Carnival Atmosphere Extends Across Oceans

Happy World Ocean day – at least, to all of you in the western hemisphere, since by coincidence I am writing this at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, meaning that for the whole eastern hemisphere it’s already tomorrow. Weird.

The good ocean advocates over at Blogfish organized a blog carnival to celebrate the day. Lead blogfish Mark Powell (no relation, but there’s more about him here) compiled links and summaries for a few dozen thoughtful ocean bloggers. He ends with a fitting conclusion: Who knew there were so many of us?

Or that we were so good? A fascinating post at Zooillogix on creeping crinoids shows something that looks sort of a like a zombie underwater sunflower tiptoeing across the seafloor in a totally Tim Burtonish way. I’d say it even beats out the walking octopus from a few years ago.

The Surfrider Foundation puts in a good word for menhaden, those teeny schooling fish that people have been hauling out from Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere on the East Coast for decades.

Oceana has been filming French fishermen illegally using drift nets, and apparently the fishermen recently attempted a raid to confiscate the evidence.  Didn’t work.

Pharyngula even gets into the game with some background on how an octopus can change color so fast. Not to be outdone, the Daily Kos has about 1,000 words on how pearls form (Hint: they’re not the tears of angels, nor are they the result of an oyster swallowing a dewdrop. Interestingly, they also don’t come from a grain of sand.)

The blog links just keep coming: Gulf Restoration Network snuck one into the comments section, correcting an absence of news from the Gulf of Mexico. (The Scribbler spent a good portion of high school a small distance above the Gulf of Mexico, hanging off the side of a catamaran.)

And if you’re too on-the-go to sit still for all this silliness, take your ocean blog with you at cephalopodcast. It is a carnival, after all.

Now, to find the frozen fried Twinkies.

Carnival badge: cephalopodcast