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- Dolphin StampedeJanuary 5
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Check out this video shot in the Sea of Cortez a friend from the Surfrider Foundation sent along. It is a great reminder of the magnificent life that still exists in the ocean. But can you imagine what it was like 200 years ago?
Read the comments on this post... - Shifting GlaciersJanuary 5
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Check out this magnificent and convincing collection panoramic photographs of receding glaciers over the decades...
Read the comments on this post... - Baby You Can Have What Invert You Like...December 21 2008
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When Oppenheimer watched the atomic bomb go off he felt he had played a part in the destruction of humanity. I know the feeling.
Last week I got a nice email from a group of graduate students in marine ecology at Northeastern University who apparently are losing their minds as badly as I did in the early 90s. They sent me links to these two videos which they said were inspired by my early Prairie Starfish videos (particularly Barnacles Tell No Lies I'm guessing). But these folks have taken it to "a ho nuva leva." They've figured out ways to rap about everything from trochophores to veligers, tell slug haters to be quiet, and extoll the virtues of forming a brown body when times are rough (if you're a bryozoan). And they also explain how to Drop your Box on the Rocks.
I give their work an "FA" (Frickin' Awesome).
Clearly the time is coming for an Invertebrate Film Festival, with a special prize for Best Tardigrade Short.
- Jellyfish and BacteriaDecember 21 2008
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...That's what you get when the ocean is infer-e-yah.
We sang about it six years ago. In 2002 we made a Flash video in which we said, "A new term for the new millennium: Jellyfish blooms." And now our dire predictions appear to be coming true, around the world.
They'll sting your knees, and cause disease.
Read the comments on this post... - Half a Million Sharks Finned Each Year in EcuadorDecember 17 2008
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I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year.
The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark finning in full effect (such as these juvenile hammerheads captured off Santa Rosa).
Yet, until the 2005 update of fisheries data, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) did not report elasmobranches for Ecuador, indicating that the Ecuadorian government failed to report on these species, probably in part due to the scandalous nature of the shark fin industry.
Our study reconstruc