Ships of Life: Shipwrecks

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):
In a solitude of the sea, deep from human vanity
and the pride of life that planned her stilly couches,
She steel chambers, light at the pyres of her salamandrian fires,
cold currents thread, and turned to rhythmic title Liars over
the mirrors, meant to glass the opulent the sea worm
crawls grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent, jewels enjoy designed to ravish

(00:27):
the sensuous mind, lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and
black and blind. Dim moon eyed fishes near gaze at
the gilded gear and query, what does this vain, glorious
nous down here? Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind

(00:47):
from How Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
I'm Joe McCormick. And we began with the first five
stanzas of Thomas Hardy's epic on the Sinking of the Titanic,
The Convergence of the Twain. We didn't read the whole

(01:07):
poem because I think the first half is better than
the second half. I don't do you remember that one,
Robert h No, I'm not as up on this one,
but I now seems that we should have read this
in one of the many voices of the actor Tom Hardy,
that would have been that would have been lovely, Yeah,
that would have been good. Or do a Billy's aane
impression from the movie Titanic. Yeah, you know. One of

(01:28):
the interesting things about this poem always is that it
was supposed to be like a memorial for the sinking
of the Titanic, But there's just like not even a
hint of of sadness or grieving for the lives lost.
Is just like celebrating the irony of the ship sinking. Yeah,
and and in this section that we read here, there's
just a lot of almost kind of ghoulish gloom, uh,

(01:51):
obsessing with just sort of the mysterious nature of the shipwreck. Yeah.
So there's the irony of the opulence going down and
then being surrounded by the worm and the moon dim
moon eied fishes that swim around at the bottom of
the sea. Because that is a really captivating image, isn't
it Like taking this like the ultimate emblem of human

(02:11):
vanity and riches and and mechanical design and opulence and
all that, and then putting it down at like the
deepest hell there is on planet Earth the bottom of
the North Atlantic. It is kind of the ultimate irony,
the ultimate middle finger from nature. But of course, shipwrecks
are a thing that you know, it's it's not like
the Titanic was the first ship to ever sink. Uh.

(02:33):
In fact, I think maybe we should start with the
trivia question. We know the answers from the for this
because we discussed it ahead of time, but I want you,
the listener out there, to think about this trivia question.
How many total shipwrecks do you think there are on
the bottoms of the world's oceans going back through all
human history. You know there's at least one because we
we just let from the Titanic. And despite that, one

(02:56):
film nobody has has has Raised the Titanic. They make
a movie where they brought it up. That happened. Yeah,
there was a film like Raised the Titanic. I think
it was called. It was one of these it's not
quite a disa it was. It was on the heels
of all the big disaster films because I recall uh
and Uh. I never saw it, but it had a
really um it was a really weird concept, it seems

(03:16):
for a film okay, okay, So the question is how
many total shipwrecks in human history. To be fair estimates,
very nobody can know this number. You just have to
have a rough guess. Uh. So guess maybe on the
order of magnitude that you would be thinking, like, uh,
before I had read these answers, or before I thought
it through, I probably would have guessed maybe on the
order of like, I don't know, fifty thousand or so,

(03:38):
even that seems like a lot, like fifty thousand ships.
Ships are huge that maybe it couldn't be that many.
But let's look at some external answers according to a
few experts. So according to the mass market adventure novelist
and underwater explorer Clive Cussler, who I always always forget
that he was also an underwater adventurer. Yeah, so you

(03:59):
like you see his book in every airport bookstore. I
think he writes, I don't know, I've never read one,
but I think they're like adventure novels about like, oh, submarines,
saying that somebody has to go down and get the
treasure out of it. I don't know if submarines carry treasure.
May be mixing genres there, but it's all underwater stuff
and so, but he's an actual underwater explorer as well.
And in his foreword to a book about shipwrecks by

(04:21):
the archaeologist James Delgado, there are more than one million
shipwrecks from history, from the history of human civilization. And
actually there are estimates that are even higher, a figure
often cited by the Inner Governmental Ocean a Graphic Commission
of UNESCO. UH. They've decided that the best testament is
about three million or even over three million. And of

(04:41):
course that's gonna that's gonna entail everything from dinghies to
treasure barges. Yeah, but even then, that's it. That is
such a high number. How could there be three million
shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean. It just seems impossible.
But then I started, I started trying to do the
firmi estimation thing and thinking through it that way. Okay,
just work with some round numbers. Assume humans have been

(05:04):
sailing the oceans at some significant scale for maybe ten
thousand years. Obviously we've been sailing a lot more in
recent centuries. Right, Even if they're not venturing out across
vast bodies of water, they're at least hugging the shores,
they're at least going out to fish, they're at least
using uh, you know, channels to move around exactly. Now,

(05:25):
simply assume an average, and this is going to be
a very rough average, because it's going to vary a
lot over the different years, but a rough average of
one hundred shipwrecks per year over ten thousand years. Uh Now,
obviously that wouldn't be even close to evenly distributed, but
that already gets you to a million. Just a hundred
shipwrecks year for ten thousand years, you're at a million already. Now,

(05:48):
think of all the times when shipwrecks surge, say during
war between big naval powers, or during horrible storms, hurricanes, cyclones.
Think of the literally thousands of ships that were sunk
during World War Two alone, and suddenly a million shipwrecks.
It does not only seem not impossible, it seems quite
you know, like that seems maybe kind of low, right, Yeah,

(06:09):
I mean you're left more with just a consideration of
how many shipwrecks remain even a remotely identifiable as a shipwreck,
and the vast, vast majority of shipwrecks out there are
completely unexplored. We might know where some of them are,
like they've been mapped in some way, but nobody's ever
been to them. And that's a tantalizing idea. We all

(06:31):
love the idea of of of an unexplored shipwreck, especially
considering that we wouldn't mind there might be treasure down there,
there might be some sort of monster down there. I mean,
it's the stuff of of so many wonderful um you know,
speculative bits of fiction or even um you know, more
believable fair like like The Deep. I believe what the

(06:51):
plot in that? Isn't it? That there's a like a
World War two era m vessel with a bunch of
morphine on it that's a sunk and it's like sunk
on top of of a treasure vessel from you know,
the co colonial days, like a Spanish treasure. Is this
the one with Nick Nolty? And yes, I believe so.
Despite my love of Robert Shaw, I've never seen this one.

