stay salty

You don't need to have a grand purpose for living. You don't need to make waves.

While the focus is often on transportation and energy generation, about one third to one fourth of global carbon emissions come from our food systems. This means that making these systems more efficient, such as by reducing wasting energy on food that never makes it to market, is a big deal--as well as an important economic factors for farmers.

In regions where grid electricity is unreliable or inaccessibly expensive, the lack of access to reliable refrigeration greatly increases the risk that harvested food will spoil before it can reach market. Farmers also have less agency in when and where to sell their food when they have to rush to sell it before it spoils.

fifa kills whales 💔

Wyland has said any financial recovery from the suit would support public art, ocean conservation, and environmental education through his foundation.

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

hey y’all! i need to travel out of state for a few days to attend to some important family stuff, so i’m running a store-wide sale to try and make up for the work i’m missing. everything in my shop is 20% off through monday, including beaded earring preorders ❤️ most of these pieces have free US shipping as well!

From the article:

Citizen scientists have discovered what they believe is one of the largest coral colonies ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef. The coral spans approximately 111 metres in maximum length and covers an estimated area of 3,973 sq m – about half the size of a soccer field. The Pavona clavus coral was first found by Jan Pope in waters a few hours offshore from Cairns. It was identified as part of the Great Reef Census, a citizen science project run by Citizens of the Reef. Pope, who has been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for 35 years, described it as “a very surreal underwater landscape. It looks like a rolling meadow.”

The goal of the Great Reef Census is to find "hotspots of resilience"--places where reefs are doing better than average so that larvae from those locations can be used to repopulate harder hit regions of the Great Barrier Reef.

Environmental advocacy and the LGBTQ+ rights movement share a common purpose: protecting vulnerable communities, caring for the spaces we all call home, and creating a world where we all can flourish. Our world is brightest when people can live authentically, love freely, and be embraced for who they are. From rainbow reefs to shimmering tides, diversity makes our blue planet stronger, healthier, and more inspiring.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Just in time for World Oceans Day on June 8, TIME's new Oceans Issue highlights the forests and jungles and life! that live below the surface of the sea.

Ever wondered what a sleeping seal sounds like?

Sea star wasting disease has been brutally decimating sea star populations up and down the West Coast for about a decade. It's been a frustrating and devastating mystery for a long time.

Sunflower sea stars are one of the hardest hit species, with 87% of the population wiped out in some areas and total extinction in others. Sea star die offs are particularly bad, because they prevent sea urchin populations from getting out of control. Sea urchins feed on the kelp that forms the basis of the whole ecosystem, so without sea stars the kelp forests take a big hit.

Now scientists have identified a bacteria that is very likely causing the disease, which is related to the bacteria that causes cholera in humans.

While this is just a first step for recovery, it means that sea stars and habitats can be tested for this bacteria before reintroducing them to previously diseased habitat. Scientists can also begin to study this bacteria more intensely and potentially find a cure.