Unfortunately, today is not the day I stop neglecting it.

But! I do have a post up at Discover about barnacle penises. So… call it even?

Ask a teenager. Or James Dean. Chasing after things just means you’re trying too hard, you know? But sitting back, calm and unperturbed, assured enough of your own irresistibility that you know the things you want will come around? That’s fierce.

Google search suggestions provide all sorts of fascinating anthropological insights, but I think this is my favorite one yet. What Carr said in 5,000 words, Google says in six. (And by the time I was done laughing, screen-capping and sending to a friend, I’d lost the motivation to actually read the article, so maybe Carr had a point after all.)

Blog Exclusive Bonus Barnacle Fact: It’s hard to meet someone nice to mate with when you sit in one place your whole life, but barnacles have surmounted this obstacle by evolving the longest penises relative to body size in the entire animal kingdom. Motion of the ocean, indeed.

On Monday, the AP reported the discovery of a shrimp-like crustacean living in the frigid waters beneath a 600-foot-thick Antarctic ice sheet. The NASA team that accidentally caught it on video only wanted to look at the underside of the ice sheet — they hadn’t expected to find any life beneath it, where light doesn’t penetrate. The discovery opens up the possibility that life could survive in other dark, frozen places, like under the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Yeah, yeah. That’s great and everything. But can we eat it?

Apparently that’s the real question on everyone’s mind, since the AP headline reads “NASA finds shrimp dinner on ice beneath Antarctica,” and one of the scientists involved in the discovery is quoted, early in the story, as follows:

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate.”

So apparently, the most interesting thing about this creature living where they thought no creature could live is that it’s kind of big, and therefore maybe okay with garlic.

Looks... delicious? (Image: NASA)

This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. When scientists in New Zealand caught a colossal squid — a squid even larger than the giant squid, with the biggest eyeballs in the world and tentacles covered in sharp, rotating hooks — the Daily Mail dubbed it “Calamari for 500.”

Really? Really, its deep-frying potential is the most important thing about it?

I’m not trying to moralize here — a reporter’s job is to help readers connect with a story, and we can all relate to wanting to eat things. I, too, enjoy eating things, and occasionally I even eat shrimp or squid. And I’m sure that Bindschadler’s comment was made offhand, and that he’s truly in the Antarctic for the science, not the snacks.

But most of us, if we’re conscientious human beings, try not to be superficial. We try not to value other people only for their looks, or their wealth, or how tasty they are when sautéed. So maybe, as conscientious explorers of the mysteries of the deep, we should try giving our invertebrate friends the same respect.

Where to start? In the spirit of change, I propose we rename the sea cucumber to something that better reflects its many talents other than looking like food. I am open to suggestions.

[H]is love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

Then in the final chapter, a first-person account of a childhood infatuation:

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones — that kind of love.

Seriously, he’s a damned good writer.

Anyway, most of us don’t actually get to inhabit the objects of our affection — except maybe figuratively, but where’s the fun in that? In the ocean, though, there’s one incurable romantic who’s got it all figured out:

(Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia Commons)

Meet Sacculina.

Sacculina is actually a kind of barnacle, though it doesn’t look at all like the ones on the beach. As a pretty young female larva, it finds a good-looking crab and punctures its exoskeleton at a soft, bendy joint. Sacculina then injects itself into the crab’s body, growing into a balloon that sits in the abdomen. It extends long, nutrient-leeching tendrils into every corner of the crab, like this:

Into you like a barnacle, baby. (From Ernst Haeckel's "Kunstformen der Natur," 1904)

The parasite has so much control that eventually the crab stops growing, hunts down food for the barnacle’s benefit, and even — after the barnacle’s mate moves into its abdomen too — takes care of the resulting larvae as if they were its own. (Say it with me: Awwww.)

Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly what O’Brien meant. Maybe it’s not the most healthy, mutually respectful relationship in the world. But if nothing else, I bet that crab writes the best angsty love poems.

Now, researchers have discovered that even in the ocean’s dead zones, where oxygen levels are too low to sustain much life, swimming scavengers will risk suffocation to go after a particularly juicy snack. In this case it’s a pig carcass dropped there by forensic scientists, but never fear — they’d eat you too.

I can’t get the infernal embed code to work, but you can watch National Geographic’s video report here. (Warning: Might make you hungry. Or never hungry again, depending on your constitution.)

