Update

Last Friday we launched the SEACOOS instrumented buoy 20 miles off of Cape Lookout. We had a pretty good day for it and things went relatively smoothly. The swell had picked up by the afternoon, so there were some interesting moments once we got it in the water while it was still attached to the relatively small (48') boat. I took some photos and video and should post some soon.

Tuesday I helped out another graduate student, May, with her project in the Cape Fear river estuary. We had to get on the road at 5:00 AM in order to be down there (near Wilmington) early, due to the tides. We spent the whole day doing transects, very boring work, with an ADCP (acoustic doppler current profiler) and a CTD (conductivity/temperature/depth) instrument. Unfortunately, about 7:00 PM, on one of the final CTD casts, the (extremely expensive) instrument was no longer attached to the end of the cable when I brought it up. So now the thing is sitting in about 47 feet of tannic water, probably buried in a lot of gunk. Along with all the data it logged. We got back to IMS around 10:00 PM, exhausted and depressed.

We talked about diving for it, but it wouldn't be too likely to succeed due to near-zero visibility, and possibly hazardous as well, due to visibility, possible entanglements and the fact that it's in a busy shipping channel. Hence, we've decided to drag our sorry asses down there again tomorrow and try to dredge it up with a grapnel anchor.

Ah the glamorous life of an oceanographer. When do I get to ride Shamu?

On the subject of sharks again, yesterday the institute was doing its monthly shark trip, run by an emeritus faculty member, Dr Schwartz, a shark biologist. Long lines are set and sharks tagged and released. I decided to go along, but we got out and seas were too rough to work on deck, so we turned around and came back in. It just hasn't been my week.

Speaking of Freak Occurances...

I was looking at cnn.com a bit earlier and noticed that the guy who did the voice of Tigger in the old Winnie the Pooh cartoons died. I remembered seeing a headline this morning on the same site, but I thought it said Piglet, not Tigger, so I either misread it or there was an error in the headline. But it turns out they both died, one day apart. Neither story mentions the other death.

The piglet guy, John Fiedler, also played Mr. Peterson on the old Bob Newhart series.

Last of the Shark Bull

After sleeping on it, I've decided that last night's shark post was a crock.

Sharks simply aren't dangerous animals. Period. Beach attendance is more than 100 million every year in the U.S. There are about 40 attacks annually, most minor, and about every two years, one person dies.

A much smaller number of people -- about 30 million -- ride horses in the United States, yet 50,000 people wind up in the emergency room due to contact with horses each year. I couldn't find national death statistics, but figures from a study by the U of Kentucky suggest that 6.7% of these injuries would be fatal, implying that over 3000 Americans are killed each year in incidents involving horses. The majority of these are riding accidents, but 19% of injuries are due to kicks. In other words, if the percentage for fatal injuries is similar, horses kick roughly 600 people to death in the U.S. every year.

I don't have the real figures yet, but what statistics I am gleaning also suggest that dairy cows are many times more vicious and dangerous than sharks, kicking or trampling a significant number of people to death each year. Not bulls. Cows. I shit you not.

OK, so a cow pasture is a much more dangerous place than a shark-infested beach or dive site (both of which really ought to be called human-infested shark sites). But lets be a bit irrational and suppose for some reason that we want to minimize our risk of dying at the beach, even though it's not a particularly dangerous place and we don't spend much time there anyway. Wouldn't our risk of dying at the beach be a little lower if there weren't sharks around? Nope. In 2000 there were 132 beach fatalities, mostly by drowning. None were due to sharks. The greatest number of people killed in a single year from shark attack in the U.S. was 3, which barely amounts to round-off error compared to other beach hazards.

That's all I'm going to say about shark attacks specifically, but I'll write more about irrational fears and our obsession with freak occurances later.

More Shark Bull

As with most Florida shark attacks, the probable culprit in yesterday's fatality is the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas. The bull shark is one of the "big three" man-eaters, the others being the larger and better-known great white and tiger sharks. Though the two larger sharks are credited with more documented attacks, the bull shark is probably also responsible for many attacks by "unidentified species" because it is of medium size and unremarkable body shape and coloration, thus hard to identify. Also, it is common in the temperate seas, estuaries and even rivers of many highly populous third-world countries where attacks may not be reported at all, and so might actually be responsible for more attacks than any other species.

The coast of North Carolina where I'm living now is arguably the shipwreck diving capital of the world, and the major dive operators are right here in Morehead City. Bull sharks are regularly seen at some of these sites, and this species has not been a problem for divers, as far as I have been aware, here or elsewhere.

Curious about this, I checked the statistics in the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File and found that while bull sharks accounted for about 12% of attacks on humans overall, and more than 16% of human fatalities (again, at a very minimum, due to difficulty of identification) they accounted for only 3.8% of attacks on divers. What explains this discrepancy? I thought of several possibilities:

1) Bull sharks don't attack humans if they can see them clearly. Hence they are dangerous in the shallow murky waters close to shore, but in the deeper, clearer waters that diving takes place in they are not dangerous.

2) Some other behavioral factor makes them more dangerous in shallow water. Perhaps their feeding strategy changes in deeper water and people no longer fit the profile, whereas in shallow water they are indiscriminate feeders.

3) Bull sharks are equally dangerous animals in either environment, but are simply much more numerous in areas frequented by swimmers than those frequented by divers

I don't have any research at hand that would tell me where these sharks spend how much time, but bull sharks do have smaller eyes than other species of similar size. To me this argues strongly for hypothesis #3. The eyes are reduced because they don't use them much. They don't use them much because they spend very little time in clear water. However, I also think there may be some validity to #1 and perhaps #2.

