Fish and aquatic news

78-year-old Florida resident Russ Sittlow has spotted something big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach at the coast of Pinellas County in western Florida.

The retired engineer first spotted the creature in April, and has now seen two of them – one bigger and one smaller. He estimates the largest to be at least 30 feet long.

“His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge,” he said of that first sighting.

Sittlow think it might be a sea serpent and has nicknamed it Normandy Nessie since he lives on Normandy Road.

“This is a snake I guarantee you, or a serpent like thing that looks like a snake,” he explained, adding that it might be an anaconda or a python or “a mutation there of.” He believes the creature to be dangerous and doesn’t recommend anyone swimming in the canal until the thing has been positively identified.

In order to capture the creature on film, Sittlow set up a surveillance camera and has now recorded “Normandy Nessie” three times. (see the video here) The video shows a dark form that appears to be 30 feet long swimming close to the surface. There is also a sequence where the creature is splashing in the water.

Sittlow’s neighbour Maria VanAiken and her husband have also encountered the elongated animal in the canal.

“I looked up and I saw this like huge-looking creature,” VanAiken said, adding that it wasn’t a manatee or dolphin.

She spotted the creature from her back porch which overlooks the canal. “This huge thing just came out of the water,” she said.

State wildlife officials that have seen the video do not give much for the sea serpent theory; they believe the animal is a manatee.

Massive fish death is planned for the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, historically known as the Chicago Drainage Canal, in northern United States.

Starting early next month, authorities will inject the powerful fish poison Rotenone into a five-mile stretch of the canal; from Lockport Locks to the electronic barrier system near 135th Street in Romeoville. The government wants to stop Asian carps from entering the Great Lakes while one of the electronic barriers is shut down for routine maintenance.

Completed in the year 1900, the canal is the only shipping link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system, and the aim of the mass killings is to save the Great Lakes ecosystem from the Asian invaders that have found their way into the manmade waterway.

Two species of Asian carp – the bighead* and the silver** – were imported by catfish farmers in the 1970’s to remove algae and suspended matter from the catfish ponds. During the early 1990s, large floods in the area made farm ponds overflow, giving the carps a chance to escape into the Mississippi River basin.

Since then, the carps have steadily made their way up the Mississippi river and are today the two most abundant species in parts of the system. They outcompete native species and cause starvation in large native game fish by devouring such large amounts of plankton.

Introducing rotenone to the canal will kill all fish, not just the Asian carps, and this has naturally stirred up some controversy. The poison is said to be safe to people, pets and other wildlife in the area, but no one should eat any fish killed by the chemical.

The plans to poison the canal were announced during a special telephone press conference Friday afternoon with members of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

“This plan has been developed with input from many biologists and scientists who all agree this is the best course of action,” said John Rogner, assistant director of the IDNR. “All of the (dead) fish will be removed and disposed of in our landfills. The clean up will take a couple of days and the cold water should remove any odours.”

Electro-fishing techniques will be used to remove and relocate as much game fish as possible from the canal prior to the release of the poison, and there are also plans to restock game fish in the area afterwards, as soon as chemical accelerants have been applied to remove the rotenone from the water.

* Bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis)
** Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix)

For the first time, a predatory coral has been captured by the camera while eating a jellyfish almost equal to its size. The event occurred in March 2009 during a dive among the Red Sea reefs located near Eilat in Israel, and the photos has now been published in the journal Coral Reefs.

Israeli researchers Omri Bronstein from Tel Aviv University and Gal Dishon from Bar-Ilan University were conducting a survey on reefs when they spotted a mushroom coral sucking in a moon jellyfish.

“During the survey we were amazed to notice some mushroom corals actively feeding on the moon jellyfish,” says Ada Alamaru, a member of the research team who is doing her PhD in marine biology supervised by Prof Yossi Loya at Tel Aviv University. “We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw it.”

Corals are predatory animals but most of them feed on tiny plankton, and corals living close to the surface can also obtain energy by forming symbiotic relationships with photosynthesising algae. While it may be possible for plankton eating corals to ingest miniscule embryonic jellyfish, this is the first time anyone has photographed a coral feasting on adult jelly.

“This is definitely unusual. As far as I know no other coral are reported to feed on jellyfish. However, some sea anemones, which are close relatives of corals, are documented feeding on other jelly species,” Alamaru explains.

The coral in question was a mushroom coral belonging to the species Fungia scruposa while the unfortunate jellyfish was an Aurelia aurita – a type of moon jellyfish. Exactly how the coral managed to capture the jellyfish remains a mystery. The area was subjected to a seasonal bloom of jellyfish brought on by nutrient rich ocean currents.

