Sent 30 January 2020. Part of Little Blue Letter.

 
"Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung."
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Ocean update
Do you want the good news or the bad news? We try our best to keep the Letter light-hearted - a tough task when every day seems to bring yet more cause for concern. This week, scientists have reported that increasingly regular and intense ocean heat waves are causing whales in California to get entangled in fishing gear more often (because they feed closer to shore when the water warms up) and that an acidic Pacific is not good for dungeness crabs.
Dungeness crabs are dissolving, but are they cute enough for us to care? (© Shutterstock)

The good news:
Wandering Albatross (© Alexandre Corbeau)

(Pssst... we don't have many curators lined up for this year... sign up to write an edition here.)
Gif of the week
Seahorse giving birth 😲
Seen on twitter
@fishphylogeny: One of my favorite @UnivOfKansas lectures of the year in Ichthyology —
Tabletop ordinal phylogeny of fishes and the major trends in their evolution.
Had a great time taping and setting it up with @Marineiac_Matt.
Shark case ID kit.
A quick overview of the coming year in ocean policy.
Little Blue Letter was curated this week by an impossibly cute axolotl.
Editing etc. by Glen Wright. Glen is a researcher interested in marine governance, the high seas, and ocean energy. He is a drinker of tea, lover of the sea, and an Oxford comma user. He recently published Academia Obscura: The Hidden Silly Side of Higher Education.
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