To demonstrate the level of toxic material in a brand of anti-dandruff shampoo, a Danish television presenter poured diluted shampoo into a fish tank on a 2004 episode of the consumer affairs show she fronted.

Lisbeth Kloester, a television presenter on the Danish public channel DV1, is now on trial for causing unnecessary suffering to animals.

After being subjected to the shampoo, all but one of 12 guppy fish housed in the aquarium died within four days and a veterinary practitioner watching the show decided to press charges. Under Danish law, causing unnecessary suffering to animals is an offence and Kloester could face a fine if convicted.

Kloester has pleaded not guilty and her lawyer Tuge Tried said he expected his client to be acquitted at the trial on Tuesday.

“The allegations are this experiment caused the fish’s fear and suffering…but expert witnesses told the court on May 12 that this was not the case,” he said. “Fish are killed by suffocation in industrial fisheries and we throw live lobsters into boiling water, but we don’t press charges against fisherman or restaurant owners.”

Indonesia will create Southeast Asia’s largest marine park in the Savu Sea, Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Freddy Numberi said on Wednesday at the World Ocean Conference in Manado, Sulawesi.

The Savu Marine National Park will cover 3.5 million hectares in an incredibly diverse area where you can find no less than 500 coral species, over 300 recognized species of fish and a lot of charismatic wildlife like sea turtles, sharks, dolphins and whales. Out of 27 known species of whale, no less than 14 migrate through the Savu Sea to get from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The Savu Sea is also an important spawning ground for many marine species, including the world’s dwindling tuna population.

Indonesia is famous for its prosperous marine environment, but this marine flora and fauna are today facing serious treats, including pollution, over fishing and the use of unsustainable fishing methods. Lax enforcement of Indonesian law has made it possible for fishermen to continue using illegal fishing methods such as dynamite and cyanide fishing.

Within the Savu Marine National Park, efforts will be made to eradicate illegal fishing practises while keeping certain areas open for local fishermen to continue traditional subsistence fishing. Tourism activities will also be allowed in certain designated areas within the park. Environmental groups, including WWF and The Nature Conservancy, will help set up the reserve together with the Indonesian government.

“Enforcement is one of the key questions we need to work out, said Rili Djohani”, marine expert at The Nature Conservancy. “It could be a combination of community-based and government patrols.”

The Savu Marine National Park is located within the so called Coral Triangle, a coral reef network bounded by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

Have you ever tried to keep a seahorse alive in an aquarium only to fail miserably? Well, to add insult to injury, these creatures seem to be much sturdier than previously believed, because how else can you explain the amazing survival of a British seahorse found three miles inland in Weymouth, Dorset?

“I was just popping out to buy a paper and I looked down and saw this funny object by the pathway, said Karen Warr, 46, who discovered the unusual visitor outside her house. I got a bit closer I saw it was a seahorse. They are very distinctive. I did wonder what on earth it was doing there but I could see it was still breathing so I dashed inside and the only thing I could think of to pick it up with was a fish slice. I put it in the bowl I use for my scales and filled it with tepid water. It was still breathing but wasn’t moving much, it must have been in shock.”

How long the seahorse had been lying on the ground gasping for air is unknown, but Warr put her cat out three hours earlier; a cat fond of eating creatures from the sea. “’It couldn’t have been there then otherwise he would have eaten it”, Warr explained.

After saving the seahorse from suffocation, dehydration and the possible return of the hungry cat, Warr made a call to the nearest Sealife Centre. “I called the Sea Life Centre because they are only down the road and somebody came out to see me.”

The resilient seahorse, an adult female who has been given the name Pegasus, is now recuperating from her adventures in a dark quarantine aquarium at the Sea Life Centre where she is gradually being acclimatized back to saline conditions.

“They can go into shock if they are not treated carefully”, says Display supervisor Claire Little. “She seems fine now but we will continue to monitor her while she is in quarantine for the next 28 days. She has been quite lucky. They are fairly hardy creatures but it was obviously just very good fortune that she was found straight away and we were called.”

