"mulm" and "gorp"

I love how we have to come up with fancy terms for what is essentially crap.

Gorp, BTW, is the term used in (fish) diet studies to describe unidentifiable, half-digested crud. I called the stuff "gunk" and was corrected by my advisor. He even sited the study that came up with the term. "gorp"...

i'm in marine icthyology. for my thesis project, i look in the stomachs of deep-sea catsharks and try to identify all kinds of crap to tell what they're eating. when it's digested shrimp, it's literally just red gunk. no shells, nothing, just red pulp.

thanks for reading my thing, hughitt.

my lab does yearly cruises ranging from Alaska to the Gulf of California in Baja. They do deep-sea trawls to get specimens. I am not too happy with the method, myself, as there's a lot of bycatch So I don't go on cruises myself. Also, most of my specimens were collected for a previous study on catshark growth, aging, and reproduction. So if I need any more stomachs, it will only be a few.

Unfortunately, to do current aging and reproduction methods, requires one to sacrifice the fish. Because the best way of doing that right now is to look at growth rings on the vertebrae and examine development of gonads. My lab is working on developing a non-invasive method, tho, by using spines on those species that do have spines. They are bony, too, and also develop growth rings. The results have been inconclusive, so far, because spines can come off (like when attacked by a predator or during a fight) and grow back later. It seems to work for some species and not others.

Oh, and I expect to find that the two species, because they're closely related and share many of the same habitats, are exhibitng subtle food prefernces which allow them to partition their resources. For instance, one prefers shrimp while the other likes crabs. also, one hunts more over rocky areas while the other is over soft bottom.

thanks again, Keith.

budrecki said:

GORP is an acronym for trail mix
"good old raisins and peanuts

Click to expand...

that's true, too. forgot about that one.

Keith,
because of my aversion to experimenting on animals, i have decided not to continue with research after i get my master's. i am probably going to go into teaching (community college) or work as an aquarist/curator at a large-scale public aquarium. it's so much more rewarding to keep animals healthy on a day-to-day basis, to me. that's why i'm here, after all!

the marine mammal lab at my school (dedicated to marine science) can not experiment on live animals, because they are protected by law. the only thing they can do with live mammals is tagging and tracking. they have to learn from necropsies done on mammals that have stranded. so they're often rotting, sick, and disgusting. those girls (mostly girls for some reason) are HARD-CORE. i've seen pictures of seals cut in half with gallons of mucus streaming out of their lungs, because it succumbed to a horrible respiratory infection.

unfortunately, because of pollution and sewage runoff, marine mammals are showing declines in health in recent years. sea otters are getting toxoplasmosis from cat feces, sea lions are getting canine distemper... it's horrible. BTW, there is also an increase in feminization in fishes due to sewage which contains estrogens from the high number of women using birth control pills or other hormonal contrception. this means that fish that were born males are showing female secondary sexual characteristics, or even cellular changes where their testes are converting into ovaries!!!

it's messed up. we need more passionate, caring, dedicated young people to help the plight of our oceans. good luck, i hope you join us in the marine field.