What the?
rolson | May 19, 2008A six-week drift to Hawaii will call attention to plastics in the sea
Yesterday Dr. Marcus Eriksen, his expedition partner Joel Paschal, and their land-based support coordinator (and fiancee of Dr. Eriksen) Anna Cummins took the newly built "Junk Raft" on a trial run to Catalina and back. All systems are go, so they're now scaling up for the big departure on Sunday afternoon, June 1, at 3:00 p.m. from the Long Beach Aquarium. If all goes according to plans, about six weeks later they should land on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's a straight shot over, mostly along the 25th parallel, just…
jjacquet | May 12, 2008On any given day, the world's fleet of ships are carrying billions of tons of ballast water with up to 7,000 different invasive species as stowaways. About one in every ten of these is likely to be a problem if it's introduced into a new ecosystem, which is why the United Nations has listed "invasive species" discharged from ballast water as one of the top four threats to marine ecosystems globally. In the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, a new species has been recorded every four weeks. More than 400 introduced species now make their home in a Sea that has (or had) one of the highest…
jjacquet | May 7, 2008We know fishmeal has problems. After posting an article back in January on the potential for bugmeal to replace fishmeal in farmed fish production, several readers asked some hard questions and wanted more information. I like readers to get what they want, so I spoke with Dr. Lou D'Abramo, who has a doctorate from Yale University and has been working to create more sustainable aquaculture systems for freshwater prawns. He is also the lead scientist studying how striped bass are responding to insect meal at Mississippi State University and got encouraging results. I pointed Dr. D'Abramo…
jjacquet | May 5, 2008If the seal and penguin weren't enough, there is another sexually curious story from the aquatic environment. According to a colleague, this story out of Japan details a male frog's obsession with a female char, seen swimming together for over a week. Unfortunately, they were found dead last week in each other's arms (and fins).
jjacquet | May 3, 2008What a rogue. An Antarctic fur seal was caught in the act trying to have sex with a king penguin. The incident wasn't too unlike a Paris Hilton escapade--the act lasted for 45 minutes, was caught on camera, and then sleazy still photos were strewn about by the press (but rather than US Weekly it was the Journal of Ethology and BBC News). It's not clear the attempt was successful but at least the penguin survived. Marine life these days... Read more on sexual coercion in animals here.
jjacquet | April 30, 2008There is evidence of hominids collecting seafood for at least 164,000 years. And then there is evidence (fishing spears found during a dig in the Congo) to suggest that humans began fishing at least 90,000 years ago. This week, there is new evidence to suggest orangutans are joining us in this occupation. Read the full article here.
jjacquet | April 27, 2008For those of you wondering what happened to the terrestrial and re-wilding side of Shifting Baselines, Josh Donlan is off trekking in Nepal until the end of May when he will rejoin with new insights and hopefully no frostbitten fingertips.
jjacquet | April 22, 2008Is it just me or was Earth Day nothing special? Judging from this article, Earth Day Goes Political and Corporate, I'm right (unless you think planting an elm tree is going green). Maybe it's precisely beacuse Earth Day went political and corporate it no longer means anything...or maybe every day is Earth Day.
jjacquet | April 18, 2008Let's just go back to the basics for a second. My minor advisor from Cornell University was Dr. David Pimentel, a stalwart advocate against the production of ethanol . From a recent debate Dr. Pimentel did on the subject of biofuels, I gleaned the following:
Consider that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted to 5 billion gallons of ethanol last year. This replaced only 1 percent of U.S. petroleum. If the entire U.S. corn crop were used, it would replace a mere 7 percent.
