Two new studies may upend previously accepted understanding of photosynthesis. A widespread type of cyanobacteria may not use as much carbon dioxide in photosynthesis as presumed, meaning the oceans are capable of less carbon dioxide absorption than scientists had thought ...
... in other cyanobacteria news, scientists discovered that viruses may play a key role in prompting the phytoplankton to consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen ...
... the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dropped buoys into the water off the coast of Massachusetts that will record sound for the next 30 months in an attempt to understand the effect of ocean noise on marine wildlife ...
... some Maine fishermen led an effort to develop a $100 million buyout plan for New England's groundfish industry, which would result in a 25 percent decrease in fishing capacity ...
... California state wardens cited ten people for illegally fishing young Chinook salmon to use for bait. In one case, a man was using a machete to catch the fish ...
... the proposed killing of sea lions on the Columbia River to protect Chinook salmon stocks was postponed ...
... Long Island, New York unveiled its first fish ladder, designed to help alewife (a type of herring) swim inland to spawn ...
... fossils discovered in the ancient seabed now part of Australia's Outback may have been the first creatures to participate in sexual reproduction. The fossils are an estimated 565 million years old ...
... and a species of small octopus was found to lead extravagant courtships that include strangling rivals to death. Both mates die after offspring are born.
Jonathan Safran Foer on his book “Eating Animals”
More power, less roadkill: How one professor’s landscape has shifted
Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change
Comments
View as Flat
Sam Wells Posted 7:47 am
05 Apr 2008
But it should be pointed out that the ocean carbon cycle is just not gaseous carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide reacts with water to form weak carbonic acid. That can in turn react to form bicarbonate (HCO3-). The carbon cycle can continue as dead organisms contribute organic, calcium, and silica particulate.
So knowing that, did the scientists mess up by assuming nearly half of the man-made CO2 would end up absorbed by the ocean and its critters? -sammie
Onward through the fog
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 8:41 am
05 Apr 2008
I could not get to the machete story straight from the Oceana e-mail message of yesterday; but I see it now.
I had been given to understand that the San Jose' Mercury News was a paper of some respectability.
And yet, notice the "most-viewed" stories:
<<
Polygamist compound raided
High school teacher accused of secretly videotaping girls in...
Partygoer killed by Santa Clara police after stabbing friend and...
Body found inside fire was Los Gatos businessman facing child porn...
Basketball coach beaten in gang attack
Hikers turn over human skull to cops investigating fatal Hwy. 9...
>>
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
Sam Wells Posted 12:23 pm
05 Apr 2008
Now using a sports fish for chunk bait is a major no-no. But it is relatively infrequent and only a few fish pirates do that kind of thing. What happens is that under-sized fish, be it a grouper or salmon or whatever, are indeed used as bait for bigger fish sometimes. When caught the perps usually pay a very severe price. Here's the one-sentence story:
"In Sutter County, a man was using a machete and a large piece of cloth to catch salmon at the river's edge."
I'd say the man was insane and the story really didn't need mention.
For comical value though, it worked. -sammie
Onward through the fog
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:42 pm
05 Apr 2008
But then again, the fossil record is hardly complete. Why should it not be possible that sexual reproduction arose independently in many places?
The concept of the "spatfall" is not easy to understand. It sort of has a fun sound, doesn't it. One wonders if those rope-beasts (Funisia is indeed formed from a good Latin word for rope, funis) were toiling through their work-week, all the time thinking now and again ahead to the weekend's spatfall.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:53 pm
05 Apr 2008
http://www.myfoxla.com/myfox/pages/InsideFox/GoodDay?page ...
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 6:37 pm
05 Apr 2008
It is interesting that Cornell University, which is popularly associated more with ornithology than with marine biology, has provided hardware and software.
In the first newsletter of the year written by the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, we read (page 3):
<<
On January 12, the Center's right whale aerial survey spotted the first right whale of the season in Cape cod Bay. And that first right whale was entangled.
In a scenario that has become distressingly familiar to right whale researchers all along the entire east coast, this whale was observed with green line exiting from the right side of its mouth that trailed alongside its flank and beyond for another three-quarters of its body length.
...
Back on land, the New England Aquarium [in Boston] and Center staff identified the whale a No. 2645, an adult female, with a long history of migration to the feeding grounds of Cape Cod Bay.
Researchers first sighted this whale in 1996 with her mother in the calving grounds of the Southeast region [northern Florida and Georgia], before migrating to the bay later that same year. No. 2645 has been seen nearly every year since her birth. She lost her first calf in 2005 when she was just nine years old. But she was sighted again last year in the Bay of Fundy, with a new calf and gear-free.
...
Because the population [of Northern right whales] is so severely compromised, the loss of a breeding female like No. 2645 could threaten species survival. ...
