WHITE STRIPED FISH

 

MAYFLOWER AUTONOMOUS SHIP ENDS JOURNEY A BIT OFF COURSE

GIZMODO - MAYFLOWER AUTONOMOUS SHIP ENDS JOURNEY  by Jauren Leffer

Excerpt: "After a 40-day and 3,500 mile journey, Mayflower Autonomous Ship successfully compeled her mission to cross the Atlantic.  She arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Sunday 5th June," said the project's website.  However, the MAS400 was expected to land in Virginia, more than 1,200 miles southwest over land, and the vessel faced multiple mechanical difficulties throughout its ocean voyage. 

MARINE BIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION - BRITISH ISLES

Marine Biological Association Recording Scheme  First read about this in Mudlarking, the book by Lara Maiklem.

Among the many activities that the MARINE BIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION is working on is the monitoring of Mitten Crabs, apparently one the world's most invasive species that among other things, competes with native species. 

MUDLARK by LARA MAIKLEM - SIREN's LINK TO SEA BOOK REVIEW - SEA FOSSILS

What a fascinating book.  For those of you who like to go to the water's edge and see what you can find - besides sea shells and sea weeds washed ashore - this book may inspire you to think ahead about where you can go and why.  Lara Maiklem's hobby as a mudlark, a person who finds things washed up by river tides, has made her an expert about the way the Thames River, the river that goes through the city of London to the ocean, flows.  Most surprising to me was that this is a river that has tides.  With the ebb and flow of the tides, various objects have been deposited, others have no doubt been washed out to sea for hundreds of years. So she and other mudlarkers make it a point of frequently visiting various areas where the river flows to see what has been brought up, what is embedded, and her finds include ancient coins, painted tiles, and a variety of objects like needles, pins, thimbles, and beads, religious objects and weapons.  As most of these objects were made of natural materials - not plastic - they don't threaten the living creatures of those waters so much though of course there is a history of sea creatures becoming extinct over time. It's those creatures though that I want to excerpt about. 

Page 53  Excerpt:  Encased in clay and lying among the gravel on the foreshore are the fossilized remains of the creatures that inhabited those prehistoric seas.  The pencil-like internal shells of belemnites, ancient extinct squid, that swam in shoals over 66 million years ago; bivalves the size and shape of cockles, frozen in stone; and 'devil's toenails', an extinct form of marine oyster that lived in the sediment of the seabed.  At Warden's Point on the Estuary, fossilized crabs, lobsters, shells, twigs, and shark teeth fall from the low cliffs of London clay onto the beach where they can be collected by the handful, and occasionally smoothed pieces of yellow amber will wash ashore where the Estuary and the North Sea mingle. Years ago, before people knew what fossils were, they were shrouded in folklore and assigned all kinds of quasi-religious and mystical associations. One of the most commonly found fossils in the south of England, and along the Thames' foreshore, are echinoids.  The colloquial name for echinoid is 'sea urchin', which comes from the old country name for hedgehog....

QUEEN CONCH IS FOOD and COLLECTED BUT ENGANDERED

 

Excerpts pages 269-270 :  No human reimagining of a shell comes close to the Queen Conches' own transformative life cycle.  The animals ride the currents as larvae, hide in seagrasses when they are little conches, hang out in grainy sand and rubble in middle age, and hope and leap to deep-sand channels when they reach old age.,  They are not all queens.  They are female or male and must join up to mate, unlike the bivalves that send their eggs and sperm into the sea to meet the currents.

In the springtime, mature conchs gather in large herds and graze on algae, plowing the nourishment into eggs and sperm.  The herds are crucial to their survival, scientists say it takes at least ninety Queen Conchs in a hectare to successfully reproduce.  Each female will develop a million eggs.  A male scoots over to stretch its long, spade=tipped penis underneath her shell.  Within a day after her eggs are fertilized, the mother makes a little trench in the sand and poles up a half a million or so in a gelatinous strand, that, if extended, would stretch longer than a basketball court. She uses her all -purpose foot to camouflage the strand with sand as she goes, coating and heaping until it could pass for a hung of white coral.  She lays about nine of these egg masses each season, bringing nearly 5 million larval concha a year into the world.  Fewer than 1 percent - 50,000 or so - may survive to become adult queens.

WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO FOR THE CREATURES OF THE SEA ?

RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE


PLEASE ! When you throw garbage on the street, it gets washed into a gutter, and the gutter takes it to a river, and the river takes to the sea...  By putting trash - especially PLASTICS into the right garbage bin - or taking your cans and bottles in for the deposit return - and taking all the things you brought to the beach back home with you - YOU ARE A CITIZEN ENVIRONMENTALIST!

DOLPHINS PLAY WITH MACHINE MADE BUBBLE RINGS

Another wonderful video from BBC Earth - one of my favorite channels!  Siren

HUMPBACK WHALES HAVE SECRET LIFE - SCIENTISTS RECORD NEW 'GUNSHOT' WHALE COMMUNICATION

DAILYMAIL : SCIENCE: SECRET LIFE OF HUMPBACK WHALES includes recording of sounds 

Excerpt:  The team from the universities of Exeter and Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Greenpeace Research Laboratories, recorded sounds at the Vema Seamount in the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles west of South Africa.

Whale sounds are categorized into continuous 'song' and shorter 'non-song' calls 0 and the study recorded 600 non-song calls over 11 days.

These included an 'impulsive sound' == dubbed 'gunshot' by the researchers --that has never been recorded before.

They also captured 'whup' and 'grumble' calls, suggesting this location could be an important stop on the whales' migration to polar feeding grounds.

PROTECTION FOR THE GIANT CONCH OF MEXICO - YUCATAN PENINSULA - MEXICAN CARIBBEAN

BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY : PROTECTION SOUGHT FOR MEXICO'S GIANT CONCH 

Excerpt: The Banco Chinchorro Biosphere Reserve in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula is one of the last remaining fishing areas in the Mexican Caribbean, where more than 90% of the country's queen conch production is harvested.  Despite policies involving bans, minimum harvest size and catch quotas, fishing pressure and uncontrolled poaching in recent years have decreased queen conch populations, which are now considered over-exploited. The Mexican National Fisheries Chart describes the fishery as "in deterioration."

SURF BAND THE VENTURES - ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME

 
Recorded 250 albums... 

ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION CIRCA 2008