Exactly how a seahorse ended up three mile inland remains a mystery, but Warr and Little both agree that it was most likely dropped by a seagull.

As reported earlier today, a Sarpa salpa fish has been caught in British waters, the first one since 1983 and the fourth one ever reported from the United Kingdom. The fish received a lot of attention, not only for being so far out of its normal range but also for being, well – far out in general. Sarpa salpa sports golden stripes along its body and can cause hallucinations in humans when ingested; hallucinations that may last for several days.

For anyone interested in knowing more about this remarkable little fish, researchers Pommier and de Haro of the Toxicovigilance Centre Antipoison at Marseille’s Hospital Salvator have conducted a clinical study on two patients who started seeing and hearing strange and frightening things after dining on Sarpa salpa in southern France.

According to the study, which was published in the journal Clinical Toxicology in 2006, ichthyoallyeinotoxism –i.e. hallucinogenic fish poisoning – can occur when you eat the head or body parts of certain species of herbivorous fish which in turn have been devouring large amounts of certain algae or phytoplankton. The substances believed to be responsible for the long-lasting trips are known as indoles and their effect on the human brain is similar to that of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

Sarpa salpa is not the only fish capable of causing vivid hallucinations and nightmares in unsuspecting dinner guests; several species of tangs, damsels, mullet, goatfish and

rabbitfish can give you a similar experience if they have been eating large amounts of algae or phytoplankton filled with indoles. Ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes are colloquially referred to as ”dream fishes” and until 2006 ichthyoallyeinotoxism had only been reported from the Indo-Pacific.

The two men studied by Pommier and de Haro suffered from CNS disturbances including terrifying hallucinations and nightmares after being served Sarpa salpa in a Mediterranean restaurant. One of them, a 90-year old man, suffered from auditory hallucinations a couple of hours after eating Sarpa salpa, followed by two nights of vivid nightmares. The second man, a 40-year-old, was admitted to hospital after developing not only terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations but digestive problems as well. For him, the psychedelic experiences didn’t trickle away until 36 hours later.

The popular food fish Sarpa salpa is normally not hallucinogenic but if you do get poisoned your mind might start playing tricks on you within minutes and the effects may last for several days; usually without causing any other health problems. There is no antidote. According to the paper, ancient Mediterranean’s used Sarpa salpa as a recreational drug during the reign of the Roman Empire.

We still know very little about the possibly mind-altering effects of algae-eating fish and there are reports of certain fish species, e.g. Kyphosus fuscus, containing even more potent hallucinogens than indoles, such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

For more details see the paper: de Haro L, Pommier P (2006) –

Hallucinatory fish poisoning (ichthyoallyeinotoxism): two case reports from the Western Mediterranean and literature review. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2006;44(2):185-8.

A strange algae plume has turned the normally crystal clear Caribbean Sea around the Virgin Islands green down to a depth of roughly 80 feet (25 metres) and sharply decreased visibility in these popular dive waters. How and if the plume will have any long-term effect on the region’s marine life remains unknown.

Tyler Smith, assistant professor at the Center for Marine and Environmental Studies at the University of the Virgin Islands, said that when he went diving Tuesday the visibility inside the plume was no more than 10 feet (3 metres). Below 80 feet, the water was just as clear as normally.

The reason behind the extraordinary plume can be found in South America, in the Orinoco River which flows through Venezuela before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. When the Orinoco outflow is larger than normal, the vast amounts of nutrient-rich freshwater from Venezuela cause a major algae bloom in the nearby ocean. Mixed fresh- and saltwater is lighter than seawater and will therefore rise to the top of the water column.

“It’s very stable, so it just sits there,” Smith explains.

Carried by currents, the algae plume has now spread from the South American east-coast to the Caribbean Sea and can currently be seen not only off the British and U.S. Virgin Islands but in Puerto Rican waters as well. The first patch was noticed by Smith and his colleagues in the waters off St. Croix on April 9.

