Lowering cages for the sharks will fix it.

My Teacher the Octopus is really good.

Octopuses should try to be useful like that since they are too chewy.

Anyway, people who insist on the shark cage are objectively afraid of a fish and don't deserve a vacation.

Those sharks wouldn't be such easy prey for killer whales if they had frickin' laser beams on their heads.

The problem is that the shark cages would not protect against lasers.

I read a similar story a while back that reported mass deaths of great whites with just their livers removed. Also due to orcas, who apparently have discerning tastes.

Also, sharks are like a third liver, for weird buoyancy reasons (no swim bladders).

Everything else pees in the ocean.

sharks pee through their skin. if you are going to eat shark (only do this is you are confident re: strength of the particular stock) this puts an ultra high premium on freshness, bc once the shark dies the residual urine starts to degrade into ammonia. the other alternative is to only eat sharks that recently peed copiously and are well hydrated so whatever pee is still in 'em is relatively dilute, and it is hard to get the buggers to participate in pre-death testing.

Can you put them in water with corn starch before you kill them?

Maybe that's chicken?

10 The pee is stored in the skin?

13 continuously moving through tissues & out skin.

this concludes all of the time & attention i am going to devote to thinking about sharks, orcas & everyone else swimming about in the seas & oceans who isn't me. *shudder*.

It is of course absolutely ridiculous, but when I'm swimming and I can see a long way down, I get nervous like I'm going to sink suddenly with 30' below me instead of 8'.

I'm sure there's a story, dq, about how you came to know this.

prior career as fish cutter to the stars*!!!!

*bay area chef var.

To what extent was/is shark legal in the US?

Sharks are legal in all coastal waters of the United States.

What if they swim up the decorative canals and bite residents in your housing development?

I'll give them $5.

I NEED YOUR $5 LIKE I NEED YOUR BICYCLE

Don't get greedy. I'm not getting you a bike.

Moby, re: that feeling that 30' is worse than 8', by some chance do you also get vertigo (e.g. on bridges)? I get both, and the feeling is similar -- balls wanting to retract back into abdomen, etc.

it's funny, i have the same odd feeling about swimming in clear open water as i hear non-sf open water people have about swimming in the murky bay, just is ... odd. at the moment better half is strolling out at crissy field, texting me pics of cruising pinnipeds 😳😳😳. bastard.

I don't know if I get actual vertigo, but it is true that I do not like high bridges.

I'm looking at you, Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

And not looking at the water.

13. Sharks don't have swim bladders, so why should they have any other kind?

To give the client what he wants.

We know all about you and sharks, Don.

Teo, fuck you. That fucking link gave me flashbacks.

It was unclear exactly what the president was talking about

No kidding about the flashbacks. Less than a year ago, but it already seems like a different era.

I'd never looked into why the Icelandic delicacy of fermented Greenland shark tastes like ammonia, but thanks to this thread, now i know.

Orcas, dolphins and every other seemingly intelligent animal scare me to death. The only intelligent animals capable of acting morally seem to be humans and elephants.

ned!

Regardless, I worry a great deal more about humans than I do orcas.

I'm a little bit worried I'll be shown up by an elephant with better judgement.

That seems an awfully high bar for orcas and dolphins -- dolphins at least have been reputed to rescue non-dolphins, and the behavior of the orca pods around the Salish Sea seems to include generosity and kindness towards other orca at least. Sure, they often thrash a mammal to death, but they have the excuse of being obligate carnivores.

I've heard they'll kill a tuna fish for gum even if they just ate another tuna fish.

In Trinidad they have this beach food called "bake and shark." Its a sandwich, basically - deep-fried shark on a tasty fried flatbread, with lots of fixings. It's a pretty good meal, but its bad for the local sharks.

Shark is very common in British fish and chip shops. It's only a little shark, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_salmon

Apparently one of the species sold as "Rock" is endangered.

I miss fish and chips shops.

I think we don't have the right batter or grease.

But maybe it's the type of fish.

re: 45

Presumably plenty of cod, haddock, and similar fish can be found in the US? The oil is just vegetable oil. I'd bet you could start a hipster fish and chip shop in a US city.

Somebody did. It's not bad, but it isn't the same.

The Long John Silvers menu looks fancier than I remembered it -https://www.ljsilvers.com/menu/

Those are almost all gone anyway.

Maybe they're all over Ohio? If so, when I come to steal one of your vaccines, I could try it again.

42: Sharks have amazing names.

...including the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias), starry smooth-hound (Mustelus asterias), rough-hound (Scyliorhinus canicula) and bull huss (Scyliorhinus stellaris).

Speaking of, we're going everyone-over-16 on April 1.

Is it considered bad form to try to get a vaccine for a 15 year old after a few months have passed for the old people to get a crack?

51 Petition to have Scyliorhinus stellaris renamed "bull hoss".

Come May, we will have a fifteen year old who is technically not approved for vaccination but the size of an adult who I would like to have a close- to- normal summer.

