! Here's a list of a few of my personal favorites:

- As I wrote on the original Oyster's Garter blog, barnacles have the most impressive penises in the sea. A barnacle’s penis can be 8 times longer than the barnacle’s entire body. Barnacles are well-endowed because they’re cemented in place—in order to advance the species, they need to, um, “visit” their neighbors. (That’s also why barnacles are simultaneous hermaphrodites that both give and receive the glorious gift of crustacean life. Separate sexes wouldn’t work, since the only neighbor in reach could be the same sex.)

- Marine flatworms, also simultaneous hermaphrodites, fence with razor-sharp penises. Since they lack a female orifice, sex occurs when the loser gets stabbed right through their body wall. The technical term? Hypodermic impregnation. Some spiders do it too. Ow.

- From horrifying spiked beetle penises to earwig penises that occasionally snap right off in the midst of sex, insects have all kinds of bizarre sexual practices. But you don't have to take my word for it—check out Season 1 of Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno series, where she dramatizes doin' it as all kinds of bug.

Tags: animal behavior, invertebrates, Science, sex

Sometimes reading science media makes me hate being a scientist. In response to poor media coverage of the squid strandings in San Diego, I spent all of last week muttering "Humboldt squid are not giant squid! I mean, they're large, but giant squid are a totally different species! No, colossal squid are ALSO a different species!" It makes me feel anal and no fun.

This Wired piece on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs also made me want to smash some test tubes. It's a stunningly inane list of animal adaptations that the author thinks are weird, uncontaminated by even the most basic knowledge of evolution. For example, No. 1:

Sea mammal blowhole. Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from water via gills. Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around.

I know this is supposed to be funny, but I find it so sad. It isn't cool enough that a cow-like mammal has evolved into a denizen of the open sea? It isn't neat that dolphins have evolved amazing echolocation, and that humpback whales use their air-breathing abilities to hunt? (Not to mention that only cetaceans—whales and dolphins—have blowholes. Other sea mammals, like seals and manatees, just stick their noses in the air.)

Evolution is all about using the tools at hand, and if something works it's good enough. Whales can't evolve gills out of nothing, but they can move their nostril to the back of their head and be successful. Kangaroos can't suddenly evolve a placenta, but being a marsupial works fine.

This is what makes the study of evolution so fascinating. There's a vast array of adaptations that have all evolved from a finite set of tools. Criticizing an adaptation as being "bad" without even a trivial attempt to understand where it came from and why it might be so ignores the most interesting aspects of evolution. And that is far worse than the Wired list's No. 8, having your sluggy sweetie gnaw off your penis. (Ok, maybe not.)

Tags: animals, evolution, Science

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dead famous author lacking possession of a good copyright, must be in want of some supernatural horror. Yesterday, Quirk Books announced the sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. My first reaction was a giant squeal—Austen and oceanic beasts together at last! But my second reaction was considerably less enthusiastic.

In Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the unfortunate Colonel Brandon has been transformed into a "hideous man-monster." Judging from the cover, his beard of tentacles resembles Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean. Upon seeing his tentacled visage, I realized that Quirk Books has fallen prey to a dread literary trope. Why must horrors from the deep always have tentacles?

Sea monsters were not always be-tentacled. Sure, the kraken lurked about, but there were sea serpents and sea monks and pleisosaurs. Even HP Lovecraft, the 19th century author most associated with horrors from the deep, did not limit his madness-inducing creatures to tentacles—the minions of the evil squid-god Cthulhu get turned into fish-people with bug eyes and gills, with nary a tentacle in sight. But bringing romance into the picture seems to evoke the Japanese tradition of naughty roving tentacles and reduce sea monster diversity.

There are plenty of horrific appendages in the sea, just waiting to be appropriated by a sufficiently creative author. There are giant teeth and giant claws and animals that barf out their intestines when pissed off. There are crustaceans with clubs the speed of a 22-caliber bullet and worms that have genitalia that grow eyes and swim away. There's even a snail that shoots poisonous darts. It's time to expand your marine vocabulary, people!