The amazing part, as a commenter at Deep Sea News notes, is that the water’s so oxygen-poor that the pig sat untouched for two whole months. Anywhere else and it’d have been lunch much sooner.

But every now and then you run across a little tidbit in a research paper — a few words, usually a sentence at most — that reveal the passion underlying the technical pursuit. Like this line, in a paper about the proteins marine worms use to build tubes for themselves out of sand: “The third glue protein category is an intriguing potpourri of previously unknown proteins with only limited and scattered homologies with known proteins.”

Technical, technical, technical — bam! “Intriguing potpourri.” The rest of the paper tells you about the science, but those two words tell you that the scientists who wrote them are pretty stoked on what they do.

Or there’s this paper on the barnacles that stick themselves to whales. The abstract is formal, straightforward and factual, so I was hardly expecting the opening to the paper itself:

Riding on a whale! This should be the dream not only for kids, but also for all sessile filter feeders, such as bryozoans, serpulids, mussels, oysters, and tunicates, to name just a few. As any sailor knows, these foulers hitchhike happily on ships. Yet, except for acorn barnacles (the gooseneck barnacle Conchoderma can settle there only after its balanid cousins have provided a hard substrate), none of them made it to whales.

Okay, it’s not exactly Herman Melville, but I adore it. You can tell that this guy loves what he does, you can tell that he was probably the kid dreaming about riding a whale, and you can tell — this is my favorite part — that he actually empathizes with the small, squishy creatures he’s writing about. And now I do too. A tunicate with dreams? Frustrated dreams? I’d read that novel.

Tunicates have secret yearnings, you know. (Image: Nhobgood, Wikimedia Commons)

The site’s founding editors, Anna Gosline and Anne Casselman, had previously run a small print science magazine as undergraduates at the University of Toronto. Then they both went to journalism school with the intention of eventually starting a magazine again “for real,” according to Gosline. When they were both living in England and working as science reporters, they entered their magazine idea into a business plan competition that won them a significant potential investment.

They ended up launching first a blog, Inky Circus, and then Inkling itself — but not as a print magazine after all. Gosline was kind enough to talk to me recently about how Inkling was born, how their idea shifted from print to online, and what it takes to keep an online media project alive.

M.G.: What was the motivation behind starting Inky Circus and then Inkling Magazine?

A.G.: As we became more involved in science media, we kept seeing readership statistics that were hugely biased toward men. Here we were, young, idealistic girls, [thinking], why is it that science publications aren’t reaching a female audience? What are they missing? We feel like we might have a handle on what that is — a different take on things, and perspective on what’s important. So we ran with this idea.

We were journalists at the time, and you run across so many hilarious, interesting things that maybe your editors reject, or maybe you could never possibly pitch because it’s just so silly or offbeat or tangentially related to science. So that’s what Inky Circus turned into. It was a pretty popular blog in the U.K. — we were a bit of a novelty there, girls blogging about science. It was great. We got a reasonable amount of media attention, but we just went along our merry ways, blogging about the things that we loved and were totally passionate about. It was all part of the plan to start a real print magazine.

M.G.: But you didn’t end up starting a print magazine. What changed?

A.G.: The thing is the amount of capital required. If you want to get your magazine sold in larger bookstores, grocery stores, that kind of thing, you literally are buying shelf space. You’re paying a huge amount of money to distributors. You can go the independent route, and this is something we looked at — independent bookstores, science centers, underground newspapers and funny little magazine shops. You’re looking at a much smaller market that way.

We had an organization interested in investing in us in the U.K., but that money would have been largely eaten up in market research and pilot testing. [We would have needed] heaps and heaps more to be able to do things with a reasonable reach in print. So we went back to Vancouver and regrouped and started putting together Inkling.

The whole idea behind Inkling was that it kind of had the feel of a magazine, but updated on a web schedule — every day, every other day, depending on what we had up our sleeves. It was designed to be a magazine online, and then we eventually brought Inky Circus back into Inkling Magazine, because it was really one of the more popular and fun parts of it for us — just blogging on the stream-of-consciousness things that we found cool. It was one of the things that had a really loyal readership, so we migrated that over, and now the pair coexist.

M.G.: What kind of resources did you need to launch the website? How much did it cost?