When the amount of photosynthesising alga increases in a region, it attracts all sorts of organisms that feed on algae and make it possible for these populations to boom as well. The algae plume around the Virgin Islands supports an entire food chain of marine life, including plankton, jellyfish, crustaceans and fish. It is not dangerous to swim or scuba dive in, but some people might dislike the high density of jellyfish.

“This is an event that occurs every year, but we haven’t seen it come this far north,” says Trika Gerard, marine ecologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In a stroke of good luck, a NOAA research vessel was scheduled to research reef fish in these waters from April 7 to April 20 – right at the peak of the unexpected plume.

To find out more about how the plume effects marine life, the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council is urging anyone who goes out fishing in the green plume to report their location, target species and success rate of each trip. According to local fishermen the fishing is always awfully bad when the water is green, but this has not been scientifically researched yet and all data is of interest.

You can reach the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council by calling (787) 766-5927. Their website is http://www.caribbeanfmc.com.

Amber, a porpoise living at the Harderwijk dolphin centre in the Netherlands, has given birth to a calf this spring, making her the second porpoise ever to give birth in captivity.

Visitors are now gathering to come and see the calf, which has been given the name Kwin.

Picture is GNU

“Mum Amber and her baby, Kwin, are doing fine,” the centre said in a statement on Thursday.

The sex of the calf has not yet been determined and will continue remain unknown for several weeks. Another conundrum concerns the paternity of the calf. According to the dolphin centre, two male porpoises were swimming with Amber at the time of conception and any of them may be Kwin’s father.

The very first porpoise ever to give birth in captivity lives in Denmark where it had a calf in 2007 and the Harderwijk dolphin centre is now enlisting the aid of Danish porpoise keepers to make sure that baby Kwin is properly cared for.

“As we don’t know much about newborn porpoises, a team of Danish minders has come to help us,” the centre says in its statement.

The porpoise is a small ocean-dwelling mammal related to whales and dolphins. There are six recognized species of porpoise and their common ancestor is believed to have diverged from the dolphins roughly 15 million years ago. Porpoises are not as large as dolphins and have stouter bodies with small, rounded heads. Compared to dolphins, wild porpoises bear young more quickly and some species give birth to a calf as often as once a year. However, porpoises do not adapt to life in captivity as well as dolphins do and successful reproduction in zoos is therefore extremely rare.

According to the simplest version of the so called Iron Hypothesis, plankton blooms move atmospheric carbon down to the deep sea and increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can therefore be counteracted by promoting plankton blooms. The Iron Hypothesis derives its names from the suggestion that global warming can be thwarted by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus, such as the Southern Ocean.

New research from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is now dealing a powerful blow to this hypothesis by showing that most of the carbon used for plankton blooms never reaches to deep sea.

Using data collected around the clock for over a year by deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats, Oceanographers Jim Bishop* and Todd Wood** have revealed that a lot of the carbon tied up by plankton blooms never sink very far.

“Just adding iron to the ocean hasn’t been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon,” says Bishop. “What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appear not to sink very fast or very far.”

The reasons behind this behaviour are complex, but the seasonal feeding behaviour of planktonic animal life is believed to play major part.

Photoplankton

The Carbon Explorer floats used in the study were launched in January 2002, as a part of the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX)***, and experiment meant to test the Iron Hypothesis in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica during the Antarctic summer.

SOFeX fertilized and measured two regions of ocean, one in an HNLC (high-nutrient, low-chlorophyl) region at latitude 55 degrees south and another at 66 degrees south. Carbon Explorers were launched at both these sites while a third Carbon Explorer was launched well outside the iron-fertilized region at 55 degrees south as a control.

Bishop and Wood were originally assigned to the project to monitor the iron-fertilization experiment for 60 days, but the Carbon Explorers continued to transmit data throughout the Antarctic fall and winter and on into the following spring.

“We would never have made these surprising observations if the autonomous Carbon Explorer floats hadn’t been recording data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at depths down to 800 meters or more, for over a year after the experiment’s original iron signature had disappeared,” Bishop explains. “Assumptions about the biological pump – the way ocean life circulates carbon – are mostly based on averaging measurements that have been made from ships, at intervals widely separated in time. Cost, not to mention the environment, would have made continuous ship-based observations impossible in this case. Luckily one Carbon Explorer float costs only about as much as a single day of ship time.”

