Category Archives: Uncategorized


Cigarette filters dangerous for fish

Filtered cigarette butts should have new requirements for disposal, says Public Health Professor Tom Novotny after a San Diego State University (SDSU) study revealed filter-tipped cigarette butts to be toxic to marine and fresh-water fish.

According to Novotny and other members of the Cigarette Butt Advisory Group, used cigarette filters ought to be classified as hazardous waste since toxins present in them harm wildlife.

cigarette but kills fish

It is toxic at rather low concentrations,” Novotny explains. “Even one butt in a liter of water can kill the fish in a period of 96 hours.”

Novotny says one way of reducing the amount of cigarette filters in our environment is stronger enforcement of anti-litter laws and non-smoking areas. Fines, waste fees or special taxes are other options, if the money is used to pay for cigarette butt recycling. A third alternative is to force manufacturers to pick up the bill for clean-up costs incurred by their products.

A thrown away cigarette butt is a combination of the original plastic filter and the compounds caught by the filter while the cigarette was being smoked. The plastic makes the filter non-biodegradable and the trapped compounds are toxic until they eventually biodegrades into the environment.

According to Novotny, cigarette butts are the number one littered substance in the world and have been the number one single item picked up on beach cleanup days in San Diego for several years.

When they unconsciously throw their butts onto the ground, it’s not just litter, it’s a toxic hazardous waste product,” Novotny says. “And that’s what we’re trying to say. So that may be regulated at the local or state level. And we hope people will be more conscious about what they do with these cigarette butts.”

The study was carried out by SDSU Public Health Professor Rick Gersberg.

Picture by: Chris Sanderson, in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Remedy against Alzheimer’s found in squid?

A Taiwan research team has successfully extracted a brain-boosting nutrient from squid skin, according to an announcement made by the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute.

The nutrient in question is phospholipid docosahexaenoic acid, commonly known as PL-DHA, a substance known to improve a persons memory and enhance learning ability.

squidAccording to the institute official, PL-DHA is superior to TG-DHA another form of docosahexaenoic acid commonly found in deep-sea fish oil — when it comes to inhibiting degradation of the intellect since PL-DHA can cross the blood brain barrier and be absorbed directly by the brain.

Researchers at the institute have also showed that PL-DHA is effective in reviving neural cells and enhancing the content of three oxidation-resistant enzymes — GSH, CAT and SOD. In addition to this, the fatty acid will moderate the oxidative damage to neural cells that can be induced by free radicals in the body, which means that it will decrease the pace of plaque and tangle accumulation in brain cells.

Quoting medical reports, the institute official stressed that Alzheimer’s and other forms of senile dementia is known to be associated with the accumulation of plaque and tangles in the brain.

East African reefs “unusually resilient” against climate change, study says

In a study announced today by the Wildlife Conservation Society* (WCS) at the International Coral Reef Initiative** (ICRI) meeting in Thailand, researchers show that some coral reefs located off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change. The high resilience is believed to be caused by geophysical factors in combination with improved fisheries management in these waters.

TanzaniaAfter studying corals off the coast of Tanzania, researchers found that these coral reefs has made an incredibly speedy recovery from the 1998 bleaching event that wiped out up to 45 percent of the region’s corals. The authors of the study attribute the swift recovery to a combination of reef structure and reef management.

Compared to many other coral reefs around the world, Tanzania’s reefs are used to considerable variations in both current and water temperature which has turned these reefs into an unusually complex web of different coral species. This bio-diverse ecosystem includes several different species known to quickly re-colonize an area after a bleaching incident.

The authors of the study believe that reefs in other parts of the world subjected to similarly diverse environmental conditions might have the same high ability to recover from large-scale climatic and human disturbances. The study provides additional evidence that such “super reefs” can be found in the triangle from Northern Madagascar across to northern Mozambique to southern Kenya and the authors suggest that these reefs should be a high priority for conservation efforts since they may come to play an important global role in the future recovery of coral reefs worldwide.

