Now some happy news from the ocean: blue whales have been spotted in migratory routes and feeding grounds in the Pacific that has been void of blue-whales for over half a century. Sightings are also increasing in the Atlantic, and recent research suggests that the Antarctic blue whale population is growing at a heartening 6% a year. About 440 blue whales have been spotted in the western Atlantic and about 200 in the eastern, including large numbers off Iceland. These are likely to be just a fraction of the total amount of blue whales present in these waters.

“The overall numbers are still tiny compared with the original populations before whaling started, but the trend is at last in the right direction,” said John Calambokidis, a marine scientist whose research on whale movements and populations has just been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This may represent a return to a migration pattern that existed in earlier periods for the eastern north Pacific blue whale population,” he said.

Richard Sears, founder of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Canada, has noticed a similar trend with blue whale sightings increasing in the north Atlantic during the past few years. Sears is cautiously optimistic, but warns that the increase in sightings may be partly due to more people looking for whales. “There is still no room for complacency,” he said.

Until the 20^th century, blue whales were normally avoided by whalers since these oceanic giants were too large and too fast for traditional ships to handle. With a maximal reported length of over 30 meters and the capacity of exceeding 170 metric tons in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal even known to have existed on our planet and capturing it using an old fashioned sailing vessel is certainly no picnic.

Before the invention of the steam-powered whaling ship and the exploding harpoon, the estimated global population of the blue whale was somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. By the 1960s, no more than 5,000 blue whales were left.

Unlike whales such as the humpback which has undergone a remarkable recovery since the international ban on whaling was imposed, the blue whale populations have not shown any clear signs of recovery during the last few decades and scientists have worried about them being too shattered and fragmented to be viable populations in the long run. Illicit harvesting has also been a problem – files handed to the International Whaling Commission by Alexey Yablokov, environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, showed that the Soviet Union killed over 9,000 blue whales from the time of the ban until 1972.

“These revelations go some way towards explaining why blue whale populations stayed low for so long,” says Dan Bortolotti, author of the book Wild Blue. “It also suggests that they may now have a chance to recover — but only if the ban on hunting all large whales stays in place.”

The fossilised skull of a gigantic predator has been found off the English Channel coast of southern England.

The skull is 2.4 meters long and scientists believe it once belonged to a 16 meter long pliosaur which probably weighed an impressive 12 tons.

The pliosaurs were a type of ocean dwelling reptiles that dominated the seas roughly 150 million years ago.

The man behind the discovery is fossil hunter Kevin Sheehan from Dorset who gradually uncovered the remains of the fragmented skull over a number of years.

“In 40 years of collecting, I have often been green with envy at some of the finds other people have made“, said Sheehan. “But now when someone shows me a find, I can say ‘That’s not a fossil, this pliosaur, that’s a fossil’.”

The fossilised skull is 90% complete and clearly shows the jaws of a powerful predator.

“These creatures were monsters”, says Dr David Martill, a palaeontologist from the University of Portsmouth. “They had massive big muscles on their necks, and you would have imagined that they would bite into the animal and get a good grip, and then with these massive neck muscles they probably would have thrashed the animals around and torn chunks off. It would have been a bit of a blood bath.”

Martill suspects that the skull may belong to a species of pliosaur that haven’t been unearthed until now.

“This is one of the largest, if not the largest, pliosaur skull found anywhere in the world and contains features that have not been seen before“, he explains. “It could be a species new to science.”

The skull has been purchased by the Dorset County Council and will be displayed in the county museum.

Lack of iron is a limiting factor for plankton growth in many parts of the ocean, especially in the southern oceans and parts of the eastern Pacific. Scientists at the University of Leeds, UK, have now showed that acid in the atmosphere breaks down large particles of iron found in dust into small and highly soluble iron naonparticles; particles which can be easily absorbed and utilized by oceanic plankton.

Since plankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, more available iron could trigger increased movement of carbon dioxide from the air to the ocean.

“This could be a very important discovery because there’s only a very small amount of soluble iron in the ocean and if plankton use the iron nanoparticles formed in clouds then the whole flux of bioavailable iron to the oceans needs to be revised,” says Dr Zongbo Shi, lead author of the research from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.

Polluting industries that causes a high degree of acidic particles to be present in clouds can therefore strangely enough simultaneously be combating global warming.

“Man made pollution adds more acid to the atmosphere and therefore may encourage the formation of more iron nanoparticles,” says Dr Shi.

