Today, we are answering a very important question: is it okay to eat fish? Or rather, we are going to attempt to answer this controversial question. Can it be ethical to eat fish? The answer is not as clear-cut as I’d like it to be, so let’s get into this mess.
Today, we are talking about one of my favorite groups of animals: mollusks. Yep, the group that contains snails and all that slimy stuff, but also octopuses and other cool stuff. Plus, snails are cool if you get past their sliminess. And I’m a marine ecologist, so the slimy bit doesn’t really concern me, as the snails I encounter are wet anyway.
Today, we are continuing our precarious climb along the ever-changing tree of life. Once I survive the three weeks of full-time lectures, we’ll make things a little more diverse on here again. There are quite a few exciting things I want to talk about, but my brain is refusing to do more than chew up this prepared content. So, today we are working hard to reach the mollusks because you know how much I love octopuses.
Today, we are going to talk about one of my favorite animals: corals. Yep, I said animal. Those plant-looking things are definitely animals. It’s even weirder than that, though. Let’s dive in.
I hadn’t planned another detour from our biodiversity series this week, but after spending a day watching propaganda from both sides on the state of fish populations and fisheries, I couldn’t help but talk about sustainable fisheries.
Today, things are getting more and more colorful with sea jellies of all shapes and forms, with rainbow-light sea combs, and more. Sea jellies are usually called jellyfish, though they are far from fish, and sea combs are usually called comb jellies, though they aren’t jellies. Oh, the fun naming of taxonomy.
Are sponges the oldest animals? What kind of sponge is that squarepanted yellow idiot with the pineapple? Are the inner skins of sponges made up of sperm? From SpongeBob to nature, we're talking sponges today.
How do you offset your carbon footprint? You plant trees. Right? Well, as we established in the episode on primary production, trees are actually not the major player when it comes to carbon offsetting. For that, we need to look at underwater “forests.”
Today, I will attempt to convince all of us that plankton is cool and worth our attention. We'll talk about what plankton is and why it's so important for our climate.
In this episode, we cover both the bacterial stuff and the viruses. Next week, I’ll try my best to convince you that plankton is cool, and then we’ll slowly move on to more and more complex life.