Well the science team at the Japanese government sponsored whaling program has significantly increased their productivity by publishing one more paper that actually could require killing whales to produce, while slaughtering 1300+ whales in the past two years. They have gone from 1700(+) whales per paper in late 2005 to 1600(+) whales per paper with the latest paper released (after two journals declined to publish it) in Polar Biology.
Anthony at Small Fish, Big Apple has more on the current paper, which for the Japanese whaling has some rather felicitous conclusions.
As an extremely adapted predator, you use your oddly shaped head to increase your ability to find prey. Your eyes and nostrils are located on both ends of your hammer shaped head. Your vertebrae are especially designed for quick turns and maneuvering. Ranging in size from 3 feet to 20 feet long, you can weigh up to 1,000lbs. You feed on fish, crustaceans and especially enjoy eating rays. You prefer warm temperate and tropical water, and can be found swimming along coastlines and continental shelves in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean and Black Seas. You may even catch a tan while swimming in shallow waters. During the day you often swim in large schools, sometimes containing more than 100 fellow hammerheads, but prefer to hunt alone at night.
As true with most shark species, you are in danger of becoming extinct. Highly sought after, your fins are considered an expensive delicacy (used to make shark fin soup), your liver oil is often used to make vitamins, and your skin is use to make leather. While people are not legally permitted to catch you, you are often caught by longlines and driftnets, and rarely make it out alive.
Money does make some things easier, I won’t deny it. But the truth is, Eric and I both have learned even more how to creatively solve problems because of our shortage of cash. Things we might have thrown away and replaced before we are now repairing and reusing. Eric has gotten very good with glue. So far the mending of the 3 foot tear in the mattress pad is holding.
I’ve acquired new skills. I taught myself how to cut Johann’s hair from a book. I’ve been cutting his hair for over a year now and no one can tell. I learned how to bake bread. Now that is the only bread we regularly eat. Eric has gotten very creative using his knowledge in woodworking and home repairs. He also made a CO2 system for the fish tanks, which saved us hundreds of dollars.
Our latest problem to solve was how to cool the fish tanks for the summer. With the temperature rising, we had to figure out how to maintain our tanks between 76 and 80 degrees. The easy way is to keep the air conditioner on higher, but that obviously comes at quite an expense. The other obvious option is to buy one of the cooling systems we’d seen advertised, but that would cost us at least $200. plus the cost of the electricity to run the coolers.
Eric wanted to add filtered water ice cubes to the tank. That was a good idea, but I had reservations. We needed to reduce the temperature at least 3 degrees, ideally more, to keep the temperature within our ideal range. A 20% water change with cooler water will do that for a short time, but not a couple of ice cubes. I was also worried about diluting the salts and disturbing the chemical balance of the water. And at some point too many melted ice cubes could cause an overflow.
I asked Eric about cooling the air around the tank. Eric said the water absorbs the heat from the outer air temperature, but will hold it longer. How was I planning to do it? Cooling the air would work, but he was worried I was going to turn up the AC. I was thinking about the ice packs in the freezer and all the extra ones we had in the attic. Eric was very skeptical. I said that you don’t know until you try.
I could hear his eyes rolling in his head as I put the first batch of ice packs touching the back of each fish tank. I waited about an hour and then took the water temperature. One ice pack reduced the temperature 2 degrees! Eric took the temperature himself, but then had to admit that it worked. Two ice packs on each tank did the trick. We were even able to set the thermostat a few degrees warmer.
So now we are changing the ice packs when we turn the lights on in the morning and again at night when the lights go off. But I like how we saved that $200. and were able to keep the fish from cooking in their tanks from the summer heat.
Well if you know me, you know blue is my favorite color.
Any shade of blue indigo, the blues of Tammy and Johann’s eyes, and the many shades of the ocean.
Well in the words of the Carnival Master of Ceremonies Mark Powell (Scientist, conservationist, the author of Blogfish, and in an odd twist, a former Avery Point Professor):
Carnival of the blue is meant to provide a community for ocean-related blogging and bloggers… [Where] ocean bloggers and readers will gather at the traveling carnival and share insights with each other and the wider world.