“This process is happening in clouds all over the world, but there are particularly interesting
consequences for the oceans. What we have uncovered is a previously unknown source of
bioavailable iron that is being delivered to the Earth’s surface in precipitation,” says Professor Michael Krom, the principal investigator of the research, also at the University of Leeds.

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of South Carolina has managed to solve a conundrum that’s been puzzling marine scientists for roughly a decade – where does all the oceanic phosphonate come from?

Roughly a decade ago, phosphonate – a rare form of organic phosphorus – was discovered in marine organic matter. Not only were researchers baffled to find this rare form of phosphorus in the ocean; they were also flummoxed by the high concentrations in which it was found throughout the sea. No one could explain where it came from and why it could be found in such abundance.

That is, no one could explain it until now.

In 2006, biologist Sonya Dyhrman and her WHOI team commenced a field and laboratory study on a group of phytoplankton called Trichodesmium. Trichodesmium is a microscopic marine microbe found in ample amounts throughout warm tropical and subtropical waters where nutrients are scarce. The WHOI team were able to show that Trichodesmium uses phosphonate to support carbon and nitrogen fixation, and that a special set of genes have given them this capacity. This triggered Dyhrman’s curiosity – where did Trichodesmium get its phosphonate from in the first place?

To solve the mystery, Dyhrman partnered up with Claudia Benitez-Nelson, a marine geochemist with the University of South Carolina, and started analyzing various phytoplanktons using nuclear magnetic resonance.

“We’ve been fascinated by these phosphonate compounds for a while,” said Benitez-Nelson. “Sonya and I decided that something had to be producing them, and we had to start looking at all these organisms to figure out who it was.”

“After culturing several different kinds of phytoplankton and analyzing them using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, we found high concentrations of phosphonate in cultures of a specific Trichodesmium species – in fact an average of 10 percent of the cellular phosphorus is in the form of phosphonate“, explained Dyhrman. “Ten percent may not sound like much, but this is the most phosphonate ever detected in a marine microbe.”

“When we first saw the phosphonate peak in the Trichodesmium culture, we were stunned, after a 10-year mystery it seemed ironic for Trichodesmium to both consume and produce this compound“, said Benitez-Nelson. “We ran it again. We grew them under different nutrient conditions and, sure enough, the results were the same.”

Since nitrogen is scarce in the open ocean, nitrogen fixing organisms like Trichodesmium are imperative to the marine food web. Trichodesmium phytoplankton will not only bring carbon into the food chain by absorbing it from the atmosphere like other phytoplankton; they will also provide the food chain with essential nitrogen due to their ability to absorb nitrogen gas from the air and transform it into a compound that other organisms can use.

“Not only does this solve a mystery about where these forms of phosphorus are coming from, but the fact that it is Trichodesmium has ramifications for how the phosphorus cycle is linked to the cycling of carbon and nitrogen and how those cycles will function in the future ocean,” said Dyhrman.

The Dyhrman and Benitez-Nelson study was recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A 19.5 feet long squid – that’s almost 6 meter – has been caught in the Gulf of Mexico by a group of scientists from the NOAA’s* Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service. This is only the second known giant squid caught in the Gulf of Mexico and the last one was collected 55 years ago.

The gigantic squid of 1954 was a dead specimen found floating around at the surface off the Mississippi Delta, while the 103 pound giant caught on July 30 this year was pulled up from a depth of more than 1,500 feet by NOAA’s trawling research vessel Gordon Gunter.

“As the trawl net rose out of the water, I could see that we had something big in there…really big,” said Anthony Martinez, marine mammal scientist for NOAA’s Fisheries Service and chief scientist for this research cruise. “We knew there was a remote possibility of encountering a giant squid on this cruise, but it was not something we were realistically expecting.”

“This is an incredibly rare find in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Dr. Michael Vecchione, director for NOAA’s Fisheries Service’s National Systemics Laboratory and a giant squid expert. “Giant squid have been found more commonly in areas of the world where there are deep-water fisheries, such as Spain and New Zealand, but this is the first time one has actually been captured during scientific research in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The capturing of the squid took place during a 60-day scientific study of sperm whale prey off the coast of Louisiana. The giant squid has now been preserved and sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for Natural History.

*U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

A previously unknown species of crustacean and two previously unknown species of annelid worms have been discovered during a cave dive near Lanzarote in the Canary Islands off the coast of northern Africa. The discoveries were made by a team of international scientists and cave divers exploring the Tunnel de la Atlantida – the longest submarine lava tube in the world.

