PACIFIC MARINE MAMMAL CENTER - LAGUNA BEACH : REHABS VISITOR AREA : SEA LIONS HAVE HIGH RATE OF CANCER : NEXT WAVE EXPANSION

You may not be able to visit as a tourist, but you CAN donate, volunteer, or be a help to the cause.

PACIFIC MARINE MAMMAL CENTER : NEXT WAVE CAMPAIGN

Excerpt: We’re excited to invite you to join us as we usher in a new era for our organization - The Next Wave expansion.

The Next Wave Campaign will include:

A water reclamation system that will save our community 15,000 gallons of water every day

Increasing the standards of animal care

Improving our research capacity

Providing more students with access to our educational programming

Laying the groundwork for powerful advocacy that will help us as we Build a Better Ocean - one with fewer plastics and less chemical pollution.

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We care for the most common pinnipeds to southern California which are:

California Sea Lions

Northern Elephant Seals

Northern Fur Seals

Pacific Harbor Seals

MERMAID MANDALA

 

PREHISTORIC SHELL TRUMPETS STILL MAKE SOUND!

DAILY MAIL : SCIENCE : PREHISTORIC SHELL TRUMPETS 

Excerpts: Amazingly, eight of the instruments still worked perfectly, with the loudest toot reaching 111.5 decibels - as loud as a powerful car horn or trombone.

Researchers believe that these trumpets would have been used as an ancient form of communication technology, with simple codes shared between communities.

These blasts could easily travel the three to six miles (five to 10 km) between the Stone Age villages where the horns were discovered.

They could have been used to communicate between different settlements, warning of attacks or coordinating harvest times.

Others, found deep within abandoned mines, might have been used to send messages through the underground darkness.


*** See the photos of the shells and read more about the archeology!

HUNDREDS OF PINK DOLPHINS FOUND DEAD IN BRAZIL'S LAKE TEFE : THEY BOILED IN HEAT WAVE WATER HOTTER THAN A JACUZZI

CBS : DOLPHINS DEAD IN WATER HOTTER THAN JACUZZI BRAZIL LAKE TEFE 

Excerpts: 

Officials from the World Wildlife Fund Brazil said 153 dolphins were found dead the week of Sept. 23, 2023, including 130 pink dolphins, and 23 tucuxi dolphins. Both are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List and the latter of which are considered "the guardians of rivers and a symbol of good luck," according to RiverDolphins.org.

"The climate emergency is here"

What made it even more remarkable, said Fleischmann, was that the same temperature was found not just at the surface but throughout the two-meter-deep water column.

Using computer modeling, the team identified four key drivers: strong solar heating, shallow waters, low wind speeds, and high turbidity — a measure of water haziness.

These factors reinforce one another. Shallowness increases turbidity, which traps more heat, while low wind carries less heat away, leaving the water more exposed to clear skies and intense sunlight.

Another stressor for aquatic life was the large swing between highs and lows, with the peak of 41C in Tefe followed by a nighttime low of 27C.

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Siren here!  It's not just sad, it's terrifying!

ARISE

 

BLUE WHALES GONE SILENT?! CLIMATE CHANGE? ALL ENERGY USED TO FIND ENOUGH FOOD - KRILL

THE WEEK : BLUE WHALES NOT SINGING -CLIMATE CHANGE

Excerpt: The study tracked over six years of acoustic monitoring in the central California Current Ecosystem. During those years, blue whale sounds decreased by approximately 40%.

"We don't hear them singing," John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the lead author of the study, said to National Geographic. They are "spending all their energy searching." There's "just not enough time left over" for singing, and that "tells us those years are incredibly stressful." It's like "trying to sing while you are starving,"

"When we have these really hot years and marine heat waves, it's more than just temperature," Kelly Benoit-Bird, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium and co-author of the study, said to National Geographic. "The whole system changes, and we don't get the krill." So the animals that "rely only on krill are kind of out of luck." High ocean temperatures lead to algal blooms that can kill krill. And blue whales are "forced to forage over a much larger geographic area when krill populations become depleted," said Newsweek.