A rigid inflatable boat capable of submerging and operating underwater has been developed by Severn (7) Shipbuilders in Gloucestershire, UK.

The boat is intended for carrying workers and equipment to underwater structures in need of repair or maintenance work, such as oil rigs and bridge structures. Since it is capable of travelling on water as well as submerged, the vessel can quickly travel to the right location on the surface before submerging down to the desired depth.

The vessel consists of outer and inner tubes, plus an underneath compartment that holds the main fuel tank and lightweight batteries. The underneath compartment can be flooded to aid submerging and keep the vessel stable underwater. The outer tubes will normally be open, but can be closed if necessary. The inner tubes are inflatable and will be used to provide positive buoyancy when its time to resurface.

According to NBC News Channel, someone has placed a shark pup on top of a toilet in a public restroom in Beaufort, South Carolina. When the young shark was discovered by two women who needed to use the facility, it was already dead. The women shot a picture of the shark and alerted the facility manager.

Beaufort is a small city located in a marshy estuary adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of South Carolina. The species of shark has not been identified, but it was probably caught nearby.

Eight School shark pups have been born at the Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World, after their mother was wounded by a Broadnose Sevengill shark.

Animal keepers at the public aquarium didn’t even know the female School shark was pregnant, and was amazed to see four tiny sharks swim out of the gouge. When the female was treated for her injury, four more shark pups were found inside her.

Despite being born prematurely, all eight shark pups are healthy. They have been transferred to a predator free area and will be raised by Kelly Tarlton’s curator team until they are strong enough to be released into the wild, something which will probably happen within 6-8 weeks. The pups are currently being fattened up on a diet of herring and mullet.

Interestingly enough, the aggressive Broadnose Sevengill shark may actually have saved the lives of the School shark pups by attacking their mother and forcing them to enter the world prematurely.

“Ironically the fight their mother got into probably saved these pups’ lives! Sharks don’t have maternal instincts and just birth or ‘drop’ their babies and swim off - leaving them incredibly vulnerable. Because we didn’t know she was pregnant, and she would be most likely to give birth at night, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to the pups in time to move them to a safe, predator free area,” said Marine Biologist Andrew Christie, curator at the aquarium.

Now some happy news from the ocean: blue whales have been spotted in migratory routes and feeding grounds in the Pacific that has been void of blue-whales for over half a century. Sightings are also increasing in the Atlantic, and recent research suggests that the Antarctic blue whale population is growing at a heartening 6% a year. About 440 blue whales have been spotted in the western Atlantic and about 200 in the eastern, including large numbers off Iceland. These are likely to be just a fraction of the total amount of blue whales present in these waters.

“The overall numbers are still tiny compared with the original populations before whaling started, but the trend is at last in the right direction,” said John Calambokidis, a marine scientist whose research on whale movements and populations has just been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This may represent a return to a migration pattern that existed in earlier periods for the eastern north Pacific blue whale population,” he said.

Richard Sears, founder of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Canada, has noticed a similar trend with blue whale sightings increasing in the north Atlantic during the past few years. Sears is cautiously optimistic, but warns that the increase in sightings may be partly due to more people looking for whales. “There is still no room for complacency,” he said.

Until the 20^th century, blue whales were normally avoided by whalers since these oceanic giants were too large and too fast for traditional ships to handle. With a maximal reported length of over 30 meters and the capacity of exceeding 170 metric tons in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal even known to have existed on our planet and capturing it using an old fashioned sailing vessel is certainly no picnic.

Before the invention of the steam-powered whaling ship and the exploding harpoon, the estimated global population of the blue whale was somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. By the 1960s, no more than 5,000 blue whales were left.

Unlike whales such as the humpback which has undergone a remarkable recovery since the international ban on whaling was imposed, the blue whale populations have not shown any clear signs of recovery during the last few decades and scientists have worried about them being too shattered and fragmented to be viable populations in the long run. Illicit harvesting has also been a problem – files handed to the International Whaling Commission by Alexey Yablokov, environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, showed that the Soviet Union killed over 9,000 blue whales from the time of the ban until 1972.

“These revelations go some way towards explaining why blue whale populations stayed low for so long,” says Dan Bortolotti, author of the book Wild Blue. “It also suggests that they may now have a chance to recover — but only if the ban on hunting all large whales stays in place.”

An aquarium fish has survived seven months in a fish tank without being fed or cared for, since its owner is in police custody after being accused of killing two Chilean students and wounding three others.

