DEEP BLUE HOME

TRIPPY TEENIES

2012-01-27T03:00:00.000-08:00

Iridescent Ctenophores from Parafilms on Vimeo.

Photo credits, top to bottom:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

HOME IN HIGH-DEF

2012-01-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

This gorgeous high-def image of Earth was taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP.

AURORA STORY

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Northern light legends, Kugluktuk from Michael Ericsson on Vimeo.

SKY PEOPLE

2012-01-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

Head In The Clouds - CRANE WILD HD from Tokksa Wild on Vimeo.

PULP OCEAN

2012-01-20T09:05:00.000-08:00

CALIFORNIA COAST MOST SUSCEPTIBLE TO PACIFIC WARMING

2012-01-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Big Sur coast, California. Credit: Calilover via Wikimedia Commons.

A new paper in PLoS ONE finds that marine life in the coastal waters of Northern California may be among the most vulnerable to warming in the North Pacific.

This on top of evidence the Northeast Pacific may be more vulnerable to warming than the Northwest Pacific.

And this on top of earlier evidence the North Pacific is warming 2 to 3 times faster than the South Pacific.

Temperate North Pacific realm, and the 16 MEOW ecoregions included in this paper. Credit: Meredith C. Payne, et al. PLOS. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0030105

The researchers assembled a picture of monthly sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over 29 years for waters within 20 km/12 miles of shore for 16 North Pacific ecoregions (map).

All their data are courtesy of satellite-borne Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments.

Cape Promontory, Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Credit: USFWS via Wikimedia Commons.

Their results suggest the flora and fauna of the Aleutian ecoregion will also be highly susceptible to rising SSTs.

Why? Because the two areas are already adapted to low variation in SSTs... with the least yearly variation found off California, and the least monthly off the Aleutians.

From the paper:

[I]t is possible to speculate which ecoregions might be most susceptible to temperature increases, assuming that, in general, organisms living in areas with smaller temperature variations would be more susceptible to temperature increases.

Kelp, California. Credit: NOAA via Flickr.

They conclude:

This speculation needs to be evaluated both by comparing the actual temperature ranges of organisms from field surveys and by evaluating temperature tolerances with experimental studies. Nonetheless, we suggest that analyses of existing temperature regimes can provide insights into what organisms and regions will be at the greatest risk from this aspect of climate change.

The ☺pen-access paper:

Payne MC, Brown CA, Reusser DA, Lee H II (2012) Ecoregional Analysis of Nearshore Sea-Surface Temperature in the North Pacific. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30105. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030105

GREENLAND'S ICE IS DARKENING

2012-01-09T16:26:00.000-08:00

Greenland melt map by NOAA’s climate.gov team, based on NASA satellite data processed by Jason Box, Byrd Polar Research Center, the Ohio State University.

Not only is Greenland's ice melting, it's also become darker and therefore more absorbent of light—accelerating its own thaw.

From NASA's Earth Observatory page:

The map above shows the difference between the amount of sunlight Greenland reflected in the summer of 2011 versus the average percent it reflected between 2000 to 2006. Virtually the entire ice sheet shows some change, with some areas reflecting close to 20 percent less light than a decade ago.

Melting atop the Greenland ice sheet. Image via The Big Picture.

As expected, rising temperatures melt snow and ice to uncover water, vegetation, and bare ground. These darker substrates absorb more sunlight.

As predicted, the loss of reflectiveness amplifies the initial warming.

Greenland glacier. Credit: Ville Miettinen via Wikimedia Commons.

Most of the melt patterns on the map (top) fit these expectations.

But what's unexpected here is that the reflectivity of Greenland's ice is diminishing not just at the coasts but far inland as well.

Even at the highest point of the ice sheet, nearly two miles above sea level, where there's no visible summertime melting, the ice is darkening.

Smaller, colder snow crystals, left. Warmed ice crystals, right. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

So what's going on?

Well, according to Jason Box at Ohio State University the inland darkening is a result of changes in the ice crystals themselves.

As temperatures rise, the snow grains clump together, reflecting less light than the many-faceted smaller crystals (above left).

The warmed—but not melted—crystals become rounded (above right), and these shapes absorb more sunlight than jagged crystals.

Greenland glacier from the air. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Another chapter in Ooops: A history of Homo sapiens.

WAKE

2012-01-06T12:58:00.001-08:00

Ship wake. Credit: Yosemite James via Flickr.

Offshore wind farm wakes. Via.

South Georgia Island cloud wake. Credit: NASA.

Island wakes, Canary Islands. Via Flickr.

Aircraft turbulence wake. Via.

Ship track wakes in the clouds, North Pacific. Credit: NASA.

Comet wake. Credit: NASA via.

Bioluminescent dolphin wakes. Credit: Ammonite via National Geographic.

Icebreaker wake. Via.

Iceberg wake. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Crabeater seal wakes, Southern Ocean. Credit: Steve Nicol via.

Penguin wake. Via.

Ship bow-wake with bow-riding dolphins. Via.

Von Karman vortices, Aletian Islands. Credit: USGS.

Sea turtle wake. Credit: Rosa Say via Flickr.

Sea turtle wake. Via RedBubble.

Surf wake. Via.

WE WERE WANDERERS ON A PREHISTORIC EARTH

2011-12-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth from James W Griffiths on Vimeo.

Adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

WONDERFUL WORLD: DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

2011-12-30T10:48:00.000-08:00

(HT George Cathcart.)

LISTENING IN ON DIVING MURRES

2011-12-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

Thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia). Credit: Art Sowls, USFWS, via Wikimedia Commons.

There's an exciting new paper in Marine Ecology Progress Series (MEPS) that lets us listen in on diving murres to learn more about their feeding ecology. Specifically:

what prey they catch by day
what prey they catch by night (really exciting!)
and how they might find these prey that exist in patchy distributions

The lead author is Kelly Benoit-Bird, at Oregon State University, whose acoustics work I profiled in The BP Cover-Up, my cover article in Mother Jones last year. You can read about her MacArthur Foundation fellowship here.

Red arrow marks the Pribilof Islands. Credit: Aleut International Association.

Research for the MEPS paper was conducted in Bering Sea off the Pribilof Islands, home to some 200 million breeding seabirds, one of the largest concentrations in the North Pacific.

The birds nest here because of the phenomenal seasonal abundance that cranks up in these waters each spring with the return of sunlight.

Phytoplankton bloom around the Pribilof Islands, Bering Sea. Credit: NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center, via the Earth Observatory.

Here's how multiple streams of data were gathered simultaneously as the researchers' boat motored along predetermined 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) long transect lines through the waters around the Pribilofs:

An observer with binoculars stood on the bow of the boat, sighting murres flying through the air and/or foraging at the surface
A 4-frequency echosounder system was used to provide nearly continuous information from underwater on the presence of zooplankton and fish (identified by their acoustic "signatures")
To verify the truth of those acoustic signatures, net tows were made at the the beginning of each transect to capture fish and zooplankton
At the start and finish of each transect, a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) profile was conducted to a depth of 100 m (328 feet) or to within 5 m (16 ft) of the seafloor in shallower waters; the CTD also gathered data on dissolved oxygen and, through a transmissometer and a fluorometer, different data on the presence of fish and/or zooplankton

Common murres (Uria aalge). Credit: Michael Haferkamp via Wikimedia Commons.

This system allowed the team to observe thousands of bubble trails made by diving murres and correlate them with schools of krill, juvenile pollock, and squid—their primary prey.

