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.

Tidal Power2 - Ebb and Flow

Interesting ...

There was indeed a story on the CBC (unreferenced at cbc.ca?), similar to the article in last week's Halifax Chronicle Herald. Some of the players are having trouble with either their gear and/or their test bed locations. The Minas Basin Power folks had their kite design overwhelmed by the tidal current. Another had to change locations - from a steep sloped sediment laded original to a flat bottomed, hard rock location 10 km away. As one principle noted, it is a technology that is in its infancy - with promise but challenges ahead

Power to the People

Clean, Green Tidal Power is coming to the Bay of Fundy.

We debated it in Geography 3454 - it is a definitely maybe.

According to the NS government website. There is enough flow in the bay that, using just a couple of locations, enough power could be generated to supply 100 thousand homes.

Personally, I would like to keep it local and small scale as opposed to the MEGAPROJECT. They key is to take it slow but make it go.

I figure that, as long as we can keep in moon in a stable orbit and keep the tectonic plates from unduly squishing together, this one is a long-term winner.

The photo is of the in-stream device favoured by the folks at Minas Basin Pulp and Power.

http://www.gov.ns.ca/energy/renewables/public-education/tidal.asp

Plastic - another bubble burst

I love plastic.

What is not to love?

Plastic is flexible, moldable, lightweight, versatile and waterproof.

Oh, we have a little plastic addiction, but nothing we can't handle.

Or so I thought.

I saw a report on PBS last night that took the lustre off my plastic rose.

The link has the full story at the end of the rainbow but the gist is that the ocean is becoming chock a block with plastics. It turns out the stuff breaks down but never biodegrades. There are sea critters with more plastic than food in their stomachs. That can't be good. My favourite factoid - Santa Monica CA installed a rig to skim plastic from the town's storm drain/ street water runoff. In one year, they got 40, 000 pounds of plastic!

(Ok, so if we promise to re-use the stuff, we are still cool, right?)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/science/plasticoceans/index.html

Selling Science - the old fashioned way

After I made mention of the new critters in the CTV story, I open the newspaper and BAM, they found a new jellyfish or something. It took me a day or so before it sunk in ... the scientists were chumming the waters, trying to interest the populace in their meeting by telling the media about all the suprising new critters that they have uncovered. It is a far use of publicity and, apparently, a successful one. Still, it unsettles me a bit to think that the scientists are massaging the media. They all look so earnest.

The Zebra Mussel - Invasive species of the week (*)

Zebras are cute. Zebra mussels are pervasive. Since hopping a ride in some ballast water and coming to our shores, they have been getting along famously. The problem is that they are spreading, multiplying, picking on the local mussels, eating all the food, messing with the algae and generally altering the ecosystem. I don't know if anybody finds them good eating but no one has found a way to get rid of them - yet.

Check them out:

http://www.ec.gc.ca/EnviroZine/english/issues/35/feature3_e.cfm

Thanks to Kelly Bates for the orginal idea and inspiration.

Hey Kids - download your own free science!

The census story mentioned that sea critter data could be uploaded to Plos One - a site devoted to accelerating scientific knowledge by making it available online. I checked it out and they have lots of it. Curious about invasive species, I trolled around and found an interesting paper. I didn't digest all of it but the paper makes the point that when a species is introduced or eliminated from an ecosystem, it has ramifications throughout the food web. It cites an example from this region, where dwindling cod means growing sea urchins and that in turn impacts kelp. I'm still not getting the 'double whammy' part where the effect is excerbated by disease in the kelp stocks. I guess I should give it another read (after I find the invasive species for this week [thanks to Kelly Bates for the original inspiration])

here is the link to the article, and by regression, to the pLoS ONE site:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000295

Stand Up and be counted ..

It's Ocean Census time, according to this story.

Scientists are hoping to have it complete by 2010

... but I bet they just keep finding more and more.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081109/Ocean_Stars_081109/20081109?hub=SciTech

Dr. Ballard

..follow the light.

Growing up, the only Dr. Ballard that I knew of was the guy who branded the dog food cans - premium dog food cans.

Dr. Robert Ballard is much cooler than that. He is an Oceanographer by trade and famous for his dives on the Titanic and Bismarck.

As we saw in class and on Dr. Conrad's class blog, he is also quite the inspirational public speaker. I had the opportunity to see him at a conference and he gave a similar talk to the one we saw on the video. It was better live. I think this is because he went a little slower, was more emphatic and he really engaged the audience. What struck me most, in watching the video, is that these guys - the giants in their field - spend tremendous amounts of time traveling, speaking both to inspire and generate support for their missions. He was fine tuning the talk all the while. When I saw him, he added bits of humour and references to NOAA and hydrography. In the video, he spoke of ocean colonization. In both, he used the line that we have better maps of Mars then of the Ocean floor - because NASA's budget is huge compared to budgets for undersea exploration.That is a powerful point. The most moving image was the shot of the university student with the look of wonder on her face. It was great stuff and a great reminder that salemanship is another skill that the giants of ocean science possess.

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/edu/oceanage/05ballard/welcome.html

Picard Out

At the risk of becoming the Ocean's graveyard blog, we report that one of the giants in the deep sea exploration has passed away. Jacques Picard died over the weekend at the fine old age of 86. He is best known for diving on the Mariana Trench - still a world record depth 48 years after the fact.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081101/obit_piccard_081101/20081101?hub=SciTech

The pop culture reference is because legions of Star Trek fans knew that this gentlemen was alluded to be the 'famous' ancestor of the Star Ship Captain. Funny old world.

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Jean_Luc-Picard