Ships of Life: Stowaways

Water vessels serve the humans who made them, but that doesn’t mean other lifeforms don’t benefit as well. In this pair of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the various organisms that thrive aboard functional, abandoned and sunken ships

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
By Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how

(00:05):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. You remember back in the day when
we did that pair of episodes about urban evolution, about
how certain animals and plants were adapting to the ways

(00:27):
that humans are changing the landscape on the surface of
the Earth, changing it to build cities, to build suburbs
and all that. And and along with all this change
in the landscape come new ecological niches, new opportunities for nutrition,
new ways of surviving, new new incentives and disincentives, and
along with that you get this whole new brand of

(00:50):
evolution is the kinds of creatures that evolved to live
in environments that we've created. Now, of course, it's easy
to think about ways that that might happen in in
city is on land, but you can also think about
the fact that sometimes people refer to like aircraft carriers
and large naval vessels as a city at sea, So

(01:10):
that starts to maybe make you wonder, is the same
thing happening with our large water craft? Are we creating
sort of urban marine environments in which in which all
new types of evolutionary niches are created. This is a
great question, and this is a question we're going to
dive into, uh in this at one point almost literally

(01:30):
right uh, in this two part exploration of stuff to
boil your mind. The first episode here is going to
focus on functional ships, ships at sea at large, and
then we're going to talk in the second episode about
what very often happens to ships at sea. Eventually they
wind up at the bottom of the sea, right they
wind up at shipwrecks, and in in either case there

(01:53):
are all these wonderful examples of how life adapts to
this unnatural structure, this unnatural uh floating, be it a
floating you know, city of floating, an aircraft carrier, or
just a mere dinghy blister in barnacles. Am I so
excited to talk about this stuff today? Yes? Now, I
do want to throw in just a quick note, uh.
We are going to talk about some of the dire

(02:15):
consequences of ships, but we're not going to get into
some of the particulars. Some of these we've talked about
on the show, concerning say, ship strikes and propellor injuries
to uh. To various organisms or sonic distress that can
occur just thanks to the sheer volume that just the
noise created by all of these large vessels let's see,

(02:39):
and some of the technologies they utilize. So not so
much the direct kinetic conflict between ships and wildlife, but
more like the the adaptations. Right, look at the non
human organisms that managed to thrive on ships, even though
in some cases their their their ability to thrive manages
to upset the balance of nature. Now, if I were

(03:00):
to start thinking about this topic, not knowing anything else,
the first organism that would come to my mind is
the barnacle. Yes, the barnacle. Uh. The barnacle is irresistible
because when you think of of ships, uh, you and
you try and focus in on organisms that are gaming
the system, the barnacle is just impossible to ignore. I'd say.

(03:22):
Barnacle is also a top five funny sounding word. Barnacle. Yeah,
it kind of sounds like it's got that that K
sound that's always humorous in the in the English language,
and then it starts with like a barney sound. Um.
But as ridiculous as they sound, they can it gets
pretty serious at times. Well, so I only think of

(03:43):
barnacles as growing on ships, but that can't be the
only place they grow. So what does the natural home
of a barnacle. Well, you do have some species of
barnacle that thrive in other situations, such as the particular
variety of barnacle that is parasitic to a particular species
of crab that grows up you know, under its it's plating. Yikes. Yeah,

(04:03):
it's pretty pretty nasty. I think this is the one
that essentially like castrates the male crabs in uh, in
its you know, parasitic manipulation, brutal, Yeah, but especially ironic
given the size of barnacle genitalia. Yeah, but which we'll
get to in a in a bit here. But but
for the most part, when you're talking about barnacles, you're
talking about barnacles that cling to rocks, and then along

(04:27):
comes the whole of a ship, and it often presents
a very rock like surface on which it can attach. Yeah. Now,
the barnacle is a pretty interesting organism in its own right,
without even getting into the complexity of ships. They're they're
they're a sessile suspension feeder, but they have two active
swimming larval stages, so that the final version. The the

(04:49):
you know, the adult mature barnacle is indeed that little
crusty thing that's that's living on the rock around the
whole of the ship. That's the full vult that's the
full vultron. Yes, there are two stages before that where
they're free, free swimming their marine arthropods related to crabs
and lobsters. And they begin life as as these freshly
hatched larvae uh free moving plankton like creatures, and then

(05:13):
they developed through several mold stages into a a a
larva stage which seeks out a nice rock or a
rock like surface like the bottom of a ship to
call home. It positions itself, it's secrete cell shell platings
around it, and then it just never moves. It depends
on if it's attached to a rock. It's probably depending
on on the tides, for instance, to bring food close

(05:34):
enough for it to snatch up with its grasping sire sirie,
how do you spell that? Ce i r r I siri? Nice? So,
So this is like the world's most lethargic full vultron. Yeah,
I mean basically they just set up shop and they
depend upon you know, the cyclical nature of of the

(05:55):
waters to bring them what they need to eat, and
then they grab it. You know, there are actually a
lot of organisms this in the ocean, and we'll talk
about a couple of other ones throughout these episodes. But
what the barnacle has in common with several other of
these organisms is that, like he has multiple stages of life,
including a free moving stage of life, and then later
it settles down and becomes sessile or immobile and just

(06:16):
stays in one place and sort of reaches out for
food and mating opportunities. So I've read they were roughly
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty different species of barnacle.
And among shore barnacles, their habitat comes down to not
only region, but also shore level. So you know, some
are gonna like different different levels of shade. For instance,

(06:37):
some cluster amid high energy shore waves, you know, where
there's just a lot of circulation, a lot of crashing waves,
while others actually attached so far upshore that waters only
rise high enough for them to feed like a couple
of times a month. So you can already imagine that
there might be some like costs and benefits to that
kind of lifestyle. Like if you're in one of those

