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May 22 is National Maritime Day

May 18, 2011 by 1 Comment

In observance of the anniversary of the first transatlantic voyage on May 22, 1933, Congress has set aside this day to recognize those in the maritime industry.

The North American Marine Environmental Protection Agency (NAMEPA) and the North American Maritime Ministry Association (NAMMA)  are teaming up for their fourth National Maritime Day celebration next week in D.C.

At the National Press Club on Monday, May 23rd there will be a seminar, “Safety at Sea”, focusing on environmental intelligence in shipping. Later that day will be a National Maritime Day dinner and awards presentation.

This year’s celebration is particularly special now that NAMEPA is over 100 members strong! Click here if you’d like to learn more or are interested in becoming a partner.

Not in D.C.?

For some festivities remotely you will want to check out these virtual exhibits celebrating life at sea from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can get the narrative of an English sea captain from 1680 or hear ‘Away Rio’ a little diddy about an outward-bound chantey filled with sailors facing homesickness and other hardships.

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Arnie ain’t no anglerfish

May 17, 2011 by 1 Comment
The Humpback anglerfish uses a modified dorsal...

Image via Wikipedia

Well, well, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a love child. As a newlywed I shook my head when I heard the news and said “surely they’re not all like that.”

I decided to investigate to find out if there are any truly monogamous species out in the blue sea.

Also, I did watch March of the Penguins. As much as I admire the Emperor penguins for staying together to raise their young, they are not lifelong monogamists. Each season they usually procreate with a different partner.

However, one group of anglerfish, from the family Ceratiidae, has a very faithful male (a little to clingy though if you ask me). Highly sensitive olfactory adaptations have evolved in these male anglerfish that allow them to smell out females. This is very useful as they are in the desolate landscape of the deep sea. Once they sniff out a mate, the males basically bite into the flesh of the females and fuse their mouth into her bloodstream. After that, these males will degenerate and simply be a source of sperm for the females.

Without this process the males would not be able to survive. The males of this family do not grow ’em tall due to the lack of a alimentary canal, essential for feeding. The males are scientifically smaller than the females and several males can be attached to one female. It took researchers some time to uncover the mystery that is the male anglerfish. For the longest time they couldn’t figure out why they were only collecting females specimens. But, unbeknown-st to them, the males were there too.

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Two eggs and a side of glasswort, please

May 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Salicornia virginica

Image by stonebird via Flickr

While I was trolling the aisles of Whole Foods the other day, I stumbled upon a familiar salt marsh plant known as glasswort (Salicornia virginica). When I would lead early morning nature walks along the beaches in Florida this marsh herb was a plant I enjoyed finding! Here’s the interesting anecdote I’d share with my sunrise hikers.

Glasswort, also known as poorman’s asparagus or marsh samphire, can be eaten boiled or pickled in vinegar. Early settlers in Florida cooked and pickled glasswort because of its high salt content. The salty stems are the edible part of this plant.

For centuries, glassworts was collected and burned to create an ash rich in soda (impure sodium carbonate). The ash was then baked and fused with sand to make crude glass, consequently, provided reason for the glassworts main common name.

Another reason this plant got its most popular common name, glasswort, is that when someone steps on a bed of this plant, it sounds like they’re walking on broken glass.

Glasswort is common along beach dunes and salt march flats on the east and west coasts of the U.S. It is easily recognizable with its cactuslike bright green stem, tiny red flowers, scale-like leaves. It is particularly well suited to live along the coast because it has a thick waxy skin that protects itself from the salt water spray. Another glasswort adaptation to help in this rather harsh climate is the addition of vacuoles within their root cells that lock up to prevent salt from being absorbed through its roots. Glasswort is usually only 4-12 inches long and has a horizontal main stem with lateral branches. Be careful you don’t trip on this matted down plant!
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Cancer research starts glowing, albeit with a lowly tunicate

May 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The BBC News released a news alert today stating that there is a species of sea squirt, or tunicate, off the coast of Scotland that ” will be able to light-up microscopic cellular activity that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye”.

Here’s a little bit of background on a sea squirt species found a little closer to home off the Atlantic coast. Molgula manhattensis are no more than 2 inches in diameter and arrange themselves in clumps. This often leads to another common name, sea grapes. They’re sessile creatures that attach themselves to boats, pilings, rocks, or other hard substrates found under water. These greenish-brown blobs with two siphon nobs feed by drawing water in one siphon and eject waste out the excurrent siphon. These hermaphrodites will spew water out of their siphons as a defense mechanism when poked (awfully scary it is not). This discovery will help people suffering from cancer, specially those with HCA https://homecareassistance.com/calabasas/.

These extremely tolerable animals have a related species that are becoming quite the nuisance for oyster reefs  in the Indian River Lagoon of Florida. Doesn’t everyone have a pesky cousin somewhere?
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D.C. embraces giant quahogs!

May 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

A few days ago the Washington Post announced that the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. is now home to 10 giant clams of the species Tridacna crocea. You may think the National Zoo is a peculiar place for clams especially since the National Aquarium now has a branch in D.C., however the clams are suitably placed in the invertebrate exhibit and I highly recommend you spend time there if you ever make it to the National Zoo. It is one of the quieter exhibits, housed in air conditioning (what’s not to love about that?), and has an exhibit for chambered nautilus, a BCS species favorite.

With all that being said, it seems as though if you want to learn about T. crocea, smallest of all the giant clams species, you’ll have to come to D.C. (or simply read the article in the Post linked above)!

So, I am going to take this opportunity to brief you on a real giant clam. This posts features the largest and most elaborately colored of all the giant clam species, Tridacna gigas (pictured right). This being the largest of all living bivalves, T. gigas holds it own at a whooping 500 lbs, 3 ft 10 in length and 30 in wide. The average male American black bear is about that size. At 500 lbs, it’s no wonder they cannot shut their two shells together (It’s like when I to pack for a weekend vacation).