The crustacean belongs to the genus Speleonectes in the class Remipedia, while the annelid worms are members of the class Polychaeta.

The crustacean has been named Speleonectes atlantida, after the cave system in which it lives. It looks a lot like its close relative Speleonectes ondinae which was discovered in the same lava tube in 1985. The two crustaceans may have diverged into separate species some 20,000 years ago after the Monte Corona volcano had erupted, forming the famous six-kilometre long lava tube.

Until quite recently, the class Remipedia was unknown to science. The first member of this class was found in 1979 by divers exploring a marine system in the Bahamas archipelago. Since then, 22 Remipedia species have been named and described. Most of them live in Central America, from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico through the north-eastern Caribbean. However, two species are instead found in caves in Lanzarote and Western Australia. The existence of these wayward species puzzles the scientists, since it is assumed that these small eyeless cave-dwellers would not be able to simply swim from the Caribbean to West Africa and Western Australia. One theory suggests that this class might be a very old crustacean group that was already widespread 200 million years ago. If this is true, the two species living off Lanzarote became isolated from the Caribbean group by the formation of the Atlantic Ocean.

As mentioned above, members of the class Remipedia live in dark submarine caves and have no eyes. Instead, they find their way around using long antennae. The heads of these predatory crustaceans are equipped with prehensile limbs and poisonous fangs.

The results of the lava cave exploration will be published in a special issue of the Springer journal Marine Biodiversity in September 2009.

The cave exploration team consisted of scientists from Texas A&M University and Pennsylvania State University in the USA, the University of La Laguna in Spain, and the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover and the University of Hamburg, both in Germany.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have developed an aquatic robot capable of collecting algal cells from the ocean and extracting the genetic information needed to identify them. The robot, which can accurately be described as a seafaring mobile analytical laboratory, can also extract toxins from the algae samples, thereby allowing scientists to assess the risk to humans and wildlife.

The MBARI-designed robot, formally known as the Environmental Sample Processor, or ‘ESP,’ for short, has now been successfully used by scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science to conduct the first remote detection of an algal species and its toxin below the ocean’s surface.

The global distribution, frequency, duration and severity of harmful algal blooms are believed to be on the increase and the new robot will make it much easier for scientists to assess the situation and relay accurate information to coastal managers and public health officials.

“Our public health monitoring program is one of the many groups that can benefit directly from the ESP technology and ability to provide an early warning of impending bloom activity and toxicity,” said Gregg Langlois, director of the state of California’s Marine Biotoxin Monitoring Program. “This is critical information for coastal managers and public health officials in mitigating impacts on the coastal ecosystem, since the toxicity of these algae can vary widely from little or no toxicity to highly toxic.”

The information obtained by ESP is transmitted to the laboratory via radio signals.

More details about the project can be found in the June issue of the journal Oceanography.

Pictures by mbari

Ballast water is great for stabilizing a ship in rough waters. Unfortunately, it is equally great at carrying all sorts of aquatic organisms across the world before releasing them into new ecosystems where many of them become problematic invasive species.

The cost of invasive species in the Great Lakes of North America have now reached $200 million a year and scientists predict that this number will increase sharply if the dreaded fish virus known as VHS manage to hitchhike its way into Lake Superior. Considering the number of international shipping vessels that arrive to this river system each week, it is probably just a matter of time unless drastic measures are put in place to stop the costly carrying of disruptive stowaways.

Is ballast treatment the solution?
On-board ballast treatment systems have been proposed by parts of the shipping industry as well as by many scientists, but so far, no one has been able come up with an efficient, cost-effective and safe solution that will work in both freshwater and saltwater. Researchers from the Lake Superior Research Institute* in Superior are now trying to change this.

“The question is how clean is clean? Zero would be great, but is it achievable?” asks Mary Balcer, director of the Lake Superior Research Institute.

Balcer, her research team and students at the University of Wisconsin-Superior are currently analyzing a long row of different solutions developed by private companies to see if any of them could help protect environments such as the Great Lakes from the threat of marauding newcomers.

The goal is to find a solution that will eliminate as many living organisms as possible before the ballast water is released. The treatment must also be safe for the ecosystem into which the water will be released.

Freshwater more demanding
Last month, researcher Tom Markee and several students tested using chlorine to eliminate organisms such as tiny worms, midges and water fleas growing in fish tanks in the university lab. Carrying large containers of chlorine on a ship is naturally dangerous, so Markee and his team instead opted for a solution where the treatment system produces its own chlorine by exposing saltwater to an electric current. The goal for Markee et al is now to find the ideal dose of chlorine as well as make sure that the system works in different types of water.

