Flyingfish

We all know about those birds which are just at home in the water as they are in the air, however, not too many species of fish can say the same thing. Flying fish can actually stay up in the air for more than half a minute, and can glide as far as 400 meters and reach speeds of up to 70 kilometers per hour!

A mechanical engineer from Seoul National University in Korea, Haecheon Choi, took a shine to the flying fish as he was reading a science book to his children. By coming to the realization that flying fish actually FLY, he and his collegue, Hyungmin Park, set about to figure out just how these fish stay up in the air so long and then publish their discovery in The Journal of Experimental Biology, which they did this past 10th of September. They had some remarkable results in tsts conducted in a wind tunnel of all places.. They found that the flying fish were just as efficient at gliding as birds were, and more effective than many forms of insects at it.

Now that Choi and Park have proven to the world that flying fish are exceptional fliers, they are now setting up for their next big task.. Building an aircraft which will exploit the ground effect aerodynamics which flying fish use to their benefit.

BP

It has been over 3 weeks since BP has capped its spewing oil well. The skimming operations to help clean up the mess have all but ground to a halt, and researchers are saying that less than a third of the oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico.

That being the case, wildlife officials are finding more birds covered in the black sticky substance than ever. Fledgling birds are getting stuck in the viscous goo that is left behind after the cleanup efforts have passed on. Rescue workers are making initial visits to the rookeries they had initially avoided, lest they disturb the precious creatures during their nesting time.

What is really disturbing, is that before BP capped off their well on the 15th of July, an average of 37 birds were being pulled in dead or alive each day. Now, after the fact, that figure has doubled up to 71 per day. This information comes to us courtesy of a Times-Picayune review of the daily wildlife rescue reports.

The number of sea turtles discovered is even higher, with more of the poor things covered in the sticky black stuff being found in the last 10 days, than during the disaster’s first three months.

While the increase of oily turtles being found is still stumping researchers, the wildlife officials have said there are several things that could be contributing to the increase in the number of oiled birds being found since the leak was stopped.

Whatever the reasons, something has to be done about the situation, however, no efforts are being focused on that at this point in time.

Humboldt Penguin

Five penguins species are finally getting a new lease on life, after being awarded protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This protection is being awarded after a 2006 petition initiated by the Center for Biological Diversity, in conjunction with two lawsuits which were filed together with Turtle Island Restoration Network.

The decision made by the Interior Department will finally put the Humboldt penguin of Chile and Peru, and four different New Zealand penguins, on the threatened list.

“Protecting these penguins under the Endangered Species Act gives them a renewed chance at survival,” explained Shaye Wolf, Center biologist “Unfortunately, in today’s finding the Obama administration failed to acknowledge climate change as a threat. This administration won’t be able to help penguins survive the climate crisis if it doesn’t admit that it’s a problem.”

These penguins are acing some very real threats from things such as ocean acidification, climate change, and commercial fishing. The designation handed down today will hopefully raise awareness about the situation these penguins face on a day to day basis, increase funding for research and conservation, and provide additional scrutiny of any U.S. government approved activities which could cause harm to both the penguins and their respective habitats.

With the oceans warming up, the sea ice melting, and overfishing, the penguins food supply of kril and fish is more scarce then ever..

It’s about time something was done about the problem, let us hope it isn’t too late..

Magellanic penguin

This is kind of weird… Apparently there are hundreds of dead penguins, who look like they’ve starved to death, are washing up on the beaches of Brazil of all places. This is very worrying for scientists on many levels, however the main focal point is just what is causing then to perish.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 of the flightless birds have been found over the past week and a half on Peruibe, Praia Grande, and the Itanhaem beaches in Sao Paolo State. This comment comes from Thiago de Nascimento, who is a biologist with the Peruibe Aquarium.

The majority of these penguins were Magellan penguins, on their way north from Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands, searching for food in warmer waters.

What is so troubling scientists so much, is that many of these penguins are not finding the food they seek. Autopsies performed on many of the penguins revealed that their stomachs were entirely empty..

Researcher are investigating whether the fault lays in strong currents, or colder waters than what have been the norm, which may have caused the species the penguin relies on for food to thin out, or if maybe human activity is to blame.