(07:13):
Yeah it was. It was one of the big ones, right,
I gotta get on that. That's like seventies cinema, right, yeah,
classic seventies cinema. Okay, yeah, that may view it. This weekend.
But you know, I think one of the I think
one of the stupidest things about people exploring underwater shipwrecks
in movie underwater shipwrecks, the ones that happened under the water, uh,
shipwrecks in movies, is that they're always looking for treasure,

(07:36):
when in fact, the real treasures are not silver and gold,
and they're not even morphine. The real treasures of shipwrecks
are the bizarre, interesting adaptations of ocean life to our
sunken sea born cities exactly. Now, the previous episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind was all about the things
that live and thrive in on and uh and on

(07:59):
a board, even in the riggings of functional sea vessels.
And now we're dealing with sea vessels that have sunk
into the bottom of the ocean. So what happens immediately
after that depends on several factors. So the ship goes down,
and what happens depends on the size of the ship,
where it falls, the intensity of the impact when it
hits the bottom. And this is probably maybe it's something

(08:22):
you don't often think of, like when you live down
in the ocean. There are boats and cargo ships and
fifty ton battleships floating above you all the time, and
if something goes wrong, they can fill with water and
they lose their buoyancy and they come crashing down on
your head. The only equivalent I can imagine is if
like ship sized objects were falling down on us from

(08:43):
space or from the sky at a rate of dozens
or hundreds of times per year, and then we're just lost,
in most cases, just lost to whatever was losing those ships.
They're like, oh, what's down there somewhere? We can maybe
we can, we can find some of them. We can
retrieve things for some of these wrecks. But that's about it.
Oh yeah, what if like what if like two hundred

(09:05):
airplanes every year were like the size of a battleship,
they crash somewhere on Earth and nobody ever went in
to clean it up. It just stayed wherever it fell. Yeah,
And certainly that's the case when when an airplane crashes
into the ocean. In many cases, I mean, their flights
have been lost, just as ships have been lost throughout
human history. Yeah, so you've got this introduction of this

(09:26):
this new thing into the underwater ecosystem. So we were
wondering what happens to the life below when a ship
comes down. I found one discussion of this in a
book called The Biology of Disturbed Habitats by Lawrence R.
Walker from Oxford University Press. And so in this book,
he's generally looking at ways that humans disrupted natural ecosystems

(09:48):
and habitats, and one of the many things he looks
at is a shipwreck. So he says number one. Of course,
more damage is caused by shipwrecks in shallow water, where
biodiversity is already high. You can imagine this like if
there's a core all reef or something shipwreck comes down
on that, it's a it's initially going to crush a
bunch of life and screw things up, right, And then
we'll get to at least one example of this later

(10:10):
on in the episode. It's when the ship falls into
essentially a waste land. I guess that's where there's considerably
less harm and potentially room for things to flourish. Yeah, well,
there's room for things to flourish in both cases. But
there are also negative trade offs as well, right well,
like like if it damages, if it heavily damages the
coral reef and introduces room for some organisms to thrive.

(10:35):
It's like, you know, what, did we really end up
ahead here? We we damaged a vital part of the ecosystem. Well,
even in in all the cases we'll talk about that,
it's there's some difficulty calculating the net benefits and and
detriments caused by a sunken ship, but we'll get into
that in a minute. So obviously as you into two, yeah,
where it's out there in the deep, where the bottom

(10:57):
might be a waste land, where there's just sort of
not much going on on the bottom of the ocean,
which is true for much of the ocean, like a
lot of the ocean has sandy or muddy bottom without
a ton of biodiversity or or closely you know, densely
compacted life. And so when a when a ship sinks
out in deep water where biodiversity is lower, the initial
impact tends to be less. But as we've been alluding to,

(11:20):
shipwrecks are known to have both positive and negative long
term consequences for underwater biodiversity. So negative consequences can of
course come in the form of like the initial impact
crushing stuff and screwing up a reef or anything like that.
But they can also come in the form of say
a ship disintegrating over time and leaking toxic substances over
time into the water. One example might be fuel or

(11:43):
other chemicals that are in the structure of the ship itself.
For some they're serving some kind of chemical purpose, say
within the engine. Yeah, because you know, in many of
these cases, we're dealing with a functionally functional vessel that
has that has sunk due to say an attack by
a military vessel or uh, you know, storm situation, etcetera. Sabotage,

(12:06):
were sabotage, it's gonna have fuel aboard. And they are
even even very notable cases where a vessel is intentionally
sunk for testing purposes, but still with tons of fuel
on board. One example I came across of this was
the plight of the German heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, captured

(12:26):
by the United States in World War Two, and then
Cobb and then cobbled into part of this ghost fleet
that the military put together, along with the aircraft carrier Saratoga,
the battle ship New York, more than eighty warships in total,
and they put this motley crew together. So and then
anchored them at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in

(12:48):
order to hit the fleet with two nuclear attacks to
see what happens when you hit a fleet with an
atomic weapon. Uh, but they thought like the ships might
be okay in the atomic blast. Well, and I guess
they didn't know a lot. Yeah, yeah, but but here
this is a summary of the results from a popular

(13:08):
mechanics article by Kyle Mizukami. Quote, Prince you can survived
the blasts, but she became frightfully radioactive. After initial attempts
to decontaminate the ship, the U S towed the heavy
cruiser to Kawa Jalion Atall, where she sank six months later.
So the ship was survived these these atomic detonations. Today

(13:31):
the ship is visible just off the coast of U
Budge Island, upside down in shallow water, her propellers resting
above the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Now. By the
nineteen seventies, though, there was significant concern from the US
Fish and Wildlife Service that oil might leak from this wreck,
oil that fortunately was not radioactive. That was one of

(13:51):
their concerns. They checked on that to make sure that
that we weren't dealing with the potential of not only
leaked oil, but leaked radioactive oil. But still the US Army, Navy,
and the Republic of Micronesia they all embarked on a
salvage mission to retrieve it's something like two thousands, seven
hundred sixty seven tons of oil, which we're still in there,
still in there. That's how tanked up this vessel was.

(14:14):
And this project was actually completed just last year with
some two fifty thousand gallons of oil removed about nine
of its holdings, and the remaining oil is said to
be safely enclosed in a few internal tanks. I mean,
at least for the foreseeable future. But but that's one
of the things about all of these these ships. Ships

(14:35):
are artificial creations of human technology, and they are they
have a fair amount of difficulty just thriving on the
surface of the water. We've talked about the accumulation of barnacles,
for example, So you sink it down to the bottom. Uh,
things are just going to get rustier and rustier over time.