>>
The Center's Director, Richard Delaney, writes in his letter:
<<
While the Japanese whalers in Antarctica made headlines around the world, reviving public interest in whales, it is equally important to understand and support the larger, more comprehensive efforts that are being made every day on behalf of the survival of the majestic whale species.
Yes, Japan's very questionable "research" plan to kill as many as 1,000 whales is onerous [right word?: grave?; weighty?; costly?]; yet many times that number of marine mammals face equally harrowing threats every day in all of the world's oceans. ...
But there is some progress. Last year, based largely on over 25 years of data from Provincetown Center of Coastal Studies scientists in collaboration with other colleagues, the International Maritime Organization rerouted the major shipping lanes into the Port of Boston. These lanes, which transected prime whale habitat on Stellwagen Bank, were shifted three and [a] half miles to the northeast, thereby reducing the statistical chances of more ship strikes on whales in that area. ...
>>
He notes that an earlier, similar rerouting of shipping lanes into the Bay of Fundy, and to the port of Saint John, New Brunswick, was based on data provided by experts in Northern right whales. In the course of the season, the whales move from Cape Cod Bay up to the Bay of Fundy.
Hopefully the bioacoustic research at the Stellwagen Bank will tell us a lot of new information about how sound, including of course anthropogenic sound, affects the behavior and movements of all marine animals, especially the crucially endangered right whales.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 7:26 pm
05 Apr 2008
We are intellectually impoverished, by being wrong-headedly encouraged to divide all animals into two groups, vertebrates and invertebrates.
We should certainly be capable of a threefold division: vertebrates (really, chordates), arthropods (insects, arachnids, crustaceans -- the majority party, so to speak, if in fact they outnumber E.O. Wilson's nematodes; the biosphere's Prime Minister might very well be a krill from off New Zealand, provided that the arthropods vote as a bloc, and so defeat the nematode candidate), and everything else (for whom we can decide on a suitable name later).
Ideally, I would go with four groups: vertebrates, arthropods, mollusks, and everything else. Vertebrates and mollusks are not as numerous as either Group 2 or Group 4; but I am naturally devoted to Group 1; and I have a fondness for Group 3, and definitely believe that a strong argument can be made for their elevation -- whatever the jellyfish may cry out in protest.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 7:40 pm
05 Apr 2008
In the case of these rivalrous octopuses, it is surprising that "strangling" is the method of murder. Among cephalopod mollusks, the tentacles seize and secure the prey item, but do not kill it, by strangling or constriction or dismemberment or whatever; the octopus (or squid or cuttlefish) actually kills its prey by biting it with its beak.
Another detail of the octopus story which should not be overlooked, is that male octopuses can approach the females, whom they desire, more easily by pretending to be females themselves: the "Some Like It Hot" gambit. But that is indicative of the true inclinations of the females: basically Sapphic.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:29 am
06 Apr 2008
http://www.hsus.org/marine_mammals/protect_seals/celebrit ...
As we know from reading the HSUS's ad in Grist, the seal slaughter is the largest intentional destruction of marine mammals in the world.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 8:05 pm
07 Apr 2008
His name has come up twice in Gristmill in the past day or so:
I happen to be reading his account of a bad encounter between human beings and whales, on the south coast of Newfoundland in the 1960s, "A Whale for the Killing"; and I quoted from it at some length in the "Navy Crock-it" thread;
The Sea Shepherd vessel that is the star of the "Seal of Disapproval" thread is in fact named the "Farley Mowat." It is registered in the Netherlands, apparently, NOT in Canada -- about which Paul Watson might be willing to say more. Their Southern-Hemisphere anti-whaling vessel, the "Steve Irwin," is after all suitably registered in Australia.
Mowat's "Never Cry Wolf" helped along the positive appreciation of wolves in North America and Russia. And his work as communicator between Ottawa and the Inuit was truly life-saving.
Meanwhile, "A Whale for the Killing" expresses well the tragic sentiment that many of us are feeling, regarding the fisherfolk of Newfoundland: seal-bashing, the greatest slaughter of marine mammals in the world right now, is carried out by those fishers, and their neighbors; Mowat portrayed them as brutes; but he also has had terrific affection for them as well, and has criticized the Canadian government for misunderstanding them, and giving them over to evil counsel.
In the interest of peace, we should all want to do right, by the whales, by the seals, by Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd folks, and by the people who live around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. And we must proceed, thinking heartfully about everybody, and believing that we can indeed come together.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
jose Posted 5:50 pm
09 Dec 2008
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 6:04 pm
09 Dec 2008
A copy of Mowat's "People of the Deer" has just arrived, and I look forward to sinking into it, when the semester and finals are over.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink