A new form of ship began to be built during the Tokugawa period, known as sengokubune or bezaisen. These large cargo ships were essential components of a massive increase in coastal trade over the course of an era when Japanese overseas trade was limited. Despite mistaken assumptions about the quality of Japanese shipbuilding in the Tokugawa (many of which arose in the 19th-century context of Westernization), this period was the heyday of a Japanese form of ship construction well-adapted to coastal sailing in and around the Japanese archipelago. The ways that such ships failed, and their weaknesses and strengths in open water, illuminate important aspects of the relationship that sailors of this period had with the ocean and the natural resources available to build their ships. While ship design did change slightly over the course of the period, some of the ships' apparently weakest points remained uncorrected in the massive sengokubune of the 19th century, because those weak points also provided an advantage in coastal waters - one which outweighed their disadvantages in the open ocean. Other peculiarities of shipbuilding in this period reflected solutions to limited supplies of necessary lumber or other resource-access problems. This paper will focus on the cargo ships built during the Tokugawa and how they speak to the particular relationship early-modern Japanese people developed with different facets of their marine and terrestrial environments.

During the summer of 1985/86, the Huon and Derwent estuary region in southern Tasmania experienced a red tide. This algal bloom was composed of Gynodinium catenatum, a species of dinoflagellate which produces a toxin that biomagnifies in filter feeding shellfish. If consumed by people, that toxin can result in paralytic shellfish poisoning, a serious and sometime fatal condition. Its identification resulted in a short-lived public health scare. More importantly, this was the first appearance of Gymnodinium catenatum in Australia. Scientists quickly tied its appearance to a likely vector of translocation: ballast water. The 1985/6 scare would catalyze decades of research into the science of ballast water-mediated “bioinvasions” and motivate the first sustained policymaking interest in ballast water management in Australia.

This paper explores the interface of science, policy, and the biological characteristics of Gynodinium catenatum during the first phase of ballast water management between 1970 and 1990. It argues that the biology, ecology, and biogeography of this dinoflagellate species informed debates about ballast water as a vector of species translocation. They also influenced stakeholder participation and encouraged specific managerial strategies to limit aquatic introductions. Australia’s early adoption and outspoken advocacy of ballast water management ensured this experience with toxic algae influenced the circulation of new scientific knowledge and national and international ballast water management policies intended to stem the anthropogenic circulation of aquatic species worldwide.

The Mediterranean Sea, located at the center of traditional Western geographies, has gradually become a model for larger scale ocean dynamics and global oceanography, as well as to conceptualise the physics of semi-enclosed basins. In fact, a ‘mediterranean sea’ is a general term in oceanography to refer to semi-enclosed seas that show certain circulation patterns. The renowned oceanographer Henry Stommel, along with the members of the MEDOC experiment, first noticed that the Mediterranean Sea could be an ideal place to study deep ocean convection in 1969. The Mediterranean Sea has since been claimed as a ‘natural' laboratory or 'open-air' model of environmental and climatic change by physical oceanographers and ecosystem scientists.

Other regional basins in the polar seas have claims to equally serve as hotspots for observing unique phenomena, but due to the logistical and technical difficulties of conducting fieldwork in the poles they were underexplored until decades later. The lack of a solid theory of sea-ice interaction imposed further complexities, as opposed to the mid-latitude, iceless Mediterranean. For instance, the first systematic study of deep convection in the Greenland-Norwegian Sea was not undertaken until 1988/1989 by the Greenland Sea Project (GSP). Much of the ground knowledge on the matter was transferred across the Mediterranean borders into this and other physical oceanographic projects at less accessible and understood polar latitudes. This paper suggests that the prominent role of the Mediterranean Sea as the West basin par excellence promoted productive encounters with oceanographic research in other geographical contexts.