(14:55):
They don't stay contained forever, but maybe some things can
stay contained for a long time. Yeah, it least they
got two fifty thousand gallons of oil moved from this thing.
Uh speaking of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, UH,
I also was reading an article that mentioned in two
thousand fourteen, they completed a five point five million dollar
conservation project to remove three wrecked ships weighing a total

(15:17):
of one million pounds from the Pacific Remote Islands and
National Wildlife Refuge. UH. These wrecks had all occurred in
the previous fifteen year period, and they had damaged the reef.
So there's just an example of another case where we
have shipwrecks, but they're in the exactly the wrong spot
and then they have to be removed. Right. So now
we've discussed some of the obvious ways that a shipwreck

(15:39):
can be very negative, can have very negative consequences, and
especially in a place like a reef where there's already
high biodiversity, there's already a lot of stuff living there. Um.
But Walker says that especially when you're looking at like
the deeper ocean. He says, quote, shipwrecks have important ecological
consequences that in some ways resemble bull those of carcasses

(16:02):
like a whale fall. Yeah, And so I was like, Wow,
I wish you would say more about that. He doesn't
in this section, but I looked up his section on
marine carcasses and this was very interesting. I see what
he's talking about here. So the effects of marine carcasses
falling down to the bottom of the ocean, Walker summarizes
some research in the number one. He says that, so
there's one study from nineteen nine that estimates there might

(16:25):
be one gray whale carcass for every three hundred square
kilometers of ocean floor. So what happens when a whale
falls to the ocean floor? Number one? Of course, it
depends on where it falls, But even in the benthic
zone out there in the deep sea, when a whale
carcass sinks, some opportunistic scavengers that specialize in unpredictable food sources,

(16:46):
such as grenadier fish and some benthic invertebrates will arrive
and start eating a sunken whale carcass literally within minutes.
In the example of one experimentally sunk whale carcass, crabs, sharks,
and other fish had eaten the whale's flesh within a
few months, and this was followed by a colonization of
polychete worms, which we'll get back to that in a bit.

(17:08):
But so after that, sulfur based chemosynthetic organisms show up,
and these communities can exist within the ecosystem of the
carcass for more than five or six years. And this
suggests that fauna that normally live on deep ocean hydrothermal
vents can also make a habitat out of a whale carcass.
And we'll see as we go on, also out of

(17:30):
a sunken ship. Yeah, it's I mean a whales carcass,
especially when you're dealing with the largest whales. This is
a substantial amount of of biomass to just sink to
the bottom. Like and unlike with a number of other
living creatures in the seas, it can sink to the bottom,
other things are going to have more potential to be

(17:52):
consumed and torn apart. UH. In the upper layers to tell,
there's only there's nothing left but like a a faint
rain of gray particles that the bottom. But here we
can see the vast majority of the carcass UH can
sink to the bottom and then become a community. And
if you're interested in this, I think Robert, You and
Christian had an episode about this from a few years ago,

(18:13):
right about whalefall and like the Osadax bone worm. Yeah,
I believe that was one of the episodes we did
with Dr maraw Hart, the author of Sex in the Seat.
So if you haven't heard that one, there's more for
you to go back and check out. Yeah, dealing with
one of the the highly specialized organisms. That's that is
all in on a whale carcass. But I think it's
fascinating how a whale carcass here can become not just

(18:34):
a food source but a habitat in itself, and in
much the same way as sunken ship out in the
ocean can become a habitat. Walker doesn't elaborate more on
the relationship between his description of whale carcasses and sunkin ships,
but I said I would come back to this, so
I looked into it. And there is a parallel about
the colonization of whale carcasses by sulfur based chemosynthetic bacteria.

(18:57):
And we will discuss this after we get back from
a break. All right, we're back, So we're on the
subject of how a shipwreck can be kind of like
a fallen whale carcass out in the ocean. And one
of the ways that has been suggested is that there
is a similar way that different organisms that often live
around geothermal vents can colonize these fallen carcasses, whether it's

(19:21):
an organic whale carcass or a mechanical monster carcass of
of a great great ship. Um so I found an
n o A a report on the marine wildlife colonization
of a group of three nineteenth century shipwrecks in the
Gulf of Mexico known as the Monterey shipwrecks, and the
authors of this report discuss these findings in a paragraph

(19:42):
about tube worms. So here's the rundown. The ship remains
show signs of vestament of farren tube worms that get
chemical nutrition from sulfides which are produced by chemosynthetic bacteria.
And now these tube worms you will usually find growing
near hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the ocean, eating

(20:02):
the byproducts of micro organisms. And this in itself is
a wonderful and surprising discovery about nature, the life that
surrounds deep sea hydrothermal vents. Up here on the surface
in the sunshine. You know, we're used to living in
food webs that are mostly traceable back to auto trophes
that get their energy from the sunlight. Right, So a

(20:22):
crocodile eats a dingo, which aid a rabbit which ate grass,
and the plant matter in the grass was chemically synthesized
sugar using the energy of the sun. It all comes
from the sun, and it kind of results in a
I guess you could say about a heliocentricum idea of
for us humans where we just think of of of

(20:42):
all life is being more directly linked to the energy
of the sun. Yeah, there's quite a good reason for
surface religions to have sun gods. You know, Helios is
the true provider, but there is another god in the deep, right,
there is a Hadian god down there. Let's say that
the hadi in one is a goddess. Okay, she creates
these awesome parallel trophic webs that don't have so much

(21:04):
to do with sunlight in some cases not at all,
in some cases at least not as much as the
surface food webs. So at the bottom of the ocean,
there's total darkness without access to sunlight. But one way
stuff at the bottom of the ocean in the darkness
can survive is to eat something from the photosynthesis food
web that falls down from above. Right, you've got stuff
making food out of sunlight up there. It comes down

(21:25):
and you eat it. But another way is to skip
the sunlight based nutrition, get your energy from the heat
and chemical rich waters around deep sea hydrothermal fins, So
deep down to the bottom of the ocean, you've got
these places where you've got heated minerals gushing up out
of the out of the earth into the water. And
around these events, microorganisms form mats which take in chemicals