(06:58):
high energy wave region, I bet it's like that's really
hard on you with the water hitting you all the time,
but it probably also provides a lot more opportunities for
food to reach you, if stuff's coming in a lot, right, Yeah, exactly.
And of course, the main barnacle topic of interest here
today is the manner by which they attached to artificial structures. Um,
they attached to wharfs, uh, any kind of structure that

(07:21):
we have built and placed in the water, but particularly
UH they are infamous for attaching to the holes of ships.
Now this may come as no surprise to our more
nautical listeners, anybody out there who has been any amount
of time at sea or has you know, served in UH,
in the in the navy or whatnot. But barnacles are
a huge problem for ships, and they have been been

(07:42):
a problem for ships as long as we've had marine vessels.
Ancient seafaring people had to contend with the accumulation of barnacles.
And we do mean accumulation because we're not talking just
a handful of organisms. We're talking in some cases tons
of barnacles, literal tons of barn uncles, and they don't
just attach, They grow into the surface and formed dense

(08:04):
calcium deposits underneath the paint. And the technical name for
this growth on ships is biofouling nice, which which is misleading, right,
because I mean they're the barnacles just doing what it
is evolved to do. You you could make the argument,
I mean we're kind of biofouling and they're just biofouling
as well. Everybody's biofouling. Yeah, I mean, if we're really

(08:27):
tellying up biofouls, we should have biofouled out as a
species by now. Oh yes, And I think I think
that that becomes obvious throughout these podcast episodes. So how
did ancient people contend with barnacles? Well, there were two
time tested methods here. The first and the most popular
option that is still practiced today is to just periodically

(08:49):
dry dock a vessel, bring it up out of the water,
and just scrape all the barnacles off the hull and
then repaint it because of course the they're gonna pull
the paint away with them. That sounds difficult, Yes, yeah,
it's difficult. It's costly, especially with larger vessels, and it
takes your ship out of commission for a little bit.
Right now, Another uh tactic that they had at their disposal,

(09:12):
some had their disposal anyway, it was too periodically dock
your saltwater vessel in freshwater so as to kill off
some barnacles. Because barnacles are a marine species, you don't
they're not gonna thrive in freshwater. So it but it
depends on the species. Apparently it's four to six hours
that's enough freshwater to kill some species, while others require

(09:33):
upwards of fifty hours. And they're apparently reports of ships
retaining their barnacles after being docked in freshwater for something
like thirty five months. So it doesn't it's not like
you just bring it into the freshwater and just watch
them all fall off necessarily. You've got a few tough
guys in there. Now some stats about why barnacles are bad,

(09:53):
just to really just drive home, like you know, why
you don't want to a ship's hole just encrusted with
these things and some of these stats. It's come from
a really insightful um but of course kind of jovial
April Edition article in addition of popular mechanics, does it
have puns. Um. I think it's gonna do a few
puns here and there, but these are mostly just the

(10:14):
facts here. This article pointed out that fifty to a
hundred tons of barnacles they may be removed from a
single scraping from some larger vessels, while very large vessels
may produce two hundred to three hundred tons of barnacles.
So think about ship carrying that much extra weight. Think
about you yourself carrying that much extra weight or something

(10:35):
more proportional to the human body around with you just
didn't sheer, uh, you know, essentially parasite weight. So this
could be like over a hundred cars worth of barnacles. Yeah,
that is crazy to think about. I mean, look at
it this way. A really large vessel may have an
acre or more of space for barnacles if you just
imagine it just folded out flat, like a field of barnacles,

(10:59):
the unsuccessful sequel to Field of dreams. Yes, and as
you can imagine, this sort of accumulation can impact the
effectiveness of a vessel. It increases the frictional resistance, requiring
from one fifth to one third more fuel to operate
and reducing speed by one fourth. To one third of
its optimal like d barnacled speed. And then on top

(11:21):
of this, you know, especially by modern estimates, it can
reduce the fuel economy of a vessel by up and
this increases c O two emissions. So uh, yeah, they're
all these additional effects that spill off from just having
to drag all these extra organisms around with you. Now
that you've been describing all this, the barnacle based torture
method idea starts to make a lot more sense. Oh,

(11:43):
you talk about keel hauling. Yeah, I don't know much
about it, but I know it involves barnacles, so you know,
we I feel like maybe we'd have to hand it
off probably to like ridiculous history for them to do,
you know, proper history of kuel hauling, because it's one
of these things that is that that everyone pretty pretty
much agreed with bar barring. But here's the basic idea.
You take a pirate or sailor whoever is on board

(12:03):
that you're just pleased with. Is this something pirates would do?
There are accounts of pirates doing it, and there are
account they're also accounts of of it happening on naval vessels.
But it you know, it was long seen is just
a barbaric thing that that was frowned upon in many
different naval traditions, but other places considered it a viable punishment.

