Dolphins. Picture from aquariumposter.com

On February 21, three baby dolphins were found dead on the shores of Horn Island, and on February 22 the finding of a fourth carcass was confirmed by The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies (IMMS). This brings the amount of dead infant dolphins reported since January up to 18. Since the beginning of the year, 10 adult dolphins have also been found dead.

Located roughly 12 miles (20 km) south of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Horn Island is one of several islands that make up the Gulf Islands National Seashore Park. National Resource Advisory employees are currently working with BP cleanup crews on the island.

Blair Mase, marine mammal stranding coordinator at The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is concerned about the high number of wash up dead dolphins.

“We’re definitely keeping a close eye on this situation,” says Mase. “We’re comparing this to previous years, trying to find out what’s going on here.”

We are now early in the birthing season for dolphins in the area, and so far, 18 bodies of baby dolphins have been found where the baby was either stillborn or died shortly after birth.

“We’re trying to determine if we do in fact have still births,” says Mase. “There are more in Mississippi than in Alabama and Louisiana. With the oil spill, it is difficult. We’re trying to determine what’s causing this. It could be infectious related. Or it could be non-infection. We run the gamut of causes.”

The necropsy of the dead dolphins will hopefully help shed some light on the situation.

Watch it here

Yet another Chinese event is by many considered to be tainted with animal cruelty, and just as with the olympics, the unlucky animals are goldfish. at the opening gala of China’s lunar new year festival earlier this month they shower goldfish swimming in perfect military formations. The show put on by magician Fu Yandong was well received by the audience but have sparked outcry in animal activist circles as the only explanation to the trick according to them is magnets in the stomachs of the goldfish. The goldfish in in another word not so much swimming as being dragged. There are many factors supporting this hypothesis including the very shallow water the goldfish is swimming in. The shallow water would allow magnets to work which wouldn´t be possible in deeper water. Experts in the field agrees and think the fish might have been fed food with metal shavings on it.

Fu has denied the accusation of animal cruelty, telling one news programme: “If I used magnets, the fish would stick together.”  This is not necessarily true and a magician never reveal his trick even if discovered right?

Another theory that has been put forward is that it is fake fish but experts reject this idea in unison as the replicas would not meet the scrutiny of 100s of million of viewers.

A coalition of 53 groups sent a letter to Chinese broadcaster CCTV asking them to prevent magician Fu Yandong performing it again at the closing ceremony.

Generic Lionfish

A turbulent, bizarre and downright strange year for fish, our list of the Top Ten Fish Stories of 2010 will have you scratching your head, wiping away tears and laughing all in one sitting. To hold you over until 2011, we put together the wildest and most comprehensive list of fish stories. So sit back, and enjoy the ride.