Some of their findings:

Individual diving murres were more likely to be found alone in shallow water (<100 m) during the day
Aggregations of birds were more likely to be found in the outer shelf and slope zones (>100m) at night

Why? The authors suggest:

[T]hat murres use different tactics when foraging on prey in different habitats and likely reflects the differences in diet noted during the same time period, with parents feeding their chicks small fish that could be caught near the colony while consuming krill and squid that are primarily accessible in deep waters, far from the colonies at night. There was, however, no significant difference in the rate of bird detections during the day and night, suggesting that both periods are important for foraging despite these different tactics. These results indicate that using only daytime observations of murres as an index of habitat use and foraging activity can significantly skew any results drawn from those data, underestimating the importance of deepwater habitats and making the calculation of accurate energy budgets impossible.

Murres on nests, Pribilof Islands, Alaska. Credit: Allen Shimada NOAA/NMFS/OST/AMD via Flickr.

As to how the birds find and track their prey—in deep water, often in the dark—the authors note:

The ability of murres to successfully track the abundance, density, and accessibility of prey that occurred at depths between 10 and 100 m (32 and 328 feet) raises questions about how they gather information to exploit these resources effectively, particularly at night. Birds could be directly detecting the prey using vision or chemosensory mechanisms. However, both would likely be inefficient for deep prey, and vision would not be effective at night when foraging activity is equal to daylight foraging activity.

Murre. Credit: christopher.woo via Flickr.

Possibilities include:

Birds cue to surface ocean color, which indicates the presence or absence of phytoplankton [see 3rd photo in this post, above]: no correlation was found
Birds cue to a physical characteristic, such as temperature: a correlation was found between murres and warmer surface temperature

Further possibilities revolve around birds cuing to other birds—something that seems obvious if you observe birds at sea... though obvious isn't always correct:

While the hypothesis that colonies function as ‘information centers’, where group members can learn the location of food by following successful foragers, has largely been discounted... there have been a number of studies showing that the detection of other predators that are already exploiting a prey patch, a process known as ‘local enhancement’, can be an effective foraging strategy... Local enhancement occurs in another species of murre, but its importance is dependent on the predictability of prey... Substantial experimental and at-sea data suggest that local enhancement works whenever feeding groups are more conspicuous than food patches... which is likely to be the case for the deep prey observed here. The local enhancement hypothesis is supported by the prevalence of aggregation among acoustically observed murres... Whatever the reason for aggregating, murres in groups were spaced in a highly regular pattern with an average of 50 m between individuals, suggesting that, while grouped, birds may be attempting to avoid direct competition, a common cause of uniform spacing between individuals.

Patchiness of prey and distribution of birds. Click for larger image. Credit: Benoit-Bird, et al. MEPS. DOI:10.3354/meps09408.

The authors conclude:

Using this [fisheries acoustic] technique, we were able to observe the diving depths of individual birds, assess these dives in relation to [prey] patch size, density, depth, and type of prey both day and night, and show that birds on the surface were a good proxy for foraging effort taking place in a given area. The concomitance of these data is made possible by acoustic approaches and provides new insights into the predator−prey relationship. During the breeding season, diving murres in the southeastern Bering Sea show strong selection for prey patches with specific characteristics, and the high degree of overlap between murres and their prey at a range of scales shows effective information gathering about prey by these birds.

Thick-billed murre. Credit: susanvg Susan van Gelder via Flickr.

The paper (♥ open access):

Benoit-Bird KJ, Kuletz K, Heppell S, Jones N, Hoover B (2011) Active acoustic examination of the diving behavior of murres foraging on patchy prey. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 443:217-235 DOI:10.3354/meps09408

NEW ISLAND BORN IN RED SEA

2011-12-27T14:55:00.000-08:00

New island born from volcanic eruption. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Imagine coming across what some fishers in the Red Sea observed on 19 December—fountains of lava bursting from the surface of the water 30 meters/90 feet into the air.

... Followed four days later by the birth of a new island.

Plate boundaries and volcanoes of Africa. Blue arrow marks location of new island near mouth of Red Sea. Credit: USGS map, modified.

The volcanic activity occurred among the Zubair Group of small islands off the west coast of Yemen. From the Earth Observatory page:

Running in a roughly northwest-southeast line, the islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a shield volcano. This region is part of the Red Sea Rift where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart and new ocean crust regularly forms.

Zubair Group on 24 October 2007. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

And here's what the Zubair Group looked like before the birth of the solstice island.

WHALE FALL

2011-12-22T09:56:00.000-08:00

Whale Fall (after life of a whale) from Sharon Shattuck on Vimeo.

TEN GIFTS FOR THE OCEAN

2011-12-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response.

What to give that favorite ocean on your list? Here are 10 little presents that say "thanks" in a big way to the big-wet-deep-dark-mysterious lifegiver to us all.

Credit: DanCentury via Flickr.

1) On your next visit to the ocean—or any of its feeder rivers, lakes, streams, or ponds—pick up trash. Every piece of (mostly) plastic you carry away will spare the ocean pollution lethal to life.

Credit: Buzz Hoffman via Flickr.

2) Report garbage on the beach via this smartphone app to the Marine Debris Tracker project.

Via Project Aware.

3) If you're a diver, join an underwater clean-up group, like Project Aware, and feed their Dive Against Debris dataset.

Credit: reuvenim via Flickr.

4) Reconsider synthetic fleece. As new research shows, its microfibers wend their way from your washing machine through wastewater treatment plants to become yet more plastic pollution in the ocean.

Credit: Justin Gaurav Murgai via Flickr.

5) If you eat ocean animals or plants, consult the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list for what's sustainably fished and what's not. Use its recommendations to double-check the recommendations of the Marine Stewardship Council... the group that "vets" seafood sold at Whole Foods and many other markets and restaurants, but that's been making dubious judgement calls of late.

Credit: colros via Flickr.

6) Avoid ocean-based remedies and natural medicines like shark cartilage, fish oil (use flaxseed), coral calcium (leafy green veggies are better), plus ingredients (like dried seahorses) in some "herbal" medicines—or any other stuff taken from the sea that may or may not make you healthier but will sicken the ocean.

Credit: irmiller via Flickr.

7) Use ocean-friendly sunscreen at the ocean, river, lake, stream, or pond where you swim. Up to 600 tons of the stuff gets washed off, or washed downstream, into the ocean ever year, carrying all kind of nasties with it. Plus sunscreen may not be so good for you as you think. Here are tips for some better choices.

Credit: Ryan E. Poplin via Wikimedia Commons.

8) If you keep a saltwater aquarium, buy only fish certified by the Marine Aquarium Council.

Credit: Lee R Berger via Wikimedia Commons.

9) Forgo the purchase of ocean souvenirs—objects or jewelry made of coral, sea shells, nautilus shell, seahorses—anything that had to be killed and removed from the ocean in order for you to take it home.

Credit: NOAA's National Ocean Service via Flickr.

10) Learn more about the ocean. Our well-stocked brains and hearts are good for the ocean and all living things.

Credit: JIGGS IMAGES via Flickr.

Happy Holidays!

ICE BIRDS

2011-12-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Visions photographiques via Flickr

Bruce McKay~YSP via Flickr

Paeonia via Flickr

andreasmarx via Flickr

Charles Jeffrey Danoff via Flickr

Metrix X via Flickr

cozymax.org at Flickr

hannanik via Flickr

glacierman via Flickr

rene j via Flickr

BaboMike via Flickr

Today is a good day via Flickr

'JAWS' LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT

2011-12-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

Shark Song from Whitehouse Content on Vimeo.

CIGARETTE CARD ARCTIC

2011-12-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

These views of the Arctic are from cigarette cards issued by the Hassan Oriental Cigarette Company between 1900-1917—during the golden age of polar exploration.

The artist is Albert Operti, an Italian who accompanied Robert Peary on his 1896 Greenland expedition.

