The installation debut reception was held at Green Spaces, Tribeca on World Oceans Day 2012.  It then traveled to the Dominican Republic for the DR Environmental Film Festival. It has since collaborated with the Finatics, a talented group of special needs kids from Green Chimneys, and with school children in the Caribbean, Denver, and New York City.  The exhibit has also shown at the Washington Convention Center in D.C. and at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Co, during the Making Waves Festival in October.

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Pitched against the mighty North Atlantic, it would seem that newly hatched loggerhead turtles would stand little chance of influencing their destiny. Perceived wisdom held that after swimming from their home beach the youngsters got picked up by the powerful currents circulating in the North Atlantic, where they could spend as much as the next 15 years being carried around the ocean. However, Nathan Putman and Ken Lohmann from the University of North Carolina, USA, were less sure. Together with other colleagues, they had already shown that simulations of the magnetic field from various locations in the North Atlantic affected the tiny animals’ choice of direction, with the minute migrants selecting the best orientation to keep them in the circulating current. However, many ecologists did not believe that the hatchlings’ efforts could influence their North Atlantic odyssey. Intrigued, Putman and Lohmann decided to take a computational approach; they set millions of cyber-turtles loose in a simulated North Atlantic to find out how much they affect their own course (p. 1863).

‘We wanted an ocean model that would depict weather events that were forced using wind, so getting a model that was very fine scale was important for those fine scale little animals’, says Putman. So, the duo teamed up with oceanographer Thomas Shay from the University of North Carolina, USA, to simulate 5 years of ocean circulation. Then, having successfully constructed their cyber-ocean, they had to figure out how to simulate the turtle voyagers. ‘We came across Philippe Verley, who devised this wonderful software that was called ICTHYOP that was designed to study the movement of fish larvae’, explains Putman. Visiting Verley at the Laboratoire de Physique des Océans in France, Putman and Verely discussed how they could convert the fish simulations into turtles migrating through the ocean. After a number of modifications to the software, Putman was ready to set hundreds of thousands of simulated turtle hatchlings loose in the cyber-ocean.

Sea Turtle credit:Ken Lohman

Setting the youngsters to swim for 1, 2 or 3 h per day at 0.2 m s–1, the program allowed the turtles to drift with the current for the remainder of the day. Then, when the turtles entered specified regions of the ocean, the program allocated them a swimming direction in roughly the same orientation that the young turtles had selected in the laboratory. ‘We were interested in modelling realistic navigation behaviour so we wanted a wide spread of around 80 deg around the directions that the hatchlings had picked’, explains Putman.

After months of computation and analysis, the duo realised that even the most minimal amount of swimming had affected the simulated hatchlings’ trajectories. Comparing the swimming turtles with simulations of turtles that drifted exclusively, the duo could see that the courses of the swimming turtles were less dispersed than those of the turtles that had been cast purely to the sea. ‘The swimming behaviour seemed to be compensating for the tendency of dispersion. It’s like the turtles were swimming to make the currents approximate what we see in the textbooks’, says Putman. Having found that swimming for even a tiny fraction of a day could help the simulated turtles stay on course, the duo is keen to track the progress of recently embarked hatchlings to find out how much of an impact swimming makes in practice.

‘The plan is to put tiny little tags on turtles. We’ll know where the turtle goes, but it won’t tell us if they are swimming or drifting, so we’ll look at the ocean circulation models along the turtles’ paths and subtract the current velocity to determine when they are swimming’, explains Putman.

Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Biology  

Provided by The Company of Biologists

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In Pursuit of Giants is a moving elegy and call to arms for the protection of the great fish of the sea—marlin, bluefin tuna, and swordfish. It’s an adventure story that takes author Matt Rigney across the globe on a quest to discover how once thriving species are now threatened. Rigney’s pilgrimage to encounter these giants of the sea takes him from the sportfishing mecca of Cabo San Lucas to the Great Barrier Reef, from New Zealand to Japan, the Mediterranean and elsewhere, as he joins commercial and recreational fishermen, marine biologists, fish-farming pioneers and activists to investigate the causes that have led to the demise of these creatures, and the various efforts being made—or not—to protect them.

In Pursuit of Giants combines the romance of a great sport narrative with the passionate advocacy of the best environmental writing. It recalls the spiritual power of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and will win comparisons to Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

source inpursuitofgiants.com/about-the-book/

Matt reached out on Twitter to let me know about his new book “In Pursuit of Giants”. Ocean Minded books  are doing very well today, as  the world’s Oceans are (finally) getting their well deserved media attention. Following in the footsteps of successful books like “Song for the Blue  Ocean” from Carl Safina, the brilliant “Lobster Coast” from Colin Woodard, and the now inescapable Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod” must be very much enticing for an author. Matt’s fisherman background should infuse a fresh prospective in his writing on pursuing the dwindling stock of giants.

While I dive straight into the reading of Pursuit Of Giants, I leave you with this cool concept of  a video/book trailer.

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ECO SYMBIOSIS by Kestutis

Eco-symbiosis is en vogue. Indeed, this approach consists in using waste from one industry as raw material for another. It appears like an ideal solution for one of the most challenging type of pollution: oil spills.

“We very quickly made the connection between oil and fuel sorption and waste from the paper industry, which then started us thinking of papermill sludge as treasure rather than waste,” Marko Likon, former CEO of the Koper, Slovenia-based Technological, Environmental and Logistical Centre (TOC), tells youris.com. He was originally spearheading a EU-funded project called CAPS.