These hermaphrodites, found in the Indo-Pacific, are planktonic when young and sessile as adults. The diet of these placid creatures is algae as they are filter feeders.

There is concern among conservationists that T. gigas is being exploited as they are harvested for food (a delicacy in Japan) and is a popular acquisition in the aquarium trade.

I wonder what creature would win if pitted against each other: the giant clam, T. gigas, or the largest sea urchin, Sperosoma giganteum? Maybe that deserves further thought in a future post.
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Image (c) manandmollusc.net.

Filed Under: Algae (Seaweeds), Bivalves, Mollusks

Linda Thornton, an inspiring aquaculturist on a mission for sustainability

May 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

If you’ve got some spare time this weekend, take some time to enjoy this fantastic documentary of one woman’s quest to transform shrimp aquaculture practices. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times helped produce this 16 minute documentary of Linda Thornton, a biologist who uprooted herself  from her home in Illinois to Belize, and set out to farm shrimp in a sustainable manner (for instance, without antibiotics). It is quite a story, filled with some sad moments as well as uplifting ones. She partners up with the World Wildlife Fund in an effort to create the first set of standards for sustainable aquaculture and is trying to get folks in the US to adopt the practices as well. Please enjoy and share your impressions of her quest. I find the most fascinating parts of the video to be the overview of her aquaculture facility and how it all fits together.
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Did the squid warn of an earthquake?

May 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Is it possible that squid can warn us of earthquakes? I say yes.

It was pointed out in the The Yomiuri Shimbun earlier this month that fishermen saw in increase of their catch of squid right before several major earthquakes, including this recent one in March 2011.

The article stated that “According to Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry statistics, squid fishermen in Tokushima brought in 491 tons of the cephalopods in 1994–just before the Hanshin quake–which was 1.4 times the 1993 catch and 1.9 times the 1992 catch.”

This is certainly an impressive increase in catch. As it was also when “There were amazing hauls of squid just before the 1946 Nankai Earthquake,” one veteran fisherman from southern Tokushima said. And, most recently the correlation can be noted when just before the March 11 earthquake  “Squid fishermen in Tokushima Prefecture hauled in a bumper catch”.

Also, interesting was a small squid stranding right before a small earthquake in La Jolla, California in 2009.

Some questions have been asked that “if this increase in catch does occur right before a major earthquake has it ever been noted that there is a sharp drop in catch right after?” My instinct is to say that there would be a sharp decline in the catch since squid would not be as easy to catch. It seems to me that since this cephalopod is typically found near the bottom of the ocean floor (close to the Earth’s crust) they must be moving closer to the surface of the ocean where fishermen can catch them easier. According to a Tulane University website,  since earthquakes “occur when energy stored in elastically strained rocks is suddenly released. This release of energy causes intense ground shaking in the area near the source of the earthquake”. It would seem as though squid can detect the grounding shaking phenomenon prior to the rest of us since it happens in their own backyard first.

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Farting on a school bus – bad; Farting as part of a school of herring – ok

May 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Recently two Ohio middle school boys were suspended from riding the bus for farting on the bus. If these boys were part of a school of herring they’d have no repercussions. In fact, they’d be making the grade in language arts.

Back in 2003 an article published in the U.K. science journal Biology Letters explained a phenomenon discovered by scientists at the Bamfield Marine Science Centre, British Columbia, Canada, where herring produce high-frequency sound bursts followed by a fine stream of bubbles, dubbed Fast Repetitive Tick (FRT).

The noise can be up 22 kilohertz.

It is suspected that these FRTs are not to be a call to hunger or a call to breed but rather are triggered while the fish are swimming at night while in large densities as a means of communications. According to a National Geographic article on the subject, “It might seem an amusing idea to us that herring communicate using farts. But for herring and the mammals that prey on them, FRTs may signal safety—or the next meal.”

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Deep sea neighborhood sees improvement when philanthropic vents release Fool’s Gold

May 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.” King Solomon

There is not a lot life down in the deep sea. Fortunately, it is convenient that the hydrothermal vents down there share a wealth of minerals to the otherwise desolate neighborhood. More notably what was just uncovered is that iron particles (known as pyrite or commonly called Fool’s Gold) are released by the vents and suspend in the nearby environment. This discovery was made by researchers at the University of Delaware.

While it is not surprising that these vents release iron, what is shocking is that it does not fall directly to the bottom of the ocean floor as previously thought. Since the size of the iron particles that are released by the hydrothermal vents are so tiny (a diameter 1,000 times smaller than that of a human hair) they are actually dispersed throughout the water column of the deep sea this is turn helps create a richer more vibrant deep sea neighborhood than deep sea areas without vents.

“As pyrite travels from the vents to the ocean interior and toward the surface ocean, it oxidizes gradually to release iron, which becomes available in areas where iron is depleted so that organisms can assimilate it, then grow,” said scientist George Luther of the University of Delaware.

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Syzygy and Supermoons

May 11, 2011 by 1 Comment

OK, just in case you are playing some pub trivia this summer I want to mention the phenomenons of syzygy and supermoons. In celestial terms, syzygy refers to when three heavenly bodies (for instance the sun, the moon, and the Earth) are aligned. This alignment typically enhances tides to an exceptional level. In marine science, it can also refer to the highest of the high tides during one tidal period.

Now, on to supermoons. They would be the syzygy when the moon is at its closest approach to the Earth (or, in its perigree).

The image above is from the supermoon this past March. The picture was taken is Egypt (If anyone would like to sponsor a trip for this Beach Chair Scientist to someday visit Egypt please let me know. It is a bucket list trip for my husband and I).

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