Operti also painted many scenes of expeditions he was not a part of. As best I can deduce, the ship in this picture, Hansa, is the same supply vessel that came to an untimely end off Greenland during the 1869-1870 Second German North Polar Expedition. From Wikipedia:

As the supply ship, the Hansa followed the Germania [exploration ship] until July 19, when [Captain Paul Friedrich August] Hegemann misread a flag signal by [captain of the Germania, Carl] Koldeway and went ahead; the ship disappeared in the fog and got separated. The agreement was to meet in such a situation at Sabine Island. After unsuccessful attempts to get there, Hansa was inescapably stuck in the pack ice by mid-September 1869. During the next month, the ship was slowly milled by the ice and finally sank on October 22 at a position 70°32’N, 21°W approximately 10 km from the East Greenland coast. The crew managed to survive the winter in a shelter built of coal dust briquettes, while drifting on the sea ice southward along the eastern coast of Greenland. In June 1870, the crew got to the coast by boat and reached the Moravian Herrnhut mission at Narsaq Kujalleq (then Frederiksdal/Friedrichsthal) near Cape Farewell, from where they got back to Germany on a Danish ship.

When he wasn't painting the real and imaginary Arctic, Albert Operti was painting other make-believe stuff. From Visions of the North:

Like many panorama and diorama painters of the nineteenth century, when the Arctic was also a popular subject for such entertainments, Operti had a background in theatrical scene painting, and it was with this work that he was chiefly occupied in the middle years of his life, principally with the [New York] Metropolitan Opera. In the last six years of his life he returned to the [American Museum of Natural History], painting diorama backdrops, murals, and friezes for their exhibitions. During this period, he actually lived in quarters provided by the [New York] Explorers Club, and it was there that he died in 1927.

All images courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

IN MEMORIUM: DEANNA PANIATAAQ KINGSTON

2011-12-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

I was sad to learn of the death of Deanna Paniataaq Kingston, a prominent pioneer in Arctic social sciences and author of the interactive website, the King Island Placename Project. From her OSU obituary:

Oregon State University faculty member Deanna Kingston, an anthropologist, died Friday (Dec. 2) after a long battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 47.

King Island, Alaska. Credit: Dave Cohoe via Wikimedia Commons.

Deanna's family is Inupiat from King Island, Alaska, and she dedicated her career to studying and honoring the culture of her ancestors. From the National Science Foundation press release:

Deanna was a pioneer in exploring the intersections of Native knowledge and Western science and ways to combine attributes from both domains for the betterment of all and especially for her beloved community of King Island.

HJ Andrews Experimental Forest. Credit: algaedoc Ken Clifton via Flickr.

I was lucky enough to spend an extraordinary weekend with Deanna last year. We were attending a symposium, Dragonfly Eyes: Multiple Ways to Envision the Future, a gathering of poets, philosophers, writers, scientists, and architects, hosted by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University.

The symposium convened at the Andrews Experimental Forest in the Cascade Range of Oregon—a beautiful place, where we all felt keenly the ephemeral nature of time. Deanna seemed to radiate with that knowledge.

Later, she posted to her blog a poem she wrote while at the Andrews:

OUR TASK

By Deanna Paniataaq Kingston

Moss is writing its story on the tree
Like the Willamette River in the past
Sending tendrils to different places
Creating patterns of swirls and squiggles
It is not a violent invasion
It is a peaceful negotiation
To coexist together on the land
We must send our tendrils into the world

I look forward to her forthcoming book from Oregon State University press, Niglarugut Ugiuvangmiuguruagut: We King Islanders are Wolf Dancing.

Credit: hannanik via Flickr.

BABY FUR SEAL BREAKS INTO HOUSE ON WELCOME BAY

2011-12-13T15:30:00.000-08:00

Baby fur seal sleeping on the sofa of a New Zealand home. Via The Daily Mail.

A baby fur seal crawled through the cat flap of a New Zealand home, hopped up on the sofa and fell asleep. From the Mail Online:

The stunned owner of the house, Annette Swoffer, thought she was hallucinating when she found the pup in her kitchen, hanging out with her cats.

It had made its way from the waterfront at Welcome Bay, New Zealand, through residential streets, across a busy road, and up some steps. 'I was in my office and I heard an awful racket down below,' Miss Swoffer told the Bay Of Plenty Times. 'I thought the cats have brought a rabbit or something in so I went down and had a look—and there's a seal in my kitchen. I thought "I'm hallucinating, this is just wrong". I'm looking and I'm definitely seeing flippers and not paws.'

Miss Swoffer called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—who struggled to believe her at first. 'They were giggling away and I'm saying "I'm not drunk, I'm not lying, there's a seal in my house",' said Miss Swoffer.

Sea lion. Credit: lowjumpingfrog via Flickr.

This reminds me of a filming trip I made to to Mexico's San Ignacio Lagoon many moons ago when an immature sea lion crawled up the ladder onto our live-aboard boat, hopped into a cabin and onto a bunk, where he fell blissfully asleep.

For the next week, he came and went from the boat as he pleased, returning in true Goldilocks-fashion to one bunk or another.

In the end we had to forcibly (gently) evict him before sailing north to San Diego.

ELEPHANT SEAL COMMUTES 18,000 MILES

2011-12-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

Southern elephant seal. Credit: Butterfly voyages—Serge Ouachée via Wikimedia Commons.

A southern elephant seal has been tracked swimming an astonishing 18,000 miles/29,000 kilometers between December 2010 and November 2011.

That's the equivalent of a roundtrip between New York and Sydney.

Jackson's amazing travels. Via Our Amazing Planet.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) fitted a male seal named Jackson with a small satellite transmitter on the beach of Admiralty Sound in Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile.

From there he swam:

1,000 miles/1,610 km north
400 miles/644 km west
100 miles/160 km south

Along the way, Jackson meandered inshore through fjords and ventured offshore beyond the continental shelf.

Aerial Patagonia by Julia Whitty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All this in search of the fuel that drove his travels: fish and squid. From the IUCN Red List description of the species:

Foraging elephant seals combine exceptionally deep diving with long-distance traveling, covering millions of square kilometers while traversing a wide range of oceanographic regions during periods of up to seven months at sea. The seals spend most of their at-sea time in particular water masses that include frontal systems, currents and shifting marginal ice-edge zones. Studies of foraging locations suggest that seals are sensitive to fine-scale variation in bathymetry and ocean surface properties (sea-ice concentration, sea surface temperature).

In the course of his travels, Jackson was also diving deep—a skill at which elephant seals excel.

Different satellite tracking studies (pdf) have shown that during the seven months they're living offshore southern elephant seals typically spend only a few minutes breathing hard at the surface before making repeated dives of 20-minutes or more duration to depths of 1,300-3,300 feet/400-1,000 meters.

Some female elephant seals have been recorded making 2-hour-long dives. And some have made dives to more than 4,600 feet/1,400 meters. From the Red List:

Southern elephant seals are prodigious divers and routinely reach the same depths as their northern counterparts. Dive depth and duration vary during the year and between the sexes, but normally range from 300 to 500 m deep and from 20 to just over 30 minutes in duration. A maximum depth of 1430 m was recorded for a female, following her return to sea after the moult. Another post-moult female dove for an astonishing 120 minutes, which is by far the longest dive ever recorded for a pinniped.

Southern elephant seals. Credit: B.navez via Wikimedia Commons.

At the end of his peregrinations, Jackson returned to the same beach he'd left from on Admiralty Sound. His satellite tag should continue to transmit until early next year when it will cease transmitting and fall off.

The WCS research is part of their ambitious goals in the region:

The information WCS gathers will serve as a foundation for a new model of private-public, terrestrial-marine conservation of the Admiralty Sound, Karukinka Natural Park (a WCS private protected area), and Alberto de Agostini National Park. It will help build a broader vision for bolstering conservation efforts across the Patagonian Sea and coast.

OCTOPUS KAMA SUTRA

2011-12-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

Combine weightlessness while swimming with 16 limbs and squishy bodies and the mating possibilities get really interesting. H/T Deep Sea News.

Mimic octopus. Credit: Bernd via Wikimedia Commons.

