Whole Foods has just launched a special color coded sustainability rating program for all their products. This new program is very revolutionary. What it does, is that all their products will now be color coded based on the danger posed to the sealife that come in that partocular product.

Green means “go ahead and shop till you drop”, yellow means “Caution. some concerns are being raised with the species”, and red means “you really shouldn’t be buying this product at all”.

They are aiming to phase out all products which are classified as “red”, which means that they are highly over fished and at risk, by Earth Day in the year 2013.

They have partnered up with Monterey Bay Aquarium and Blue Ocean Institute to help them categorize their products. Whole Foods is the first such national grocer which will have such a system in place, and it is causing waves throughout the industry.

Both Monterey Bay Aquarium and Blue Ocean Institute are well known and respected for their science-based seafood programs. They painstakingly evaluate species and the fisheries which reel them in, and categorize them based on life history, abundance, habitat impacts, fishery management practices and bycatch.

It’s good to see big business finally taking an interest in keeping the Earth and its oceans in prime condition, and not just worrying about their bottom line.

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.

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.

No, this fish is not animated by Pixar – it is a very real fish created by Mother Nature deep down in the ocean. Its name is Macropinna microstoma and it has puzzled ichthyologists since it was first described by Chapman in 1939.

Macropinna microstoma, also known as the Barreleye fish, has a fluid-filled dome on its head through which the lenses of its barrel shaped eyes can be clearly seen. The fish lives at a dept of 600-800 metres where it spends most of its time hanging almost completely still in the water.

Even though the Barreleye was described by science in the late 1930s, the transparent dome is a fairly new discovered since it is normally destroyed when the fish is brought up from the deep. Old drawings of the fish do not show the see-through part of the head and the species was not photographed alive until 2004.

Thanks to new technology, it is now possible for researchers to explore the deep sea much more efficiently than ever before and we are therefore learning more and more about the weird and wonderful creatures that inhabit these baffling parts of the planet. It has long been known that the tubular eyes of the Barreleye are good at collecting light; an adaptation to a life deep down in the ocean where light is scarce. The eyes were however presumed to be fixed and the fish was therefore believed to have a very narrow upwards-facing tunnel-vision. Researchers Bruce Robinson and Kim Reisenbichler from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has now changed this notion completely by providing evidence suggesting that this fish can rotate its eyes within the transparent dome in order to see both upwards and straight forward. Robinson and Reisenbichler observed that when suitable prey, e.g. a jellyfish, is spotted, the fish will rotate its eyes to face forward as it turns its body from a horizontal to a vertical position to feed.

Robinson and Reisenbichler were able to get close to five living Barreleyes using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) at a depth of 600-800 meters off the coast of Central California. In addition to observing and filming the fish in its native habitat, the researchers also captured two specimens and placed them in an aquarium for a few hours in order to study them more closely.

Live specimens of Macropinna microstoma turned out to have beautifully coloured green eyes; probably in order to filter out sunlight from the surface of the ocean since this would make it easier for the fish to spot bioluminescent jellyfish. Robinson also suggests that Macropinna microstoma might be using its supreme eye sight to steal food from siphonophores[1].

If you want to know more about the intriguing Barreleye fish, check out the paper BH Robison and KR Reisenbichler (2008) – Macropinna microstoma and the paradox of its tubular eyes. Copeia[2]. 2008, No. 4, December 18, 2008.

As we release more and more carbon dioxide from fossil fuel into the atmosphere, the world’s oceans become more and more acidic. Exactly how this will affect marine life remains unknown, but a paper published this week by marine chemists Keith Hester and his co-authors at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute is now shedding some light on how a change in acidity affects sound waves under water.

Beluga Whale

So, why is the speed of sound underwater of any interest to Monterey Bay Aquarium researchers? As sounds travel faster, the amount of background noise in the sea will increase and this could affect the behaviour of marine mammals. Many marine mammals, such as whales, dolphins, and porpoises, relay on sounds for communication and food location.

According to conservative projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the chemistry of seawater could change by 0.3 pH units by 2050. According to Hester and his colleges, such a change in acidity would allow sounds to travel up to 70 percent farther underwater in some areas, especially in the Atlantic Ocean. The paper also states that sound may already be travelling 10 percent farther in the oceans than it did a few centuries ago.

According to Hester et al, a change by 0.3 pH units by 2050 will have the greatest effect on sounds below about 3,000 cycles per second. This range includes most of the low frequency sounds that marine mammals are known to use, but it also includes a lot of sounds produced by human activity, such as boating, shipping, and certain military activities. As if acidification of the ocean wasn’t enough, the amount of underwater sound produced by human activities has increased dramatically over the last 50 years. So, even if acidification would make it possible for sound produced by marine mammals to travel farther than ever before, it might also cause these sounds to be effectively drenched by a cacophony of human generated low frequency noise. In such a noisy sea, a marine mammal’s ability to locate prey animals and a suitable mate and could be severely impinged on.

The paper will be published in the October 1, 2008 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The young white shark brought to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on August 27 has now been released back into the wild after 11 days on exhibit. She was captured on August 16 in Santa Monica Bay and has now been safely returned to the same waters. During her stay at the Monterey Bay Aquarium she lived in their million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit, but despite her relatively roomy accommodation she only fed once and the staff decided that she would be better of in the wild.

A white shark

“These decisions are always governed by our concern for the health and well-being of these animals under our care,” says Jon Hoech, director of husbandry for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

On September 7, the young female was released in offshore waters in the Santa Barbara Channel at 1:30 p.m. (Pacific Time). Before being released, she was tagged with a tracking device that will provide researchers with data on her life in the ocean. For 148 days, the pop-up tag will collect information about geographical location, depths, and water temperature. After this period, the tag will pop free and deliver the collected data via satellite.

As of now, a total of four White Sharks with tracking tags have been released from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The three other sharks did however stay longer at the aquarium before going a back to the wild; between four and six months. Together with their research partners, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has tagged and tracked 18 juvenile white sharks off Southern California as a part of their “White Shark Conservation Research Project”. The aquarium is also involved in the project “Tagging of Pacific Predators” (TOPP) led by Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, which has tracked 143 adult white sharks off the Central Coast using data-collecting tags.

If you wish to know more about the white shark research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium you can visit www.montereybayaquarium.org/whiteshark/.