Boooooring.

I looked for deep sea cyclists, but they're much harder to find.

ogged, you hater. These are awesome.

ogged, you hater.

In-joke reference: comments 6, 7, and 15.

I love Pokemon!

What the hell sort of creature is the "Big Red", exactly? Is it some distant relative of a jellyfish?

And I'm fairly certain that if one of those Scaly Dragonfish ever crawled out of my toilet, I'd die of fright. Especially because I can just tell by looking at that thing that the 32cm one they found is just a little baby. The parents are probably about 6m each. Bleck.

The 5th photo, the "unidentified species" that looks like a disembodied pair of lips, is freaking me out.

I maintain, notwithstanding the injoke-explication, that ogged is a hater.

Hundreds of deep-sea species new to science are disappearing before they can be identified or studied, oceanographers are warning. The organisms are being pushed to extinction by trawlers targeting undersea volcanic mountains called seamounts.

5: yes, almost certainly. Radial symmetry, so it's not some sort of octopus.
7: it's a ctenophore, or comb jelly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophore
And, yes, distinctly freaky.

Articles like that linked in 9 make me angry enough to seriously contemplate terrorist activity. (Of the ELF variety.) It seems profoundly wrong to just sit around doing nothing, and blowing shit up is about the only thing I can think to do. Probably wouldn't ultimately do any good, but at least it's something. The ocean floors will be trawled bare before any sort of international regulations are seriously contemplated, much less effectively implemented. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,

No Brock, I don't think growing the human population even larger is going to help at all.

I wasn't talking to you, M/tch, I was talking to the endangered deep-sea species. Their only hope is to fuck like crazy.

I wasn't talking to you, M/tch, I was talking to the endangered deep-sea species.

Until I saw the byline I was sure that was Emerson talking . . . .

The ocean floors will be trawled bare before any sort of international regulations are seriously contemplated, much less effectively implemented.

Didn't Joni Mitchell put it, "all in all it seems to go, that you don't what we've got til it's gone"? That's the name of the game for unowned and unprotected resources like the seamounts, or even the crashing tuna fisheries.

But some progress IS being made on seamounts, such as the December 2006 UN resoultion and related action by various countries and regional fisheries management councils, as described here. Don't forget that the Bush administration acted last year to create the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument , the largest Marine Protected Area in the world. According to Wikipedia, "The monument covers roughly 140,000 square miles (360,000 km²) of reefs, atolls and shallow and deep sea (out to 50 miles offshore) in the Pacific Ocean — larger than all of America's National Parks combined. It contains approximately 10 percent of the tropical shallow water coral reef habitat (i.e., 0 to 100 fathoms) in U.S. territory."

We need more of these, and we need them to be actually DEFENDED. Otherwise, they are just pieces of paper, and to the lions and hyenas (and our dinner plates) go the spoils, with most being dumped overboard as unwanted by-catch.

We need more of these, and we need them to be actually DEFENDED.

Yes. If necessary, with CARRIER BATTLE GROUPS.

on't forget that the Bush administration acted last year to create the Papah?naumoku?kea Marine National Monument

I'm on record at this very blog acknowledging this as the Bush administration's one unambiguously positive achievement.