(21:47):
and minerals, for example, hydrogen sulfide escaping from the earth,
and they oxidize it into sulfur, and this chemical reaction
produces energy that can be used to create nutrition for
the micro and thus another type of food web is born.
So other organisms might graze on the microbial mats and
eat them or eat their byproducts, and then you've got

(22:09):
a second round of eaters that feed on the first round,
and so forth. And hydrothermal vents are just amazing. You've
also got these giant tube worms that actually live in
a mutualistic relationship with the chemosynthetic vent microbes. The microbes
provide the worms with nutrition and the worms provide the
microbes with shelter. Uh. But so where did chemosynthetic bacteria

(22:33):
come from in the Monterey shipwrecks. Well, the authors of
the n O a A report suggest a process. They say,
you know, probably first wood boring organisms come in and
consume the wooden parts of the ship, and then this
converts stored chemical energy in the wood into bioavailable nutrients.
And then they write, quote, as organisms devour these nutrients,

(22:55):
increased respiration causes the development of anoxy condition without oxygen
and sulfide production by sulfate reducing bacteria. As a result,
the shipwrecks are producing conditions similar to those of other
deep sea chemosynthetic habitats, such as methane seeps and hydrothermal vents.

(23:16):
So the shipwrecks here are like a new temple to
the Hadian goddess of the hydrothermal vents. They provide a
sort of analog of the conditions of hydrothermal vents that
can allow similar organisms to thrive without anything escaping from
the earth. Yeah, this is interesting about considering the wood

(23:36):
here because of course, for the vast majority of of
of human history, ships were wooden like we're discussing the
wooden ships, uh and their their issues with barnacles in
the last episode. Uh so, and of course even ships
with steel hull, so they're gonna have a number of
wooden components on them. Yeah. And I guess in a way,

(23:56):
this would be a version of the other kind of
survival down in the deep where which is surviving based
on stuff from the photosynthesis web up above falling down.
But this would be like converting that into at later stages,
into a parallel of the chemosynthetic food web. You end
up with the same tube worms, the same chemosynthetic bacteria,

(24:18):
the same sulfur based food web, and the creatures of
the deep sea hades take root. And of course in
all of this, uh, you know, we were kind of
glassing over the obvious that win A when a ship
first sinks into the ocean, it may or may not
contain uh say, human beings or or either or other
you know, could certainly can contain other organisms as well, chickens, goats, uh,

(24:42):
the gorilla and orangutang that we discussed in the in
the most recent episodes, So there could be other forms
of immediate sustenance. Aboord a ship as well. It's a
ship is like a box of chocolates that has various
you know, surprising morsels throughout and you you don't know
what they're going to be until they land on the
bottom and you explore. Yeah, it could be full of primates,

(25:04):
it could be full of plant life, it could be
cook full of radioactive oil. You simply don't know what's
the box of chocolate's equivalent of radioactive oil. Um depends
on the box of chocolates. Some of them they're all
radioactive oil. I'd say, we're the ones that have the
really fake cherry goo in the middle. Oh yeah, yeah,

(25:26):
because those can be Those can be good if you
have a really nice a Machino cherry inside of a chocolate,
but very often you get the radioactive sludge version of that.
I'm more into the Luxardo cherries myself. Okay, no, no, no,
Back to the tube worms from Motion Hill. So the
Monterey rex are not the only ones where vent life
has been discovered like this. For example, I found this

(25:48):
one paper by Maria Christina Gambi, Anya Schultz and Inzio
Amato called Record of Limeli Brachia, and then it lists
several uh taxon names here from a deep shipwreck in
the Western Mediterranean Sea, Italy in Marine Biodiversity Records two
thousand eleven and the author's report finding tube worms Lamelli

(26:09):
braccia at a shipwreck site of a ship called the
Katania which was sunk in nineteen seventeen on the bottom
of a western basin of the Mediterranean Sea and the
author's right quote. It needs still to be clarified which
type of energy source the obligate symbiotic bacteria of these
worms may use for nutrition, since no sulfur emissions can

(26:31):
be documented on and around the shipwreck. The Katania contained
some wooden structures and was transporting cotton balls and oil seeds,
so here's some more little chocolate morsels, cotton balls and
oil seeds, so the symbiotic bacteria may rely on degradation
of these materials. This record stresses the importance of shipwreck

(26:52):
as a possible stepping stone habitat for the large scale
dispersion of vesta minta fera, meaning like life. So that's
really interesting. They're saying it's possible shipwrecks could serve as
a stepping stone habitat to sort of walk communities of
vent life from one scarce deep sea vent to another

(27:14):
across the bottom of the ocean. This is interesting. I
wonder if if this means that the accidental sinkings of
ships in human history have enabled populations from one vent
to reach other vents, that they that that what otherwise
journeys that would have otherwise been impossible. Yeah, I'm I'm
trying to think of an analogy for the surface. It's like,
go back to the idea that there are these giant

(27:36):
ship sized airplanes flying around all the time and they
crash pretty often. What if they crash and create like
they're full of water and create an oasis in the
middle of a desert that occasionally crashes allow plant life
to like cross a desert barrier, right, or I think
you can also maybe draw some analogies to land bridges

(27:57):
enabling our our ancestors to cross from one piece of
land to another. Yeah. So I think at this stage
this is just a hypothesis of the authors. We don't
know for sure if this is the case, but that, Yeah,
what a fascinating idea if that's true, Like the fact
that whenever a ship sinks, you could be enabling the
spread of wildlife through the deep dark desert. I mean

(28:17):
it's kind of it's again, it kind of comes back
to the idea of like the butterfly effect. Right, it's
just one small change, uh could unsettle an ecosystem or
allow one invasive organism to completely invade uh this other habitat. Yeah, now,
I guess on the other hand, we could at least
say that it looks like whale carcasses might do a
similar thing, So it wouldn't just be ships, but we'd

(28:40):
be contributing every time, we every time the captain goes
down with the ship. But back to Walker, he says,
of course, on top of the his comparison to the carcasses,
shipwrecks can just generally have a very positive impact on
benthic biodiversity because a shipwreck, like a sunken ship, creates
habitats for colonization by all kinds of organism barnacles, sponges, brianzonans,

(29:03):
and the fish that feed on those organisms. So in
many ways, I think we really can think of a
sinking ship as kind of like a giant inorganic whale carcass,
I guess, with a major difference being that ships are
not covered in edible flesh, though they might have a
wooden hull that might be edible to some organisms. They
might be full of morsels of you know, organisms and
food and stuff like that that partially filled this role.