Northern Tanzania’s reefs have exhibited considerable resilience and in some cases improvements in reef conditions despite heavy pressure from climate change impacts and overfishing,” says Dr. Tim McClanahan***, the study’s lead author. “This gives cause for considerably more optimism that developing countries, such as Tanzania, can effectively manage their reefs in the face of climate change.”

The study also stresses the impact of direct management measures in Tanzania, including closures to commercial fishing. Algae is known to easily smother corals, but researchers found how areas with fishery closures contained a rich profusion of algae eating fish species that kept the corals clean. The few sites without any management measures remained degraded, and in one of them the population of sea urchins had exploded. Sea urchins feed on corals and can therefore worsen the problem for an already suffering reef.

The study has been published in the online journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems.

Authors of the study include Tim McClanahan and Nyawira Muthiga of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Joseph Maina of the Coral Reef Conservation Project, Albogast Kamukuru of the University of Dar es Salaam’s Department of Fisheries Science and Aquaculture, and Saleh A.S. Yahna of the University of Dar es Salaam’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Stockholm University’s Department of Zoology.

* The Wildlife Conservation Society is an institutional partner to ICRI and is actively conserving tropical coral reef species in priority seascapes in Belize, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Kenya and Madagascar. Along with monitoring reefs, WCS also trains of park staff in protected areas.

** The International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) is a global partnership among governments and organizations working to stop and reverse the degradation of coral reefs and related ecosystems. This ICRI General Meeting was convened by the joint Mexico – United States Secretariat.

*** Dr. McClanahan’s research regarding ecology, fisheries, climate change effects, and management of coral reefs at key sites throughout the world is supported by the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) and The Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg arrived to Key West on Wednesday to become artificial reef

After a 1,100-mile voyage and more than ten years of planning and acquiring funding resources, the ex-military ship Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg finally arrived in Key West this Wednesday.

ship

The ship is scheduled to be sunk sometime between May 20 and June 1 and will eventually form the second largest artificial reef in the world. The ship will rest some six miles south of Key West in 140 feet of water in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

We’re all pretty excited here in Key West and particularly in view of the fact this is going to be the second largest artificial reef in the world,” said Key West City Commissioner Bill Verge, who is serving as a project liaison between the city and various state and federal agencies.

One of the big products that we make here is happy vacations,” said Joe Weatherby who conceived the project some 13 years ago. “And we feel that this artificial reef is the world’s best product ever produced for scuba diving. People are going to come from all over the world to dive this, but this product also has been designed so we can offer it to glass bottom boat riders, snorkelers or new divers as well as advanced divers, it holds interest for all of them.”

The Vandenberg is now undergoing final preparations before the scuttling and is for instance fitted with several hundred big holes along its decks and sides to prevent it from falling over as it sinks. The ship has already been ridded from potentially dangerous materials by two Norfolk, Va., shipyards who removed 71 cubic yards of asbestos, 193 tons of materials that contained potentially carcinogenic substances, 46 tons of refuse, 300 pounds of mercury-containing materials and 185 55-gallon drums of paint chips. The cleaning required 75,000 man-hours and used up 70 percent of the projects $8.6 million US dollars.

The artificial reef is becoming a reality thanks to the cooperation of a lot of different people and entities. It is funded by Monroe County, the Florida Governor’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development; City of Key West, U.S. Maritime Administration, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida Keys & Key West tourism council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as by industry and private donations. Banks that provided loans include First State Bank of the Florida Keys, BB&T and Orion.

As of now, you can find the Vandenberg docked behind the USS Mohawk at the East Quay Wall in Truman Annex Harbor. The USS Mohawk is a historic Coast Guard ship open as a floating museum.

History of the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg

This ship has not always been known under the name Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg; it used to be a U.S. Army troop transport named the General Harry Taylor. In 1963 it got its new name, the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, as it began tracking the U.S. space program’s launches off Cape Canaveral. Vandenberg has also been used for monitoring U.S. defense missile test launches in the Pacific as well as eaves dropping on Russian missile launches during the Cold War. Its last active duty homeport was Port Canaveral in Florida, from 1976 to the ships formal retirement in 1983.