“Overfishing may have made the fish and squid scarcer,” Nascimento has explained.

He also said that it is common for penguins to make their way north this time of the year. Unfortunately, some of them do happen to lose their way and perish from hunger or exhaustion, and then wind up dead on the Brazilian coast far from their homes.

However, in these numbers it is a grave concern… Hopefully they find an answer soon, before these creatures wind up the going the way of the do do bird.

A 10-year study of Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge alligators has yielded some surprising results. Despite having plenty of suitable males to choose among, up to 70 percent of the female gators in this Louisiana refuge preferred to mate with the same male year after another. Also, females who mated with more than one male per breeding season and produced young from multiple fathers usually continued to mate with their select group of males year after year, thus displaying a form of polygamous fidelity.

“Given how incredibly open and dense the alligator population is at RWR, we didn’t expect to find fidelity,” biologist Stacey Lance of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in South Carolina said in a press release. “To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.”

Most reptiles are polygamous and will choose a new mate or mates each breeding season, and only a few reptilian species are known to actively choose the same mate or mates over and over again.

Since the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge is so densely populated with alligators, researchers don’t think that the repeated pairings are the result of chance.

The study has been published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117989598/home

A group of conservationists and scientists are planning a research trip to the world’s largest rubbish pile; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, the Pacific Trash Vortex, or simply the Great Plastic Vortex; this gyre of marine litter has been gradually building over the last 60 years but we still know very little of this man-made monstrosity.

The expedition, headed by Hong Kong based entrepreneur and conservationist Doug Woodring, hopes to learn more about the nature of the vortex and investigate if it is possible to fish out the debris without causing even more harm.

“It will take many years to understand and fix the problem,” says Jim Dufour, a senior engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, who is advising the trip.

According to Dufour, research expeditions like this one are of imperative importance since establishing the extent of the problem is vital for the future health of the oceans.

“It [the expedition] will be the first scientific endeavour studying sea surface pollutants, impact to organisms at intermediate depths, bottom sediments, and the impacts to organisms caused by the leaching of chemical constituents in discarded plastic,” he says.

The research crew, which will pass through the gyre twice on their 50-day journey from San Francisco to Hawaii and back, are using a 150-foot-tall (45-metre-tall) ship – the Kaisei, which is Japanese for Ocean Planet. They will also be accompanied by a fishing trawler responsible for testing various methods of catching the garbage without causing too much harm to marine life.

“You have to have netting that is small enough to catch a lot but big enough to let plankton go through it,” Woodring explains.

Last year, building contractor and scuba dive instructor Richard Owen formed the Environmental Cleanup Coalition (ECC) to address the issue of the pollution of the North Pacific. A plan designed by the coalition suggests modifying a fleet of ships to clear the area of debris and form a restoration and recycling laboratory called Gyre Island.

Hopefully, the garbage can not only be fished up but also recycled or used to create fuel, but a long term solution must naturally involve preventing the garbage from ending up there in the first place.

”The real fix is back on land. We need to provide the means, globally, to care for our disposable waste,” says Dufour.

Despite being sponsored by the water company Brita and backed by the United Nations Environment Programme, the expedition is still looking for more funding to meet its two million US dollar budget. Since the enormous trash pile is located in international waters, no single government feels responsible for cleaning it up or funding research. Another problem is lack of awareness; since very few people ever even come close to this remote part of the ocean it is difficult to make the problem a high priority issue. A documentary will be filmed during the expedition in hope of making the public more aware of where the world’s largest garbage dump is actually located.

What is the Eastern Garbage Patch?

According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme, our oceans contain roughly 13,000 pieces of plastic litter per square kilometre of sea. However, this trash is not evenly spread throughout the marine environment – spiralling ocean currents located in five different parts of the world are continuously sucking in vast amounts of litter and trapping it there. Of these five different gyres, the most littered one is located in the North Pacific – the Eastern Garbage Patch.

The five major oceanic gyres.