A.G.: Anne designed it, which probably would have cost us ten grand to have done. And then we had a developer code it all for us, so we gave her the designs, and she would code everything and make it a reality. There was an initial phase, and then obviously tweaks as we went along. I would guess [that cost] somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $7,000.

M.G.: Did your audience from the blog follow you to Inkling, or did you have to work to build a following?

A.G.: Inky Circus definitely brought over a certain readership, but Inky Circus was very British. It had a very British feel to it; we were very known in Britain. Inkling has always been much more American. There’s definitely overlap, but it was more our personal networking that carried over between the two of them as opposed to the actual readership coming along.

Publishing on the web right now — so much is being part of the science blogging network. That’s what started getting us a lot of our traffic. Pharyngula, Thus Spake Zuska, some of the really big science blogs would link to us, and then some of the bigger, mainstream blogs, like The Atlantic or USA Today, would start linking to some of our work — whatever stories they found particularly interesting or offbeat. That was how it grew.

M.G.: I know freelance contributors don’t get paid. Does anybody on the site get paid?

A.G.: No.

M.G.: Does that make it hard to find good content? How did you manage that?

A.G.: We spent so much of our time editing writers. We were taking a lot of students who were in journalism school, saying, if you guys have stuff that you’ve done in your coursework, why don’t you publish it on Inkling? You get exposure and a clip, instead of all your coursework going into the black hole. Or there were scientists who wanted to get involved in science writing.

These were not professional writers, so it was a great experience for us, learning how to edit well, and balancing between how much you rewrite yourself and how much you send back to people. It was really interesting to do it that way.

M.G.: Do the ads on the site bring in any significant revenue?

A.G.: Inkling went really strong for about two years, and its height it was making upwards of $500 a month in ads. We have minimal server fees, and we don’t pay anybody, so it did make a reasonable amount of money — but that mostly went to paying off the original development costs.

I can’t say it’s a money-making entity, but then, we weren’t really running it as that. We were both working as freelancers pretty much full-time. We were running [Inkling] kind of as an experiment, like: is this ever going to pay our livelihood?

We did the math — it’s really, really, really unlikely. So it was just a fun thing to do on the side. It’s really complementary to working as a freelance journalist, because you do spend so much of your time story-hunting and finding interesting things. It sort of adds to your overall persona as a writer.

M.G.: What would your advice be for someone trying to start up a media project or a web venture of some kind? Any wisdom that you’ve gained from your experience?

A.G.: If you’re trying to make this into a business, the thing you need to do is make sure you diversify your base. You want some sort of paying job that gets you through, and then you want to start up a venture that complements what you do already. That was why it worked so well for us for so long.

The other thing is that online especially, and in science, the network is really, really important. Everyone’s sort of supporting each other — the Bad Science blog, Bad Astronomy, Cosmic Variance — there’s a group of people who really add to the experience. The network is really important — understanding who’s in the same sphere as you. Because it’s not necessarily competitive. There’s a really additive factor, I think.

M.G.: You and Anne aren’t really running the site anymore. Why not, and what’s happening with it now?

A.G.: It’s a huge, huge time commitment. It’s like a baby. You have to feed it, you have to put up new articles, you have to make sure it stays alive. Even when we were blogging, before Inkling — sometimes you wake up in the morning, and you’re just like, “I have nothing interesting to say to the world anymore. Unless you’d like to know what I put on my toast.” You have to make the commitment to do it — to go hard or go home.

I’ve gone back to school, Anne started working at a museum design company, and we were both kind of like, “This was awesome when we were freelance journalists, but it’s hard to do if it’s not complementing what you’re doing as your actual career.” Inkling has a reasonable backlog of articles right now and gets a lot of search traffic. So we kind of let it go for a while.

Meera [Lee Sethi], who had written a couple of articles, approached us like, hey guys, I know you’re not doing much with the site right now, how would you feel about me taking it over? And we were like, that’s awesome! Because it’s something we put a lot of hard work into — it’s there as a pretty museum to all the hard work we did. If someone’s injecting new life into it, it’s awesome. She really understands the tone, the feeling, the Inkling slant on science. We’re so lucky that such a talented person wanted to carry on the Inkling name.

Unfortunately, they don’t see well enough to avoid you when you slip and fall on top of them, as I discovered a few summers ago.

Urchins: yet another thing you don’t mess with.