In 1983, the Vandenberg was moved to the James River Naval Reserve Fleet. Even though it had been formally retired, it was still kept in a state of readiness in case it would be needed again. Every six months, technicians would power up all its electronics and make any necessary repairs. It was kept like this for 10 years until it was formally struck from the naval register in 1993 and transferred to the Maritime Administration.

After this, the ship began a new life and did for instance serve as a Russian science ship in the 1999 movie “Virus,” where it played its part alongside Hollywood stars like William Baldwin, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Donald Sutherland.

Endangered whale hit by whale protection research boat

A research boat used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency charged with protecting the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, collided with one of the whales off the Massachusetts coast this Sunday.

The NOAA vessel Auk was on its way back from a research journey when a Right Whale surfaced just 10 feet in front of the boat. The boat collided with the whale and the propeller cut into the animal’s left tail fluke. According to NOAA spokesman David Miller, the lacerations on the left tail fluke did not appear to be life-threatening. Researchers followed the whale for about 45 minutes after the accident and it appeared to be OK.

right whale

The accident highlights how difficult it is to avoid whale collisions and how we must work even harder to learn new ways of keeping these animals safe from boats. Even with the special precautions taken by NOAA vessels, the calamity still happened.

To me, if it can happen to NOAA, it can happen to anybody,” said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, a Plymouth-based biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. “Therefore, everybody needs to up the ante and up their vigilance and take the issue much more seriously.

Ship strikes are currently the major threat to the North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis). This year, a record number of calves were born in U.S. waters, but the population still comprises no more than roughly 400 animals.

U.S. Supreme Court allows tuna-mercury lawsuit

A New Jersey woman whose diet consisted almost exclusively of canned tuna for five years can sue a tuna fish producer over the mercury poisoning she allegedly suffered from, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday.


Deborah Fellner sued Tri-Union Seafoods LLC under the New Jersey Product Liability Act for failing to warn her of the dangers of eating the company’s canned albacore tuna. She claimed that the Tri-Union Seafoods tuna products that she ate from 1999 to 2004 contained methylmercury and other harmful compounds which caused her injury.

California-based Tri-Union Seafoods LLC, who market their products under the “Chicken of the Sea” brand, said the company was not responsible for her claimed illness, arguing that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not consider canned tuna fish worthy of mercury warnings to consumers. The company referenced a 2005 letter the FDA sent former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer* that said state-mandated mercury warning labels were pre-empted by federal law.

The law suit was thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge Dennis Cavanaugh, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the class action.

State law is not pre-empted whenever an agency has merely ‘studied’ or ‘considered’ an issue; state law is pre-empted when federal law conflicts with state law,” 3rd U.S. Circuit Senior Judge Walter Stapleton wrote for the appeals court.

In response to the ruling of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Tri-Union Seafoods asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case and the justices have now allowed the appeals court ruling to stand. The U.S. Supreme Court has not commented on their decision.

* Lockyer was trying to sue three tuna producers (one of them being Tri-Union Seafoods) for not complying with California’s Proposition 65. According to Proposition 65, businesses must provide “clear and reasonable” warnings before exposing people to known carcinogens or reproductive toxins.

Jurassic sea monster discovered in Norway

The remains of a 15 meter[1] long sea living predator has been found in Svalbard, an archipelago located about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The animal, a species of pliosaur dubbed Predator X by the group of scientists who discovered it, lived in the ocean 147 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

Predator X
Predator X hunting (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

The skull of Predator X is twice as big as the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and researchers believe the jaws of this hunter could exert a pressure of 15 tonnes[2]. The weight of the live animal is estimated to be around 45 tonnes[3].

It is the largest sea dwelling animal ever found and as far as we know it is an entirely new species”, says palaeontologist Espen Madsen Knutsen[4] from the Olso University in Norway to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Knutsen is a part of the research team who dug out the skull and backbone of the creature during a two week long research expedition to Svalbard in June 2008. The remains were first discovered by Professor Jörn Hurum[5] from the Natural History Museum at Oslo University in 2007. Hurum noticed a piece of bone sticking up from the permafrost, but since it was the last day of the 2007 expedition the group was forced to leave the bone behind without any further investigation after having jotted down its GPS position.