“They’ve tested it in saltwater and it works fine, but when you get to harbors or a river system, that’s when it becomes less effective,” Markee explains.

Other examples of techniques that are being explored by the research institute are the use of ultraviolet light, ozone and even lethal inaudible sound.

Balcer says her research team hasn’t yet found any viable treatment system that would kill all the living organisms in a ballast tank, but she’s happy with the progress that’s been made.

“Everyone’s behind getting the problem solved,” she says. Eventually we’ll be able to find something that really works.”

* Lake Superior Research Institute, http://www.uwsuper.edu/wb/catalog/general/2006-08/programs/LSRI.htm

New coral reefs and hills have been discovered in Lónsdjúp, off Iceland’s eastern coast.

The corals, which come in two different colours, were stumbled upon by the Icelandic Marine Research Institute during a submarine research expedition in June.

The newfound coral area is located within a 40-square-kilometer vicinity at a depth of 200 to 500 meters. Unlike the corals that form reefs in tropical environments, the Icelandic corals are cold water species. Since no sunlight reaches them at these great depths they cannot carry out any photosynthesis. Instead, they survive by filtering nutrition from ocean currents.

“What makes these so special is that they take a very long time to grow; it takes a coral reef several hundred thousands of years to develop and in that time it creates a special habitat for other organisms,” says Steinunn Hilma Ólafsdóttir, an expert in demersal organisms.

All other known coral areas off the coast of Iceland are protected as nature reserves.

The reef in the picture is not the newly discovered reef. It is a picture from the great barrier reef.

Two species of Asian mouse-deer have been observed utilizing a very interesting technique to get away from predators; they jump into the water and stay there until its safe to come up. By carefully swimming up to the surface to breathe now and then they can stay submerged for long periods of time.

People living in the Indonesian country side have always claimed that deer hide in the water when chased by their dogs, but it wasn’t until the behaviour was observed by a team of scientists doing a biodiversity survey that it caught the attention of the larger scientific community.

In June 2008, the team visited the northern Central Kalimantan Province in Borneo, Indonesia where they suddenly spotted a mouse-deer swimming in a forest stream. When the deer understood that it was being watched by humans, it went below the surface and remained hidden. Over the next hour, team members could see it come to the surface four or five times. Although it probably went up for air a few more times without being noticed, it could clearly remain submerged for more than five minutes at a time.

Eventually, the researchers caught the animal and photographed it before releasing it back into the wild unharmed. It was a pregnant female deer.

One of the members of the team is the wife of Erik Meijaard, a senior ecologist working with the Nature Conservancy in Balikpapan, Indonesia. When she showed her husband the photograph, he identified it as a Greater mouse-deer (Tragulus napu).

That same years, another group of observers witnessed a Mountain mouse-deer (Moschiola spp) throwing itself into pond and swimming under water to get a way from a hungry mongoose in Sri Lanka. The mongoose followed it into the pond, but eventually retreated as the deer continued to stay submerged.

“It came running again and dived into the water and swam underwater. I photographed this clearly and it became clear to me at this stage that swimming was an established part of its escape repertoire,” says Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, who saw the incident.

“Seeing it swim underwater was a shock”, he says. “Many mammals can swim in water. But other than those which are adapted for an aquatic existence, swimming is clumsy. The mouse-deer seemed comfortable, it seemed adapted.”

Both incidents have now been described in the journal “Mammalian Biology”.

“This is the first time that this behaviour has been described for Asian mouse-deer species,” says Meijaard. “I was very excited when I heard the mouse-deer stories because it resolved one of those mysteries that local people had told me about but that had remained hidden to science.”

What is a mouse deer?

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Family: Tragulidae

Mouse deer are small deer-like animals with large upper canine teeth. In male specimens you can even see the teeth project down either side of the lower jaw. Ten different species of mouse-deer have been described by science and all except one live in South-East Asia. The Water Chevrotain (Hyemoschus aquaticus) is the only mouse deer native to the African continent and it is also the largest member of the family.

The Water Chevrotain (Hyemoschus aquaticus) lives in swampy habitats and is known to dash into the nearest river as soon as it is spooked by something. Until recently, this was the only mouse deer in which the habit of swimming under water and staying submerged for long periods of time had been described and all the Asian members of the family Tragulidae were thought to be strictly dry-land animals.