(29:25):
On the other hand, they might be full of poisons
and toxins that leach out into the water and damage
sea life. So you've got these positive and negative effects
coming along. Whenever a ship goes down, it could just
be filled with gold coins, and you know, what are
you gonna do with that? I mean depends on if
you're a tube worm that doesn't care or a greedy
octopus that must have all the gold. You show up,

(29:47):
you think you might get something to eat or some
wood to munch on, and it's just the amber room.
What am I going to do with this? Okay? So
we've been talking about what happens to a shipwreck sort
of in the short term when it goes down, But
I was wondering what happens to a shipwreck over a
long period of time after it goes down. So I
want to look at a passage from another book. This

(30:08):
is by Martin R. Spate and Peter A. Henderson. Marine
ecology Concepts and applications. Uh From and Spate and Henderson
say essentially that sunken ships can function as artificial reefs.
This shouldn't be much of a surprise. In fact, ships
are often sunk on purpose to create artificial reefs. Now,
the wisdom of doing this might be somewhat questionable, right,

(30:30):
I feel like this is one of those areas where
it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well,
anytime you scuttle a vessel and send it to the
bottom of the sea, you're you know, you're you're doing
a favor to marine communities down there, right, But of course,
as we already discussed, that's not the case if your
vessel is full of oil or you just dropped it
on top of a on a delicate reef environment, exactly right.

(30:54):
So they're they're positives and negatives that come along with this.
But literally, mechanically, what doce O old obsolete warships and
stuff like that do once they go down to the bottom. So,
first of all, the authors say they provide a quote
new clean, hard substrates for the settlement of many sessile
and sedentary species. Like suddenly there's a lot of just

(31:15):
new virgin territory that you could have fixed yourself too,
exactly right. So, sescile and sedentary species like coral generally
make a base out of rocky surfaces like loose seafloor.
Sediment does not provide a good place for them to
lock down. So if you've got a lot of you know,
empty ocean floor, that's just kind of sandy out there
that these organisms can't really find purchase there. That's not

(31:38):
the way they make a living. They need a rock
or they need a ship's hull. Second, they provide shelter
and a complex habitat for fish that like to hide
within and around physical structures rather than out in open water.
And there are a lot of species like this where
where you know, you can imagine when you go into
a restaurant, would you would you rather be sitting at

(31:58):
a table in the middle of the room with your
back to the door, or in a kind of secluded
booth in the far corner. Am I going to fetch
a handgun from the toilet and assassinate a mafia down?
I don't know. I guess it kind of depends on
the restaurant. Oh wait, Robert, I don't know if I
was getting into bad. Are you like a table preference,
Like you'd rather be in the middle of the room. Well,

(32:20):
I mean, if the restaurant's good, there's a hopefully you're
not gonna have a lot of choices. You're gonna have
to deal with it. You're gonna have to deal with
that table right next to the door and get a
blast of cold air every time somebody opens it. Oh no,
I'm not advising people to complain about their table. Don't
do that. You look like such a jerk when you're like,
I don't like this table. But no, I mean everybody
would not every Most people, I think, would rather be

(32:42):
secluded in the corner where you got your back to
the wall, you got your kind of ensconced in a
protective little booth area. Yeah, I guess there is a
natural tendency to want that kind of seating. However, we
certainly heard, you know, people give like security advice where
they say, all right, for thing you do when you
go into a restaurant, you just go ahead and inspect

(33:02):
all the eggs, look for a handgun behind the toilet,
make sure you have your escape breath, like I don't know,
like like yes, know how to get in and out
of a building. But ultimately, like if I'm going into
and enjoy, say, you know, some pizza or sushi, what
have you, you want to be imagining what violence might be.
So I want to just assume that I'm going to
get out of here in one piece and I'm not

(33:23):
gonna have to fight my way out with, you know,
with chopsticks or something. But that's that's kind of a
human privilege. There is certainly in an oceanic environment you
need to be prepared to fight your way out. Right. Yeah,
I would say generally the life of an ocean dwelling
organism is much more dangerous than your average restaurant. But
even given our understanding of that, it's it's very natural

(33:46):
to see. I mean, I don't want to compare fish
and humans too much, but it's natural to see how
organisms like shelter. You know, you like to have a
place to hide, a place you can kind of like
get with, get under stuff and get inside stuff that
makes you feel secure. Yeah, shipwreck is gonna have a
lot of little nooks and crannies that organisms could could
could could could hide in little naturally occurring caves. I

(34:09):
was fortunate enough to get to snorkel over a shipwreck
in Barbados a few years back. It was a World
War One era vessel and and so it had plenty
of time for stuff to you know, accumulate. You could
still certainly it was a big metal vessel, so a
big steel vessel, so there's still plenty of it there.
It was definitely a shipwreck. You could identify it as

(34:30):
a human u structure, but it was. It was very
well populated, and it's kind of haunting to swim over it.
And you stare down into these dark recesses and see
things swimming in and out of it. Uh, see all
of this life that is thriving just all over the
surface of the thing. Do you do? You constantly think
you see a dark recess and you think what would

(34:50):
happen if I stuck my hand in there? Oh? Yeah,
you think what would happen if I dove down there
and got lost in it? You know? You see these
documentaries in which people are diving not only down to shipwrecks,
but going inside them, and that you know that that
kind of yeah. So anyway, here's another advantage that sunkin

(35:12):
ships can provide to organisms that I found this one
interesting and surprising Spatan Henderson do not mention this one.
I found this instead in some online materials from the
Ocean Exploration Trust, which is associated with Bob Ballard the
Undersea Explorer UM. And so it's this elevation above the
sea floor. So like by climbing up higher off the

(35:35):
ocean floor, they say, you give yourself better access to
currents moving streams of water within the ocean. So if
you are saying immobile or mostly immobile organism like a
fly trap anemony, you want to take root in a
place where food sources will drift past you, so you
can grab and eat things as they float on by.