(12:25):
But the ideas that you would you would rope somebody up,
throw them over the front of the vessel, and then
they would be dragged banged under the hole and then
come up on the other side. I would come up
in the back of the vessel, and of course that
whole is covered in yield barnacles. Yeah, so although the
shell scraping into your body, lacerating you on top of you,

(12:46):
you just you know, slamming into the whole of the ship. Uh,
that that alone could be enough to kill you. And
then of course the drowning risk the cold waters in
many cases. So yeah, it's a pretty pretty grotesque thing
due to somebody. Uh, but it certainly becomes more grotesque
when you consider acres of barnacles. That is awful. Now,

(13:07):
you mentioned earlier ancient sailors dealing with the problem of
barnacles and coming up with solutions. One particularly effective solution
was copper. Oh copper, I mean, copper is a metal
we had access to for a long time, even before
we had bronze, we had copper. Yeah, so you saw
the ancient Greeks and the Romans, for instance, using copper

(13:27):
nails on the whole of their vessels. Uh. Later in
the eighteenth century, the British Navy sheathed its wooden holes
and copper um in part to deal with the barnacles,
but also to deal with shipworms, which we'll we'll touch
on later. Now you're probably wondering why copper, Why does
copper work? You know, because just it's not that it's
a metal alone, because we have steel holes that's still

(13:49):
become covered with barnacles. Well, the reason is because in
the water a toxic film forms on copper that repels
barnacle larvae and this is even them inside. It as
a potential factor in the superiority of the British Navy
at the time they had the copper plated holes, and
so the ships were just that much more efficient than

(14:10):
all of the competing vessels because they had just far
fewer literal hangars on on the holes. Now do you
know if they were coated in copper specifically for this
reason intentionally or was that just a happy accident. Now
it was it was to deal with barnacles and shipworms.
But of course the age of the wooden warship came
to an end in favor of steel, and in this

(14:31):
you end up losing your copper advantage. Now you can
use copper laced paints, but these particles leach out, and
in doing so they end up hurting vulnerable organisms that
aren't attaching to your hole, like salmon and oysters, meanwhile
depleting the paint of its protective power, so you end
up having to deal with the barnacles again. Anyway, then
there have been other poison based methods as well, So

(14:53):
lacing your whole paint with arsenic mercury strict nine cyanide
tin apparently pretty effective, but you end up with the
same consequences, just killing sea life wherever the ship goes,
because it's just raining down death, just poisoning the ocean. Yeah,
apparently the since that, the synthetic drug metatomadine has proven

(15:14):
pretty effective. According to a two thousand eleven article in
Popular Science by Joshua Saul, the drug quote activates the
octopamine receptor, is similar to adrenaline receptors in barnacle larvae,
causing them to flee. So in other words, it just
like cranks them up on barnacle math and so that
they can't settle in. Then they end up swimming off.

(15:35):
It wears when it wears off, but they end up
you know, they don't fix themselves to the whole. They're
like Jason, stay them in that movie exactly. You're not
gonna You're not gonna see Jason stay them in those
cranked movies, like settle down anywhere. No, he's gonna be
in constant motion. Uh. Now some other solutions have also
been presented UH many in recent years, such as the

(15:55):
use of a robotic whole bio mimetic underwater grooming system
or whole bug. So that'd be sort of like a
Remora fish for your for your shift, go along and
clean a whole room, but if you will, okay um.
There also have been new chemical approaches that depend on
in some cases, you know, on natural chemicals that have

(16:16):
been found in um in other organisms, bio mimetic approaches
that are based on say, shark skin or other uh
surfaces or structures skin, other skin inspired whole hydro gels.
And then there's been some some research concerning bacterial solutions
as well. UH but barnacles remain a problem. They've they've

(16:38):
performed exceedingly well and they continue to do so. Some
of the ships they grow on stick to a very
small geographic area. Uh, some don't move at all, especially
if they say, you know, sink to the bottom of
the sea, as we'll get to in their second episode.
But one interesting byproduct of all of this is that
it's enabled barnacles to travel in ways that they never
did in pre modern or even pre human time. Well. Yeah,

(17:00):
especially in their their later stages of life. Barnacles are
not light footed. You know, they're not going to be
hiking around unless they happen to end up on something
that travels with them. Right. And then, remember, you know,
even though this is the endpoint, barnacles do breed. The
cycle of life is going to continue, and it's going
to continue with those plankton like um mobile larvae. And

(17:22):
while we're on the subject of barnacle breeding, if you've
never looked up barnacle penises, that's worth of google. Well.
The barnacle penises, i think are just one of either
the largest or one of the largest like penis to
body size ratio in in the entire animal kingdom because
obviously they can't like move around to find a mate,

(17:44):
so they essentially have to reach to find a mate,
and so there isn't a very strong incentive to have
a ridiculously long penis, and that is what a lot
of these little creatures have, so that they're not only
clinging to your whole, feeding from your whole, they're also
breeding on the whole of your ship up. So this
scenario with the you know, the ships encrusted with barnacles,

(18:05):
and then the ships moving around, uh sometimes across the
surface of the globe. This has led to the spread
of various invasive barnacle species linking coastal inco ecosystems that
would have never come into contact with with one another,
otherwise threatening to biodiversity in the process. And certainly barnacles
are just one part of the problem. But even in

(18:27):
two thousand and eight, according to Assessing the Global Threat
of Invasive Species to marine biodiversity by Muhlner at All
published in Frontiers and Ecology and the Environment, as few
as sixteen percent of marine ecosystems were unaffected by invaders,
and they stressed that these figures might be off due
just to under reporting. I mean previously, if you had
asked me to think about the invasive species threats caused

(18:52):
by ocean travel on boats, I primarily would have thought
of terrestrial animals stowing away in car go holds or
on boats and then getting moved from say, one island
to another. Yeah, I would not really have considered much
the marine ecosystems that are brought along by the parts
of the boat that are underwater or maybe even filled

(19:14):
with water, which we can get to in a bit.
But before we do that, first of all, we're gonna
take a break, and then we're going to discuss another
very notable infamous ship hopping organism. And this one resides
inside the hole a rascal with lungs. Thank alright, we're back.
So what do you think it is? What's the other

(19:36):
big organism that comes to mind when you think about
about the ships at sea? Hyenas? That would be good.
I didn't run across any any particular mention of hyenas.
Uh No, it's got to be the rat, right, it
has to be the rat, the rat man. What's the
most prominent religion with a rat god? Because I want
to join that one. I mean, rats are impressive. You

(19:58):
just gotta hand it to them. They know what's up. Well,
it does remind me that the Ganesha has a has
a rat as a vehicle, you know, and the rat
does have have some importance in different corners of Hinduism.
But but the idea of a of a rat is
a vehicle, a thing that would you know, that would
move you, that would move the remover of obstacles. Uh.