For ever so much more about the softer side of sea monsters, see Dr. Balan U.S. Nubilus' disquisition titled "A Brief Essay on the Sad Lack of Imagination in Invertebrate Oriented Erotica with Brief Notes on the Lascivious Nature of Both the Lophotrochozoa and Ecdysozoa, or, Getting Beyond 'Hur hur! That Squid Tentacle Looks like Penis!'" It is text-only but NSFW unless you work in an oceanic adult store.

Real-life tentacles are the very opposite of romantic, anyway. Most squid have serrated teeth lining their suckers that are meant to grab and tear. If Marianne smooched Colonel Brandon's tentacled beard, he could accidentally rip her face off. That's not the way to a lady's heart. It would be much easier to emulate predatory snails and simply drill right through the chest.

Tags: animals, Jane Austen, ocean, Science, sex, tentacles

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Last week, the Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), released a survey comparing how scientists and the general public view science. Lots of juicy nuggets were picked up in news stories—the difference between the public's opinion of scientists and scientists' opinion of the public, clashes on hot-button issues such as global warming, and the public's view of the preeminance of American science.

But no one reported on the gap in science literacy between men and women. To measure general science knowledge, non-scientists were given a 12-question survey on basic science. (If you want to take the quiz yourself before reading further, go here.) Questions included "textbook" basic science facts (Is an electron bigger than an atom?) and "contemporary" science news questions (Scientists believe what gas causes global temperatures to rise?).

Overall, men answered 8.1 questions correctly, while women lagged at 7.4. Even when accounting for age and education (people 30-49 and people with the most education did best), men got more questions right than women. The biggest differences were on questions about lasers and Mars, those tropes of babes-in-space-bikinis sci-fi novels. Only 37 percent of women knew that lasers do not work by focusing sound, compared to 57 percent of men. And just over half of women (54 percent) knew that water had been recently discovered on Mars, compared to 69 percent of men.

The three questions in which women did better than men related to health. Women knew that aspirin prevents heart attacks (94 percent to men's 89 percent), that stem cells could develop into many kinds of cells (54 percent to men's 51 percent) and that antibiotics do not kill viruses (59 percent to men's 49 percent).

Before I speculate on the reasons behind our delicate ladybrains containing less science, I want to note that the report did not provide obvious (at least, I couldn't find them) measures of statistical significance. For example, if the standard error is plus or minus 2 percentage points, there might be no actual difference between men's or women's understanding of stem cells. However, a difference of 20 percentage points, as in the laser question, is certainly significant.

So why did women do worse than men in all but the health questions? Do men follow the science and technology news, supplementing Popular Mechanics with contemplation of laser-wielding Martians? Is Dr. Mom, that stalwart of TV pharmaceutical ads, a real life phenomenon? Or is the stereotype that women are the caretakers of their family's health but just don't care about hard science self-fulfilling?

I am totally in love with science and lasers so frankly I have no idea. Double X readers, you are smart and well-read people who are not necessarily into science. What do you think?

Tags: communication, Science, science in society, women in science

As the Senate starts debating the climate-change bill, the pseudoscientific nonsense coming out of Exxon-funded think tanks will no doubt increase. The latest denialist rant, a memo allegedly suppressed by the EPA, sounded plausible to non-scientists but was easily demolished by actual climate scientists. It's tempting to follow Paul Krugman and shout "Traitorous fiends!" instead of getting into annoying technical arguments over prevalence of sun spots and historical concentrations of carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, debunking the climate change denialist talking points is important, particuarly in the aftermath of the narrow margin on the climate legislation in the House.

Recently, the popular denialist blog Watts Up With That gleefully announced that global temperature for June was exactly average, showing neither warming nor cooling. The author, Anthony Watt, said that "...this should give some pause to those who are rational thinkers. For those that see only dogma, I expect this will be greeted with jeers." Oh noes! Does one month of data utterly demolish the idea of global warming?