(35:56):
It's kind of like a reverse drive through. Well that
makes sense. Yeah, Uh, You're able to essentially climb up
into an area of greater traffic, like getting up in
the wind. Yeah, so imagine sort of like plopping down
a fresh unoccupied combination of a reef and a cave
system in the water. Obviously, things are gonna want to
take roots. So shipwrecks can be especially attractive to marine

(36:19):
life if they sink in a place with muddy or
sandy seabed, like we've been talking about since the sunken
vessel will now be the only hard substrate around, and
hard substrates are very valuable real estate in the ocean.
In another way, we've already discussed the analogy of a
desert oasis, but this is another way that a shipwreck
can be kind of like a desert oasis at the
bottom of the sea. And then ultimately it's gonna it's

(36:43):
there's there's often going to be something there for quite
a while now, certainly with with wooden vessels, those are
going to deteriorate at a far faster rate, whereas steel
hold ships are going to linger quite a bit longer.
But speaking of Bob Ballard, I was watching a documentary
a while back about his work and some of the

(37:04):
you know, the undersea explorations that he's taken part in.
And in one of them, they were they were looking
at really ancient recks, uh, you know, Greek sailing vessels
and uh. And by this point in time there was
virtually nothing left, like all the wood was gone, but
you had you had the remnants of the cargo on

(37:26):
there there on the bottom arrange more or less in
the shape of the ship. Oh yeah, yeah. And so
another thing I do want to talk about is how
you can have remains of a ship even after a
lot of the wood is gone from a wooden shipwreck,
not just from the cargo. I mean the stuff about
the cargo is interesting because, yeah, you see like the
ghosts of the shape of the ship, and then inside

(37:47):
there like the amphora, like the wine jars or you know,
gold or something, at least the shattered remnants of it. Yeah.
Uh So sometimes what happens to the remains of a
ship is what's known as concretion. And Robert, I have
attached an image for you to look at here in
our notes. Uh this is an image I put in
of a concretion from the remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge,

(38:10):
the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard. How do you say?
His name? Is it Edward Teach? Its spelled like Teach,
but I want to say, it's like taoch or something.
I don't know. I always said Teach. Okay, Well I'm okay.
But he like he's going to teach you a lesson
with his cut lists if you don't hand over all
the booty. So Edward Teach, the pirate known as black Beard.

(38:33):
He sailed around, he robbed ships, his flagship the Queen
Anne's Revenge was sunk. I think it was sunk off
the coast of North Carolina. Um, but so it. I
was reading a blog post by a North Carolina archaeologist
named Courtney Page, who worked on the Queen Anne's Revenge project,
and uh, and she was writing about how this process happens.

(38:55):
You know, when people study sunken ships that contain iron elements,
this often leads to the creation of what are called concretions.
And these are interesting structures. As the name implies, they
sort of resemble concrete. I was looking at this image
of the one from the Queensland's Revenge, and it looks
to me like a cement cow heart or a deep

(39:18):
fried chicken cutlet. It's kind of what I was getting from.
It looks like you could go on a biscuit. It
looks like you go on a sandwich. Would be a
real tooth crack in sandwich. But yes, so so. Concretions
are formed out of a combination of products and processes.
One is the corrosion of iron in seawater. Iron is
corroded by the water and that produces byproducts. But the

(39:40):
concretion also incorporates according to page sand biological byproducts created
by marine life forms. So anywhere there's iron in a wreck,
concretions can form and spread around in nearby structures, even
structures that are not made of iron, So you can
have iron elements that are things like cooking pots or
cannonball balls or nails, studs, tools. And this leads to

(40:03):
the fact that sometimes even in waters where organic materials
like cloth and rope and wood would normally disintegrate over time,
they can be preserved by their proximity to an iron object,
which means they get encrusted with concretions and partially preserved well,
almost like a fossilization. Really, yeah, kind of. And some objects,

(40:25):
like she gives the example of wrought iron objects, they
often disappear and dissolve entirely in the water, leaving only
their concretion byproducts behind. So you like can't see the
original thing, but you might be able to try to
determine what it was by looking at this cement Cowhart
that formed around it. Another interesting bit of shipwreck iron

(40:45):
chemistry I want to look at is the rustical Robert,
have you ever seen these before? Yes, you included a picture,
and this is this is something you see on a
number of these documentaries were exploring shipwreck. Yeah, like I
think you see it on the Titanic. Actually, and a
rustical is pretty simple. It's like an icicle made of rust.
It happens when iron oxidizes in some deep sea wrecks,

(41:07):
creating hanging formations of rusty material, which are sometimes inhabited
by a special species of bacteria. Back to rustical loving bacteria.
And one more thing I gotta mention this is this
doesn't really have anything to do with biology. But one
of my favorite bits of shipwrecks science trivia is that
lead ingots from an ancient Roman shipwreck have been used

(41:29):
in the twenty one century to build a neutrino detector. Wow,
that's awesome. I think it's supposedly because that because they
were so old and sunken, the recovered lead ingots had
much lower than average level levels of natural radioactivity or
something like that. Interesting. You don't think about the about
modern scientists creating something and saying, all right, it's ready

(41:52):
to go, but we we have one missing component, and
the only place we can get it is a sunken
Roman vessel. It sounds like the setup of a really
contrived deep sea adventure movie. Yeah, The Deep to Finding Neutrino. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to take one more break,
and when we come back, we're going to talk about
some of the more notable organisms that make their home

(42:15):
in the shipwreck. Thank alright, we're back. Okay. So we've
been talking about what happens when a ship sinks, it's
impact on marine biodiversity, uh, and what happens to the
ship itself the materials that's made out of. But let's
talk about some shipwreck life. What so a shipwreck sinks.
We've mentioned a few organisms that sometimes move in and

(42:36):
set up shop, but let's talk about some more. Well,
for starters, there are the shipworms that we talked a
little bit about in the previous episode. Shipworms. Yeah, these
are Tarado novalis and alongside barnacles, they were they were,
you know, once to score the scourge of wooden sailing vessels.
Certainly a functional sailing vessels, so it makes sense that

(42:57):
they would feast on the remains of wooden vessels as well. Okay,
So what they do is that they drill into the wood,
not to eat the wood, but for shelter. Any wooden
structure is just going to be, uh, you know, irresistible
because they can just make a home in it. I
got a new blister in barnacles. The okay, the new
expression should be shivering shipworms, blister and barnacles was as

(43:18):
a saying, yeah, that's from Tintin, So the the old
Sea Captain and Tintin he says, blister and barnacles. What's
in their cartoon Sea Captain that can yell shiver and
shipworms shiver and shop. I like shiver and shipworms more. Yeah,
I like it all right. Well, what if we just
glanced at a few studies that look into what kind
of organisms set up shop at shipwrecks and uh and