(20:21):
That that fits perfectly what we know of the rat.
Like the rat has gone everywhere that humans have gone.
It is our our our furry secretive shadow, I mean,
after like micro organisms that live inside our bodies. Is
there anything more inherently linked to human civilization that we
take with us everywhere we go to the extent of

(20:43):
a rat. I can't think of one. No, I mean,
I guess maybe cockroaches are perhaps another example. But in
both cases we're dealing with with animals that have been
with us as long as we've had surplus food, you know,
as long as we've been growing enough to say, oh,
I'll save this for later. The rats have been around
um and and so as long as we've been piling

(21:04):
some of the surplus uh material into ships or boats
the rats have been willing to come on board and
and find a place to hide if there is at
all room for them. Now, I wonder what makes a
rat decide to join the navy, Like, not all rats
do this. Some rats just hang out, but other ones
they go into the boats. And they're the ones that

(21:24):
that settled the new rat frontiers. Do we know what
makes one decide to do that? Well, I mean it's
the available food. It's it's just but we're gonna get
into like some slight differences here between the brown rat
and the black rat as far as it's willingness to
go to sea. Now, I should also point out that
in addition to always having ship rats, we've also always

(21:49):
had ship cats to deal with the problem. Like even
even on like ancient Egyptian river boats, the cats were there. Um,
if you go back into the vikings had ats for instance.
I didn't know that, yeah uh. And then we'll have
some examples later on of other know, some menagerie's living
aboard sea going vessels. Um, But it's one of those

(22:10):
as with the cat in with the dog. You know,
there's this mix of purpose and companionship, Like the cat
is there, the cat is amusing you have a little
antisocial but then it occasionally kills a rat or a
mouse that would otherwise try and get into your provisions
or your cargo. Okay, question just popped into my mind
of interpretation of some great mythology. Take the Noah's ark story.

(22:32):
You gotta have two of every animal. I think they're
a different version where sometimes you gotta have more of
certain animals. But like, but yeah, so you gott have
at least two of every animal, male and female. Do
you do you bother packing two rats? Or do you
just assume you're gonna have at least a few hundred
rats anyway, so you don't bother to like put put
those on board. I like to imagine that that Noah

(22:55):
asks the Almighty this and says, hey, do I need
to pack the rats and the mice? And God says says, now,
don't worry about those that they're self packing. Right, if
you build it, they will come. Yeah, they're already. They're
they're waiting on you. The field of barnacles. That that's
the motto. So when we look at rat success stories,
we're mainly talking here about the black rat Ratus rattus

(23:17):
a k a. The ship rat. And then there's brown
the brown rat or Rattus nor vegicus. Now, these are
just in general, some of the most successful mammals on
the planet, especially the brown rat, which with few exceptions,
just lives wherever humans live. Um and as such, the
story of human migration is the story of of rat migration.

(23:39):
To a large extent, every island or new land that
humans have brought ruined too, they've also brought rats, rats,
who in turn have decimated native species, out competing them
for resources, introducing diseases, and preying on them, all depending
on how a given organism fits into the black or
brown rats approach to life, and sometimes the portunate natives

(24:01):
that fall to these new rat overlords our rodent species themselves.
So we've touched touched on some of these, uh in
our discussions of Christmas Island. Oh yeah, it was the
idea there that there was some native rat on Christmas
Island that kept the crab populations in check originally. Yeah,
that's the hypothesis anyway, and then there were like invasive

(24:21):
rats that killed off those rats, and then the crab
population skyrocket, right, Yeah, but that's potentially what's happening so
the first success story though here was that of the
black rat and the house mouse. They followed human agricultural
expansion for thousands of years, but interestingly enough, the brown
rat didn't leave its native abode in China and Mongolia

(24:43):
until far more recently um and so this would be
the difference alluded to in you know, of a rat's
willingness to take to see or take to the road.
I was looking at a two thousand sixteen genomic study
published in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings be that mapped
the expansion of the brown rat using tissue samples from

(25:05):
three d and fourteen rats from seventy six global locations.
So this was the first in depth genetic study of
brown rats from around the world and was conducted by
Fordham University. They followed this sub species movements first of
all into Southeast Asia, and from there I believe they
went to they hit Japan and in Siberia, and then

(25:25):
there was another movement that ends up going out across
Eurasia via the Silk Road. And then once it gets
all the way to Europe, that's that's where it really
uh sets off because here it's it is it perfectly
lined up for the voyages of discovery and of course,
of course a colonization and exploitation. So from here they

(25:46):
end up reaching the America's Africa, Australia and untold you
know islands in between. And one key point here, according
to the researchers, is that while the black rat is
a natural expansionist, following the path alf of grain and
garbage through human history, the brown rat is otherwise is
usually normally you know, it's normally happy just to hang

(26:07):
out in a single location. He's the Bilbo Baggins of rats.
You know, he's not eager to travel and adventure, at
least not without some prodding. Um. But of course we
know Bilbo does travel, he does adventure, right, So so
the question then is you know what prodded him on,
what prodded the uh, this particular species of rat on?