ATOLL

2011-12-10T01:00:00.001-08:00

Credits, top to bottom:

Mataiva Atoll, Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia.
Bokak Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Arno Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Tetiaro Atoll, Society Islands, French Polynesia.
Pearl and Hermes Atolls, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
Bikini Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Atafa Atoll, Tokelau Islands.
Nukuoro Atoll, Federated States of Micronesia.
The Tuamotu Archipelago, chain of atolls, French Polynesia.
Malosmadulu Atolls, Maldives.

THEORY

2011-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY POETRY: SEA MAP

2011-12-04T10:29:00.001-08:00

Credit: desdibuix - miquel Miquel Bohigas Costabella via Flickr.

SEA MAP
By Hilda Morley

Taste of salt on my fingers,
                                           that’s how
I like it:
               the line of sea rising
above the dark-green pine,
                                           the sea meeting
the horizon,
                     so always the eyes are lifted higher,
                     the pulse buoyed upward
with them
                  So it
should be for us all—
                                  to belong to
whatever moves us outward into
the wideness, for journeying,
                                              tales of
distant places,
                        treasures piled
                        to fill our smiling,
                                                       for us to know of
along the travelled coastline,
                                           the mountains
we can climb to,
                           each port,
                                           each harbor
another window to wash our faces in,
                                                         pull us
forward
               & made for us,   made for
all of us,
                as the birds know, who
fly the continents,   the oceans
for their secret reasons,
                                     a map of the earth
written inside their bodies,
                                           marked
under their breastbones:
                                       a continuance
of the now most fragile,
                                        always travelled
patiently enduring world

VIEW FROM AN ICEBREAKER

2011-12-02T12:09:00.001-08:00

Via Tim Zimmermann.

FAILING ARCTIC REPORT CARD

2011-12-01T13:29:00.001-08:00

Icebergs breaking off glacier, Greenland. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

NOAA released its 2011 Arctic report card. And then they confused the metaphors by using a traffic signal. *Sigh.*

But if we follow through on the original metaphor, we get the following report card:

Sea ice age in the first week of March derived from tracking the drift of ice floes in 1988, 2009, 2010 and 2011. Figure courtesy of J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, via NOAA.

The foremost conclusion of the report is that 2006 marked a major shift in the Arctic Ocean system.

The report doesn't say 'tipping point.' But in fact it might well have been a tipping point. Here's what this tippinglike point looks like:

Persistent decline in the thickness of sea ice cover
Persistent decline in the summer extent of sea ice cover
A warmer upper ocean
A fresher upper ocean

The tipping-ish part is that the system may not return to what it was before 2006. In other words, another new normal.

Polar bears approach the submarine USS Honolulu (SSN 718) while surfaced 280 miles from the North Pole. Credit: Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs, US Navy.

The consequences of the tip are broad spectrum, impacting biology, chemistry, meteorology in (often) positive feedback loops.

For marine life, most consequences are a response to ever-smaller areas of ice and ever-larger areas of open water. Specifically:

Biological productivity at the base of the marine food chain—aka phytoplankton—has increased
Sea ice-dependent marine mammals—like polar bears and walrus—continue to lose habitat

Many of the changes underway for terrestrial life are linked to warmer temperatures in coastal regions where sea ice used to keep things cool but is now in retreat. Including:

Increases in the greenness of tundra vegetation
Increase in permafrost temperatures

Increased autumn snow in Siberia predicts a weakening Arctic vortex in winter. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

A second key point from this report card is the repeat in 2011 of an anomalous wind pattern that first appeared in the Arctic winter of 2010. This weakening of the Arctic vortex led to the jet stream dipping south and warming Greenland and northeastern Canada, while bringing much colder temperatures to Europe and North America. The results:

Higher than normal temperatures in the Arctic
Record ice sheet mass loss
Record low late spring snow cover in Eurasia
Shorter lake ice duration
Unusually lower temperatures and snow storms in some low latitude regions

Rare deep depletion in the ozone layer over the Arctic in 2011, much like the annual Antarctic ozone hole. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

On top of all that, the Arctic grew its own bona fide ozone hole last winter—one that threatens far more populated areas of the globe than the Antarctic hole, and one with the power to impact the winter crops that feed us.

The executive summary of the report concludes:

The 2011 Report Card shows that record-setting changes are occurring throughout the Arctic environmental system. Given the projection of continued global warming, it is very likely that major Arctic changes will continue in years to come, with increasing climatic, biological and social impacts.

I LONG TO BE ONCE AGAIN IN THE SEA

2011-11-29T18:39:00.001-08:00

dagdraumar from Allan Wilson on Vimeo.

OZ MARINE PARK: BIGGEST, BEST, OR BUST?

2011-11-29T12:50:00.001-08:00

Part of the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast of Australia. Credit: NASA.

The Australian government announced last week a proposal to create the world's largest marine protected area in the phenomenally biodiverse richness of the Coral Sea.

Too bad no one's happy with it.

Of course, it's in the nature of protected areas to make people unhappy for a good long while before there's any hope of making them happy.

Bison, Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Daniel Mayer via Wikimedia Commons.

Yellowstone, the world's first national park, might have triggered part 2 of the Civil War if there had been more people living in the West at the time. Here's what Senator Cornelius Cole of California had to say about it during legislative debate:

I have grave doubts about the propriety of passing this bill. The natural curiosities there cannot be interfered with by anything that man can do.... I cannot see how [they] can be interfered with if settlers are allowed to appropriate them.... I do not see the reason or propriety of setting apart a large tract of land of that kind in the Territories of the United States for a public park. There is abundance of public park ground in the Rocky Mountains that will never be occupied. It is all one great park, and never can be anything else.... There are some places, perhaps this is one, where persons can and would go and settle and improve and cultivate the grounds, if there be ground fit for cultivation.

Australia's Coral Sea draft marine reserve covers 989,842 square kilometers (382,180 square miles). Courtesy Commonwealth of Australia.

In Australia, some fishers are mad as hell about the proposed new park. For brevity in reporting, nothing beats this article, in its entirety, from the Queensland ABC:

Commercial fishers in the Coral Sea claim they are being made scapegoats despite a long history of sustainable fishing. Rob Louden is a licence and quota holder in the Coral Sea and East Coast sea cucumber fishery. He says the proposed Commonwealth marine park will put valuable and productive fishing grounds off limits for no apparent ecological or biological reason.

Man, sea cucumber. Credit: Fritz Geller-Grimm via Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists and conservationists are equally unhappy with the Coral Sea proposal. From Nature News:

Hugh Possingham, director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland, points out that little more than half... of the Coral Sea reserve is proposed as a 'no take' area, in which all fishing would be banned. The world’s largest existing marine reserve, established last year by the British government around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, spans 544,000 [square kilometers] and is a no-take zone throughout. An alliance of campaigning conservation groups, including the WWF and the Pew Environment Group, argues that more of the Coral Sea should receive this level of protection.

Blue starfish (Linckia laevigata) resting on Acropora coral, Lighthouse, Ribbon Reefs, Australia. Credit: Richard Ling via Wikimedia Commons.

The fight is fierce—and important. Australia is struggling to create meaningful protection for much of its waters.

But its weak draft proposal last May for a southwestern Australian marine park prompted 173 scientists to write an open letter to the government in protest. One of the co-signers, CJA Bradshaw, wrote at his blog Conservation Bites:

Basically, the proposed parks are merely a settlement between government and industry where nothing of importance is really being protected. The parks are just the leftovers industry doesn’t want. No way to ensure the long-term viability of our seas.

Barry Wrasse is a stakeholder too. Here's what he has to say.

ICE LIGHTNING

2011-11-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

FIRST FISHERS

2011-11-25T11:06:00.001-08:00

Beach at Tutuala, East Timor. Credit: doug.deep Doug Anderson via Flickr.

A new paper in Science reports on 42,000-year-old fish bones found in Jerimalai cave on the island of East Timor, just north of Australia.

