MARINE POLLUTION: UNEP head wants worldwide ban on plastic bags; political commentator Glenn Beck believes ban doesn’t make any sense

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Buck

Image: Sea birds mistake marine litter for food and will even feed pieces of marine debris to their chicks. As a result, chicks starve to death. All that’s left after some breeding seasons are decaying carcasses containing all types of marine litter.

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Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, wants to “reverse . . . [the] alarming quantities of rubbish thrown out to sea [that] continues to endanger people’s safety and health, entrap wildlife, damage nautical equipment and deface coastal areas around the world.” In addition to a ban, public education is certainly needed—especially in schools. From the United Nations Environment Programme:

“Marine litter is symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely the wasteful use and persistent poor management of natural resources. The plastic bags, bottles and other debris piling up in the oceans and seas could be dramatically reduced by improved waste reduction, waste management and recycling initiatives”.

“Some of the litter, like thin film single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased-out rapidly everywhere-there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere. Other waste can be cut by boosting public awareness, and proposing an array of economic incentives and smart market mechanisms that tip the balance in favor of recycling, reducing or re-use rather than dumping into the sea,” he said.

Of course Glenn Beck shouldn’t be taken serious, but his obtuse attitude towards efforts to remedy the problem of marine debris is ignorant and embarrassing. In this video, Glenn Beck demonstrates why he’s a Fox News snake oil salesman and not an environmental manager.

Image found here. Video via Gawker.

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ANIMALS: Record oyster found

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Buck

A monster 3lb oyster was found in the bottom of a “box of mixed fish” that was purchased by a fishmonger in Plymouth, England. The oyster was subsequently “donated to the Mevagissey Sealife Aquarium.”

The massive bivalve—shown below—was affectionately named “Shelly.”

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SHARKS: Mystery solved regarding world’s second-largest shark

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Buck

IMAGE shows a swimmer with a basking shark—a harmless plankton feeder—off the Cornish coast.

The basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is the second largest fish in the world, and the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), another harmless giant, is ranked as the world’s largest fish. These large sharks are slow-moving filter feeders, and both species are threatened by overfishing, since “they have a lengthy maturation time, slow growth rate and a long gestation period.”

Basking sharks can “attain lengths of at least 10 meters, but the average size is 7-9 meters and may live up to 50 years, [and] it is a highly migratory species.” Until now, data regarding the seasonal movements of basking sharks were incomplete. From the Washington Post:

Basking sharks were easy to spot in summer and fall. Many cruised near the surface off New England, filtering water through an impossibly wide mouth.

But then, in winter, the sharks vanished from these waters, and scientists couldn’t find them anywhere else. One guess was that they sank to the bottom and hibernated, waiting out a food shortage. But nobody knew for sure: The basking shark became a reminder of the unsolved mysteries of the oceans.

Last week, however, a group of researchers from Massachusetts and Maine said they had found the answer.

. . .

Soon, the tags began popping up in places that nobody expected a basking shark to be: near the Bahamas, off Puerto Rico, even the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil. The sharks had remained undetected because they stayed so deep, between 650 and 3,300 feet, that they were not caught in fishing gear.

There is more plankton in warmer waters, scientists said — but it would be abundant enough off Florida, so there would be no reason to visit Brazil. Gregory B. Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries said there could be another reason drawing the sharks south. Female sharks could be giving birth and raising young in tropical waters.

“We’ve never seen pregnant females, and we’ve never seen a newborn basking shark,” he said — and that could be because they haven’t been looking in the right place. Skomal said the data could be used to add protections for the sharks in the newly discovered habitat.

Remember, the third week of July is “Shark Week” on The Conservation Report

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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.

NATURE: The fascinating lumpfish

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Buck

I remember when I came across my first lumpfish (or lumpsucker) while working on a trawler that was fishing out on Georges Bank. Before as a fisheries observer, I had been working exclusively on boats in the mid-Atlantic, but after some time, I volunteered to work on fishing vessels in the northeast. While working in the north, it was immediately apparent that the species composition found in the trawl nets up north was much different than I had observed down south—and the lumpfish was a species that I had never seen in southern waters.

The lumpfish are oddly shaped—like a ball—and these fish have strange looking tough feeling skin with rows of tubercles. Furthermore, they have a sucker visible underneath the ventral side that helps them attach to substrate. The roe of the Atlantic lumpsucker (Cyclopterus lumpus; see image above by Joe Kunkel) is a popular and “affordable alternative to the sometimes wildly expensive caviar produced by sturgeons.” C. lumpus is common in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean.

It seems like lumpfish are fairly smart too.

NewEnglandAquarium’s “Training Lumpfish Behaviors” video:

More lumpfish images:

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Photo source for attribution here, here, and here. The authors or licensors of these images do not endorse my work or me and their images are protected under an attribution license.

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RECOMMENDED IMAGE(S): Phytoplankton blooms from space

Posted on March 29, 2009 by Buck

Plankton—phytoplankton and zooplankton—are some of the most important living things on planet Earth. Phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen and are the foundation of the food chain, followed by zooplankton. Plankton blooms are so massive that they are visible from space. All images are from NASA’s Visible Earth.