Top Ten Fish Stories of 2010

1. Nothing affected fish more strongly in 2010 than the BP Gulf Oil Spill . Going down in history as the worst man-made ecological disaster in antiquity, the repercussions of this tragedy are truly stunning. According to the official report released January 1, 2011 by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, “Organisms are exposed to oil through ingestion, filtration, inhalation, absorption, and fouling.” With ecological and economical losses proving difficult to pinpoint exactly, 2010 will nonetheless go down in the fish-histories as a time of great doom, death and terrible loss.
2. Making a strong statement for endangered and extinct species the world over, the Lake Saiko salmon reemerged from the pages of history in 2010. Thought to be extinct for over half a century, the “kunimasu” or “black kokanee” salmon materialized from the murky beyond, laying testament to the true adaptability of this remarkable species. Like the infamous snail darter fish of the Tellico Dam controversy, the black kokanee baffled researchers and proved once again that life always finds a way. Look also to salmon in Alaska and Derbyshire England for inspiration – both species experiencing respective rebounds in 2010. We’ll have to get one of these guys in an aquarium , just in case they try to run off on us again!
3. In 2010, high-fiving a fish became possible for the first time with the discovery of a mysterious “pink handfish” off the Australian island of Tasmania. Walking with its fins rather than swimming, this fish marks an exciting chapter in the voluminous and burgeoning book of “unknowns” discovered in the world’s oceans to date. Indeed, on the weird-o-meter, this fish gives the angler fish (with its spooky, head-dangling light bulb) a run for its money.
4. The Bluefin Tuna has been in the news at every turn in 2010. Between the BP oil spill and over-fishing sparking controversy in the EU, this species of fish should be on every fish-aficionados mind.
5. Although mammals, dolphins made a statement in 2010 that spoke volumes about the difference between mammalian brains and those of fish. In the wake of the BP oil spill, unlike sea turtles or fish, dolphins showed their smarts by swimming away from deadly oil plumes. What does this tell us about fish? Simply put, fish need more help in a human dominated world, which should in good conscience influence policy-making in the coming years.
6. Try squeezing one of these suckers into a fish tank and you might have the makings of a freak show on your hands! One of 38 species discovered around Greenland since 1992, the “longhead dreamer” anglerfish came seemingly screaming off the pages of your favorite science fiction novel in 2010 to send chills up the spines of people worldwide. Not only does this fish look like a monster found on a 14th Century sea map, it illustrates the vastness of the true “final frontier” – the Earth’s mysterious and largely unexplored oceans. Knowing more about the surface of the moon than about our own oceans, this species has shown mankind that we have only scraped the surface on what lies beneath the briny beyond. So Bigfoot, move aside! There are countless species yet to be discovered beneath the world’s waves.
7. Calling to mind the archetypal image of a mad scientist bringing a new species to life —“It’s Alive! It’s Alive”—“Transgenic salmon ” made their real debut in 2010 as mankind’s most recent installment in a long line of playing god. Modified by scientists for human consumption, what was once an Atlantic salmon has been spliced with the DNA of two other fish species to create a hybrid that reaches full size in just half the time of a regular salmon. One has to wonder, is this exciting, or just plain scary?
8. Mankind’s interest in missing links led to the repeal of longstanding Darwinian Theory pertaining to a species of hybrid that formerly spanned the gap between tetrapods and fish. A Tiktaalik fossil that was once accepted as the missing link between fish and tetrapods was recently supplanted for an even older fossil discovered in Poland of tetrapod tracks that tell quite a different story. This new evidence has effectively set scientists back to their laboratories, searching for the true missing link between fish and tetrapods.
9. People are finding new and surprisingly simple solutions to battle invasive fish species in the Florida Keys. A rising star in the invasive fish ranks, the lionfish has overtaken the warm, pristine waters of the Florida Keys in 2010. In the words of the Associated Press, people in the Keys are taking the tact, “If you can’t beat them, eat them,” with the Reef Environmental Education Foundation most notably releasing “The Lionfish Cookbook.” Now, if we could only find a way to make the zebra mussel or lamprey eel appetizing, we would really be in business.
10. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger, enter the infamous Snakehead fish of Australia. Sure, we’ve all seen scary looking fish before, but before now, we only worried about them in the water. That’s right, this invasive species, known to inhabit Oceania, is worried to make landfall in Australia if action isn’t taken to curb the spread of this strange beast. So what makes this species so strange? It’s a fish that can breathe air and hunt on land. Enough said.

Guest post by: FishTankWarehouse.com

Shark fins

A high class restaurant situated in Tsim Sha Tsui, the Sun Tung Lok – which also happens to be very famous for its shark fin soup – has just gotten the honor of being the first restaurant, not part of a hotel, to be given three Michelin stars.

“After no less than eight visits in the past year by our inspectors, we decided that with its new chef, Joe Chan, the restaurant was a three star,” director of Michelin guides, Jean-Luc Naret explained.
“The chef has visited different parts of the mainland and incorporated ideas into the menu.”

Roughly eighty percent of the menu is Cantonese, which stems to include stuffed crab shell, roast suckling pig and beef rib with house gravy.

The price of the succulent shark fin soup ranges from $20 USD to $650.

The group of caterers opened up their branch in Tsim Sha Tsui four decades after the grand opening of their first restaurant in Happy Valley.

The soup has been popular amongst rather famous patrons of the restaurant such as Stanly Ho Hung-Sun, casino mogul, Lee Heung-kam, an actress, and Alex Fong Lik-sun, a singer.

A food critic and chef from Hong Kong, Lau Kin-Wai, has commented that the Sun Tung Lok deserves the highest rating as the quality of the soup is outstanding, and of course the innovative menu as well.

