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Tag Archives: ocean

Plastic

Like Peter and the Gang at DSN, Johann, Tammy and I are getting fed up with plastic garbage, especially bags and bottle caps. We are especially upset about how much of it ends up in the oceans and the effects it has once it is there.

Captain Charles Moore of the Alguita was at TED this year and gave a 5 minute presentation to TED about the Pacific Garbage Patch:

So, what can you do? Reduce the amount of plastic you use and recycle everything you can of what you do use. With very little effort we’ve given up plastic drink bottles (it helped that I gave up Cokes) and by bringing our own canvas bags, we have given up plastic bags. Try giving up both for lent, for passover, for spring break, or for whatever reason. It may not seem like much, but reducing our plastic use is the only thing that will help in the long run.

Winter Build

<a href="http://www.instructables.com/id/Underwater_ROV/">Underwater ROV</a> - an <a href="http://www.instructables.com/">instructable</a> by <a href="http://www.instructables.com/member/SpaceShipOne/">SpaceShipOne</a>

While the gents at Deep Sea News get time on some of the best manned and remotely operated vehicles out there, the rest of us don’t have to sit it completely out. I think some time this winter Tammy and Johann and I will build a homebrew ROV to explore some of the local shores. Maybe we can find some of the stomatopods that live in the Mystic estuary for a test cruise.

Outed in Blue

I knew it would happen sooner or later, and truth to tell I wasn’t hiding it, I just wasn’t advertising it. Yet, they have found me out!

My first clue was when a certain picture showed up on the staff and students page for a lab, for which I am doing a summer internship that is turning into a longer term project. Hopefully, I can do some research at the lab as well. I would love to do a bit of research on survivability and development of larvae under severe conditions.

The professor is also my adviser, so when I saw him on Monday, I was a little bit nervous that the web site, or certain components of it, might be an issue. Fortunately, it isn’t an issue and he’s even linking it under my bio on the web page.

Bio on the lab pages

At the same time, Rick MacPherson, the Director of Conservation Programs for the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL), has included The Other 95% in a salute to great ocean blogs. I have some serious respect for CORAL and the work they have done all over the world, genuinely making it happen, and Rick’s Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunset is one of my regular reads, especially the awesome That’s A Moray Monday series.

His list had some new sites for me, especially the international ones. If you’re at all interested in ocean science an conservation it is a highly recommended starting point for your cyber classroom and adventures.

Blue

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.

Today the Carnival of the Blue #13 was put up at Blogfish, including two of my posts from The Other 95%.

So what is the Carnival of the Blue?

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…

Diving Into Antarctica, Long Distance

This winter has been the season for learning about Antarctica.

Early this winter Johann’s great-grandfather went on a cruise around South America. At home we tracked the voyage on our big wall map and talked about some of the sights, cultures and especially animals we would encounter if we went to those locations. While his girlfriend was visiting some of the South Atlantic Islands, Great Grandpa took a flight over the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Peninsula. We are still awaiting a report from him on what he saw, but we tracked the probable flight path and talked about Austral Summer, the long sunsets and sunrises and non-existent nights.

Now one of the professors from Avery Point, Dr. Patricia Kremer, is in Antarctica aboard a research vessel to investigate salps. Johann met Dr. Kremer during the day long Festival by the Sea at Avery Point. She was in one of the labs giving demonstrations of ctenophore bioluminescence. Johann surprised her when he knew not only what they were (common name is comb jellies), but also knew that they luminesed when disturbed. He told her about the experiment he performed, and had questions for her about the parasitic worms we found in about half of the ones in our experiment. (He also loved petting the Lion’s Mane Jelly that one of the Graduate students had on display in that lab).

Dr. Kremer is co-principle investigator for Dive and Discover’s Expedition 10 to Antarctica to study salps and their role in the changing trophic system of the Southern Sea. Dive and Discover is a program operated out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Dive and Discover website has information and educational resources online for all ten of their expeditions (since 2000) and is an excellent resource for teachers and home schoolers as well as anyone who just wants to learn more about the oceans. In many ways similar to Ballard’s Jason Project, only a bit more focused on oceanographic topics. Johann has insisted that we spend time going through all of the expeditions after the current one is done. The team on the expedition puts up daily updates, slide shows, a critter of the day and interviews of personnel on the site, along with the current weather and ocean conditions. Johann was really excited to see Dr. Patricia as the first interviewee.

The program also allows classes and individuals to ask the scientists and crew questions by email. We told Johann about it and suggested that he think about what he would want to ask the scientists. Naturally he focused on the animals. He dictated his email to me and we sent off two questions:

Do salps have parasites like the comb jellies in Mystic?
Are there any penguins around the polar station?

Last night we got a reply from Dr. Larry Madin, the Chief Scientist and co-principle investigator of the expedition. Johann was very excited to get a reply from Antarctica (Penguin Post, we called it.) Dr. Madin informed him that salps do indeed have parasitic amphipods that affect them, and that there were Adelie penguins around Palmer Station, including a nearby rookerie that they visited.

We continue to make the expedition a daily part of school here. Checking first the daily update, tracking the expidition’s location on the map and comparing the weather there with the weather here. We also take a look at the slide show, “Dive Deeper” and the “Critter of the Day”. The critter of the day invariably leads us to our books to find out more about the critter. One of the highlighted critters — a copepod — led to us doing a predator/prey experiment. Afterward we both were running around the house as copepods trying to catch a variety of food items, including Tammy, who we “captured” by tickling with our maxillipeds (specially adapted appendages near the mouth for gathering food). It’s a game we’ve played before, but whenever copepods come up, it always leads to either that game or an often humorous discussion of the importance of copepod poop.

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