Ocean Blog

Plastic bags don’t just pile up in your kitchen; they contribute to the North Pacific Gyre, a giant mass of trash twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. Plastic bags are also a danger to sea turtles who mistake them for food.

What can you do? Sign Oceana’s plastics petition and make sure to minimize plastic waste in your daily life.

What would you do with half a million dollars if you really wanted to make some waves?

OK, I realize the title of this post makes me sound like some giant living on the hillside or a flunking ESL student. But I want you to remember that clumsy string of metadata posing as a title in case you forget to bookmark this clip to send to friends and family and you need to google it for yourself.

Say it with me now, "Dolphin.. play.. bubble rings."

So let's get Matty in the loop on iron fertilization. My coworker Kevin first told me about it earlier this week, but I'd love for some folks to weigh in and let me know their take on the science and politics of this sketchy-sounding idea.

The best link I could find on the subject was a background paper called "How far can we go in manipulating the oceans to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere?" from the Alfred Wegener Institute and EUR-Oceans in Berlin.

Here's a pithy excerpt:

Despite the great natural potential of the oceans to uptake atmospheric CO2, our current knowledge indicates that seeding iron on the oceans or dissolving more carbon dioxide into the depths do not seem conceivable solutions to solve our CO2 problem. However, given the current situation, taking no action may lead to even greater risks. We need to decrease our emissions of carbon dioxide and will probably have to adopt multiple strategies.

I didn't even know there was such a thing as undersea WiFi, but evidently folks are already using sound waves to transmit data across vast distances the same way whales sing to each other. Speeds are only in the range of dial-up at this point, but a University of Missouri-Rolla researcher is doing some interesting work that should lead to a more broadband ocean network.

The glossy folks over at National Georgraphic News have some more exciting pix for us. The photos are the result of a five week exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Iceland and Portugal by an international team of researchers. The team cataloged a bunch of rare species, brought back thousands of specimens, and left six automatic observation stations that will continue to collect data for the next two years.

I have a really close friend vacationing in Thailand right now so I was kinda freaked out to see this little article on MSNBC. Evidently there have been 15 deaths and over a hundred reports of illness there in the past three years from folks eating puffer fish. The guts of the puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin, a poison the FDA says can "produce rapid and violent death."

The sensational news isn't even the death or illness but that vendors have been selling the poisonous puffer fish as salmon - even dying the meat to make it more convincing. I shudder at the thought of my friend traveling in Thailand by herself amidst such feckless fishmongery.

Read this strangely-worded quote about puffer fish while I get my angst in check...

The fish is called fugu in Japan, where it is consumed by thrill-seeking Japanese gourmets for whom the risk of poisoning adds piquancy.

Hey, good news: my friend just chatted me while I was writing this. I told her about the salmon scam and now I can stop worrying. Crazy coincidence though - her ears must have been burning or something. I guess all things considered I prefer burning ears to rapid and violent death, piquancy notwithstanding.

So by now you've probably heard about wikiscanner, right? Wired.com ran the story a few days ago, and they were interviewed on NPR this morning.

The upshot is that Cal Tech grad student Virgil Griffith wrote a Web app that uses IP addresses to reveal the locations of folks who've made edits to Wikipedia entries. The story gets interesting because a ton of companies and orgs are essentially caught trying to polish up their own images. There's an entertaining list on wired.com with some of their favorites.

The app itself is mostly non-functional right now due to all the hype it's getting. The list at wired.com includes an edited description of the impact of the Valdez oil spill.

This isn't what ExxonMobil's Wikipedia entry looks like now, but it's what somebody edited it to say in December of 2004 - and the somebody worked at an IP address that traces back to ExxonMobil's offices.

Awkward!

If Charles Darwin were alive today I wonder what he'd think about the brand that his name has become: a satirical Jesus Fish. Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 his eager earthlings have discovered penicillin, climbed Mount Everest, and mapped the human genome. Yet the study begun by the godfather of evolution remains, perhaps ironically, unfinished -- a work in progress.

At least that's the impression I was left with after reading this article on msnbc.com this morning. It's called "Why animals left the sea for land," and it not only fails to answer that question but a host of others -- including how mammals moved back into water and evolved into whales, and how snakes became legless -- though to their credit they may have discovered how chimps began to walk upright.

Speciation and natural selection have always been misunderstood and mischaracterized, and I've done a healthy amount of that sort of thing myself. Reading up on some murky areas concerning the particulars made me curious about the basics and led me to this transcript of a talk by John Wilkins, an Australian bio prof with a sciency name who's all about the "history of evolution" so to speak. One quote that really spoke to the current threats to marine biodiversity was this:

So we must not expect that evolution is a process that will correct our mistakes. A crucial part of evolution is what we are witnessing happen now more than any time in the history of the earth -- extinction. Natural selection cannot overcome the massive challenges we are throwing at living systems. ...

I think Chuck D. himself would be glad to see that of his many contributions, the bumper sticker isn't the only one that still has legs.