However, the soup is not sitting well with conservationist groups such as the WWF and PETA. The WWF has commented that is is rather disappointed for the three star rating, as it is rewarding bad behavior.

“Since the Michelin Guide is popular with diners, it may induce more shark fin consumption and further impact marine ecosystems,” a spokeswoman commented.

NASA-funded scientific research has just blown us away, by changing the way we look at life on Earth.

Scientists who were researching and testing the harsh environments of Mono Lake in California have uncovered the first organism on the planet which can reproduce and thrive in arsenic – a deadly poison. The organism actually uses arsenic in place of phosphorous in the cell components.

“The definition of life has just expanded,” commented NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington, Ed Weiler. “As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it.”

This has turned everything we have known on its head. Science textbooks will need to be changed, and we will need to readjust our point of view when it comes to looking for extra terrestrial life in the universe. The findings of the study were published in this week’s edition of Science Express.

Now, an organism which lives in arsenic is one thing, but this little guy actually is made out of it!

“We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new — building parts of itself out of arsenic,” explains a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team’s lead scientist, Felisa Wolfe-Simon. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”

Yes, we will now need to go over all the old data for the moon.. It’s possible we missed something..
This new data means a whole lot more work, but a whole lot more excitement is around the bend as well.

Credit: André Karwath

Tens of thousands of jellyfish have been discovered washed up on the shores of Ocean Beach, San Francisco.

The jellyfish covered a section of the beach about three miles in length and twenty feet wide.

George Durgerian, a spokesman for the National Park Service, has commented that this strange event was much like “a huge, cobblestone walkway made of jellyfish.” he added that he has not seen anything like this before.

Durgerian reported the incident right away to the Ocean Beach Bulletin. He commented that this amazing thing can be seen by many residents of San Francisco from Pacheco to Lawton streets.

He went on record stating that the cause of this phenomenon could be the tides.

“There was a large swell overnight that may have been responsible,” he explained.

The jellyfish were identified by Durgerian as a common species known as moon jellyfish.

“There were jellfish like you think they look like – large, circular, translucent and gelatinous,” he continued.

The only other time that Dergerian was witness to such an event was around seven years ago on Ocean Beach which involved by-the-wind sailor jellyfish, more commonly known as Valella jellyfish.

‘They kind of look like a windsurfer,’ Durgerian commented..

Durgerian has commented that he can not explain just why the jellyfish beached over the weekend, but said that a park service biologist would be looking over some specimens.

He also mentioned that there is no planned cleanup for the jellyfish, as high tide will just sweep them back out to sea.

Sealion

It seems that sea lions have once again pulled the wool over the eyes of researchers. We all know it’s a rough world, and no less is true of those poor orphaned sea lion pups. However, decades of painstaking research has proven that the sea lion females shun any sea lion pups which aren’t there own.. Or do they?

A new bit of genetic research of the populations of Californian sea lions, published this past Monday in the online journal PloS ONE, now sheds some new light on the subject, and states that sea lions are not as cold as they are made out to be.

Up to seventeen percent of the females in the California sea lions populations off of Mexico’s coast will actually take on an orphaned pup as one of their own offspring, according to the new research. What is even more amazing, is that the researchers were able to watch the females care for these pups year after year.
“Females are incredibly aggressive toward pups that aren’t theirs. They’ll bare teeth and bark, sometimes grab and toss pups that aren’t their own away,” explains a marine biologist at Arizona State University who made the discovery through an unrelated research effort, Ramona Flatz. “That they adopt at all really surprised us. We didn’t think it happened.”

So, while the chances are not that high that an orphaned pup can find an adoptive mother, the chance still exists, so like people, there are some decent sea lions out there…

Sturgeon - Aaron Gustafson

OK you fish egg fanatics, some good news – black caviar can once again be purchased for your upscale parties. It is available on the shelves in Russia for the first time since it was taken off the menu back in 2007.

It was taken off the market in Russia due to concern for the survival of the sturgeon, who were under constant attack from poachers for the delectable delicacy.

However, now it is back on the market, even though the sturgeon is not yet out from under the cloud of extinction, and officials are keeping their fingers crossed that the competition in the commercial market may just help put an end to the black market of black caviar.