The energy expended to produce a gallon of corn ethanol is 40 percent greater than what is in ethanol itself…
josh donlan | April 10, 2008US environmentalists are up in arms on farms across the nation because of a recent downward trend in the Conservation Resource Program. The program, established about 25 years ago, pay farmers not to grow on some of their fields. The result has been impressive: 400,000 participating farmers and an area totaling over 36.8 million acres. Duck populations rose to about two million as a result. But now wheat and other crop prices are soaring, and farmers want their land back to...what else...farm. Last year farmers took back an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Surprised? You…
josh donlan | April 5, 2008In some Asian countries (e.g., India, China, South Korea), it is well documented that male births often far exceed female births. In India the ratio is 1.39:1 and in China it is 2.25:1. Many point to China's one-child policy, high-dowry payments in India, or reliance on children for support as important drivers of the observed sex ratios (the biological norm is 1.05:1). New research to be published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences challenges those factors. U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian parents also show a male-biased sex ratio. In 2000, if a couple…
josh donlan | April 1, 2008Avocados and Osage Oranges only make sense in the light of megafauna. That is because American gomphotheres (related to elephants) and ground sloths ate and dispersed those large-seeded fruits. While those megafauna went extinct around 10,000 years ago, many large-seeded plants in the Americas are still around today. If those plants once relied on those large creatures to disperse their seeds, why have they not gone they way of the dispersers? Three ecologists have gotten us one step closer to understanding why.
In a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS One, Drs. Guimarães,…
jjacquet | March 27, 2008There are 19 species of seabirds that spend a portion of their lives in the Galapagos Islands and one seems a very unlikely resident. The Galapagos penguin, Speniscus mendiculus, is the only penguin to live as far north as the equator.
Speniscus mendiculus is most likely a descendant of the Humboldt penguin, brought north to the islands on the Humboldt current that travels from Antarctic waters up South America's west coast. The Humboldt Current converges with two other warmer currents making Galapagos the epicenter of the underwater confluence.
The third smallest of the penguin family, the…
jjacquet | March 27, 2008Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time. If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.
Check out the full story at the CBC.
This particular experiment might seem harmless fun setting fish out to pasture, in the big picture, does evoke the rapid, large-scale domestication of marine species that has occurred…
jjacquet | March 24, 2008I should have added this one to the Galapagos drama that has occurred over the past year: this albino whale shark was spotted last September off the northern island of Darwin. Seeing is believing. Check it out:
josh donlan | March 16, 2008Last summer, one million square miles of Arctic Ocean melted. The Arctic icecap is half the size that it was 50 years ago. The Northwest Passage is now a reality, and territory and resource claims are starting to show up at the United Nations. While the UN has rejected all Arctic claims, things are heating up in the north in more ways than one. Russian iceabreakers, submarines, and bombers are lingering around. Canadian icebreakers have joined them. Ironically (and uncharacteristically), the US is on the sidelines of this new, emerging arms race for Arctic resources and shipping shortcuts.…
josh donlan | March 5, 2008Everyone has a bad Monday every now and then, right? Here's one for you: at 7a.m. spilled an entire cappuccino on my laptop and at 7p.m. I hit some black ice on the highway and rolled (and totaled) my truck. That is what I call a rough Monday...but what a banner, no?
Carl Buell is one of the most sought after paleo-artists. He brings life to fossils. Been looking for a ground sloth painting for your living room? Carl Buell is your man. Carl and I first crossed paths back in 2004. If you start researching scientific illustrators that specialize in ecological history, it doesn't take long to…
josh donlan | March 2, 2008I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the…
jjacquet | February 19, 2008If you've ever seen this TED talk with "jaw-dropping footage" of a cuttlefish, octopus, and other sea creatures, then you should definitely check out fellow ScienceBlogger Carl Zimmer's article on cuttlefish camouflage in today's New York Times. Zimmer visits scientists at Woods Hole, MA and reveals the secrets behind being a true wallflower.
Octopus colored like a rock. Photo by Roger T. Hanlon
jjacquet | February 7, 2008I was staying away from politics on the blog but this one I can't resist. That's right. After making the fun and unique (and, apparently, narcissistic) YouTube video about her crush on Obama, (nearly 6 million views) Obama Girl then went and did something very unoriginal. She stayed at home for the primary. Single women, after all, are the least likely to vote. But I thought Obama Girl was different. Girl, you've got the t-shirt. Where's your follow through?