(26:29):
Well basically yeah, but you know, again, the house mouse
originated in the fertile crescent black rats in India, and
so you know, early farming societies and widespread trade, that's
what pumped these rodents out pretty early on. But the
brown rat didn't really jump into high gear to the
last three centuries, the most recent three centuries of human civilization,

(26:51):
particularly the brown rats of Europe again who departed on
these voyages uh to uh, you know, to take North
and South America Africa and show you and uh and
in that the Brown rats expansion expansion, the authors argue here,
is entirely human mediated. Uh. It's depending into a very
large extent on the ships. Interestingly enough, the researchers didn't

(27:15):
find evidence of a lot of rat immigrants though to
New York City. They were looking at the the the
rat genome there. But so many ships come there, yeah,
so and and certainly the rats are still coming. But
they pointed out that what appears to be happening is
that the New York City rats are just so entrenched,
so well fed and powerful, and just so mean and territorial,

(27:38):
they can't be dethroned, exactly, they can't be beat. So
they're actually protecting their territory from new incoming rats. If
you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
But lots of people who can make it elsewhere can't
make it there, right And of course this this would
hold true theoretically for places beyond New York City. Essentially
like once the rats have entrenched themselves. Once the brown

(28:00):
rats have have taken over in an area, they're gonna
hold it. They're gonna hold that fork because this is
their their sweet garbage empire. All right, I think we
should take a quick break, but when we come back,
we will talk about ballast water and builge life. Thank alright,
we're back. And and in this portion of the podcast

(28:21):
episode really getting into a territory of ship life that
is easy to overlook. Yeah, so yeah, you can imagine.
Of course, the first thing I would have thought of
would be barnacles clinging to the hull. Then if you
imagine things stowing away in a ship, obviously rats come
to mind. But ship life, by by no means stops there.

(28:42):
There is so much more shift life to talk about. Uh,
And so I want to start with the question of
have you ever seen what's on the underside of like
a yacht or a sail boat? What's down there? It's
not just like a sort of round bottom, right. What
you will usually see is a big fin thing poke
down into the water below the yacht or the sailboat.

(29:03):
And this is known as the keel. I guess the
same word that's referenced in the horrible practice of keel
haul uh. And it can serves several functions, but one
of the main functions of the keel is stability. It's
there to keep the boat stable and upright, and it
does this a couple of ways. So one is that
if you imagine like wind blowing really hard against the

(29:24):
sail of a sailboat and it's sort of tipping the
boat over to one side, the keel will be underwater
pushing against the water, and this helps provide a counterbalancing
resistance force that makes it harder to roll the boat.
Just imagine like empty out a plastic soda bottle and
floated on the surface of the water, and see how
easy it is to roll that around on its side.

(29:48):
Obviously would be very easy, But if you take a
single fin to the bottle running lengthwise under the water,
suddenly the fin hanging down in the water is going
to make it a lot harder to roll the bottle around.
The other advantage is that the keel helps give the
boat a lower center of gravity. It pulls the center
of the hull down and that also helps resist any

(30:09):
force that wants to roll the boat. Or I think
it's called healing healing the boat over to the to
the side. Now, imagine that you've got a really big boat.
You want, like a cargo ship that can transfer a
load of shipping containers across the ocean. Obviously, it needs
to have a very big hull, be very buoyant, So
you might load it up with heavy cargo, uh, to

(30:31):
to take to your destination, and it sits down deep
in the water because it's full, right uh. And so
you deliver the cargo. But once you deliver the cargo,
if you don't fill back up immediately with more cargo,
you're going to be traveling around with an empty or
mostly empty hull. You be riding high and dry exactly.
So you might imagine, oh, my god, is that what

(30:52):
that phrase comes from. I never knew that, I assumed,
but I actually have never looked it up. I'm gonna assume.
You must us to be right. Can't wait for the
corrections if you're not. So. Yeah, So you might imagine
that a ship in this situation faces a problem similar
to a sailboat without a keel. Right, it's buoyant, it's
sitting high up in the water without enough mass deep

(31:14):
in its hold to keep the center of gravity low
and prevent it from rolling. So the answer to this
problem is what's known as ballast. This is material that's
taken into the ship's hull to provide stability. And if
you're a giant metal tub sitting out in the ocean,
a very convenient and accessible form of ballast is what water. Obviously,

(31:36):
so in chips that use ballast water, after they discharge cargo,
they will fill tanks in the hull up with water
for ballast and then pump the ballast water out when
they load up their hull with new cargo. So they'll
be going to one place filling up with tens of
thousands of tons of seawater than going to another place
and dumping it all out. Perhaps you can begin to

(31:58):
imagine how this could go wrong, because it's not just seawater.
It's not just it's not like pure water from your
your out of your brid of filter. No, it's more
like the stank water that comes out of your refrigerator filter.
Right do you have one of those? Is the refrigerator
put out nasty water? It does not put out any water. Now,

(32:19):
we don't get to experience that. More than half the
people I know who have one of those things that
puts out water. It puts out this water with an
other worldly funk. I don't know what's going on there.
It may be being drawn from the ocean. But yeah,
So I want to talk about a few ways that
this could really go wrong, because in alertic it's kind
of like a filter feeder. It's it's if it's as

(32:40):
if a large whale to one corner of the world
sucked all this stuff in and instead of digesting it,
just vomited it somewhere else. It's more like that that
ancient description of the kraken that we talked about it
I think in the Bathosphere episodes that said that it's,
you know, this giant fish that it sucks in like
mill ends of gallons of water. Basically, it sucks in

