It’s time to get ready for World Ocean Day – it’s less than two weeks away on June 8. If you haven’t started your Ocean Day preparations yet, it’s not too late to plan a sunset sail, beach clean-up, aquarium trip, oyster BBQ, or ocean-themed karaoke night. 

As an Intertidal newsletter reader, you already know the ocean connects us to everything and everyone. This month’s offerings link you to a range of topics to help you drop a little ocean into any conversation and lure more people to Team Ocean. 

• Has the ocean become a subprime asset in our global bioeconomic portfolio? In 2019, the Blue economy was the fifth largest economy in the world, and that’s without including the $24 trillion dollars worth of natural services provided by a healthy ocean, like food and flood protection. How do we stop spending 30$ destroying those natural services for every 1$ we invest in sustainability? 

  “Shifting capital from extractive to regenerative models at scale requires three things: reformed accounting that treats ocean degradation as the material financial risk it is; redirected capital flows from nature-negative to nature-positive activities; and regulatory frameworks that close the gap between what the science shows and what the market prices. None of this is technically complicated. It is politically and institutionally inconvenient – precisely what was said about mortgage reform in 2006.”

• We’ve still seen more of the moon than the bottom of the ocean, but we’re making progress. We have detailed maps for 28% of the seafloor and a plan to get eyes on 10,000 sites through the global deep sea exploration goals. In the last year, we also discovered 1,100 new marine species, like this ghost shark.👇

• While we started tagging sharks just to know where sharks are, it turns out that sharks are also helping us do better climate and weather forecasting by gathering temperature data from remote areas. Thanks, sharks! 

• If you’re trying to wrap your head around all the different data collected and managed by the U.S. government, Denice Ross & Christopher Marcum made you a field guide. It’s nice to see some ocean creatures featured as icons for science, navigation, and reference data. If you’re struggling to organize data for your organization (ocean or not), this taxonomy might work for you. 

• Good news in crabs (and biotech): Amgen & Abbott Laboratories announced they’re moving to using synthetic blood for drug testing, which means no more blood donations for hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs. 

• Should we bring back jelly island cakes? Discuss.

Get out and touch salt. 

-Kate