When employees from Contractor’s Choice and members of the Summer Lake Homeowners Association walked into the vacant town house at Miramar Beach, Florida, they discovered what appears to be a plecostomus.

The fish was apparently overlooked when lawmen removed the other pets – fish and birds - from the home after the arrest of the pet owner Dannie Baker. The fish went unnoticed for so long because Baker’s home was closed to the homeowners association after the arrest.

“I was very upset because I thought the police had taken everything after Dannie’s arrest,” said Dianne Richmond, vice president of the homeowners association. “This poor fish has been in that boiling house with no air conditioning and nothing to eat for about seven months.”

The pleco was discovered by the fiancée of Contractor’s Choice owner, who noticed something moving in the tank and sprinkled some fish food in the water. This caused the pleco to swim out into the open to feed.

When the pleco was discovered, much of the water in its tank had evaporated and the remaining water had turned dark.

Josh Olis, an account manager at Contractor’s Choice, said he didn’t believe it when his boss told him a fish was still alive in the tank. After seeing it for himself, he and the owner refilled the tank with about 50 gallons of water. He said he will make sure the fish is fed for as long as the company is working in the home. The contractors have even given the fish a name – Theo.

“I think we’re going to accept him into the cleaning family for now,” Olis said. “He’s been living in that tank for so long, surviving off algae. I have so much respect for him, I had to name him.”

The employees at Contractor’s Choice are now looking for a permanent home for Theo.

“This poor fish has really worked for a new home,” Richmond said. “It’s a wonder he’s survived this.”

AC Comment

Although I certainly don’t recommend neglecting your plecos for seven months, I’m not very surprised that Theo was alive and kicking when they found him. Many of the catfish species commonly referred to as plecos are algae-eaters (especially when young), so if there was any light coming into the room, Theo probably had some food to eat since nobody was there scrubbing away the algae. It all comes down to how large the tank is; a big tank may generate enough algae to keep a pleco alive (albeit hungry and malnourished) for several months.

Also, the natural habitat of plecos is Central and South America, so living without air conditioning in Florida is probably not something that bothered Theo much, especially if the aquarium was placed in a location where it was sheltered from sunlight during the harshest hours of the day.

Evaporation on the other hand, that is a real threat. The build up of waste in the water was probably tolerated by Theo since the progress was slow and gradual, but eventually ending up with hardly any water due to evaporation would naturally have killed him.

Last but not least, a word of caution. Although the employees of Contractor’s Choice acted admirably and should be applauded for taking such an interested in an abandoned fish, giving Theo 50 gallons of new water was actually quite risky since such a rapid change of water quality (and probably also temperature) can be lethal to fish – especially if the tap water is also heavily chlorinated. (But this is naturally impossible to know unless you’re an aquarist so I don’t mean to sound condescending here.) If you find a neglected fish, the safest method is to gradually change water quality and temperature until conditions are ideal for that particular species.

After being exhibited for two months at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a young female white shark was released back into the ocean Wednesday this week.

“I’ve always said that these animals will tell us when it’s time to put them back to the ocean. Now was clearly the time,” said Randy Hamilton, vice president of husbandry for the aquarium.

The release was prompted by a change in behaviour; she started acting aggressive towards other sharks in the million-gallon aquarium and during the Halloween weekend she received a superficial bite wound. She also injured a galapagos shark by biting it and was observed chasing the scalloped hammerhead sharks.

“We monitor the behavior of great white sharks very closely while they’re on exhibit,” Hamilton explained. “When we saw a new pattern of aggressive behavior, we decided it was best to release her.”

The young female was the fifth great white shark exhibited and successfully released back into the wild by the aquarium. Monterey Bay Aquarium is the only institution to keep a great white shark on exhibit for more than 16 days, get the shark to consistently take food from the staff, and document the animal’s successful return to the sea.

Just like this young female, the four previously released great white sharks were fitted with electronic tracking tags which make it possible to confirm the shark’s successful adaptation back into the wild. Two of the sharks travelled to the southern tip of Baja California and beyond after being released, while the third one opted for Santa Barbara waters. The fourth shark also stayed near Santa Barbara where it was caught and released by a commercial fisherman just a few days after being released from the aquarium and it was then reportedly in good health.

The female shark released this week has been fitted with two tracking devices; one that will deliver real-time data on her location and one that will collect and store information about her travels, the depths she dives to and the water temperatures she favours for about six months, before it pops free and delivers those data to scientists via satellite.

You can find the real-time data emitted by the first device on the TOPP website (Tagging of Pacific Predators): http://www.topp.org .

The shark was released in offshore waters near the southern tip of Monterey Bay shortly after sunrise.