(33:03):
a whole ocean's worth of things and then just belches
it all out after it has partially eaten it or whatever.
I mean, it's just you're drawing in a lake basically.
Uh So, here's here's one thing that happened. I want
to talk about the jelly invasion. So we will be
looking at the carnivorous tina for Nemeopsis laity, also known
as the sea wall nut. That sounds delicious. It's I

(33:26):
don't know. I haven't tried it, you know. I did
forget to mention that there are varieties of barnacle you
can eat that are consumed in for instance, Japanese and
Spanish customs. So the sea walnut, it's it's a species
of comb jelly native to the east coast of the
America's So it goes sort of like along the east
coast of North America, I think somewhere around New England

(33:46):
and then way all the way down to Argentina. It
does not really look like a walnut to me. You
can look it up. It's more like a It's a small,
transparent comb jelly is usually just a few centimeters or
a few inches long. It's got feeding tentacles, It's got
these spiny combs running up and down the length of
the body that glow with a faint bioluminescence when the

(34:07):
jelly is disturbed. And so even though it is a
native to the U to the eastern coast of the
America's in the early nineteen eighties and Mimiopsis appeared in
the Black Sea and it rapidly expanded to colonize the area.
In the words of author T. A. Shiganova in a
nine paper and Fisheries Oceanography, quote, the Black Sea was

(34:31):
characterized until the mid nineteen seventies as a highly productive
ecosystem at all trophic levels, which by the nineteen nineties
had degraded to an ecosystem with low biodiversity dominated by
a dead end gelatinous food web. Now that may be
just technical terminology, but it sounds it sounds quite pejorative.

(34:51):
So the Black Sea's got this dead end gelatinous food
web now. And to quote from article and New Scientists
by Fred Pierce, quote, at one point it's biomass reached
a billion tons, ten times the world's annual fish landings.
Uh So, essentially what had been a diverse and thriving
habitat for marine life was turned into jelly hell, and

(35:15):
fish populations were hit really hard, especially since the sea walnut.
It hurts them in two different ways. It preys on
fish eggs and larvae directly, so it's eating up the fries,
but also it preys on zooplankton, which is a food
source for the fish. So it's just it's like a
biological apocalypse scenario. It's like like a green goose scenario,

(35:36):
exactly right. So you've got this species of anchovy that
was really hit hard, the ingraulis in krasicolus, and that
that was an important commercial fishery. It was catastrophically affected,
at least for a time in the nineteen nineties. Uh
that we should also note that the sea walnut was
not the only problem facing life in the Black Sea
at the time. You've got the other obvious culprits like pollution,

(35:59):
YouTube location and so forth lending a hand and really
screwing up this ecosystem. And given how we introduced this,
it might not be hard to guess how the jellies
from Hell ended up colonizing the Black Sea. The most
likely explanation is they were brought there by accident in
the ballast water of merchant ships. So ships somewhere that

(36:19):
these jellies existed naturally filled up their ballast tanks. They
went to the Black Seed to pick up some cargo,
They discharged their ballast tanks, and they spit a bunch
of jellies out into the Black Sea that quickly took root,
reproduced fast, and and colonized the entire thing and turned
it into the dead end gelatinous food web. Yeah, nobody

(36:40):
wants that were basically in another blob scenario, right, Yeah,
so maybe maybe you're you don't want to think about
dead en gelatinous food web. How about crab horror? Uh? So,
we we've mentioned, i think on the show before, the
invasive European green crab, the car car Kenis maynas, which
is an invasive species in North America, thought to be
read by ships being carried across the ocean and ballast water. Yeah.

(37:04):
I believe we touched at least briefly on the fact
that they're too small to eat, but if you have
the proper equipment and methods, you can kind of process
them down into a rather tasty broth. That's been one
of the crab stock Yeah, crab stock, Yeah, essentially. Uh.
This is, of course, has been one of the solutions

(37:25):
or attempted solutions to many an invasive species problem. Can
we figure out a way for us to eat them? Um?
And and will certainly come back to another invasive species
for which we often try and roll out this this option,
the rat, well man and the rat. The rat is
certainly showing up and even the finest of restaurants in

(37:46):
the in the world, but usually not on the plate,
at least not while anybody's looking. Right. But this isn't
the only invasive crab. Oh no, no, there are a
bunch of other species. I think we may have also
mentioned that Chinese mitten crab. It's been spread far outside
its original range and not look nearly as interesting as
the name makes it sound. It's got kind of like

(38:08):
it's got kind of white claws maybe that look a
little bit mitteny, but not just like full on mittens. No, no, no,
that would be cool. But uh, but it's not like
the boxing crab that has the pom poms, right, or
doesn't look like the hof crab, you know, the hydrothermal
vent lobster that had kind of kind of looks more
like it has mittens, at least to my eye. Now,

(38:28):
I guess comparatively, this is a relatively boring looking crab.
But it is a harmful invasive species and brought from
one place to another by the discharge of ballast water. Probably.
Now there's also there are even more tragic examples, like cholera.
So Cholera is a diarrheal disease caused by infection with
the bacterium Fibrio colora, and according to the CDC, there

(38:51):
are an estimated two point nine million cases of cholera infection,
leading to approximately nine thousand deaths worldwide every year. Cholera
is is a major public health menace, and it's spread
primarily through the ingestion of unclean, unwashed food and unclean
drinking water, especially say, when sewage is allowed to commingle

(39:15):
with water that's later used to drink or prepare food,
or or water crops or something like that. Uh. And
it's widely believed by experts that cholera is spread by
ballast water. I've seen ballast water cited by experts as
an explanation for an epidemic of cholera in South America
in the early ninety nineties that began in Peru but

