Ocean Blog

The House of Representatives just finished voting on the Pombo bill to gut the Endangered Species Act. It passed, 229-193.

We'll obviously have more to say on this soon but I wanted to give our readers a heads up on the result...

(Crossposted at Daily Kos)

If you care about protecting endangered species, you should mark tomorrow on your calendar. Because tomorrow is the day the House is voting on HR 3824 -- and if that bill becomes law, you can kiss the protections provided by the Endangered Species Act goodbye.

Details and what you can do about it on the flip.

Wow! Check this out:

BBC News: Live Giant Squid Caught on Camera

A live, adult giant squid has been caught on camera in the wild for the very first time.

Japanese researchers took pictures of the elusive creature hunting 900m down, enveloping its prey by coiling its tentacles into a ball.

The images show giant squid, known as Architeuthis, are more vigorous hunters than has been supposed.

The images, captured in the Pacific Ocean, appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Documentary companies have invested millions of dollars trying to film adult giant squid in their natural environment. These efforts have met with little success - though one team has managed to capture a juvenile on film.

There are more pictures from the footage at National Geographic, and commentary at both the Squidblog and the other Squidblog.

(I can't tell you how cool I think it is that the world actually has two squid blogs!)

Wanna learn more about these reclusive giants? Dive into Wikipedia for tons of background info.

I want to say thanks to Susan Casey for taking the time to guest-blog with us over the last few days, and introduce you to our next guest: introducing Dick Russell, Oceana's guest blogger starting Sep. 26.

Dick Russell has dedicated most of his professional and private life over the past 20 years to fighting for the environment, a passionate pursuit fueled by the crisis that's fast pushing the world's fisheries and oceans to the point of no return.

A longtime recreational fisherman, Dick spent the better part of three years fighting for stronger regulations to protect the endangered Atlantic striped bass, organizing a national conference in Washington, D.C., and appearing on numerous radio and TV programs. For his efforts, he was awarded the citizen's Chevron Conservation Award in 1988. Today, the return of the striped bass is considered the foremost example of the resiliency of the oceans - provided a species is given a chance to recover. His new book on this subject, Striper Wars: An American Fish Story, was published this summer by Island Press/Shearwater Books.

Striper Wars has been very well received. Critic Sandy Bauer said in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "This book is one of the most amazing fish stories I've ever come across, and that's counting John McPhee's sturgeon book, John Hersey's exploration of the bluefish, and Mark Kurlansky's ode to the lowly cod. It's a conservation textbook, a testament to human fortitude and wily tactics, not to mention a splendid yarn about a fish that Russell calls the aquatic equivalent of the bald eagle."

And this, from H. Bruce Franklin in The American Scientist: "Can a book about a single species or genus of fish teach us more about ourselves and our interrelationships with our environment than it does about that fish? "Yes" is the answer suggested by a rapidly growing literary genre....To this genre we must now add Dick Russell's wonderfully rich and provocative Striper Wars: An American Fish Story."

Here's a link to Dick's book on Amazon:

Amazon.com: Books: Striper Wars : An American Fish Story

Recently, Dick was a guest at Oceana, where he met and had a chance to speak with other longtime warriors in the battle for the oceans. Among topics discussed at the breakfast meeting were some of Dick's previous books, including Eye of the Whale (Simon & Schuster hard-cover; paperback edition by Island Press/Shearwater Books), which upon publication was named among the Best Books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Eye of the Whale is an account of his following the migration of the California gray whale, from Mexico's Baja peninsula all the way to Alaska and Siberia.

Dick also is a respected and long-established magazine writer, having penned dozens of stories about other environmental issues for a broad variety of publications ranging from The Nation to Parenting and is an active member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and PEN USA.

Among his many non-environmental works is the acclaimed The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), a book hailed by Publisher's Weekly as "a masterpiece of historical reconstruction" focusing on the Kennedy assassination.

For more details of Dick's rich and varied career, please visit his website, www.dickrussell.org.

Please welcome Dick Russell as Oceana's guest blogger!

Oceana's and the Mercury Policy Project's report, Fair Warning: Why Grocery Stores Should Tell Parents About Mercury in Fish, is stopping the presses. The study, which details the results of a major, 22-state mercury testing project, was covered by the Associated Press, CNN and tons of other news outlets. It found that swordfish and tuna bought in 22 states at major grocery chains like Safeway, Shaw's, Albertsons and Whole Foods contain levels of mercury that the federal government has determined may be hazardous to human health, particularly children.