Of course not. In the short term, no change of temperature or even cooling is completely consistent with long-term warming. A shiny new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters and described in the excellent blog Climate Shifts, explains why periods of cooling don't contradict an overal global warming trend. Essentially, there's going to be little up and down squiggles overlying an overall increase in temperature. Even if we're in a cool-temperature trending squiggle for a decade, the larger upward trend towards higher temperatures remains.

It can take specialized knowledge to figure out why pseudoscientific climate arguments are wrong. So in case you end up arguing with your cranky uncle at the next family barbecue, here's my favorite resources on global climate change.

- Skeptical Science has a list of every denialist argument, along with debunkings from peer-reviewed science. And it has a cute little thermomenter showing which is the most popular!

- Grist Magazine has a list of arguments organized by Stages of Denial, Scientific Topics, Types of Argument, and Levels of Sophistication.

-Real Climate is written by working climate scientists and tends to be more technical. Go here for the real deal on the data, or if you want to stun your friends and co-workers with statements like "But in any case, the trend in from 2003 to 2008 in the Levitus data (the Domingues et al data does not extend past 2003), is still positive but with an uncertainty (both in the trend calculation and systematically) that makes it impossible to state whether there has been a significant change." They also have a handy list of responses to common denialist arguments.

Tags: climate change, denialism, Science

James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau are worried about your appliances gently rusting to death in the event of a human apocalypse. So they've made household items that can sustain themselves by catching and eat pests. According to New Scientist,

The pests are lured in and digested by an internal microbial fuel cell. This exploits the way microbes generate free electrons and hydrogen ions when oxidising chemicals for energy. Electronics can be powered by directing the electrons around an external circuit before reuniting them with the ions.

There's a fly-paper covered alarm clock, a mouse-trapping coffee table, and even a Venus fly-trap-like lamp. My favorite, though, is the fly-stealing robot. Designed to lure spiders into building their webs between its pegs and then to steal their flies, it serves no purpose whatsoever except as strange wall-mounted performance art. (I leave it up to my colleage Nick to decide whether a fly-eating wall hanging is in good taste—or just tastes good.)

In an interview with New Scientist, Auger said, "If the system fails, the grid goes down and all humans die, these robots could go on living so long as the flies don't go with us." But the critical question is this: if furniture eats flesh but isn't itself alive, does it count as a zombie? Because I want to see Sean of the Dead remade with ravenous coffee tables and bloodthirsty lamps.

Tags: Design, furniture, robots, Science, zombies

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Sharks have a serious public relations problem. It's understandable—it's hard for people to feel bad for an animal that ate an adorable surfer girl's arm. But sharks are in serious trouble. To paraphrase Alan Moore, people shouldn't be afraid of sharks. Sharks should be afraid of people.

A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released last week, found that more than 30 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction. An additional 24 percent of species were classified as Near Threatened. These are not sharks that were lining up to eat you—of the 350 shark species, only 10 are considered dangerous to people. (Seriously, people, the most dangerous part of your visit to the beach is the car ride there! Compare 10 shark deaths per year in the entire world to 40,000 auto deaths each year in the U.S. alone.) But the declining species are sharks that are strange and beautiful and important to the ocean's health.

Sharks are slow to grow and reproduce, and their decline is primarily due to rampant and wasteful overfishing. The most well-known practice is shark finning, where the valuable fins are removed and the rest of the animal thrown back to rot. Though shark finning is illegal in many locations, poaching is rampant, particularly in isolated, poor areas such as the Galapagos. The lesser-known cause of sharks' decline is as bycatch in other fisheries. Millions of sharks are unintentionally killed every year in the tuna and swordfish fisheries, alongside turtle and seabirds and other unwanted fish.

