Tom Iwanicki

Experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have rediscovered a recording and determined it’s probably the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely vocalist? A humpback whale. 🐋 spklr.io/6007Dxy1Z

📷: BlackBox
🎙️: Luis Lamar, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

From our new paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol... w/ @neurofishh.bsky.social @gkafetzis.bsky.social @denilsson.bsky.social

Looking across animals, the vertebrate eye is an obvious outlier. Why is it so different that other highly visual animals?

You heckin' did it! Congratulations 🪼

Picture of a sandy beach littered with marine debris.

If you've spent much time at the beach, you may be familiar with plastic debris washing ashore. Is it dangerous? Colleagues @oceanconservancy.org have developed a risk assessment framework for mortality due to plastic ingestion in seabirds, marine mammals & sea turtles 📝 www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Wow. People are way too chill around an active & uncontained fire in the building they're standing in.

Starting in one minute! Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS images to be shared by NASA. YouTube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A55S...

The comet looking thing is in fact a comet, very cool how many assets were brought to bear to confirm that fact

Come to the sea surface. We got beautiful violet colored snails that cling for dear life onto a bubble raft of their own snot, too

I was a starbucks barista for a minute. Sad it has come to it but seeing this brings me joy - up with the workers!

A gorgeous wee righty 🥹

We're #hiring a new #PhD student - come join @lec-reefs.bsky.social to investigate coral reefs, MPAs, and climate impacts. 🌊 🧪🦑

Details + apply here - www.exageo.org/phd-student-...

Deadline Jan 9th! International applicants encouraged 👍

By The Wind sounds like an Oscars bait feature film from the 90s I love it

Thanks Trevor, hope it was worth the wait

Stunning! I lived on Van Island for a time, it is near and dear. You caught a lot of lefties from the looks of it thanks for sharing

Thanks for your note! We have an update that I hope answers your question ☺️ bsky.app/profile/iwan...

We have an update! bsky.app/profile/iwan...

Using participatory & traditional science we robustly support Savilov’s hypothesis that a mirrored trait plays a key role in the global distribution of By-the-wind sailor. This will help elucidate patterns in the community of animals floating on our high sea surface

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

multi-panel image showing mean streamlines of left- and right-handed sailors globally, lower section depicts wind roses where wind favoring left- (upper) and right- (lower) handed sailor stranding with proportions of each.

But are they really By-the-”WIND”? We looked at the coast of Portugal which experienced episodic strandings of lefties and righties. Under wind conditions where we predict more left- or right-handed sailor strandings, we did in fact observe that, so the wind is the likely culprit. So, altogether...

A phylogenetic tree of Velella samples showing that left- and right-handed Velella form a mixed population. An inset showed population differentiation by Fst, with left- and right-handed Velella having effectively zero population differentiation.

We used genetics to test whether lefties and righties are members of the same species and/or distinct populations. When comparing lefties and righties that found together on the North Carolina coast & lefties from Monterey Bay California, we found that sail direction came from a mixed population...

A world map with dots for left- and right-handed by-the-wind sailor, more dots corresponding to left-handed sailor are in the North and more right-handed sailors in the South. An inset shows at-sea observations in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre with pie-charts corresponding to sail direction. Exclusively right-handed sailor were observed in the central part of the gyre and proportionally more left-handed sailors appear toward the coast of North America.

Answer this age-old question. Using ~11,000 photos from @inaturalist.bsky.social and 300 samples in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre from two sea-going expeditions, we found proportionally more lefties ashore in the North, more righties in the South, and righties concentrated inside the gyre...

Screen capture of a Nature article by Robert Bieri with the text highlighted, “From the above it is apparent that the origin and occurrence of the different sizes and morphological forms of Velella and Physalia are not yet satisfactorily explained.”

Until the trail ran dry... R. Bieri saw merit in A.I. Savilov’s hypothesis, but because data was scarce (& the high seas are hard to study!) he concluded that the mystery remained. Now decades later, we combined community (citizen) science with advances in genetics and oceanography to...

A simplified depection of Savilov’s more complex hypothesis that left-handed sailors are blown outside of oceanic gyres toward the coast and right-handed sailor are blown inside gyres in the Northern Hemisphere, the opposite being the case in the Southern Hemisphere.

Savilov thought that in the Northern Hemisphere, left-handed sailors would be blown outside of gyres toward the coastline and right-handed sailors would concentrate inside gyres; the opposite being true in the Southern Hemisphere. Through the 1960s...

Drawings by A.I. Savilov, upper left a detailed drawing of a young velella having swallowed a small anchovy, right, simple cartoons of left and right handed velella and physalia showing the direction they move relative to the wind.

By-the-wind sailor are a spiraling mystery. They have a fleshy rigid sail that points to the left or right. Lefties go left and righties go right relative to the wind. This led a Soviet scientist, A.I. Savilov, to predict that sail direction had something to do with their global distribution...

text from Nature Magazine, April 1902, titled “Swarm of Velella.” it reads: The brief note from Alassio by Mr. Isaac Thompson on the extent and density of a swarm of Velella off that coast this month recalls to my mind seeing a similar scene on each of two occasions when staying at that place in April. On each occasion of the swarm there was, as I well remember, a strong wind from the east ; on each the shore became so thickly strewn with the organisms as to become unpleasantly odorous from their decay. Ch. S. Sherrington. Felixstowe, April 19. overlaid on a scene of tens of thousands of Velella floating on the sea surface stretching out toward the horizon

100 years! By-the-wind sailor, or Velella velella, have dazzled and perplexed beachgoers for ages. Their episodic strandings on beaches around the globe bring a high seas mystery and a potpourri of ocean stink, as immortalized in this account from April, 1902 in the journal Nature...

In our last thread, we left the jelly-enjoyers of Bluesky with a cliff hanger ending, in what one eager onlooker described as soap opera science 😜 ... wait no more, we are back! Grab your popcorn shrimp and come with us on a journey spanning more than...

bsky.app/profile/iwan...

High praise!!! Thanks Marina 🥹

Thanks Jim! It is with radical optimism that we keep poking and prodding at the mysteries of the beautiful blue planet

There's something that feels a bit dead about the world right now, but tens of thousands of people just came together to help us solve a 100 year old mystery about a little blue jelly, and I find that heartbreakingly hopeful:

I had student meetings yesterday for my class. It was a writing class so most meetings started with my comments on their papers, but I told them they could ask about anything. Some asked for advice for gap years, how to choose the next career step, even audio books :) my favorite question was...🧵

Today is a good day. Thank-you New York City. You are beautiful