(39:35):
spread to multiple countries and ended up killing thousands of people.
Cholera is no joke, and we should always be thinking
about ways to stop it from spreading. But by taking
in ballast water at one place and dumping it out
somewhere else, you can risk spreading cholera from one point
of the globe to another. And of course it's cases
like these that that have led to public campaigns to

(39:55):
require all the merchant ships to sterilize ballast water. That
this is a a thing that would help prevent spreading
harmful forms of ballast dwelling life from one place to another.
And there are plenty of ways to do this right.
You can have combinations of like filters just on intake
and outflow, your radiation biosides and all all that kind
of stuff. Everything you would expect. Yeah, because especially when

(40:16):
you when you really think about the sheer number of
big cargo vessels out there on the seas. You know,
we know, it's easy to sort of fall into the
trap of thinking about you know, us living in this
age that's defined by uh by air travel. But but
so many of our goods are are making their way

(40:38):
around the world on these giant ships. Yes, absolutely, you
use something that arrived by ship every day. Now, there
are plenty of other organisms we could chat about here. Um,
the zebra muscle, for instance, shows up a lot in
these papers. One that uh that I happened upon. I
mean I looked it up bit because when I think
of invasive aquatic species, I and help but think of

(41:00):
the lion fish. Now if you if you've ever looked
at well salt water with fish in it, I feel
like there's a really good chance you've seen a lion fish.
Because this also known as the zebra fish. It's confusing, well,
lion zebra it's very If you look at one, you
can it's the main thing you see is that it

(41:22):
has kind of a stripy ornate pattern, but also kind
of a main kind of currence. You know, it's got both,
so both in the liberty spikes. Yeah, it looks they
look super stylish. Now, when we say lionfish, that's generally
referring to several species of the genus Taros tarois, but
the most infamous member of the genus is the red

(41:43):
lion fish or tarois of Volatons, a beautiful and really
an almost delicate looking reef fish from the Indo Pacific
that is anything but delicate. No. These they may look
like a living Christmas ornament, but they're a spiny, venomous
carnivore that has proven itself incredibly durable and has staked

(42:04):
out invasive territory and warm waters around the world. Now
you can find them u all up and down the
Atlantic coast of North and South America from Rhode Island
to Brazil. Uh And they have a host of enemies
in their native waters that will gladly gobble them up,
you know, various sharks and whatnot, but they have no
natural enemies elsewhere. In fact, some would be predators in

(42:28):
these foreign waters. They try to eat them, but they
can't cope with the spines, right, they haven't co evolved
a defense, so you end up with just way too
many lionfish hanging out. For instance, Um, several years ago,
I went on a family trip to Jamaica and we
did a lot of snorkeling, and it was just super
cool getting to see all of these you know, natural
denizens of this little coral reef that was right off

(42:51):
off the coast there. It was really one of the
most magical experiences of my life. But at the same time,
you'd reach these corners, you'd see, oh, here's a lionfish here,
and here's the lionfish there, and they're not supposed to
be there. And then sometimes it would be like, oh,
here's half a dozen lion fish just hanging out together.
And yes, it's a beautiful organism. Uh And and that's
why they've been very popular as aquarium specimens, but when

(43:15):
they are taken out of their native waters, they just
take over. Now, why why do they wind up in
these native water as well? The most accepted theory, backed
up by a sort of limited genetic diversity and invasive populations,
is that they stem from aquarium species that were dumped
into the Atlantic Ocean around southeast Florida, UH and from
here the currents distributed their egg masses and larvae far

(43:38):
and wide. But ballast waters can also help distribute larval dispersion,
certainly within their adopted habitats, but some have argue that
it could have played a role in their overall expansion
as well. Um again, don't be fooled by the glamorous
look though these are. The lionfish is a hearty little monster.
You're saying that they could they could make it for

(43:58):
a bit in the tank. There are there are at
least anecdotal accounts of them surviving in bulge water, you know,
just sort of the mucky water and the very depths
of a ship. Over the last few decades, the world
has experienced and an exponential increase in documented marine invasions
due to the global transport of invertebrates in ballast water
as we've been touching on, and lion fish populations in

(44:20):
the Atlantic have increased as well. Though it's always worth
noting that there's there's more public awareness regarding the lion fish.
There have been some some um, some big campaigns to
encourage local fishermen to uh to catch lion fish and
then also reminding them like, here's how you can eat them.
Here are cooking uh here, here some preparation methods you
can employ, and I'm told that they're quite tasty. But

(44:44):
then also the other part of this is that they
do stand out more as well. Like when you see
a lion fish uh in its own habitat or in
an an invasive situation, it really catches your attention because
it is an eye grabbing fish. It is a fish
who's very body is alerting you to its presence and saying,
don't mess with me. Wherebert I'd say before this episode,

(45:06):
ballast water regulation was not something I realized was worth
caring about. Now I realized that is a very important
issue for for world ecological preservation. Absolutely. Now some of
you may be listening and wondering, well, just how many
different species can pile up in the bilge waters of
a ship like the lionfish right or or its whole

(45:27):
uh you know, cleaning to the side or in the ballast.
I looked at an article titled Marine Boating Habits and
the Potential for the spread of Invasive Species in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence by Darbyson at All, February two
th eight in Aquatic Invasion, Volume four. And they were
just looking at boats in the Atlantic's Gulf of St.