An average mercury concentration of 1.1 parts per million (ppm) was found in the 24 swordfish samples tested. The FDA has set the "Action Level" (the level at which they can act to remove a product from the market) for commercial fish at 1.0ppm, so you can see why an average level of 1.1ppm has caught people's attention. Two samples, including one from Maine and one from Rhode Island, contained more than 2 ppm, twice the FDA Action Level. The testing results also suggest that a typical shopper buying swordfish in a grocery store has a 50 percent chance of buying a swordfish steak with mercury levels considered unsafe by the FDA.

31 samples of fresh or frozen tuna steaks averaged 0.33 ppm of mercury, a level comparable to that of canned albacore tuna -- a fish specifically targeted for limited consumption by women of childbearing age and children in the 2004 joint advisory from the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The second page of the same advisory has similar consumption advice for tuna steaks.

As our own Jackie Savitz pointed out in many of these stories, "The results clearly demonstrate the need for signs in our supermarkets...people have a right to know what's in their food, and posting warning signs in grocery stores where these fish are sold is a simple, common-sense solution that fulfills that right."

Avast, ye buckos -- today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

What say ye? Ye don't know how to talk like a pirate? Arr, step smartly over t' the Pirate Speak Translator, she's just the thing a scurvy lubber needs t' get started.

Allow me to introduce our latest guest blogger: Susan Casey, who will be joining us starting on Monday, Sept. 12.

Susan is the development editor of Time Inc., the world's largest magazine publisher. She was previously the editor of Sports Illustrated Women and an editor-at-large for Time Inc.'s magazine titles. Under her editorship, Sports Illustrated Women was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. She also served as the creative director of Outside magazine, which during her tenure won three consecutive, history-making National Magazine Awards for General Excellence. At Outside she was part of the editorial team that developed the stories behind the bestselling books "Into Thin Air," and "The Perfect Storm," as well as the movie "Blue Crush."

Her first book, "The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks" (published June 2005 by Henry Holt & Company) reached the New York Times bestseller list. It's about two biologists who uncover astounding facts about the great white sharks that come from the Pacific every fall and congregate in the Farallon Islands, a group of ragged, jagged rocks 30 miles west of San Francisco. The rocks are nicknamed The Devil's Teeth because of their ferocious appearance. The great whites gather there to feast on seals and sea lions, an alien spectacle of predator and prey in an inhospitable setting.

Here's a passage from her book:

The Farallon great whites are largely unharassed. They might cross paths with the occasional boatload of day-trippers from San Francisco, but they're subjected to none of the behavior-altering coercion that nature's top predators regularly endure so that people can sit in the Winnebago... and get a look at them. This is important because despite their visibility at the Farallones, and despite the impressive truth that sharks are so old they predate trees, great whites have remained among the most mysterious of creatures."

Here's a link to a interview with Susan Casey on Amazon.

A native of Toronto, Susan lives in New York City.

So please give a warm Oceana Network welcome to Susan Casey, everybody!

Boy, I sure picked the wrong week to go away for vacation...

Halfway through my trip home to see my family (in Ohio, don't worry) Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, with the results that you all know about. Like you, I've been glued to the television watching the tragedy unfold.

I know I speak for everybody here at Oceana, in all our offices around the world, when I say that our hearts and prayers go out to all of those whose lives have been changed by Katrina.

I use this space sometimes to ask you to support us with a contribution. Today, though, I'm going to ask you to reach out and help the displaced by contributing to hurricane relief. You can always come back next time you get paid and help us out.

To get started, here are links to some directories of Katrina relief funds:

• Network For Good
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• Instapundit
• Give.org
• The Truth Laid Bear
• Charity Navigator

There are some scumbags out there scamming people by pretending to be raising money for hurricane relief, so be sure (as you always should) to check into the organization you're giving to before you contribute.

Just got some great pictures back from Ranger, which is out putting tracking tags on sea turtles:

Say cheese! :)

Today's our National Day of Action on Seafood Contamination.

If you haven't hit your grocery store yet, what are you waiting for?!?

Share how it went for you -- post your experiences in this thread!