(43:40):
and see what they have to say. Sure, yeah, there's
one study we looked at by Zinsen at All, and
this was published in Marine Biodiversity back in two thousand
six titled Epifonal Inventory of two Shipwrecks from the Belgian
Continental Shelf. So in this study they had benife I
had one and twenty one macrofauna species, and they estimated

(44:05):
the number of species probably involved anywhere between one and
fifty and two hundred and eighty, So there were a
lot of Nigerians, right, right, so that the Nigerians would
be a large phylum of animals that includes jellyfish, coral
and semms. Yeah, clearly the type of organisms you might
expect to find in a uh, you know, like a

(44:25):
coral environment or certainly a shipwreck environment. They also point
out that the two dwelling amphipod Jossa her Money was
also particularly abundant. But there was still a fair amount
of variety between shipwrecks here just in this particular study
that they couldn't completely explain. So every shipwreck is different. Yeah, yeah,

(44:46):
I mean it kind of comes back to that idea,
that hypothesis that we mentioned earlier about them being uh
stepping stones between habitats and so forth. So it depending
on where ship falls, you know, they're gonna be different things,
perhaps in position to take advantage of it. And then
of course it's going to depend on the nature of
the wreck too, right, So the inherent conditions like how

(45:08):
deep is it, temperature of the water, you know, salinity
and all that kind of normal stuff, but then also
just what's nearby and has access to set up shop,
like who can move in first? Right, because like there
are there are gonna be some some first responders, right,
the crab legions are probably gonna be a little slower
in getting there as opposed to certainly, you know, the

(45:30):
faster moving sharks. Now i'd wonder, like, are are there
qualities of certain boats or ships that make them more
amenable to hosting lots of marine biodiversity than other ones? Well,
this was a question that was looked at in a
two thousand seven marine ecology paper. Uh. This came from
Walker at All titled Spatial heterogeneity of epibinthos on artificial reefs.

(45:55):
Fouling communities in the early stages of colonization on an
East US Rallion shipwreck. We got that fouling again, so
much fouling in the ocean. And they point out that
complexity of structure is key enabling a complexity of colonization. Okay,
so if you've got like a lot of like a
little twists and turns and different kinds of structures on

(46:17):
your shipwreck, that maybe will mean that more different types
of organisms move in and that's good for you know,
a healthy ecosystem. Yeah, lots of nooks and crannies, you know,
they think of it if if it's a speedboat like
all you know streamlined doesn't have eight toilets on it,
how attractive is that going to be versus a toilet
barge there's just nothing but toilets. It's gonna there, It's

(46:39):
gonna be so much more room to hide in that. Uh.
This is a quote from this particular paper quote. This
study supports the notion that REX enhance local diversity and
biomass within the habitat mosaic of their location and habitat complexity.
Maybe an important mechanism for this, as demonstrated by the
large spatial variability in the assemblages documented here. To get

(47:00):
those smooth boats out of here. Yeah, I mean, I
guess for the most part, though, vessels are not going
to be that streamline like. They're gonna have a lot
of nooks and crannies. They're going to have a number
of compartments, right, certainly the larger vessels. Now, on the
other hand, we've mentioned already that there, you know, a
shipwreck is not always a net positive for undersea biodiversity,

(47:23):
that it can be very negative and not just the
initial impact. Like one example that I was reading about,
as summarized in that book by spat and Henderson earlier
was about a fishing vessel that sank in nine on
a on a coral reef in the Central Pacific Ocean.
This was around the Palmyra a Toll and this was

(47:46):
described in a study by work at All in two
thousand and eight, and they showed that by the year
two thousand five, after this thing went down, so this
is what like fourteen years later, there had been a
phase shift in the ecosystem. So you had a naturally
pretty verse coral ecosystem that had been taken over by
this aggressive organism called Rhodactus rhodostoma. And basically the author's

(48:09):
come to the conclusion that you know, when the ship
came down, it it just obviously caused physical disturbance when
it sank on the reef, but then there were also
changes in what kind of nutrients were available in the
water and in pollutants that the boat was leaching out
into the water, and this favored this new aggressive invasive
species taking over the natural, diverse coral habitat. And in

(48:32):
light of the study, Spade in Henderson say, you know,
maybe we shouldn't be so quick to think, yeah, sinking
a ship that's great for for the undersea life. Yeah,
because basically, if you're sinking it into an existing ecosystem,
you could destabilize that ecosystem. Yeah. And so this is
yet another case where it seems like people may have
been too quick to rush to judgment on the idea

(48:52):
that forming an artificial reef is always just great, and
that like maybe we should hesitate to mess with undersea
or just understand maybe we should hesitate to mess with
ecosystems at all if we can help it. Now, coming
back to my own experience, is smirkling around a shipwreck
certainly one of the things that I was looking for
something that I'm just generally looking for if I'm just

(49:15):
walking around in the surf anywhere, morphine, well moreph Yeah,
I want to find the morphine. I want to find
that Spanish gold. But I also want to see an octopus,
because that is a creature that can appreciate nooks and
cran I mean, the octopus is kind of like you
would expect some kind of named kracking at the bottom
of the ocean to be guarding the gold and the shipwreck,

(49:35):
much like smell the dragon guards his pile of gold
in the lonely mountain, right. I mean they are kind
of like dragons of the sea, and they like their
their layers that they like their middens absolutely. So I
was reading a section from a book about octopuses and ships. Well,
the book isn't about octopuses and shipwrecks. The book is
just about the octopus. It's called Octopus the Oceans, Intelligent

(49:58):
Invertebrate from teen by Anderson Mather and Would timber Press,
and the authors here writing about how octopuses often do
and habit ship precks. They say octopuses can be shy,
and they tend to seek out shelter and enclosures in
whatever forms they can find, and this often means in
objects and structures made by human hands. So octopuses can

(50:19):
sometimes be found living or at least hiding, and everything
from beer bottles to ancient wine jars those mp A
we were talking about in the wrecks of Roman galleons.
And there's even research showing that they like age to
beer bottles better when they're covered in barnacles and other growths,
more than they like fresh beer bottles, presumably because the