The existence of the Eastern Garbage Patch was first predicted in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States. NOAA based their prediction on data obtained from Alaskan research carried out in the mid 1980s; research which unveiled high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by particular patterns of ocean currents. Using information from the Sea of Japan, the researchers postulated that trash accumulations would occur in other similar parts of the Pacific Ocean where prevailing currents were favourable to the formation of comparatively stable bodies of water. They specifically indicated the North Pacific Gyre.

California-based sea captain and ocean researcher Charles Moore confirmed the existence of a garbage patch in the North Pacific after returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpac sailing race. Moore contacted oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer who dubbed the region “the Eastern Garbage Patch” (EGP).

Twice the size of Texas

The Eastern Garbage Patch is located roughly 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N between Hawaii and mainland USA and is estimated to have grown to twice the size of Texas, even though no one knows for sure exactly how large the littered area really is. The garbage patch consists mainly of suspended plastic products that, after spending a long time in the ocean being broken down by the sun’s rays, have disintegrated into fragments so miniscule that most of the patch cannot be detected using satellite imaging.

Impact on wild-life and humans

The plastic soup resembles a congregation of zooplankton and is therefore devoured by animals that feed on zooplankton, such as jellyfish. The plastics will then commence their journey through the food chain until they end up in the stomachs of larger animals, such as sea turtles and marine birds. When ingested, plastic fragments can choke the unfortunate animal or block its digestive tract.

Plastics are not only dangerous in themselves, they are also known to absorb pollutants from the water, including DDT, PCB and PAHs, which can lead to acute poisoning or disrupt the hormonal system of animals that ingest them. This is naturally bad news for anyone who likes to eat marine fish and other types of sea food.

The first-ever comprehensive global report on the state of shellfish has been released by The Nature Conservancy at the International Marine Conservation Congress in Washington, DC.

This one of its kind report is a collaborative work carried out by scientists from five different continents employed by academic and research institutions as well as by conservation organizations.

The report, which focuses primarily on the distribution and condition of native oyster reefs, show that 85 percent of oyster reefs have been completely destroyed worldwide and that this type of environment is the most severely impacted of all marine habitats.

In a majority of individual bays around the globe, the loss exceeds 90 percent and in some areas the loss of oyster reef habitat is over 99 percent. The situation is especially dire in Europe, North America and Australia where oyster reefs are functionally extinct in many areas.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented and alarming

decline in the condition of oyster reefs, a critically

important habitat in the world’s bays and estuaries,”

says Mike Beck, senior marine scientist at The Nature

Conservancy and lead author of the report.

Many of us see oysters as a culinary delight only, but oyster reefs provide us humans with a long row of valuable favours that we rarely think about. Did you for instance known that oyster reefs function as buffers that protect shorelines and prevent coastal marshes from disappearing, which in turn guard people from the consequences of hurricanes and other severe storm surges? Being filter feeders, oysters also help keep the water quality up in the ocean and they also provide food and habitat for many different types of birds, fish and shellfish.

Even though the situation is dismal, there is still time to save the remaining populations and aid the recuperation of damaged oyster reefs. In the United States, millions of young Olympia oysters have been reintroduced to the mudflats surrounding Netarts Bay in Oregon, in an effort to re-create a self-sustaining population of this native species. The project is a joint effort by government and university scientists, conservation groups, industry representatives, and local volunteers.

“With support from the local community and other partners, we’re demonstrating that shellfish restoration really works”, says Dick Vander Schaaf, Oregon director of coast and marine conservation for the Conservancy. “Expanding the effort to other bays and estuaries will help to ensure that the ecological benefits of oyster reefs are there for future generations.”

If wish to learn more about the global oyster reef situation, you can find the report here.

The Suffolk Police has decided to call off their investigation into the mysterious disappearance of 27 koi and seven goldfish, since the culprit turned out to be a hungry heron.

When the expensive fish disappeared from their home in Carlton Colville, UK, the police suspected human thieves and promptly issued a witness appeal which asked if locals had seen “anything suspicious” or if they had been offered similar fish. The appeal was however recalled soon, as the police found out the true identity of the perpetrator.

A further statement issued by police explained: “This incident is now being attributed to a large heron.”
“We take all incidents very seriously and we were worried that someone might have made off with fish worth thousands of pounds”, a police spokesman explains. “Thankfully, on this occasion an arrest wasn’t necessary.”