This is the oldest evidence yet of human fishing activity. Even more interesting, about half the 38,000 bones were of fast-swimming pelagic species—tuna and shark—implying the ancient fishers worked offshore from vessels.

Credit: Froschmann : かえるおとこ H Aoki via Flickr.

We know that people were seafaring 50,000 years ago. And seafaring and fishing are inextricably linked. But until now hard evidence of pelagic fishing was lacking. From Science Now:

Although modern humans were exploiting near-shore resources, such as mussels and abalone, by 165,000 years ago, only a few controversial sites suggest that our early ancestors fished deep waters by 45,000 years ago. The earliest sure sites are only about 12,000 years old.

What's not known is exactly how these first fishers in East Timor caught open-water species. The researchers speculate they went to sea on boats or rafts equipped with nets or hooks-and-lines.

A broken shell fishhook found in East Timor. Scale is in millimeters. Credit: Sue O’Connor, et al. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207703.

At Jerimalai the archaeologists also found the earliest known fish hooks—including one from a mollusk shell dating to 23,000 years ago. These hooks were too small to catch the pelagic species, so were likely used inshore.

Prior to these findings, the oldest fish hooks dated to the beginning of agriculture, or about 5,500 years ago in Southeast Asia.

Fisher, East Timor. Credit: United Nations Photo via Flickr.

The paper:

Sue O’Connor, Rintaro Ono, Chris Clarkson. Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans. Science. 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207703

HAPPIEST FEET: OILED PENGUINS GO FREE

2011-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

Little blue penguin. Credit: Noodle snacks via Wikimedia Commons.

Forty-nine of 343 little blue penguins rescued from the oil spill off the New Zealand coast were released back into the ocean yesterday—with more to come in the next few weeks, says Maritime New Zealand.

At least 2,008 birds died.

When Rena grounded on 5 October 2011 it contained 1,712 tons of oil. About 360 tons spilled into the ocean. The last of the 1,319 tons remaining were removed by salvors working under really tough conditions by 13 November. Kudos to them.

The freed penguins were released back into the Bay of Plenty with hopes they'll make their way to their breeding rookery on Rabbit Island.

Bonne chance, little dudes.

ULTIMATE WORLD CRUISE

2011-11-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

TODAY'S PACIFIC

2011-11-20T13:54:00.001-08:00

20 Nov 2011, 2100 UTC. Credit: NOAA-NASA GOES Project.

A HISTORY OF THE SKY

2011-11-18T14:43:00.001-08:00

A History of the Sky from Ken Murphy on Vimeo.

TIDEPOOL CURIOSITIES

2011-11-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

Keyhole limpet. Credit: skome via Flickr.

Bubbles left at tidepools after waves retreat. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Sparring sea anemones, white tentacles are fighting tentacles. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

The curio cabinet of a tidepool, with starfish, anemones, sea urchins, marine algae, barnacles, and hermit crabs. Credit: summersumz via Flickr.

Tidepool architecture. Credit: 4johnny5 via Flickr.

Artificial tidepool. Credit: Johnny Grim via Flickr.

Natural tidepool. Credit: bikehikedive (nugun) via Flickr.

Sea star growing new legs. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Sea anemone, Anthopleura sola, eating a by-the-wind-sailor, Velella velella, carried to shore on spring winds. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Octopus in tidepool. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Microcosmos. Credit: Avenue via Wikimedia Commons.

Highrises. Credit:Glen Bowman via Wikimedia Commons.

Sea star eating a mussel. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Brooding sea anemone, Epiactis prolifera. Numerous young in different stages of development are visible on the pedal disk. The brooding anemone is a colonial hermaphrodite that fertilizes and incubates its eggs in its own digestive cavity. After hatching, the larvae swim out of the mouth and migrate to the disk, installing themselves on the outside until they're big enough to move on and feed themselves. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Nudibranch, Acanthodoris lutea, laying eggs in tidepool. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Psychedelic nature: flame-lined chiton. Credit: Mila Zinkova via Wikimedia Commons.

Ocean vegetables. Credit: bastasia via Flickr.

Curiosities observed. Credit: nashworld via Flickr.

KILLER WHALES V. SALMON

2011-11-14T13:25:00.001-08:00

Credit: Robert Pittman, NOAA.

What happens when we 'manage' two species in the wild with different—and conflicting—objectives?

And what happens when one eats the other—and so do we?

That's the question raised in an interesting new paper in PLoS ONE. The authors investigated how many endangered chinook salmon are needed by endangered killer whales to recover their numbers in the northeastern Pacific.

Salish Sea, comprising the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound, surrounding Vancouver Island and Washington state. Credit: SeaWiFS Project,NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.

The question gets even more intriguing when you have two countries—Canada and the US—managing the fate of the two species that blithely cross international boundaries as if, you know, they weren't there.

The killer whales in the middle of the conflicted question are known as the southern resident killer whales (SRKW), who summer in the Salish Sea. They eat only fish, and are so dependent on chinook salmon that when they can't get them more adult whales die and fewer calves are born.

Current population of southern resident killer whales: 87 individuals
Current chinook salmon stock: 36% of historical run in Canada, 8% in US

Chinook salmon. Credit: Josh Larios via Wikimedia Commons.

The stated objective of US management is to grow the dwindling killer whale population by 2.3% per year over 28 years.

The authors assessed what the minimum basic caloric requirements were likely to be to make that come true—based on food requirements of captive killer whales, and body lengths of wild whales.

Estimated prey requirements of wild killer whales, based on two plausible values for calorie content of a typical, 4-year-old Chinook salmon. Credit: Rob Williems, et al. PLoS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0026738.

What they found suggests that the chinook salmon can't support both a growing killer whale population and human fisheries at current levels.

What's a fish-eating primate to do? The authors' suggest:

When one protected species relies almost exclusively on another protected species, it can be difficult to develop management frameworks that meet the needs of both species. This can lead to a perception that the needs of the more charismatic species will unfairly trump those of the prey species. In our experience, genuine conservation conflicts often result in management inaction in the absence of a framework in which to assess likely impacts... It is faster to reduce takes of salmon than to increase salmon production, and it is faster to increase salmon production than promote population growth in killer whales. The efficacy of salmon habitat restoration actions can often be measured within a decade, whereas similar measurements will take decades in studies of long-lived species like killer whales.

In other words, maybe we should let the whales get the fish for a while.

There's a lot more interesting stuff going on in this forward-looking paper and luckily it's open access. So you can freely read deeper.

The paper:

Williams R, Krkošek M, Ashe E, Branch TA, Clark S, et al. 2011Competing Conservation Objectives for Predators and Prey: Estimating Killer Whale Prey Requirements for Chinook Salmon.PLoS ONE 6(11):e26738. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0026738

SHYSCAPES

2011-11-10T15:22:00.001-08:00

shyscapes from Misha Shyukin on Vimeo.

HAIR O' THE SEAL

2011-11-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

Antarctic fur seal (right), Weddell seal (left), Penguin Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica. Credit: © Julia Whitty.

How do you assess the health of a marine invertebrate—namely Antarctic krill—when there's no historical baseline to measure it against?

In an intriguing piece of detective work reported in PLoS ONE a team of researchers from China and the US turned to analyzing old seal hairs to determine changes in abundance of krill in the past century.

Antarctic krill. Credit: Uwe Kils via Wikimedia Commons.

Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a keystone species in the Southern Ocean and the primary consumer in a foodweb supporting fish, penguins, seabirds, seals, and whales.

They school in swarms of up to of 30,000 individuals per cubic meter and are perhaps the most abundant animal on Earth, with a total biomass estimated at ~379 million metric tons.

In the video below (starting at 00:01), you can see humpback whales bubble feeding on krill in Antarctic waters.

There's evidence of a decline in krill biomass in parts of Antarctica in the past 30 years—but when did it begin?