(50:39):
older beer bottles that get covered in stuff let less
light through and it feels more like a solid, rocky shelter. Oh, yeah,
of course. And then also, I mean a number of
you know, the the octopus have the ability to to
mimic um the the the surface like naturally occurring surfaces. Yes,
probably not glass bottles. Yeah, And I think I should

(51:00):
say it's a coincidence that these containers I mentioned held alcohol.
Octopuses apparently sometimes also chill out in crab and lobster
traps and stuff, which is great because that's shelter and
it's a buffet. But there's a section of the book
where one of the author's Roland Anderson, is writing about
his own experiences with octopuses and shipwrecks. So Anderson is

(51:22):
writing about how you know, he explores uh shipwrecks like
off the uh the Puget Sound area, and these shipwrecks
often contain giant Pacific octopuses, which can be huge. These
are like some of the biggest octopuses. They live. They
live to become as big as four hundred pounds sometimes
or dred and eight ms. And uh, I want to

(51:43):
read a quote here. He tells a particular story quote
Once while diving on the wreck of the clipper ship
Warhawk in Discovery Bay off Puget Sound. I saw the
greatest number of giant Pacific octopuses I'd ever seen on
one dive. This full rigged sailing ship caught five air
and went down in eighteen eighty three, and all that
remained were the skeletal ribs of the ship's starboard side

(52:05):
protruding from the sand bottom, and a hundred foot long
or thirty meter long pile of ballast rocks. Next to
the ribs. Eight giant Pacific octopuses were living in the
ballast pile, perhaps because there was little else to make
a din out of nearby in the bay, only vast
expanses of sand and mud. These octopuses made dens where

(52:26):
they could, even though they were closer to each other
than they would have liked. Instead of just a home,
this was an octopus condominium. Interesting but but also interesting
points out that it's it's forcing these creatures to live
in closer proximity to one another. Yeah, so even then,
like it's providing them with something that they like, which

(52:47):
is the shelter, but it's also maybe messing with what
they would be naturally doing. And shipwrecks can be such
desirable habitats that octopuses will sometimes fight over them. Uh,
did Robert, did you ever see the video the two
octopuses fighting over who got to stay in the shipwreck
from last year? So? Okay. On April some in Oa

(53:09):
A scientists were observing a sea floor scene in the
Gulf of Mexico about six thousand feet or about one
hundred meters deep, and there was an octopus of the
species muse Octopus john sonnianus, which tried to enter a
sea floor shipwreck, presumably to make a din, but the
cavity of the shipwreck was already occupied by another octopus

(53:32):
of the same species. The two octopuses start fighting, but
the intruder seems to be on the losing end, and
then it seems to grab hold of part of the wreckage,
and it looks like it's trying to pull at it,
as if to rip it off. I'm not sure that's
exactly what happened. What's happening, That's just what it looks like.
And you can hear one of the scientists who's watching

(53:52):
on the intercom saying, guys, if you could have your
creatures stopped tearing apart of the shipwreck. That would be great,
But what happens after the fight is the most interesting.
The defeated octopus, who did not get to make it
din in the shipwreck, retreats and then settles down in
the mud and then starts writhing and wriggling all of
its arms at once in churning up a cloud of sediment.

(54:14):
And I'm like, what's going on here? Like is it
trying to bury itself and hide or is this an
expression of anger and frustration like when somebody punches a wall.
It's one of those many times you look at octopus
behavior and you see some kind of maybe a little
bit unsettling type of display of intelligence or something emotional

(54:36):
or social that you're not expecting to see out of
such an alien creature. Yeah, a degree of complexity there,
for sure. But shipwrecks, of course, probably make great sites
for an octopus for multiple reasons. The octopus loves shelter
to make itself an enclosed in the wreck also functions
as a food oasis, attracting prey organisms for the octopus
to eat, especially in areas of otherwise like fairly boring,

(54:59):
unoccupied andy or muddy seafloor. If you haven't seen this
video of the octopus is fighting over the shipwreck. It's
worth a look. You can you can google it. It's
pretty easy to find alright. So I feel like these
examples do illuminate the you know, the benefits as well
as the disadvantages of shipwrecks. How they can offer a

(55:20):
number of organisms new territory, new uh, new layers, and
also eventually a new mini ecosystem in which to thrive,
but also all the downsides that can come with that.
I mean, I'm reminded again of the dim moon eyed
fish that says, what does all this vaingloriousness down here? Yeah,

(55:41):
apparently what it does is attract chemosynthetic food webs and
tube worms and leech oil. Now, certainly we could we
we could easily do an entire episode on on oil
spills loan not only to two marine environments, but coast
coastal environments. Well oh yeah, I was reading a Scientific

(56:02):
American article about how the deep Water Horizon oil spill
may have altered some of these shipwreck ecosystems in the
surrounding area because like oil spills could speed the corrosion
of shipwrecks. Interest and of course affect the wild left
directly right, and then if there's anything within those shipwrecks
that could leach out due to that corrosion, it's kind

(56:22):
of a domino effect, it would see right. So I'd
say we touched on several things today that we could
return to, much like a shipwreck from which we have
not recovered yet, all of the sunken Spanish gold, yeah,
or the the odd atomic weapon here and there, that
sort of thing. It would be interesting if you had
like a god's eye view of everything, and you could

(56:43):
you could essentially look at a list of all the
things that have been lost and remain lost on at
the bottom of the ocean. What would that that list
consist of. I think this is where some troue nerd
out there would make a joke about the second season
a firefly or something, Yeah, because because they actually filmed
it and then saw on DVD down in Davy Jones Locker,

(57:05):
Davy Jones locker, or We're an octopus just lords over
it next to its uh its stash of morphine gold
coins or Robert this has been fun. Yeah, this, this,
this has been fun. I feel like the shipwrecked territory.
On one hand, maybe seemed like it was going to
be like a little more straightforward, But I do feel

(57:27):
like we discussed some dimensions to the disruption of shipwrecks
that maybe hadn't been as obvious to a number of listeners.
Now certainly we know that we we we have some
divers out there who listened to the show. We would
of course love to hear from anyone who has experience
uh diving down to ship reps rex and observing the
kind of ecosystems that that thrive and at these locations.

(57:52):
We'd also love to hear from just anybody with with
nautical experience and experience dealing with barnacles and chip worms
and what of view. So that's it for this episode.
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(58:36):
Bargain publishes every Monday. Each episode is a is a
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(58:59):
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