(45:47):
Lawrence in Canada, and they found that bilge water and
whole scrapings from the vessels there contained thirty one and
forty seven taxa, respectively. So that's thirty one from billage water,
forty seven from whole scrapings. And this included such invasives
as the clubbed toniquet and the green crab. All right,

(46:07):
And to clarify, how is bilge water different from ballast
water that's not ballast water. No. My understanding is that
bilge water is kind of it's more it's not it's
not so much intentionally taken in. It's not part of
this ballast system in these larger ships. I think it's
more like what manages to leak into the ship and
then gets pumped out later. Right. Yeah, so like older

(46:28):
ships like a clipper ship, Uh my understanding, would not
have had a ballast system certainly like a modern ship does,
but it would have had bilge water. Nice. Now, of course,
there are a whole host of invasive creatures that ventured
along on ships because humans intentionally brought them along. We've
already talked about the cat um we mentioned in passing

(46:48):
the dog. Chickens came with us as well, and also
even some some old world monkeys came along for a ride.
And this h the idea of of old world monkeys
hanging out in in in the on a ship, in
the riggings of of a ship, uh, forced me to

(47:09):
do a bit of a dive here looking into accounts
of animals running wild, particularly primates running wild on old ships.
And there's actually there's an account from an eight nine
edition of the Sydney Morning Herald that tells of the
eighteen eighty nine voyage of the Margaret, which sets sail

(47:29):
from South Africa for Boston with a cargo of something
around a hundred cockatoos, a dozen snakes, two crocodiles and
orangutang and a gorilla in various monkeys and parrots. And
this is this is a horrible story, um that that.
It's just just just full of terrible things happening. So

(47:51):
first of all, there were rats on board as well,
of course, and they ate all the provisions for the birds,
and that doomed most of the birds to perish. Then
bad weather released snakes and crocodiles, who then battled with
the rats. At the end of this battle, Royal, you
had one crocodile remaining, and then it was crushed by
falling cargo in another storm. And then the monkeys escaped

(48:14):
into the ship's rigging and the crew were only able
to recapture four of them before uh more, stormy weather
set in and swept the rest of the monkeys out
to sea. Yeah, and so they perished. And then the
gorilla also got out and allegedly threatened sailors with a truncheon.
Um there. This is a quote that's related in the
BBC article of the incident from two thousand fourteen. Quote.

(48:37):
Having obtained possession of an iron bar, he commanded all
objects within ten feet of where he was chained, reported
the the Devisease and Wiltshire Gazette. With this formidable truncheon,
he threatened to brain every sailor who came within range.
The cook one day, unwarily approaching, heard the bar whistling

(48:57):
through the air and ducked, but not in time to
say his head, which was half scalped. WHOA. So yeah,
they ended up with just a chain guerrilla throwing things
around within the ship, and they just had to put
up with it until they got back. Why is it
hard for me to feel bad for the humans? And yeah,
I don't at all. I feel bad exclusively for the
for the animals in that story. But but it does

(49:19):
partially answer my question about about whether monkeys could take
up in the rigging of a ship and survive, say,
you know, you know, a transatlantic voyage and set up
somewhere else, you know, purely on their their own without
the the humans enabling their journey. And I think the
answers is generally they could not. The humans would have

(49:39):
to help them, because they would. There are a few
cases like this where a monkey has swept out of
the rigging into the sea. I ran a car across
several accounts uh that were from an eighteen seventies six
Harper's Weekly article by Lady Vernie a. K. Francis Vernie
who lived eighteen nineteen through eighteen ninety. She mentions the
vessel on called the h MS You're Yalus and she

(50:03):
she writes that there was a monkey on the ship
that had allegedly gotten into the ship's rigging and there
was fear that it might wreck uh the chronometer. And indeed,
one day the monkey crept into the room where they
kept the chronometer uh and then carried it off into
the rigging. And the crew, especially like the master who
was in charge of looking after this instrument, they were

(50:24):
just chasing after the monkey, trying to get it back,
and finally the monkey throws it into the ocean before
they can stop him. Mice. She also writes of a
monkey on another ship that reportedly held up in the
rigging until bad weather spilled it overboard and the sea
was rough, and the captain was just like, good leave
it there. But the crew had become so attached to

(50:45):
the monkey it was like, you know, their mascot. At
that point they insisted, no, we're lowering a boat and
we're gonna save the monkey. They it kind of sounds
like yeah, they so he's he caves. He's like, all right,
we'll go look for the monkey. They go down in
the boat are looking around for it, and then they
look up and they see that the monkey has already
reboarded the vessel and is climbed back into the rigging. Yes,

(51:07):
I want to high five that monkey. Uh. There's another account,
she writes, of the monkey Jocko, who had earned its
place aboard a particular ship and was known for jealously
chucking a kitten overboard, and despite initial protest from from
from the dog from a mother dog on the ship,

(51:27):
it nursed a litter of puppies as well. But she
shares this quote from from one of the crew members
on this particular vessel, quote, Jocko was an abominable beast.
I could not bear him. He used to get drunk
and play underhanded tricks. Still, he was not altogether bad.
What Yeah, And and yet there's one more, she mentions,

(51:51):
without sighting a particular ship. Uh, an orangutan quote on
board a king's ship returning from India with a governor
general on board. Quote A most genteel person that put
on a flannel shawl every evening as soon as it
became cold. Crossing it tidily across its chest like a lady.
In this it was copying the Governor General's wife, who

(52:12):
was also on board. So so I guess the orangutang
was a you know, a pretty laid back passenger on
that voyage. But anyway, just a few um difficult to
substantiate stories of primates on the high seas well. Those
were a strange mix of horrifying and delightful, yes, which

(52:34):
I think kind of sums up human nautical adventures in general. Yeah,
I mean, I guess we're all primates on the waves.
That's true. Alright, Joe, I think it's time to go
ahead and sink this ship. To go ahead and end
this episode, to scuttle it so that in our next
episode we might discuss uh sunken ships and the habitats

(52:55):
they create for marine life forms. In the meantime, if
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(53:58):
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