From ScienceNOW: Sperm whales adopt deformed dolphin. Sperm whales are fierce squid hunters, but they also have a softer side. In a serendipitous sighting in the North Atlantic, researchers have discovered a group of the cetaceans that seem to have taken in an adult bottlenose dolphin with a spinal malformation, at least temporarily. It may [...]
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Discovery.com reports that wild dolphins give gifts to humans. On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish. While these gifts might [...]
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Next time you’re wading in the sea down at Drumbeg or Whalebone, ponder this as you tiptoe past clusters of mussels: Mussel goo inspires blood vessel glue. From UBC: A University of British Columbia researcher has helped create a gel – based on the mussel’s knack for clinging to rocks, piers and boat hulls – [...]
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If you’ve always wanted to know more about jellyfish, this is for you. From the New York Times: Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?
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Last week I blogged about seals being released on Gabriola. (On seals, the Vancouver Aquarium, and Gabriola.) Do you wish you’d been there to watch? Here’s the next best thing, then – a video of the release.
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From Wired: Electric Bugs: New Microbe Forms Living, Deep-Sea Power Cables. The world’s deep seafloors are dark and airless places, but vast swaths may pulse gently with energy conducted through a type of newly discovered bacteria that forms living electrical cables. [continue] Well, how odd is that? Reminds me of the slime mold that formed [...]
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From Science Daily: Fishy Physics: Adaptation Lets Silvery Fish Reflect Light Without Polarization, May Help Them Evade Predators. Silvery fish such as herring, sardine and sprat have evolved special skin that gets around a basic law of physics, according to new research from the University of Bristol published Oct. 21 in Nature Photonics. Reflective surfaces [...]
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Would whales try to speak to you, if they could? Would they mimic your speech, if they could? Well, maybe. From ABC News (Australia): Whale mimicking humans ‘trying to make contact’. Marine biologists say a beluga whale which was recorded making human-like noises in a US aquarium may have been trying to communicate with its [...]
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From the Tyee: Killer whale ‘grannies’ coddle their baby boys well into adulthood. Like some of their human counterparts, killer whale mothers continue to dote on their sons well into adulthood, says a new study based on two pods of resident killer whales off the coast of British Columbia. That coddling appears to help the [...]
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We’ve mentioned Tucker, the whale-poop tracking dog, before. Now Tucker’s fame has spread to the New York Times: Tracking a Subtle Scent, a Dog May Help Save the Whales. A dog named Tucker with a thumping tail and a mysterious past as a stray on the streets of Seattle has become an unexpected star in [...]
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From Wired: The Hidden Power of Whale Poop. It may well be the world’s largest documented poop. It’s also an exclamation point to a line of research pursued in recent years by marine biologists who say whales are the ocean’s unappreciated gardeners, playing enormous roles in nutrient and carbon cycles. In short — or perhaps [...]
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Oh my. Every time I go for a swim at Whalebone or Sandwell, I find myself thinking that we could really do with fewer jellyfish in the world. But now somebody has made an artificial jellyfish built from rat cells.
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Do you pity the whales when you sit by the sea, listening to all the zoomy boats going by? I do. The Sydney Morning Herald explains: Scientists have long known that man-made, underwater noises – from engines, sonars, weapons testing and such industrial tools as air guns used in oil and gas exploration – are [...]
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From New Scientist: Giant living power cables let bacteria respire. It is the ultimate in subsea communications: bacteria living in sulphurous mud beneath the seabed respire by transforming themselves into long, insulating cables and shuttling electrons from one to another. This phenomenon has now been imaged for the first time, allowing us to see how [...]
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Apparently we have a hermit crab in these parts: the Pacific Red Hermit Crab. (Elasmodiver.com has photos.) Have you seen one around Gabriola? I haven’t, but then, I tend to be above the water. Maybe those of you who dive at Berry Point have seen one. Anyway, here’s a Boing Boing article you might like [...]
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These days we’re all concerned about the ocean, and not just the waters around Gabriola. So, in today’s worth reading pile is an Environmental Health News article, Canada’s mass firing of ocean scientists brings ‘silent summer’. It begins with this: Editor’s Note: Canada is dismantling the nation’s entire ocean contaminants program as part of massive [...]
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Researchers from UBC and the Smithsonian have discovered a new organ in baleen (rorqual) whales, that allows them to manage their jaws during ‘lunge feeding’. Blue whales take in a volume of water larger than a city bus during each lunge, but the jaws have to open and close in under 10 seconds in order [...]
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This seems to be from GROWLS (Gabriola Rescue of Wildlife Society); I’ve had a few copies forwarded to me. GROWLS has had calls about a sickly and injured looking seal on the beach. The seal has been identified as a juvenile elephant seal which is moulting. This is an unusual sight here on Gabriola. They [...]
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