It is a monthly roundup of the best stories and writings by bloggers with a focus on the ocean and life within it. A year ago on World Ocean Day, June 8th, Blogfish hosted the inaugural edition of the carnival. Since then it has been to many of the top ocean blogs including many of my (almost) daily reads. Now as World Ocean Day approaches again, the 13th edition has gone up with 35 entries from 25 sites. My favorites are Craig MacLean’s story from Te Papa’s colossal squid dissection, a knit wolf fish (still trying to convince Tammy to knit the bone eating worms) and the wealth of sustainable seafood entries.
Yeah, no direct links… but if you go to the Carnival at Blogfish you can access all the Blue links you need to truly get your blue on…
My family loves Lobster, especially Mom and me. Whenever they come east to visit there is one meal we know we will always have… lobster. Now there is a great way to support independent lobstermen and women - buy a trap or a share of a trap direct from from. Sea Notes has a great piece about the growing community supported fisheries movement.
From Maine to California, it’s possible to connect directly with the folks going out each day to catch fresh, seasonal seafood. You get a fresher product from someone you know. The folks on the boat get a better price for their catch. Fishing communities stay alive and healthy, rather than withering away into ‘colorful’ remnants on a once-thriving waterfront.
You can, for example, buy a year’s catch from a Maine lobster trap for $2,995 — with the average catch around 150 lobsters a year. Or you can buy a share of the catch for just $249, with the guarantee of ‘a gourmet lobster feast for 4′ from the lobstermen with the Catch a Piece of Maine partnership.
In this area you can still see a number of small family operated lobster boats out on the sound, but more and more they are disappearing. Fortunately there are some restaurants here that support the local fishermen especially during the tourist season, offering only, or at least predominantly, local caught scallops and lobster. My question is where can I buy a share of an oyster farm. mmmm… raw oysters.
It looks like both Dad and I have some new digital real estate.
My father is a professional photographer and now has a web site to show some of his works. I love his bear series of photographs and hope you will too. The cool thing is that he is also providing some facts and conservation information about some of these magnificent animals. I often have to wonder if the work he will do as a photographer will have more impact in informing people’s opinion about nature and conservation than my plans as a scientist or science communicator.
My own photography has taken a back seat to school and I do miss it. I especially love doing underwater video and photo work. If I could make an impact by producing a book or being on the team that produces a book on the beauty of underwater life similar to the magnificent and inspirational books Reef by Scubazoo or The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I would jump at the chance. I love underwater photography even more than doing nature photography above water.
Speaking of science communication, I will now be participating in a multi-author blog called The Other 95% (TO95% for short). It is a site mostly dedicated to talking about invertebrates and the latest news, science publications, jokes, videos, etc. related to inverts.
I just put up my first posting there, about recent discoveries of social and complex mating rituals in a species of octopus. I hope you will look at it and enjoy. I took this on in part to help myself become a better writer and in part to help spread the beauty of inverts, especially cephalopods.
Over the past 20 years the Japanese “Scientific” whaling program has taken between 8,000 and 9,000 whales, including the 1,000 to be taken in this year’s hunt.
A minke whale mother and calf being dragged aboard a Japanese factory whaling ship. PhotoAFP
Increasing pressure from Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd disrupted this years hunt for three weeks, but the biggest blow to the whaling may come from ex-Midnight Oil lead man Peter Garrett. Now the Australian Minister of the Environment, Peter Garrett released the above image taken by an Australian Customs official. The customs officials were tailing and documenting the hunt which Australia considers illegal. The Japanese government first claimed the photo of a mother and calf being hauled into a factory whaling ship were fake, but now claim that both whales were adult females, and that Australia is engaged in “dangerous emotional propaganda” agaist its “scientific” whaling efforts.
So how scientific is the whaling effort?
Well, two years ago that question was examined by an informal panel of Australian scientists on the ABC show Catalyst. At that time the 18 year old scientific whaling program had taken 6,800 whales. The panel found that of the 55 peer reviewed papers published by the Japanese government sponsored whaling program only 14 were relevant to study of cetaceans or developing and managing a whaling industry. Only 4 of those 14 would have required lethal sampling methods to actually obtain the information required. So the final score, by their count, was 1700 whales killed for each paper.