“Her health is excellent, and we learned a lot while she was with us. Based on past experience, we have every expectation that she’ll do well after release,” said Hamilton.

During her two month long stay (69 days to be exact) in the aquarium, she grew from 5-foot 3-inches to 5-foot 5-inches and put on an extra 20 pounds. She ate mackerel only and would happily gulp down up to three percent of her body weight in a day.

The exhibit of young great white sharks is part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s effort to change public attitudes towards the feared white sharks and raise awareness about the threats facing them in the wild. The first white shark was exhibited in 2004/2005 and was seen by over a million visitors before being released after six months in captivity. Collectively, the four sharks exhibited before the newest addition has been seen by almost 2.5 million visitors.

“I can’t overstate the impact of this single animal on advancing our mission to inspire conservation of the oceans,” aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard said of the first white shark the aquarium had on exhibit.

The million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit will undergo renovations starting late August 2010 and it will therefore not be possible to see any great white shark at the aquarium until summer 2011 at the earliest.

Europe’s first artificial surf reef was officially launched this Monday. Around a dozen surfers and body boarders headed for the waves as soon as the Bournemouth Borough Council declared the reef open.

As reported earlier, the artificial reef – which is located in Boscom on UK’s South Coast – consists of big geo-textile bags pumped hard with sand and aids in the formation of powerful barrel waves by pushing the naturally occurring waves upwards.

Prior to the opening, surfers had expressed fears that the reef was too big, situated the wrong way around, located on the wrong side of the pier, and potentially dangerous, so many eyes are now carefully monitoring the project to see if it’s a flip or flop.

“We have now got to give it the chance to see if it [the reef] does perform against the criteria that we have agreed with them,” says Roger Brown, the council’s director of leisure services.

Sean Wade, from Sorted surf shop, said: “Longer term it will need tweaking but with any project it is finding out how it works and what the best conditions are. Yesterday it looked pretty amazing.”

The artificial reef is part of the £8 million Boscombe Spa Regeneration Project funded through the sale of a seafront car park to a company that will use the space to build flats. On days with good swell, the new reef is expected to provide grade five waves.

Last month, 82 Green sea turtles hatched at SeaWorld in San Diego, California.

The eggs hatched on Shipwreck Beach and the youngsters didn’t need any human aid to get out of their shells and into the water. The park had decided to let nature take its course by refraining from incubating the eggs or help the hatchlings emerge. SeaWorld are now planning to dig up the beach to check if any buried eggs failed to hatch.

At the moment, the baby sea turtles are roughly one month old and only weigh a few grams. They happily feed on squid, shrimp, krill and special pellets. Assistant curator of fishes Tim Downing says they are all in excellent health and that they will go on display before the end of the year.

“There is so much that is not known about sea turtles,” said Downing. “We are getting real good information on the growth rate of juveniles. They are all gaining weight and doing well. We have done some X-rays, and they are progressing just like we would expect them to.”

SeaWorld is home to 30 adult sea turtles, including four Green sea turtles – three females and one male. They have been living at SeaWorld since the 1960s and are sexually mature, so all three females may have buried eggs in the sand. Only genetic testing will be able to reveal the maternity of each baby turtle.

All seven species of sea turtle in the world are endangered or threatened, with the Green sea turtle being listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It will be up to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine whether the new turtles will stay at SeaWorld and whether the adult turtles will be given opportunity to mate again next year.

A new method for distinguishing between tuna species has been presented in a paper co-authored by Dr Jordi Viñas, a fish genetics specialist at Girona University in Spain and Dr Sergi Tudela, Head of Fisheries of WWF Mediterranean.

The new method is based on gene sequencing and the researchers hope that it will support fisheries management and make trade restrictions possible for endangered species of tuna, since it can be used to accurately identify the species from any kind of processed tuna issue. It works for all eight recognized species of tuna, including highly endangered species like the Southern and Pacific bluefin tuna.

The true tunas belong to the genus Thunnus and are among the most endangered of all commercially exploited fish. They are also high priced, so when you pick up some cheap tinned fish in the supermarket the box will rarely contain Thunnus; the content will in most cases have been made from fish belonging to related families such as mackerels.

The Principality of Monaco has already lodged an application before the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for a trade ban on the endangered Atlantic (Northern) bluefin tuna.

The paper – “A Validated Methodology for Genetic Identification of Tuna

Species (Genus Thunnus)” - was published on October 27 in the journal PLoS ONE.

http://www.plosone.org/

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has launched a national campaign asking top U.S. chefs and culinary decision makers to take a “Save Our Seafood” pledge not to serve items listed in the “avoid” section of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List.