To look deeper into history, the authors analyzed core samples from lake sediments near an Antarctic fur seal colony on King George Island in the South Shetland Islands off the Antarctic Peninsula.They dated the fur in the cores via stable carbon (δ¹³C) in the samples. They inferred the abundance of krill in the seals' diet via the nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) isotopes in the fur. From the paper:

Since Antarctic fur seals feed preferentially on krill, the variation of [nitrogen] in seal hair indicates a change in the proportion of krill in the seal's diets and thus the krill availability in local seawater.

Antarctic krill grazing on algae living on the underside of sea ice. Credit: Uwe Kils via Wikimedia Commons.

Their results indicate that krill began to decline in the diet of fur seals in this part of Antarctica nearly a century ago. That time frame correlates with increasing sea surface temperatures and dwindling sea ice. (See my post Life Inside the Sea Ice more about the relationship between krill and sea ice.)

From the PLoS ONE paper:

In this region for the past decades, the sea ice shows a decline trend, and this is in coincidence with the decline trend in krill populations. Like the seal [nitrogen] values, the sea surface temperature anomaly in Southern Ocean (50°S) also shows an obvious increasing trend for the 20th century, and the significant correlation between them... suggests that the inferred decreasing krill population is linked with warming ocean and declining sea ice extent.

The paper:

Huang T, Sun L, Stark J, Wang Y, Cheng Z, et al.Relative Changes in Krill Abundance Inferred from Antarctic Fur Seal.PLoS ONE. 2011.DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0027331.

OCCUPY VERTEBRATES!

2011-11-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

Credit: Kara Treibergs and Laurel Hiebert for the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, via Pharyngula.

OCCUPY EAGLE!

2011-11-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Herring gull mobbing a white-tailed eagle. Credit: Markus Varesvuo/naturepl.com.

The situation: The breeding season, a mad-as-hell gull defending eggs or chicks, a gigantic maurading scavenger.

BIRDS OVER WATER

2011-11-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

ANTARCTICA EMERGES

2011-11-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

1657. Jan Janssonius. Dutch. Showing hints of southern coastlines labelled 'Terra Australis Incognita.'

1714. French. Guillaume de L'Isle. Antarctica empty.

1739. Philippe Buache. French. Showing two Antarctic land masses, New Zealand connected to Antarctica, and Australia connected to New Guinea.

1777. Thomas Bowen. British. Showing the 'Track of his Majesty's Sloop
Resolution in Search of a Southern Continent.'

1818. John Pinkerton. US. Antarctica missing again.

1855. J. H. Colton. US. Showing partially sketched details of the 'Southern Regions.'

1894. Scottish. Real features getting named, including ocean currents.

1912. German. From Stielers Handatlas. Suddenly, details.

1920s. Showing 'unexplored regions,' focus on expedition routes.

1922. John Bartholomew. UK. Limited but exquisite detail.

1934. US. Focusing on the Byrd Expedition.

1972. H.C. Berann. US. Showing Antarctica in context with the seafloor.

2006. UK. Showing Antarctica without the ice.

2006. Dave Pape. Stitched satellite view.

SEA LIFE I.D. CHART

2011-11-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to xkcd.

SURFBOARD SPIRITS

2011-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

PANDA BEAR "Surfer's Hymn" from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

SAND, GLASS, WAVES

2011-10-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

Llewelyn Ash {Adventures of a Glass Blower} from Benjamin Dowie on Vimeo.

EARTH FROM AFAR

2011-10-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

This view of Saturn eclipsing the sun is a composite assembled from 165 images taken by the Cassini spacecraft while 2.2 million kilometers/1.3 million miles from Saturn on 15 September 2006. The mosaics were captured over the space of about 12 hours as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn's shadow.

Seen far in the distance, at the 10-o'clock position just outside the bright rings, is a tiny pale blue dot—Earth.

For a whole lot more on how this image was created and what its details reveal, check out the JPL Cassini page. Click here for a bigger version.

THE SECRET LIFE OF TSUNAMI DEBRIS

2011-10-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Portions of houses and an overturned boat afloat in the Pacific after the 11 Mar 2011 earthquake and tsunami off Japan. Credit: US Navy/ Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd.

The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) in Hawaii reports that somewhere between 5 and 20 million tons of tsunami debris from the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan is migrating quickly across the Pacific Ocean.

Crew from the Russian tall ship STS Pallada spotted furniture, appliances, and a fishing boat with the home port 'Fukushima' painted on it after passing the Midway islands—part of the Hawaiian Islands Archipelago—last month. That's 2,000 miles from the epicenter of the quake.

This is the first confirmed sighting since shortly after the disaster, when the massive floating remnants of coastal Japanese towns—more than 200,000 buildings—simply disappeared from view.

The image above shows the likely path of tsunami debris as of 25 Oct 2011.

The IPRC research suggests this path based on 678,305 tracers released from the northeast coast of Japan beginning 11 March 2011—the same day as the quake.

You can watch an animation of the full dispersal here. The fluid dynamics are beautiful.

This video shows the IPRC prediction of the long-term—5-year-plus—travels of the tsunami debris. The original animation for the statistical model is here.

As you can see from the video, the debris, after bouncing off the west coast of North America, is likely to get trapped in the North Pacific Gyre—along with all the other garbage collecting there. The plastics will last close to forever.

As an interesting aside, monstrously huge rafts of tsunami debris may well be one of the mechanisms by which life originally dispersed to the Hawaiian Islands.

Pallus' rosefinch, Carpodacus roseus, native to China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. Credit: M. Nishimura via Wikimedia Commons.

A new analysis of the genome of Hawaiian honeycreepers reveals they're not descended, as thought, from the honeycreepers of the Americas, but are instead a sister taxon to the Eurasian rosefinches of the genus Carpodacus.

Based on a genetic analysis, the precursors of Hawaiian honeycreepers probably arrived on Kauai and Niihau about 5.7 million years ago and continued to diverge into different species after Oahu emerged from the sea.

ʻIʻiwi, or scarlet Hawaiian honeycreeper, Vestiaria coccinea. Credit: Paul Banko, NPS.

It's possible that huge floating mats of tsunami debris—perhaps from Japan—brought the ancestors of Hawaii's present-day honeycreepers to the islands.

Those of you who've spent time at sea know how land birds get blown off course and will rest on any platform on the water—ship, boat, raft, the backs of sleeping whales—as they fight to stay alive.

Maybe the current tsunami debris will transport some newcomers to the Hawaiian Islands.

Townsend's warbler rests on a boat. Credit: Andrew Revkin via Flickr.

If so, would we recognize them as naturally-delivered refugees?

Or would we try to exterminate them as human-introduced aliens?

The papers:

Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner. Marine Debris. pdf.
Heather R.L. Lerner, Matthias Meyer, Helen F. James, Michael Hofreiter, and Robert C. Fleischer. Multilocus Resolution of Phylogeny and Timescale in the Extant Adaptive Radiation of Hawaiian Honeycreepers. DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.039.

BODIES OF WATER

2011-10-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

PHANTOM WATER EDIT from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

TWICE AS MANY DOLPHINS, WHALES STILL DYING IN GULF

2011-10-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

Stranded spinner dolphin. Credit: qnr via Flickr.

The latest NOAA report on unusual strandings of whales and dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico finds they're still dying at twice the normal rate 18 months after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Map of strandings in relation to Deepwater Horizon well. Click for larger version. Credit: NOAA.

As you can see in the map above, the most heavily oiled shoreline still corresponds with the most dead whales and dolphins.

Bottlenose dolphins are shown as circles and other species as squares. Premature, stillborn, or neonatal bottlenose dolphins (with actual or estimated lengths of less than 115 cm/45 inches) are shown as a circle with a black dot inside.

Pink points mark the most recent week of data. Green points mark are all other cases since 1 January 2011.