While I’m reluctant to condone the aggressive actions of Sea Shepherd, on this issue I find myself wondering if it is not warranted since the Japanese fleet is violating the spirit of international law in waters where no individual nation has the authority to intercede, yet every nation has a vested interest.
In related news Terri Irwin, who gave permission to the Sea Shepherd to rechristen their flagship in honor of Steve, has set up an agreement with Oregon State University to launch a southern ocean whale research program to prove to the Japanese you don’t need lethal whaling to conduct significant whale research.
While their future is still up in the air, the whale’s past has gotten a little clearer…
(Edit 9pm) It seems the past is even clearer with a paper posted today in Systemic Biology analyzing genetic and morphological evidence to track the evolution of baleen whales.
The Alvin on deployment — one of the submersibles used on the Sea Mounts along with the Hercules and Argus tandem ROV system. Image from mpi-bremen.de
From Deep Sea News comes a post that is right on time for me. Deep Sea News is a science blog run by a Post-Doc from MBARI, a research assistant from TAMU-Corpus Christi and a Graduate Student at Penn State. They cover all things Deep Sea (below 1000m).
One might think that’s a lot to cover…in a way it is, considering that almost 80% of the earth’s ecosystems, by volume, is deep sea (1000m or deeper), but…the truth is we have only explored less than 1% of that area. Even 48 years after the Triest reached the deepest spot in the sea.
I am fortunate to work with a professor at Avery Point who has explored part of the deep sea ecosystem. He focused his attention on the sea mounts that form a chain from the continental shelf of eastern North America to the mid-Atlantic Ridge then on to the Azore Islands. These sea mounts may act as “islands” in the deep sea that intermediate depth deep sea, bottom dwelling fish (those that live between 200m and 4000m depths) use as stepping stones across the much deeper abyssal plains. During a recent cruise his team documented 7 new deep sea octocoral species in 10 days of diving. I have seen some of the video from that cruise, along with pictures of what a trawled zone looks like before and after the trawl. I hope that a ban on dep sea trawls comes to pass since the trawlers now have the capability to reach over 2km down and leave scars across the bottom that stretch for kilometers.
Before he heads to Rome for an FAO meeting on limiting deep sea trawling, I have to meet with him for a new HD video editing project I will be doing with him about cephalopods. Hopefully I will also be able to work with him on some future deep sea video surveying work as well. The ultimate would be deep sea cephalopod behavior and ecology studies!! (or mangroves… but there are few cephalopods in the mangroves.)
Well, maybe we drive it a hair more than that, and it’s not to church, but unfortunately to an Environmental Law class. Still at this point, the bike has twice as many miles as the car! I just wish we could find an insurer who would bill us appropriately! No matter though, I feel good knowing that we have only driven 49 miles so far this month.
I have taken the bike in 3-4 days a week now, and generally feel great, though my thighs and quads are still yelling at each other and me. My commute times are getting shorter (dropped 6 minutes off the longer route in one month) and my fitness is increasing (measured by resting heart rate, max heart rate going up the 1km long, 8-11% grade out of Groton, and generally improving times at lower average heart rates).
Tammy and Johann walk everywhere they need to in town, and only require the car for groceries and to get to the Stonington Library.
Last Ride
Date: September 17 Distance: 23.5 km ( 14.6 miles) Ride type/Bike: Commute / Tri-Cross September Distance: 191.7 km (119.1 miles) Year To Date Distance: 653.4 km (406.0 miles) Weight Lost/Gained: -0.45 kg (-1.0 pounds)
The majestic cheetah from the Zoo in Providence, RI. It was a hot and humid day there and he was pacing restlessly. The screen and scratchud up plexi (scratched from the human side!) in the viewing area was a bit of a pain for photography, but I did get a couple of good shots. Surprising how many people were saying “oh, look at the pretty Leopard” especially when there were 2 signs proclaiming the species in 8 inch tall type in white on black. Oh well….
This shot ended up with a nice discussion about cheetahs as well as the role of zoos and aquariums. If you don’t have a flickr account I would be interested in hearing your views in the comments here.
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