Parts of the head and backbone was dug out during the abovementioned June 2008 expedition and together with an earlier find of a smaller specimen of the same species located just a few kilometres away, scientists have now managed to map together a good picture of what the live animal once looked like.

We haven’t unearthed a high number of parts yet, but the parts that we do have are important ones and this has made it possible for us to create an image of what Predator X once looked like”, says Knutsen.


The digg site (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

In the excavated area, palaeontologist have found roughly 20,000 bone fragments – the remains of at least 40 different sea dwelling Jurassic animals. Once you’ve started digging in this region, it is fairly easy to spot the bones since their pale colour contrasts sharply against the black earth of the Svalbard tundra. The main difficulty is instead the short dig period and the fact that much time is spent restoring the excavated area after each dig.

Each time we leave a dig site we have to restore the area. There can be no traces of our activities. This forces us to use half of our time digging up the same spot all over again when we return”, Kutsen explains.

Svalbard lies far north of the Arctic Circle and the average summer temperature is no more than 5°C (41°F), while the average winter temperature is a freezing −12 °C (10 °F). In Longyearbyen, the largest Svalbard settlement, the polar night lasts from October 26 to February 15. From November 12 to the end of January there is civil polar night, a continuous period without any twilight bright enough to permit outdoor activities without artificial light.

The team plans to return to Svalbard this summer to carry out more digging. They hope to find another specimen in order to make the skeleton more complete, and they also wish to unearth the remains of other animals that inhabited Svalbard at the same time as Predator X.

If you wish to learn more, you can look forward to the documentary shot by Atlantic Productions during the Svalbard excavations. The name of the documentary will be Predator X and the animal is actually named after the film, not the other way around. The film will be screened on History in the USA in May, Britain, Norway and across Europe later this year and distributed by BBC Worldwide.

predator X
Pliosaur crushing down on Plesiosaur with 33,000lb bite force (Ill.: Atlantic Productions)

All the scientific results will be published in a full scientific paper later this year.

You can find more Predator X information (in English) at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo: http://www.nhm.uio.no/pliosaurus/english/


[1] almost 50 feet

[2] over 33,000 lbs

[3] over 99,000 lbs

[4] Espen M. Knutsen, Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, e.m.knutsen@nhm.uio.no, phone +47 930 373 96

[5] Jørn H. Hurum, Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, j.h.hurum@nhm.uio.no, phone +47 918 360 41

Two new Crenicichla cichlids

The cichlid genus Crenicichla now has two new described members: Crenicichla tesay and Crenicichla mandelburgeri.

Crenicichla tesay

Crenicichla tesay lives in the Paraná River drainage and was described by Argentinian ichthyologists Jorge Casciotta and Adriana Almirón. The fish was caught in the Iguazú River upstream of Iguazú falls in Argentina, an environment characterized by falls and pools with clear and rapidly flowing water. The bottom in this habitat consists of stones, mud and sand.

The name Crenicichla tesay is derived from the Guaraní word for tears; the fish displays a tear-shaped suborbital stripe. You can distinguish Crenicichla tesay from its close relatives by the existence of a serrated posterior preopercle border, the number of scales on the E1 row, the length of the snout, and the colour pattern which consists of a suborbital stripe, 4–6 dark blotches and numerous irregularly scattered dots on the sides of the body.

The description has been published in the journal Revue Suisse de Zoologie[1]. For more information, see the paper: Casciotta, J and A Almirón (2008) Crenicichla tesay, a new species of cichlid (Perciformes: Labroidei) from the río Iguazú basin in Argentina. Revue Suisse de Zoologie 115, pp. 651–660.

Crenicichla mandelburgeri

Just like Crenicichla tesay, this newly described cichlid hails from the Paraná River drainage. It was described by Swedish ichthyologist Sven Kullander and named Crenicichla mandelburgeri in honour of Paraguayan ichthyologist Darío Mandelburger.