Seafood Watch is one of the best known sustainable seafood advisory lists, compiled by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The origin of the list can be traced back to the “Fishing for Solutions” exhibit which ran at the Monterey Bay Aquarium from 1997 to 1999.

The list consists of an avoid list and a good-alternative list and is updated twice a year. The website (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx ) is updated even more frequently.

“Ocean life is still in decline and we clearly need to take urgent action to turn things around,” said aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard. “The good news is that we know what it will take, and that key players are working more closely than ever to solve the problems. I’m confident that we can and will create a future with healthy oceans.”

So far, about two dozen top culinary professionals from across the nation have agreed to adhere to the list, including Susan Spicer (Bayona, New Orleans), Rick Bayless (Frontera Grill/Topolobampo, Chicago), Suzanne Goin (Lucques, Los Angeles), Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger (Border Grill/Ciudad, Los Angeles), Fedele Bauccio (Bon Appetit Management Co., Palo Alto), Rick Moonen (rm seafood, Las Vegas), Michelle Bernstein

(Michy’s, Miami), Alton Brown (Be Square Productions, Atlanta), and Michel Nischan (The Dressing Room, Westport, Conn.).

Monterey Bay Aquarium is also working with 14 nonprofit organizations across the United States and Canada as part of the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions (www.solutionsforseafood.org). Participating organizations have crafted a Common Vision for Environmentally Sustainable Seafood to help seafood buyers and suppliers develop comprehensive, corporate policies on sustainable seafood. Since the debut of the Common Vision in 2008, more than 20 major companies across North America have pledged their support.

The amazing eyes found on the mantis shrimp may inspire a new generation of CD:s and DVD:s, according to a new study from the University of Bristol.

Odontodactylus scyllarus, a species of mantis shrimp living on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, has the most complex vision system known to science and can see in twelve colours as opposed to the human eye which only sees in three. As if this wasn’t enough, Odontodactylus scyllarus can also distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

The eyes of this mantis shrimp are equipped with special light-sensitive cells that work like the quarter-wave plates found in CD and DVD players; they can rotate the plane of the oscillations of a light wave as it travels through. Thanks to this feature, the mantis shrimp is capable of converting linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

The design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye outperforms anything manmade. While the quarter-wave plates found in CD and DVD players tend to work well for one colour of light only, the mantis shrimp can convert light across the whole visible spectrum, i.e. from infra-red to nearly ultra-violet.

“What’s particularly exciting is how beautifully simple it is,” said Dr Roberts, lead author of the article. “This natural mechanism, comprised of cell membranes rolled into tubes, completely outperforms synthetic designs. It could help us make better optical devices in the future using liquid crystals that have been chemically engineered to mimic the properties of the cells in the mantis shrimp’s eye.”

How the mantis shrimp benefits from having this ability remains unknown, but polarization vision is sometimes used by animals to secretly communicate within their own species without catching the attention of predators. Also, it might make it easier for the mantis shrimp to see under water, which would come in handy when hunting for prey.

The research was carried out at the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences in the UK in collaboration with researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA.

The paper was published in Nature Photonics on October 25.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2009.189.html

The fossilised skull of a gigantic predator has been found off the English Channel coast of southern England.

The skull is 2.4 meters long and scientists believe it once belonged to a 16 meter long pliosaur which probably weighed an impressive 12 tons.

The pliosaurs were a type of ocean dwelling reptiles that dominated the seas roughly 150 million years ago.

The man behind the discovery is fossil hunter Kevin Sheehan from Dorset who gradually uncovered the remains of the fragmented skull over a number of years.

“In 40 years of collecting, I have often been green with envy at some of the finds other people have made“, said Sheehan. “But now when someone shows me a find, I can say ‘That’s not a fossil, this pliosaur, that’s a fossil’.”

The fossilised skull is 90% complete and clearly shows the jaws of a powerful predator.

“These creatures were monsters”, says Dr David Martill, a palaeontologist from the University of Portsmouth. “They had massive big muscles on their necks, and you would have imagined that they would bite into the animal and get a good grip, and then with these massive neck muscles they probably would have thrashed the animals around and torn chunks off. It would have been a bit of a blood bath.”

Martill suspects that the skull may belong to a species of pliosaur that haven’t been unearthed until now.

“This is one of the largest, if not the largest, pliosaur skull found anywhere in the world and contains features that have not been seen before“, he explains. “It could be a species new to science.”

The skull has been purchased by the Dorset County Council and will be displayed in the county museum.