Georgia, U.S.A. – Enjoy two of the South’s favorite foods – shrimp and grits, at this weekend festival September 14-16, 2012. With delicious food, live music, and great entertainment, “Shrimp and Grits: The Wild Georgia Shrimp Festival” is an Island-wide event that showcases the wonderful tastes, sights and sounds of Jekyll Island. The weekend features an amateur and professional shrimp & grits cooking competition, Brew Cruise, book signing, fine arts & crafts vendor village, live entertainment, and family fun entertainment.

Live music includes the following bands; Soul Gravy, Traveling Riverside Band, Shane Bridges Band, Honey Blue, and Wharfratz. All activities and entertainment are set amongst the live oaks and historic cottages of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel National Landmark Historic District.

Admission to the festival is free. New to this year’s festival is a craft brew tasting presented by Southern Eagle Distributing. Breweries include Magic Hat, RJ Rockers, Kona Breweries, New Belgium, and Southern Tier.

This year the Jekyll Island Club Hotel has decided to celebrate Shrimp and Grits all month long! That means during the month of September we are offering some spectacular deals for lunch and dinner. So, stop by before the festival to get a taste of the best and come back after because it was that good.

Join us for lunch and get a taste of our Award Winning Shrimp and Grits for just $12.50. This is a deal you won’t want to miss. Can’t make it for lunch? No problem they are also offering it as a 3-course meal for dinner. This includes a house salad or soup du jour along with Shrimp and Grits and a dessert selection. Enjoy this delectable meal for only $35.00 per person before tax.

Wild Georgia Shrimp and Grits Festival Package Includes for $285.00/per night:

• Clubhouse or Traditional Accommodations with queen, king or two double beds
• Breakfast Buffet each morning
• Two tickets to the Jekyll Island Club’s booth for their award winning Shrimp and Grits
• 2012 Festival t-shirts and official poster

Image Courtesy of  http://www.shrimpandgritsfestival.com

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This early January, a team of marine scientists discovered a new species of life in a most unlikely place: on the ocean floor, hidden from sunlight and steeped in pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch, swarming around vents that spurt scorching water.

Boarding the vessel, Atlantis, the team – led by marine biologist Dr. Jon Copley and marine geochemist Dr. Doug Connelly – descended five kilometers to the Cayman Trough, located south of the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. At the Cayman Trough, like at other trenches, two tectonic plates are slowly shifting apart 0.6 inches or 15 mm per year, producing fresh ocean floor. Hydrothermal vents often sprout at trenches due to the volcanic activity occurring below.

Found commonly in ridges, they are essentially seafloor chimneys – as tall as ten meters – that spew mineral-filled water, whose temperatures range from 300 to 400° C (600-750° F). Their heat comes from magma chambers under the ocean floor. Upon reaching their destination, the marine scientists were surprised to see two hydrothermal vents that were six meters tall. The team did not expect to find vents because it was thought that they did not exist in the area.

This type of vent, known as a “black smoker vent,” gushes 450° C (~850° F) water, filled not only with minerals, but with metallic particles, making the water appear smoky. The explorers named the vents the Beebe Vent Field, after William Beebe, an American scientist who was the first deep-sea explorer. The team was surprised even further when they spotted a new species of shrimp clustering (2,000 per square meter) around the vents and feeding on the minerals.

In lieu of eyes, the ghostly white shrimp have a light-sensing organ on their backs to help them navigate through the dim glow emanating from the vents. Furthermore, white anemones were found laying on the sea floor, where they fed off of the copper-rich water that seeped through. In a previous expedition, the team also found vents around Mount Dent (3 km high), an underwater mountain located at the Cayman Trough.

“Finding black smoker vents on Mount Dent was a complete surprise,” Dr. Connelly says in the National Oceanography Center news release. Dr. Connelly works at the National Oceanography Center. “Hot and acidic vents have never been seen in an area like this before, and usually we don’t even look for vents in places like this.”

With their finding vents at Mount Dent and now at the Cayman Trough, the marine scientists surmise that there is more volcanic activity in the ocean than previously thought. Recently, another team of scientists discovered new species of crab and octopus – called the yeti crab and the pale octopus, respectively – hanging around vents in Antarctica.

With the combination of the discovery of life at the bottom of the Antarctic and at the Cayman Trough, marine scientists all over the world are expanding their perception of what sorts of conditions life can thrive in, especially in the deepest parts of the oceans. “Studying the creatures at these vents and comparing them with species at other vents around the world will help us to understand how animals disperse and evolve in the deep ocean,” states Dr. Copley of the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

“One of the big mysteries of deep-sea vents is how animals are able to disperse from vent field to vent field, crossing the apparently large distances between them,” he adds. “But maybe there are more ‘stepping stones’ like these out there than we realized.”

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