All stranded cetaceans (dolphins and whales) from Franklin County, FL to the Texas/ Louisiana border. Credit: NOAA.

Here you can see how the numbers of strandings have not yet stabilized or even begun to decline. In some cases they're still growing.

The magenta-colored bars mark strandings per month in the year 2010. The ivory-colored bars mark strandings per month so far this year.

Credit: NOAA.

This graph shows stranded premature, stillborn, or neonatal bottlenose dolphins.

In my Mother Jones article The BP Cover-Up last year, I wrote about the kind of long-term problems the Gulf might face not just from oil but from extreme quantities of oil in very deep water, as well as from chemical dispersant, including dispersant injected into very deep water.

Sadly, it seems that cetaceans—past, present, and future—may be bearing some of those burdens.

Beached sperm whale. Credit: Rachel Denny Clow, Corpus Christi Caller-Times/AP.

You might be interested in these other posts describing other scientific findings in the wake of last year's Gulf catastrophe:

MOTION-CONTROLLED MIDNIGHT SUN

2011-10-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

Midnight Sun | Iceland from SCIENTIFANTASTIC on Vimeo.

I suppose we'll tire of motion-controlled time-lapse videos one of these days. But not yet.

CANADIAN SEABIRDS WALLOPED BY BP'S OIL

2011-10-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

Northern gannet. Credit: Alan D. Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.

A new paper in early view in Biology Letters—a journal of the Royal Society—finds that Canadian migrant seabirds suffered disproportionately the lethal effects of BP's oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

Northern gannets (Morus bassanus) suffered the highest oiling among beach-wrecked birds recovered last year.

These are the largest seabirds in the Atlantic, who migrate from their Canadian breeding colonies to overwinter in the Gulf of Mexico. Adults return to the breeding colonies by about March—earlier than immature birds.

Winter positions of northern gannets from 4 of 6 North American colonies, where adults and chicks were banded and adults and juveniles tracked. Mean winter (Jan–Feb) positions from adults carrying GLS (2004–2010) and final positions from 18 juveniles with PTTs (2008–2010). Deepwater Horizon site (star) and associated slicks (grey) indicated. Credit: William Montevecchi, et al. Biology Letters. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0880.

Due to these migration timetables, most of the northern gannets killed in the Gulf last year were likely immature birds.

Which means the real impact of their deaths will not show up until those birds would have reached sexual maturity—at about 5 or 6 years old—or betwen now and far beyond. Gannets can live at least 21 years.

From the paper:

Most adult gannets had returned to Canadian colonies by 20 April 2010, although more than 50,000 immature gannets were in the Gulf at the time and suffered oil-related mortality. Hence, two probable outcomes are (i) a lagged (likely difficult to detect) population decrease or (ii) mortality will be buffered by age-related life-history processes.

A bonded pair of northern gannets. Credit: Al Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.

The authors found the story grew even more ominous when they compared numbers on how many gannets were overwintering in the Gulf of Mexico—numbers that differed hugely depending on the technology used:

Old-fashioned technology: recovery of banded birds
Modern technology: bird-borne global location sensors (GLS) and satellite tags (Platform Terminal Transmitters, PTTs)

The newer technologies revealed more than twice as many gannets overwintering in the Gulf. From the paper:

Extrapolation from band recoveries indicates that 13,318 adult gannets winter in the Gulf of Mexico, much less than the 66,124 estimate based on GLS data... PTT positions suggest an estimated population of 52,509 immature gannets in the Gulf compared with 41,587 extrapolated from banding recoveries. Extrapolating tracking data for all gannet age classes more than doubles the estimated number of birds using the Gulf, from 54,905 to 118,633 birds.

Oiled gannet washed ashore on Cape Cod. Credit: Dennis Minsky at SeaNet.

Add to that the fact that dead or oiled birds found ashore represent only a fraction of the birds dead or dying at sea. From the paper:

Seabirds are among the most obvious and immediate indicators of wildlife and environmental damage during marine pollution events. In these circumstances, seabird mortality has been assessed by counting dead and dying animals along coasts. These assessments are biased towards animals that die near accessible well-populated coastlines, and as offshore winds and currents can reduce coastal-deposition of carcasses that sink after a few days, mortality is inevitably underestimated.

The authors note that gannets may be shifting their winter range to the Gulf in response to overfishing of menhaden—their primary winter prey—in Atlantic waters.

Northern gannet in flight. Credit: Andreas Trepte via Wikimedia Commons.

And the authors noted possible signs of oil fouling on birds returning to their Canadian breeding colonies:

In April 2011, at their southernmost colony, Cape St. Mary's Newfoundland, gannets on inaccessible cliff-sites were observed and photographed with dark soiled plumage that looked like oil, but this could not be verified by chemical analysis. Tracking, survival and physiological measurements at gannet colonies during 2011 are evaluating other potential repercussions and informing management about conservation concerns.

The paper:

William Montevecchi, David Fifield, Chantelle Burke, Stefan Garthe, April Hedd, Jean-François Rail, Gregory Robertson. Tracking long-distance migration to assess marine pollution impact. Biology Letters. 2011. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.088.

SWEATERS FOR OILED PENGUINS

2011-10-19T00:48:00.000-07:00


Example of a penguin sweater knit by New Zealanders to keep sick, oiled penguins warm. Via the Bay of Plenty Times.

From the Bay of Plenty Times comes the news that knitters in New Zealand are making sweaters for little blue penguins (aka fairy penguins) oiled in the wreck of the cargo ship Rena.

Nearly 1,300 birds are known dead from the spill already, most penguins. From the Bay of Plenty Times:

A Napier factory has sent a care package off to Tauranga—full of tiny woolly penguin pajamas. The PJ package came about after Napier's Design Spun general manager Brendan Jackson was contacted last week by a local woman whose daughter had been involved in the oil response unit. The recovery crews were coming across oil-smeared penguins who, trying to preen their feathers clean, became more ill.

The Massey University Wildlife Recovery team she was part of had cast their minds back to a similar spill in Tasmania some years ago, where locals knitted pure wool jumpers to be put on the little blue penguins during the recovery phase to prevent them getting at their feathers before they could be washed clean.

It worked, so the word went out to Design Spun, which has a "yarn club'' of devoted knitters. Within a week the four to five dozen bright little jumpers were all knitted and the last of them were sent to Tauranga yesterday.

Some even have messages including one, which has the words "Cut Down on Oil Use'' embroidered lovingly on the front.

Here's the pattern if—like mine—your needles are practically jumping up and down at the prospect.

Penguin sweater via.

LIFE AND DEATH OF A SEA STACK

2011-10-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

1890

Jump-off Joe was a 100-foot-/30-meter-tall sea stack near Nye Beach, Oregon—named because visitors had to jump off its steep side to get around it.

Before the 1880s it was still attached to the mainland. Around 1890 its connection fell away. From then until World War I it was a well-known tourist attraction.

These undated postcards show part of its lifecycle.

According to Historic Photo Archive:

The rock formation was subject to rapid erosion and returning visitors would make a point of checking out the changes since their last visit... The arch finally collapsed during a severe storm in late January, 1916.

Or not. The following photographs, courtesy of the USGS, suggest that Jump-off Joe survived as an arch at least until 1920, then in ever-diminishing incarnations until the 1990s. (H/T Irish Weather Online.)

1910

1920

1970

1990

As an interesting aside—near my home in northern California there are a few old uplifted sea stacks that now stand high and dry on coastal terrace.

Photo by tuolumne tradster via Flickr.

These ancient stacks bear areas of highly-polished mirrorlike rock, which have have been analyzed by archaeologists using scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope, then compared with wave polish from cliffs below the terrace, with elephant rubs, and with just about every other form of rock polish.

Their conclusion: woolly mammoths rubbed here.