People are indoctrinated into fearing sharks in childhood. Even the quasi-friendly-sharks in Finding Nemo aren't nice sharks after all. But like all top predators, sharks are critical to maintaining the stability and health of their ecosystems. Without sharks, Nemo and all his buddies would be homeless, their coral reef demolished through a series of food chain breakdowns. To help sharks, consider buying fish that are caught with minimal bycatch. And never, never let your children see Jaws.

Photograph of a Caribbean reef shark by Tom Brakefield/Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: environment, extinct species, IUCN, ocean, Science, sharks

Last week, the United States Global Research program released a report on the potential impacts of climate change in the United States. Based on a year and a half of work and a consensus from 13 federal agencies, the 198-page report makes the doom, gloom, and destruction that await us available to all. Still, who reads 198-page government reports? Well, I do.

So in an attempt to bring some amusement to a dark situation, I’ve summarized the main points of the climate change report using five different literary (ok, quasi-literary) styles. Each vignette is set in the year 2100 under the “higher emissions scenario,” which is a conservative estimate that presumes some kind of international reduction in emissions.

However, our current climate change trajectory is much, much worse than any of the scenarios considered in the report. We’re emitting so much carbon that we’re exceeding climate scientists’ worst nightmares. But I’ve never been a horror fan, so I’ve stuck with the more optimistic predictions here.

Genre: Noir

Climate change prediction: The U.S. will be seven degrees hotter.

The moment she walked into my office, the temperature got two degrees hotter. She smoked like a coal-fired power plant and had a carbon footprint that went all the way to 850 molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of atmosphere. That was more than double the carbon in the atmosphere now, and more carbon than I really wanted to handle. This dame was hot—and I mean seven degrees of global temperature increase hot. And she wasn’t even the worse-case scenario. Even her smart cousin, who stabilized climate change at a mere four degrees of global temperature rise, looked like she could kill some penguins before breakfast and wash them down with torrential flooding. I poured myself a shot of ice water. I was going to need it.

Genre: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Climate change prediction: Flooding in the northern US, drought in the southern US

It was a dark and stormy night in the Northern U.S., not so dark as it had been from all the fossil-fuel-lit streetlights, but still pretty dark. Rain threw itself violently against the huddled houses—considerably more rain than there had been when Bulwer-Lytton wrote about the very first dark and stormy night, since warm air holds more water and since the air was a lot warmer than it had been 100 years ago. The night in the southern U.S., particularly the Southwest, was still dark, but considerably less stormy due to more droughts and dramatically decreased snow pack.

Genre: Haiku

Climate change prediction: Three to four foot sea level rise

The ocean creeps up
And floods the New York subway.
Three to four foot rise.
South Florida floods!
Don’t retire to West Palm.
You’ll need gills to golf.

Genre: Romance
Climate change prediction: Increased wildfires and insect infestations, mismatches between animals’ life cycles and their food sources

Flynt McKraken’s powerful arms glistened with sweat as he uncoiled his long, thick fire hose. It was dry and hot, like it always was these days. Warmer winters meant more tree-eating beetles and less rain, so every bit of summer lightening or power line sparking could lead to vast wildfires. But it wasn’t just the fire that made McKraken sweat. Katarina was out there, passionately looking for her precious butterflies. The plants the butterflies ate bloomed too early now, before the butterflies had a chance to emerge from their cocoons, and now they were all but extinct. So raven-haired Katarina had wandered far into the back country, and now she was trapped. At the thought of losing her, not even the intense heat of the wildfire warmed the cold ashes in McKraken’s turgid heart.

Genre: New Yorker short story
Climate change prediction: Increased heat leads to worse air quality in cities from ozone and higher pollen loads, insect-borne diseases increase

They sat at the kitchen table, silent except for the gentle susurrations of her asthma. Now that the number of days hotter than 90 degrees in Chicago had quadrupled, she wheezed all the time. He remembered a day, long in the past, where they had had a picnic without worrying about pollen or West Nile virus. They had sat together on a blanket, eating brie and arugula, laughing at the little dogs in coats. He hated her wheezing. The microwave beeped.