The scientific hypothesis that iron can be used to stimulate phytoplankton growth in regions low in iron but rich in other nutrients is still intact and experiments show that algal blooms do in fact occur if you add iron to such waters. The study by Bishop and Wood only shows that the carbon bound by the plankton do not end up far down in the depths of the sea.

Jim Bishop’s team. (From left) Christopher Guay,
Phoebe Lam, Jim Bishop, Todd Wood, and David Kaszuba.

During the early stages of the South Sea experiment, the Iron Hypothesis seemed to hold up to scrutiny as the Berkeley researchers could detect not only a vigorous plankton bloom in the fertilized region at 55°N, but also how carbon particles sank beneath the bloom carrying 10-20 percent of the fixed carbon away from the surface layer and down to a dept of at least 100 meters. These results were published in the 2004April issue of Science.

But since the Carbon Explorers continued to submit information even when the 3-month study was officially over, Bishop and Wood could continue their monitoring of South Sea carbon levels throughout fall and winter and well into the following spring; a continued monitoring that would prove invaluable.

The two Carbon Explorers released at 55 degrees south continued to report for over 14 months and almost reached South America before they turned silent. After this, the explorer launched at 66 degrees south continued to transmit for another four months, despite having spent much of the Arctic winter recording at a dept of 800 meters where the pressure is immense. This explorer also had several encounters with the underside of chunky sea ice as it tried to surface to report during the Arctic winter.

All this new data surprisingly showed that there seemed to be much less particulate matter reaching the depth where the biomass was highest, i.e. in plankton blooms. Reports from the 66°S explorer showed how particulate carbon levels decreased sharply as the perpetually dark Arctic winter commenced and ice began to cover previously open waters. As the sun returned in spring and melted the ice the levels made a modest increase, but no sinking (sedimentation) of large amounts of carbon to the deep ocean was observed.

Another even more surprising report came from the control float, dubbed 55 C, which reported higher sedimentation of carbon 800 meters under a region with no plankton bloom than what the other 55°S (dubbed 55A) reported from the fertilized, blooming region.

Researchers are currently pondering several ideas as to explain these unforeseen results but have not reached any conclusion. A higher biomass seems to be linked to a lower export of carbon, but one knows why. One of the most promising hypotheses takes into account how phytoplankton needs sufficient amounts of light to survive and grow. Latitude 55°S is located far enough from the Arctic for light to reach the ocean year round, even though the amount is severely reduced during the winter months. But the notorious winter storms occurring in these waters can cause mixing between near-surface water and underlying water layers all the way down to a dept of 400-500 meters. Phytoplankton are dragged down to depths where it is too dark for them to grow and where hungry zooplankton waits for them.

“Mixing is the dumbwaiter that brings food down,” says Bishop. “The question is whether the dumbwaiter is empty or full.”

If mixing is consistently below the critical light level, phytoplankton can not grow, i.e. the dumbwaiter stays empty and the zooplankton gets no food. As the winter storms stop with the advent of spring, the phytoplankton can quickly rebound, aided by increased levels of sunlight. But since a lot of zooplankton starved to death during the winter, the zooplankton population is not large enough to keep steps with the phytoplankton bloom and intercept carbon loaded material as it sinks between 100 and 800 meters.

In the part of the South Sea where Carbon Explorer 55C spent the winter collecting data, storms where not continuous and the mixing was therefore halted now and then. More zooplankton survived, zooplankton which fed on the phytoplankton in spring, keeping their numbers down and increasing carbon sedimentation.

Bishop says these observations point to an important lesson: “Iron is not the only factor that

determines phytoplankton growth in HNLC regions. Light, mixing, and hungry zooplankton are fundamentally as important as iron.”

You can find more information about Bishop and Wood’s study in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Preprints of the issue are already available to subscribers at http://www.agu.org/journals/gb/papersinpress.shtml.

* Jim Bishop is a member of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.

** Todd Wood is a staff researcher with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laurence Berkley National Laboratory.

*** The Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX) is a collaboration led by scientists from Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Commercial, recreational and party/charter boat fishermen from Maine to North Carolina have all rallied together to deal with an out-of-balance population of predatory spiny dogfish sharks that threatens the recovery of New England groundfish and several others fish stocks living along the U.S. East Coast.

The newly formed Fishermen Organized for Rational Dogfish Management (FORDM) has requested the assistance of Dr. Jane Lubchenco, newly appointed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head, in dealing with the predator.

Spiny dogfish

The disproportionate abundance of dogfish is not a new problem; as early as 1992 Dr. Steven Murawski, now chief scientist of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s, wrote “Given the current high abundance of skates and dogfish, it may not be possible to increase gadoid (cod and haddock) and flounder abundance without ‘extracting’ some of the current standing stock.”

That was over 15 years ago and the situation has not improved. On the contrary, the amount of dogfish now exceeds that of skates, and dogfish comprises over half of all fish taken in the annual trawl surveys carried out by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

The spiny dogfish can exceed 150 cm in length and preys on virtually all species of fish smaller than itself. Dogfishes can also create a problem for other species by competing with them for prey fish.

This remarkable abundance of dogfish is most likely the result of countless years of ever increasing over-fishing. Spiny dogfish is not an appreciated food fish and the depletion of other species seems to have favoured it greatly in these waters.

Russia is planning to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves with the aid of a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations. A prototype is currently being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk and is scheduled to be ready for use in 2010. Four similar ones are also planned to be built in the near future, according to an agreement between the northern Siberian republic Yakutiya and Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation.

Each 70-megawatt plant will consist of two reactors placed on giant steel platforms. The floating power stations will be self-propelled and store both fuel and waste. The generated power will be used by Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The oil- and natural gas company Gazprom is currently Russia’s largest company and it employs a large number of Russians.

In addition to the power stations, engineers have also developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs powerful enough to drill eight wells at a time.

The new about Russia’s intentions have alarmed environmental watchdog groups around the world who fear the Arctic will become even more polluted if firms try to exploit these oil and gas reserves.

According to Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, the risk of nuclear accidents in the Arctic is also high.

“It is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle,” said Bellona spokesman Igor Kudrik.

Russia claims that all radioactive waste will be stored on the platforms, but this country has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste and environmentalists fear that Russia will continue this practise. Countries such as Britain have had to pay Russia billions of dollars to decommission around 160 Russian nuclear submarines, and at least 12 nuclear reactors have been dumped despite this. Russia has also dumped 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

According to a new report from the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, Russia is also considering building nuclear plants to power settlements in northern and eastern Russia. “The locations that have been discussed include 33 towns in the Russian far north and far east. Such plants could be also used to supply energy for oil and gas extraction,” says the report.

According to the journal Surgery, a 50 cm (20 in) eel was removed from a man’s rectum at the Kwong Wah Hospital in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

The 50-year old man was admitted to the Accident and Emergency Department complaining about abdominal pain.

European Eel – Picture by Ron Offermans; GNU

Doctors diagnosed him with peritonitis, inflammation of the peritoneum*, and did an x-ray to find out the underlying cause. Interestingly enough, what they saw on the x-ray was an eel stuck inside the man’s rectum.

The eel was still alive and biting the patient’s splenic flexure, which is a sharp bend located between the transverse and the descending colon. Doctors also found a 3 cm perforation over the anterior wall of the rectum.

“On further questioning,” says the paper, “the patient admitted an eel was inserted into the rectum in an attempt to relieve constipation. This may be related to a bizarre healthcare belief, inadvertent sexual behaviour, or criminal assault. However, the true reason may never be known.”

The patient was released from hospital a week later. We have been unable to find any information about what happened to the eel.

* The peritoneum is a serous membrane that forms the lining of the abdominal cavity or the coelom.