From the paper:

In eastern and southern Africa, rubbing stones are relatively common in the savanna and grassland areas. They stand as monuments to ancient itches... Stack 1 in our study area is adjacent to a [freshwater] seep which has probably been active throughout the Pleistocene. The modern Asian elephants and African elephants especially like to rub on trees and rocks after wallowing in mud. Ectoparasites encased in the drying mud are removed by the rubbing action which benefits the animals. It is possible that the seep was an animal wallow which encouraged the use of the adjacent rocks, and caused their high polish over a matter of perhaps a hundred thousand years.

The paper:

E Breck Parkman, et al. Extremely High Polish on the Rocks of Uplifted Sea Stacks along the North Coast of Sonoma County, California, USA (pdf).

Woolly mammoth at the Royal British Columbia Museum. Photo: WolfmanSF via Wikimedia Commons.

THE CORAL FOREST

2011-10-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

'(How To Grow) A Floating Forest' from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

Another beautiful short film from Morphologic Studios, shot at an underwater nursery for staghorn coral. This critically endangered species has lost 80 to 98 percent of its population throughout the Caribbean in the past 30 years, much of that from climate-change-induced coral disease and coral bleaching.

The nursery featured here highlights some intense human efforts to reverse that decline. From the Morphologic Blog:

One of the most innovative, practical, and functional coral nurseries on the planet can be found just a few miles off the shores of Key Largo. The nursery consists of thousands of neatly organized colonies of the critically important staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) grown by the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF) for the purpose of transplantation back to the reef. Staghorn corals have been decimated by disease and extreme weather here in Florida over the past 30 years, resulting in a seriously degraded reef ecosystem. Fortunately the CRF has developed methods that maximize the growth potential of these corals in their nursery, demonstrating that coral aquaculture is a realistic and effective way to restore beleaguered wild populations.

From the Morphologic Blog.

EVOPOLLUTION

2011-10-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

NEW ZEALAND'S WOES GROW

2011-10-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

THE X-RAY ORIGAMI OF TAKAYUKI HORI

2011-10-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Takayuki Hori's unique work won first place in the 2010 Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Competition. Using a process called Oritsunagumono—defined as 'things folded and connected'—he portrayed eight endangered Japanese species. The only color in Hori's pieces comes from the ubiquitous marine garbage swallowed by his wild origami birds and reptiles.

Via designboom and monogocoro.

AFTERWAVES

2011-10-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

The Cold Sea's Embrace from Carl Olson on Vimeo.

OCCUPY OIL SPILL!

2011-10-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

MAYDAY CALL FROM NEW ZEALAND TANKER

2011-10-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

MV Rena grounded on a reef (right) 13.5 nautical miles off Tauranga, New Zealand. Via: The Guardian.

TVNZ reports a full mayday call has gone out from the stricken tanker MV Rena, requesting an immediate helicopter rescue of all crew remaining aboard.

The ship—grounded on a reef off the coast of New Zealand since last Wednesday—is now believed to be breaking up in heavy weather. The Rena carries 1,700 cubic meters/450,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil (see my earlier post). From TVNZ:

The ship has spilled between 10 and 50 tonnes of oil so far andmore has been seen leaking from the vessel and headingsouth-west. The barge which is being used to pump oil off the ship wasdamaged overnight and has returned to the port for repairs. It willsail again once it is fixed and the weather improves.

A little blue penguin found on the beach is washed at the Oiled Wildlife Response unit set up in a makeshift camp in Tauranga, New Zealand. Via: The Guardian.

Check out this The Guardian slideshow for more images of the worsening spill.

MAN, SEA, WOMAN

2011-10-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Man Made by The Sea from Catherine François on Vimeo.

UPDATE: NEW ZEALAND OIL SPILL THREATENS PENGUINS

2011-10-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

A family of little blue penguins, Eudyptula minor, exit their nest burrow. Credit: Noodle snacks via Wikimedia Commons.

The New Zealand Herald reports the country is facing one of its worst ecological disasters as the stricken tanker Rena is now in danger of breaking apart. The ship grounded 20 kilometers/12 miles off Tauranga Harbour, near the Bay of Plenty, on the North Island, after striking a reef on Wednesday.

UPDATE: 22:07 GMT, 9 OCT 2011: New Zealand's MetService has issued a severe weather watch for the Bay of Plenty, with strong northeasterly gusts and heavy rains possible in the region today [Monday, New Zealand time]. Officials are advising that oil will start reaching shore at Bay of Plenty's Papamoa beach on Wednesday. Questions remain as to why the large ship hit a well-documented reef in calm waters.

The Rena is carrying 1,700 cubic meters/450,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil. The race is onto siphon off—or at least contain—the oil before the ship sinks. From the New Zealand Herald:

More resources and special equipment [are] likely to be needed during the operation. An offshore boom barrier device to ring-fence the oil—measuring about 1250m [three-quarters of a mile]—was being transported from Australia along with three heavy skimmers to scoop it from the water. A salvage architect was due to arrive from Holland, with further expert help from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority also on their way.

Site of the grounding of the MV Rena, off the North Island of New Zealand. Satellite image courtesy of NASA/JPL/NGA.

Meanwhile, heavier weather is bearing down on New Zealand, including a forecast for rain and strengthening northeasterly winds on Monday—when the pumping operation is slated to begin.

Most worrisome, it's spring in the southern hemisphere, and many seabirds along New Zealand's coast are breeding. This is prime egg-laying/chick-hatching season for little blue penguins (called fairy penguins in Australia), who come ashore en masse each dusk to exchange incubation duties or feed their chick, before departing again en masse before dawn to hunt.

(The sound of little blue penguins calling at dusk in New Zealand. Credit: Benchill (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.)

So far, seven oiled birds—five little blue penguins and two cormorants—have been taken to a wildlife center at Tauranga Harbour. The New Zealand Herald reports:

"It's a very difficult situation and the reality is that we are going to see a significant oil spill," [Transport Minister Steven] Joyce said. "So far it's been reasonably small, so I think everybody's preparing for the worst. We are dealing with a very serious situation ... and I don't think anybody is under any illusions."

If you haven't met Cookie, the 'ticklish' little blue/fairy penguin at the Cincinnati Zoo, here he is, a sweet ambassador for his kind.

BEAUTIFUL BRAINS

2011-10-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

Photos, top to bottom:

Colpophyllia natans. Credit: Nhobgood Nick Hobgood via Wikimedia Commons.
Diploria cerebriformis. Credit: Jaro Nemčok via Wikimedia Commons.
Diplora labyrinthiformis. Credit: Nhobgood Nick Hobgood via Wikimedia Commons.

Trachyphyllia geoffroyi. Credit: Jmk777 via Wikimedia Commons.

Diploria labyrinthiformis. Credit: Jan Derk via Wikimedia Commons.

Trachyphyllia. Credit: RevolverOcelot via Wikimedia Commons.

Favites favites. Credit: RevolverOcelot via Wikimedia Commons.

Unknown. Photo courtesy of MarineBio.

Unknown. Credit: RevolverOcelot via Wikimedia Commons.

Ctenella chagius. Credit: Micaelalah via Wikimedia Commons.

Unknown. Via.
Unknown. Via.

Unknown. Via.
Platygyra platygyra. Credit: Nhobgood Nick Hobgood via Wikimedia Commons.

'BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2011' NOW OUT

2011-10-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

The Best American Science Writing 2011 (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) is out. This year's edition is edited by Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), her father, the poet and essayist Floyd Skloot, and Jesse Cohen.

I'm honored to say that my Mother Jones article, BP's Deep Secrets, is one of ten pieces chosen for the volume. Of it, one reviewer wrote:

"Deep Secrets" by Julia Whitty: An examination of the recent oil spill near Louisiana. This was my personal favorite. What we didn’t know about the gulf environment before the oil spill we may never know if the environment’s destroyed.

Support your local indie bookstore and a science writer or two and buy a copy. Or two. Thanks!