The Crenicichla mandelburgeri specimens were collected from two different environments. Some lived in the rapids of a large stream (5-10 meters wide and up to 1 meter deep) with turbid, brownish water. Others lived in a much smaller stream (up to 3 meters wide) with shallower brown water where both velocity and transparency fluctuated. In this environment, the bottom consisted of stones and sand and was generally without any plants.

Young Crenicichla mandelburgeri cichlids feature numerous narrow vertical bars along the side, which changes into an irregular dark horizontal band as the fish matures. You can also distinguish Crenicichla mandelburgeri from other crenicichlas by the distinct caudal blotch, the number of scales in the lateral row and in the E1 row, the lower jaw (which is longer than the upper), and the serrated preopercular margin.

For more information, see the paper: Kullander, SO (2009) Crenicichla mandelburgeri, a new species of cichlid fish (Teleostei: Cichlidae) from the Paraná river drainage in Paraguay. You can find it in Zootaxa 2006: 41–50.[2]

Crenicichla

Crenicichla is the cichlid genus where you can find the largest number of described species, about 75 species. They live on the South American continent where they inhabit freshwater rivers, streams, pools and lakes. The richest variation of species is encountered in the Amazon region, but you can find Crenicichla cichlids as far north as Guyana, Venezuela and Colombia and as far south as Uruguay and central Argentina where the water can become fairly cold in the winter.


[1] http://www.ville-ge.ch/mhng/publication03.php

[2] http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/

Post Halloween catch-up

Sorry for the silence over Halloween. Posting will now hopefully return to normal with at least one post every or every other day. This first post will be somewhat of a link post catching up on some of the fishy news that happened last week.

First of is an update on the Atlantic Blue fin Tuna. Despite good signs going into the Marrakesh tuna conference the outcome was very bad with the quote for eastern blue fin tuna being set to 22,000 tons, 50 per cent higher than scientific advice. Last years quota was 29,000 tons but it is believed that a total of 61,000 tons were brought ashore when counting illegal catches. These levels are unsustainable and the blue fin tuna populations are near a collapse. You can read more about this here

Another Tuna news. A fisherman out of San Diego is believed to have caught the largest yellow fin tuna ever caught. The tuna weighed in at 381.1-pound. View a video here.

Time to stop talking about tunas and start talking about something completely different, snakeheads. A new study has shown that snakeheads are proving much less damaging to the native fauna than expected. They do not seem to be destroying populations of native fish such as largemouth and peacock bass. The scientist examined the stomach content of 127 snakeheads and found one of the most common pray to be other snakeheads. They found 13 snakeheads, one bluegill, 11 mosquitofish, seven warmouth, two peacock bass, several lizards, bufo toads, small turtles, a rat and a snake. No remains of largemouth bass were found.

Another interesting article posted this last week is this one that tells the story of the mass gharial die of that happened last winter when half the worlds population of this once common animal. Scientist finally thinks they know why this happened. Something that might help save the worlds last 100 specimens.

That is it for this time but I might post more post like this during the week if I decide that there are more news that are to important to miss.

Seldom seen squid caught on tape by ROV

A ROV (remote operated vehicle) owned and operated by the oil company Shell have caught video of a very rare squid while filming a mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater on the drilling site known as Perdido in the gulf of Mexico. The squid known as a Magnapinna squid has a unique look due to the fact that it has “elbows” on its arms. Little is known about these enigmatic squids that can grow to be between 5 to 23 feet (1.5 to 7 meters) long.

See videoSee pictures

A total of four species of these squids have been found so far but there are likely more species still waiting to be discovered.

Magnapinna pacifica was the first species to be described and was described in 1998 by Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and University of Hawaii biologist Richard Young based on juvenile squids. Michael Vecchione and Richard Young later released a report that showed that Magnapinna squids are common in deep sea areas around the world. (Below about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters).)

The second species, M. talismani, was described in 2006 and the year after a third species M. atlantica was described. Both these species have been found in the Atlantic.

The last known species has yet to receive a scientific name.