The size of an adult who doesn't even lift, but still.

When I swim in the open ocean out pas the break, it is not depth, but rather the sense that there are no barriers whatsoever between me and all the critters of the sea.

Plus the Jawsian viewpoint from under the water. Pathetic land mammal inefficiently churning the water at the surface.

I don't think I've ever actual swam in the ocean.

When I lived out in Orange County I did a few open water swimming races and triathlons. Would practice for them off of Huntington Beach. Go out past the break turn parallel to the shore and count lifeguard stations. You progress past them at a distressingly slow pace.

59: true! always good to be up on which direction will provide current assist & if possible arrange for it on the return. i love all my swims in the bay, but particular 😍 for low wind, 58 & above temp, pink-orangey sunrise & slack water spectaculars!!!

53: I didn't think any of the EUAs covered under-16s. Enroll the kid in the Moderna clinical trial.

I was just thinking of asking his doctor if he could please have a shot.

Have you seen the humpback yet, dq? More swimming friends for you!

(Favorite shark name is of course pyjama catshark. Exceedingly cute.)

My favorite shark name is "Ramón".

At a meeting this morning, a colleague was complaining about having enrolled in the J&J clinical trial and now being torn over whether to drop out of the (two year!) trial to get vaccinated for sure. "They're just hosed," she said. "Who's going to stay in the trial and take their chances?" I don't know the answer, although some of you probably do...

Presumably they could wave some of that nice, green pharma money front of people's faces to keep them in the trial.

63: nope! i swim at aquatic park in sf, on the other side of the bay from san rafael, and also have a strict policy of swimming away away decidedly and briskly away from any conglomeration of excited sea birds - where they gather in greedy groups there are likely to be seals, sea lions and oh my god maybe a whale. it's very cool! but really super uninterested in a close up view.

We used to have great big bunches of gulls in the supermarket parking lot because of an asshole with stale bread by the car load.

pyjama catshark. Exceedingly cute

These are the villains of My Teacher the Octopus. You really come to hate them.

69. I disliked the human diver considerably more than I disliked the sharks. The octopus died a natural death at the end of her life. I cried when my last cat died, but if I had made a film to explain cats, I wouldn't have made much of my reaction to a short-lived animal's death.

My favorite shark name is "Bruce"

proof, if any were needed for this crowd, which it is not, that i'm an irredeemable asshole - i am not going to watch the octopus movie, and avoid reading about them, bc love eating them too much. bad, bad dairy queen.

Do you know how to get them where they aren't so rubbery?

71: Wouldn't have guessed you were a Finding Nemo fan.

52. MA is going 16+ on April 19th. Probably not coincidentally, that's Patriots Day in MA, celebrating the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.

I reluctantly had to give up on octopus.

They'd eat you if they could.

hi all! We're back. It turns out that we had zero reception, and I can never get "scheduled posts" to work as scheduled. On Monday I happened to leave the campsite for some reception, but then I just let it go after that.

Anyway, I'm finally washed, unpacked, and cozying up to my computer again.

Lukewarm Recommendation for Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Title overpromises, but I learned a lot about octopuses and cuttlefish (which are very, very weird).

It's no The Secret Life of Lobsters.

Was it sere and cleansing?

If we're opening the door to other octopus reading, here's an interesting molecular biology/genetics mechanism that's turned up orders of magnitude higher in Octopuses:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26268193/
but:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881472/

I suspect that counting individual sites as independent is an error, a lot of this phenomenon happens in localized clusters, and the cluster is the right thing to consider. Of course, defining the clusters has some ambiguity, and there's not a ton of data, so tough to actually do this.

Also, ey're apparently fedeerated intelligences, their limbs and skin have a fair amount of autonomous activity compared to us. Yes, I am procratsinating again, why?

78: Welcome back! Hiking during the pandemic was wonderful; staying out overnight sounds great (except for the traditional sleeping on the ground, etc. complaints).

In fact, I really should schedule a day to hike in April. She's recovering a bit, so another relatively level hike would be good.

81: Also, ey're apparently fedeerated intelligences, their limbs and skin have a fair amount of autonomous activity compared to us

Found this hard to wrap my mind around. "Oh. so we're doing this? I guess we're doing this."

65: Trials like that have an ethical obligation to switch control subjects to active as soon as it becomes statistically clear that it would be unethical to withhold treatment. I don't know how J&J is handling this specifically, but it's really unlikely any participants would be effectively penalized.

And speaking of neural wiring, I never really appreciated the true perversity of the lack of CNS neuron regeneration in mammals given the ability of peripheral neurons to do so. And apparently there are multiple factors that stop it from happening.

DON'T SHAME OUR KINK, BRO.

This study makes me wonder how the results were presented to the government. I'm picturing someone saying, "Prime Minister Chamberlain, we've shown that if we need to do so to win the war, Britain can survive on her own food. But the middle class will have to fart like the poors." And then he resigns, knowing that only Churchill has the strength to deal with that.