Marine heat waves are only going to get worse due to fossil fuel usage. Oceans act as the world's largest carbon sink, meaning they "already absorb more than 90% of the excess heat from climate change," said The Independent. There are "whole ecosystem consequences of these marine heat waves," said Benoit-Bird. If whales "can't find food and they can traverse the entire West Coast of North America, that's a really large-scale consequence."

BLUE WHALES ARE THE LARGEST ANIMALS ON OUR PLANET!

LEAF SHAPED FANGS?! PACIFIC DISCOVERY LINKS UNPRECEDENTED FIND! GINKO BEAKED WHALES

Unprecedented!   OOOOH this is great!

UNION RAYO: GOODBYE TO DECADES OF ASSUMPTIONS : GINKO BEAKED WHALES

Excerpt: For the first time in history, a team of scientists managed to see, record and document the elusive ginkgo-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon ginkgodens) swimming in open sea, off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. And the best part is that with this encounter they also solved a mystery that had been puzzling experts for more than a decade, a mysterious acoustic signal, the famous BW43, that no one had managed to attribute to a specific species.

.... For the first time, a species known only from stranded remains was alive, recorded, confirmed!!! Now scientists can track this species without seeing it, just by listening to its signals in the ocean.

Battles, wounds and sharks

The ginkgo-toothed beaked whale has a distinctive feature and it is that the males develop two flat leaf-shaped teeth near the tip of the snout. They do not use them to eat, but to fight with other males for the females.

The photos show long scars, cuts, white lines, many battles on their backs. In addition, many had circular bite marks made by sharks called “cookie cutters”.

CLAM ANALYSIS SHOWS NORTH ATLANTIC SUBPOLAR GYRE ACTING STRANGELY

LIVE SCIENCE : MASSIVE SYSTEM OF ROTATING OCEAN CURRENTS ACTING STRANGELY

Excerpt: An analysis of clam shells suggests the North Atlantic subpolar gyre has had two periods of destabilization over the past 150 years: one around 1920 and the other from 1950 through present. ....

"It's highly worrying," study lead author Beatriz Arellano Nava, a postdoctoral research fellow in physical geography at the University of Exeter in the U.K., told Live Science. "The subpolar gyre was recently acknowledged as a tipping element. We still need to understand more of the impacts of a subpolar gyre abrupt weakening. But what we know so far with the few studies that have been published is that it would bring more extreme weather events, particularly in Europe ... and also changes in global precipitation patterns."

.... But the other signal was a total surprise, she said. The clam data revealed that the subpolar gyre was unstable for a few years in the run-up to the 1920s North Atlantic regime shift. This previously described event was characterized by the strengthening of currents in the gyre. Instability in the subpolar gyre likely caused the 1920s regime shift, and the timeline suggests the period of instability may have reflected the subpolar gyre's recovery from its Little Ice Age collapse, Arellano Nava said.


Go to the article for more upsetting details and a globe showing the way currents work!

CALIFORNIA : VERY LITTLE PLASTIC BEING RECYLCLED

LA TIMES - Environment : VERY LITTLE PLASTIC BEING RECYCLED IN CALIFORNIA 

Excerpt:  Polypropylene, labeled as #5 on packaging, is used for yogurt containers, margarine tubs and microwavable trays. Only 2% of it is getting recycled. Colored shampoo and detergent bottles, made from polyethylene, or #1 plastic, are getting recycled at a rate of just 5%.

Other plastics, including ones promoted as highly recyclable, such as clear polyethylene bottles, which hold some medications, or hard water bottles, are being recycled at just 16%.

No plastic in the report exceeds a recycling rate of 23%, with the majority reported in just the single digits.

READ ON MY FRIENDS!  

DO YOU KNOW WHICH PLASTIC CONTAINERS ARE SAFE TO REUSE TO STORE OR COOK FOODS?

AS GOOD FISH IN THE SEA AS EVER WERE CAUGHT

A vintage Valentine published in 1909

 

HOLY MACKEREL BUT I LOVE YOU

 

SAVE THE SEA