Sponge(Bob forage Pant)s

The discussion on sponges in yesterday's class was thought provoking. I believe that sales of the bath sponges would plummet if the eco-crowd reminded mothers that sponges were over exploited - and animals. I am not sponge people - other that an hearty appreciation for Sponge Bob Square Pants (good attitude, nice smile). I think sponge use might be a gender thing, synthetic "dish sponge" excepted. A little Googling and I find that some Dolphins use sponges as a tool while foraging. Apparently, it protects their snouts. According to the article, it was observed that sponge using dolphins were mostly females. Crazy old planet.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7475

Thanks again to Kelly Bates for the original sea critter idea.

Heat Your Home with Fish Oil

I was driving to school today, when I saw a sign from Wilson's, advertising their biofuel.The sign said that the fuel is made from fish oil!?I went to the website http://homeheating.wilsons.ca/services/index.php?id=53 and it was interesting - they take fish oil, cut it with ethanol and then blend it 20-80. I don't know how much fish oil that ends up in the furnace; not much, I suspect. Even more interesting was the reference to Ocean Nutrition Canada. It turns out it is run by John Risley, and do they have have a lot of product with Omega3 stuff in it. http://www.onc.ca/Products/Products-DS.php

Question: Do I want to know where they are getting all that 'fish oil' from?

Fog

Fog is one of the icons of Atlantic Canada, as it is of many coastal areas
One of the best lines of the term was having it described as "Clouds at Sea Level".
You could market a place with imagery like that.
Strangely, the is something peaceful about fog; the way that it shrouds and insulates the immediate from the distant.
I was stuck in Ottawa once when an early January thaw caused ground fog at the airport.
They couldn't deal with it.
In the Maritimes, one slows down and trys to enjoy it.
It would make a great name for a soccer team too - The Atlantic Coastal Fog.
(Actually, the championship ball team from Clark's Harbour are the Foggies!)

Invasive species - the Sea Lamprey

Again, slogging through "The Song for the Blue Ocean", I was suprised to see that lampreys are on the west coast. I was at a conference where Sea Lampreys were considered an invasive species in Central Canada. Apparently, Great Lake trout were ravaged in the 1950's. Many techiques have been employed to abate their influence and this has largely been considered a success. Imagine spending your day with one of these bad boys stuck on your side!

http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/science/Publications/article/central_arctic/sea_lampreys_e.htm

(Thanks to Kelly Bates for the original concept)

The Guest Speakers were great

It is late November. One more week and classes are complete.

Back to work!

It is both good and bad.

One of the highlights of the last few months was all of the guest speakers that came to share their knowledge and experiences with the class. I saw them in Geog 2305, 3315, and 3454.It was amazing: how uniformly good they were, how well they were accepted and how much I learned from them. All the more amazing was the fact that I knew many of them before now - but just to see them in a hallway or meeting room. I would not admit to who my favourites were but the one that seemed to captivate the crowd the most was Steve Campana and his talk about sharks.

Slogging through "Song for the Blue Ocean", I was delighted to see that, ten years ago, the were also employing satellite implants to track the movements of aquatic animals. Also, retrieved implants are still worth $1000 (exlusive of exchange rate). I wonder how many have ever been returned.

Sparks visit - Oceans: Critters and Litter don't mix

This week, the two eldest daughters and myself, got to talk to mom (aka "Sunshine"), the youngest daughter and the rest of the sparks for a few minutes. It was just enough time to talk about a possible future trip to BIO, hand out some neat Species at Risk activity books and discuss how important it was to not litter becuase of the damage it will do to the water environment. It was like taking coals to Newcastle; one spark knew the species much better than I did. That is more than ok by me.

Since we are flushing, let me get this off my chest..

(image from 13 Nov Dartmouth Community Herald)

Ok, I am probably too cynical about this, but this smells bad to me. Earlier on, we were given the chance to help out the fresh water mussels by relocationing them whilst their Lake Banook home was tidied up. Well, according to the article in 13 November Dartmouth Community Herald (the local ad-wrapper, but it always has a few good local news items), the HRM water folk are lowering the lake 0.5 metres (and then another 0.75 metres?) to install a big new sewer pipe that links Burnside, Dartmouth Crossing, and Port Wallace with the new trunk sewer (heading to ... the harbour?). The pipe is bigger, better, gravity fed - so it is 'cheaper' and 'safer'. They will cover it up and build a walkway on top of it. Earlier this year, the young swimmers and paddlers had some nasty swimmers itch and a few weeks without swimming, courtesy of e coli - supposedly caused by the half dozen ducks that were in the Lake. HRM said, no problem with sewage leaks and, since they don't provide life guard services at that location, they don't ensure that the water is tested frequently. It seems to me that, if there is on ongoing contamination problem in an absolute jewel of a location (home of this year's Canadian Paddling Championships and next year's World Championships), and there is now a bigger pipe bringing hitherto non-existent contaminants and run-off that had been directed elsewhere, through this area, then environmental monitoring should be the standard. Vented and dizzy, I descend from atop the soapbox.