Lake Ontario renamed Lake America: that's the story leading this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and we dig into what it actually means, on paper and in practice, when a president tries to rename a body of water shared with another country. We trace the same playbook back to the Gulf of Mexico becoming "Gulf America," walk through what it normally takes to rename a U.S. body of water through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names versus what just happened with a single executive order, and dig into whether a rename like this even holds up internationally — including how Google Maps decides what name you see, and what happened when Mexico sued over the Gulf rename. We also look at the actual polling: most Americans, and even most Floridians, opposed the Gulf rename when it happened, and usage data suggests "Gulf of America" is losing ground in the press, not gaining it.

This episode's Ocean People Spotlight profiles Dr. Craig McClain, a marine biologist who spent six years as Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), growing the consortium's funding, research vessel capacity, and campus footprint before returning to full-time research and teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We cover his path through Duke University and LUMCON, his current NSF-funded work using DNA sequencing to catalog deep-sea biodiversity before it's lost, and Deep-Sea News, the long-running deep-sea blog he founded and still edits.

We close on real optimism from the deep ocean: a two-week research expedition off the coast of Brazil, aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel Falkor (too), just turned up 31 species new to science in the ocean's midwater, the vast, largely unexplored zone between the sunlit surface and the seafloor. New onboard technology let the team confirm new species in days rather than the usual decades, and the footage includes an octopus feeding on a jellyfish 800 meters down and a possible entirely new family of siphonophore. It's a reminder that even as we're renaming lakes for political theater, there's still a genuine, largely unmapped frontier left to discover in the ocean.

Takeaways:

Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" on the U.S. side, following the same playbook as the earlier Gulf of Mexico to "Gulf America" rename amid trade tensions.

Renaming a U.S. body of water normally goes through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a free but slow process (6 months to over a year); an executive order bypasses that entirely.

A rename doesn't automatically hold internationally: Canada isn't obligated to recognize "Lake America," and Google Maps follows each government's own official naming source.

Most Americans and most Florida voters opposed the Gulf of America rename in polling, and media usage data suggests the new name has lost ground over time rather than gained it.

This episode's Ocean People Spotlight, Dr. Craig McClain, led LUMCON from 2016–2022, now researches deep-sea biodiversity at UL Lafayette, and founded the long-running Deep-Sea News blog.

A two-week Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition off Brazil discovered 31 new species in the ocean's midwater zone, using new tech that compresses species identification from decades down to days.