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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“Carbon dioxide emissions are rising fast and are already above the safe level for corals,” said Dr Alex Rogers, head of marine biodiversity at the ZSL. “Some reefs are already beginning to fail and many will die within a few decades. We need a plan B, and freezing them is the best option.”

The idea of creating a coral cryobank stems from similar projects concerning seeds, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault where seeds from all over the world are preserved inside a cool cavern on Spitsbergen, north of mainland Norway.

Storing coral for prolonged periods of time without killing them was made possible quite recently thanks to a new method developed by researcher Craig Downs of the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory.

“We can take 1mm-2mm biopsies from coral, freeze them at -200C and thaw them out to regenerate back into a polyp,” says Downs, who is now working with the ZSL. “We are proposing to do this for every species of coral on the planet.”

Roughly 3,350 cold-water corals and about 1,800 tropical coral species are currently know to science. Downs proposes keeping 1,000 samples of each at the zoo.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is now discussing setting up their own coral sample facility to alleviate the risks of having just one coral sample storage in the world.

Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said he supported the efforts but warned it was no consolation for the eradication of reefs. According to Veron, endeavours such as cryobanks, genetic make-up preservation, and coral aquariums aren’t meaningful.

“These are not solutions,” says Veron. “Because Australia is home to the biggest coral reef in the world, it should concentrate all its efforts into helping the Great Barrier Reef survive. Personally, I feel it’s no compensation to know that the genetic information of corals is kept in machines.”

“This is huge,” says Professor Julia Parrish, a marine biologist who leads a seabird monitoring group at the University of Washington. “It’s the largest mortality event of its kind on the West Coast that we know of.”

Similar mass-deaths have taken place along the coast of California before, but this is the first time it is reported from the states of Oregon and Washington. Also, as far as we know, the California die-offs affected hundreds of seabirds, not thousands.

The so called algae “bloom” consists of tiny single-celled algae of the species Akashiwo sanguinea.

Marine biologists have not been able to determine the reason for the sudden appearance of up to a million Akashiwo sanguinea cells per litre seawater, but recent storms in the area may have contributed to the severity of the problem by breaking up the algae.

When the algae get whipped, it turns into what can best be described as a bubbly soap which sticks to the seabirds.

“It looks like they’re [the seabirds] lying in a sea of bubble bath,” said Greg Schirato, regional wildlife program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“The five warships and reconnaissance plane have conducted routine patrols in the Natuna waters as part of efforts to reduce the number of fish thefts,” S.M. Darojatim, Commander of the Main Naval Base IV Commodore, announced Tuesday.

He also stated that the Natuna waters and the South China Sea were vulnerable to a number of criminal offences, including fish and coral thefts.

“The Pontianak naval base has so far secured the West Kalimantan waters well so that it sets a good example to other naval bases to safeguard the Indonesian waters,” said the commander.

Natuna Sea Facts

The Natuna Sea is a part of the South China Sea and home to an archipelago of 272 islands, located between east and west Malaysia and the Kalimantan (the Indonesian portion of the island Borneo). The islands form a part of the Indonesian Riau province and is the northernmost non-disputed island group in Indonesia.

The islands are populated with roughly 100,000 people, most of them farmers and fishermen. The beaches are important nesting sites for sea turtles and the surrounding waters are filled with biodiverse coral reefs. The archipelago is also famous for its rich avifauna with over 70 different described species of bird, including rare ones like the Natuna Serpent-eagle and the Lesser Fish-eagle. The islands are also home to primates, such as the Natuna Banded Leaf Monkey which is considered one of the 25 most endangered primates in the world.