The ban on the sale of black caviar was supposed to help encourage people to start caviar farms – what can we say, good old Russian logic – which were supposed to use breeding techniques approved during the reign of the Soviet Union.

That being the case, black caviar farms remained under developed in Russia, and only one out of every five of them actually produces the delectable black tidbits. The rest of the black caviar comes from smuggling and poaching operations, Itogi reported.

After three years going down this path proved to not be getting the desired effect as the demand for the black caviar simply made prices skyrocket, and cases of poaching and smuggling became more abundant.

While black caviar has been put back on the market, the red caviar is expected to be the choice this Christmas and New Years’, given that the price is much easier on the purse strings.

A case nearly three decades old which revolves around what is thought to be the worlds’ biggest pearl is being brought into the lime light yet again in a Denver courtroom. The tale is one of murder shrouded in mystery, toped off with a several million dollars.

The Pearl of Allah, a fourteen pound wonder of nature, is currently in residence over in a bank vault in a Colorado Springs Bank. It may finally get to have the dust blown off it once again, now that a Denver federal has agreed to re-open the case, which aims to properly distribute the gains from the sale of the nine inch wonder.

Our story begins back in 1934, when a diver found this gigantic pearl shaped like a brain in a clam off the Philippines coast. Unfortunately, he drowned attempting to bring it to the surface.

A Denver Post article published back in 2007 has said that the pearl eventually came to be owned in part by one Joe Bonicelli, the proprietor of a bar in Colorado Springs. Then in 1975, Eloise Bonicelli was murdered by some intruder in their residence. The police later found that the demise of Eloise Bonicelli was contracted by none other than Joe Bonicelli, with the help of a scrupulous business man, Tom Philips who – surprise surprise – was also a part owner of the pearl. The two rascals hired a barber named Delfino Ortega, to kill both Mrs. Bonicelli and Phillip’s Wife.

It appears that Phillips managed to get himself immunity at the trial if he went on the stand against Ortega, the Colorado Springs Gazette announced back in 2005.

Joe Bonicelli passed on back in 1998, and his share of the Pearl of Allah switched over to his second wife, who he was briefly attached to back in 1980, and his daughter from that same marriage, one Nicolina Bonicelli. The children from his first marriage, Michael Bonnicelli, Gwendolyn Garris and Donna Fuller, then were made aware of the fact that their father and Philips were behind the untimely demise of their mother, and filed a wrongful death suit against the estate of both their father and Phillips. Back in 2005, a jury of their peers awarded them the princely sum of $32.4 million.

Nicolica Bonicelli appealed this outcome, stating that the lawsuit was not only filed too late in the game, but also it was an exorbitant amount. In 2007, The Appeals court of Colorado upheld the original ruling. Nicolina Bonicelli commented that by upholding the original ruling, the Court was in fact letting her and the citizens down.

At the time of this decision, the pearl had an appraised value of some $60 million.

Joe Bonicelli’s children from his first marriage were very pleased by the first ruling, and added that they intended to set up a foundation to help abused children in their mother’s name.
Of course, the case is still as muddled as ever, and is complicated by the fact that the principal owners and investors have all passed on..

The world awaits to see the outcome and the final resting place of the “Pearl of Allah”.ä

Yucatan

Scientists specializing in the area of underwater archeology, have just unearthed what appear to be four complete skulls of the extinct Arctotherium – a kind of stout faced bear which vanished off the face of the planet over 11,000 years ago – 42 meters beneath the waves, in an underwater cave on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

The skulls, which measured between 25 and 30 centimeters, belonged to two adult bears – one male and one female – as well as two bears which had not yet reached adulthood. It is not known whether these bears were a family unit or not, and that answer is not likely going to be easy to find out from just the skulls of the bears. A team of scientists, led by Guillermo de Anda Alanis, from the Yucatan Autonomous University, unearthed these skulls when they were making a dive through the underwater caverns.

Along with the skulls of the bears, the team also uncovered the skeletons of five humans not too far away. As soon as the dating of the human skeletons has been completed, they will be able to ascertain if the two finds are related.

The discovery of the skulls will help to initiate a change of thinking when it comes to the biogeography of bears in the Americas – Arcotherium was believed to have only made its home in South America. The only living descendant of these prehistoric bears is the spectacled bear which makes its home in Venezuela.