Why does it matter? Aside from idle curiosity, if the explanation is #3 then divers on these wrecks aren't completely safe. Of course, they aren't in great danger either, given that attacks by any shark species on divers are very rare. Most of these wrecks are deep dives as recreational dives go, so the danger of a diving accident (the bends, air embolism, pneumothorax, drowning, etc) is surely much greater than the threat from the sharks. However, the bull shark would remain a much more dangerous animal than the other sharks normally encountered diving in these environments and would warrant some caution.

If the explanation is one of the first two, however, then they are much safer. Bull sharks in this environment might be no more dangerous than grey reef or sandbar sharks.

My guess, however, based on limited personal experience and hearsay is that bull sharks are not a particularly common species on dive sites worldwide. If this is the case and relative scarcity is in fact the reason for the small number of attacks on divers then they may present a small hazard to divers when present.

As it is, I would dive (in clear water) with bull sharks around, but I wouldn't spearfish (if I spearfished) and would get out of the water very quickly if I cut myself. I'd also probably avoid bright colors and jewelry (if I owned any) as usual for sharks, though I'm not sure it matters with this apparently not-very-visual species.

Shark Attack

A 14-year-old girl was killed by a shark in Florida yesterday, which of course is all over the news. I'm hoping the news-starved media don't start with the "Summer of the Shark" stories like in 2001, when the number of shark attacks was...uh, two fewer than the previous year.

Interesting statistics about shark attack:

Average number of people killed in the U.S. per year by:

• deer: 130 (automobile collision)
  
• lightening strike: 90
  
• dogs: 18
  
• sharks: 0.4
  

U.S. injuries (1996) involving:

• toilets: 43,687
  
• buckets and pails: 10,907
  
• room deodorizers: 2,599
  
• toilet bowl cleaning products: 1,567
  
• sharks: 13
  

Can Netflix Replace Television?

Since I don't have cable TV here, and Blockbuster sucks so badly, I decided to join Netflix. Now I've spent the past two days surfing the Netflix site and picking out DVDs. I haven't even received my first 3 movies yet, and I've already got 36 more stacked up in my queue.

It's fun and addictive to pick out films from such a huge selection. I'll never be starved for pre-packaged, sofa-based entertainment again!

I'm wondering if Netflix can permanently replace television for me. Thanks to the proliferation of "reality" shows it's finally gotten to the point that there isn't one single prime time show any night of the week that I have the slightest interest in watching. There are a few oddball things I might want to see on cable, but not really enough to justify the cost.

The only thing I'll miss is the Sopranos, whenever it comes back, but that's probably another year off anyway.

Hello from Morehead City

I've been in Morehead City for almost three weeks now. I'm sharing a house with a Felix, a marine biologist at NC State's lab.

So far, so good. I'm slowly getting acclimated and am enjoying living near the beach. I've probably even lost a little weight and gotten a bit of a suntan.

Morehead City is small, and there isn't a great deal to do here that isn't ocean-related. When I get out here for good, I definitely think I'll need to get a little boat of some kind. Rents are cheap -- I'll definitely make out better here that I would have in Seattle, or even Chapel Hill.

I saw Batman Begins in the theater with Felix the other night. I thought it was pretty decent, even though it was about two-thirds back story. As the director pointed out in an interview I saw, it's pretty hard to explain why a guy would dress up in a bat suit to fight crime.

Last night I was in the mood to see a documentary, so I rented "Capturing the Friedmans." It was a very strange film that documented the disintegration of a family when the father and one of the sons are accused of child molestation. Dad was definitely a pedophile and surely molested some child, some time, though apparently not those for which he went to prison. The tragic part was that his son, who seems almost certain to be completely innocent, went to jail as well, for 13 years.

After finding child pornography in Friedmans's house, the police started interviewing children who had attended computer classes in his basement (he was a retired school teacher). Sure enough, some claimed to have been molested, though high-pressure, leading interview techniques and even hypnosis (which has been proven capable of implanting false memories) were used. The stories the children told were totally unbelievable -- mass anal rapes, occuring week after week for months, after which the parents would show up to pick up the kids and not notice a hair out of place. Was there not a single person with a shred of common sense involved in the prosecution?

Apparently not the impartial judge, who actually said on camera that "she never had a moment's doubt" about the defendants' guilt, even though the case never got to trial due to a plea bargain.

The children's ridiculous stories implicated not only the father, but his 18-year-old son as well. (Unlike the case with the father, there was no other evidence that the son was a pedophile). Facing something like 300 years in prison if convicted (which he likely would have been, given the publicity), the son pled guilty, got 6 to 18 years and would up serving 13.

Here's a question to ponder. If a judge is presented with a signed confession with blood on it, what does he do? He throws it out of court. A confession obtained under threat of violence is no confession at all. So why is it any different when the threat, instead of a beating, is a 300 year sentence?

And yet here is the slimebag judge defending herself at the premier, emphasizing how the kid admitted the crime in open court. This impartial judge who never had a moment's doubt about his guilt and who dangled over the head of a terrified 18-year-old the prospect of dying in prison.

This sort of thing happens all the time, actually; the justice system has no intention of giving anyone but the very wealthy a fair trial, and pressures most people into pleading out, whether they are guilty or innocent.

What a country we live in.