In this project, papermill sludge is transformed into an absorbent capable of cleaning up oil, fat and chemical spills. Prime candidate for its use are ports, marinas, petrol stations, oil refineries, garages and even restaurants.

After separating and compacting, the paper waste becomes an absorbent that can be scattered on a hard surface spill, or over oil floating on the surface of water. In the latter case, the scattered material can then be encircled with a rope, which lassoes the pollution. When the calorific value of the absorbed substance is high, the material can be used as a secondary fuel source.

A first assembly line has already been tested in Slovenia.  “There are plans to expand our operation with a new production line within the Slovenian papermill and later on with another production line in Finland,” says Franc Cernec, Project Leader at TOC. The goal is to handle a quarter of the papermill waste produced in Europe, which currently represents over four million tonnes per year.

“Clearly, to put such waste material to the benefits as described has merit,” comments Grahame Mackenzie from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hull, UK, who is testing the use of plant spore shells to mop up oil. The spore shells are made of the polymer sporopollenin which can be recycled. He adds: “On the face of it, the project seems to have been well thought through in terms of materials, costs and end use of product once recovered.”

However, some are more cautious on the value of such approach. “I would question whether this project brings value for money,” Sudipta Seal, Director of the Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA,  tells youris.com. His own project is looking to turn fly ash, one of the residues generated in combustion from power plants, into a cleaning agent. By comparison to the €1.5 million overall budget of the EU project, he claims he only spent $67,000 (€53,000) in US National Science Foundation funding for his project’s proof of concept.

source youris.com

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Wang and his colleagues sampled the waters off the U.S. east coast about the R/V Ron Brown. Starting in the waters off Galveston, Texas, they worked their way around the Louisiana and west Florida coasts, past the Florida Straight, and up the eastern seaboard, collecting samples along nine different transects that ran from the coast to deep ocean off the shelf break, up to 480km (300 miles) offshore. (Courtesy Z. Aleck Wang)

A continental-scale chemical survey in the waters of the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico is helping researchers determine how distinct bodies of water will resist changes in acidity. The study, which measures varying levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other forms of carbon in the ocean, was conducted by scientists from 11 institutions across the U.S. and was published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography.

“Before now, we haven’t had a very clear picture of acidification status on the east coast of the U.S.,” says Zhaohui ‘Aleck’ Wang, the study’s lead author and a chemical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “It’s important that we start to understand it, because increase in ocean acidity could deeply affect marine life along the coast and has important implications for people who rely on aquaculture and fisheries both commercially and recreationally.”

Coastal ocean acidification, Wang says, can occur when excess carbon dioxide is absorbed by, flushed into or generated in coastal waters, setting off a chain of chemical reactions that lowers the water’s pH, making it more acidic. The process disproportionately affects species like oysters, snails, pteropods, and coral, since those organisms cannot effectively form shells in a more acidic environment.

Zhaohui ‘Aleck’ Wang, the study’s lead author and a chemical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), worked with colleagues from 11 institutions across the U.S. to better understand the coastal ocean’s sensitivity to changing chemistry. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

According to the survey, says Wang, different regions of coastal ocean will respond to an influx of CO2 in different ways. “If you put the same amount of CO2 into both the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Mexico right now, the ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine would probably feel the effects more dramatically,” he says. “Acidity is already relatively high in that region, and the saturation of calcium carbonate—the mineral that many organisms need to make shells—is particularly low. It’s not a great situation.”

Excess CO2 can enter coastal waters from a variety of different sources, Wang says. One large source is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has been steadily increasing in concentration worldwide for the past hundred and fifty years. The higher those levels of atmospheric CO2 rise, more CO2 gas will be absorbed into seawater by contact, says Wang. Another potential culprit, he notes, is nutrient-rich runoff from land. Rainfall and other surface flows can wash fertilizers and other byproducts of human activities into river systems and ground water, and ultimately, into the coastal ocean, delivering an excess of nutrients and often an explosion of biological activity that can lead to decreased oxygen and increased CO2 and acidity.

“This happens regularly in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Wang. “The Mississippi River dumps enormous amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients into the Gulf, which spawns large algal blooms that lead to production of large amount of organic matter. In the process of decomposing the organic matter, the microbes consume oxygen in the water and leave carbon dioxide behind, making the water more acidic. If this process happens in the Gulf of Maine, the ecosystem there may be even more vulnerable since the Gulf of Maine is a semi-enclosed system and it may take longer time for low pH, low oxygen water to disperse.”

Wang and his colleagues conducted their fieldwork in 2007 aboard the R/V Ronald H. Brown. Starting in the waters off Galveston, Texas, they worked their way around the Louisiana and west Florida coasts, past the Florida Straight, and up the eastern seaboard, collecting samples along nine different transects that ran from the coast to deep ocean off the shelf break, up to 480km (300 miles) offshore.

During the cruise, the researchers measured seawater samples for total dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), which is made up of a combination of carbonate, bicarbonate, dissolved CO2 and carbonic acid. The team compared this measurement to the water’s total alkalinity, a measure of how much base is in a water sample. The ratio of the two is a marker for water’s ability to “buffer” or resist changes in acidity. Waters with a high ratio of alkalinity to DIC, Wang says, would be less susceptible to acidification than waters that showed a much lower ratio.

After analyzing their data, Wang and colleagues found that, despite a “dead zone” of low oxygen and high acidity outside the mouth of the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico on the whole showed a high ratio of alkalinity to DIC, meaning it would be more resistant to acidification. As the team traveled farther north, however, they saw the ratio steadily decreases north of Georgia. The waters in the Gulf of Maine, Wang says, on average had the lowest alkalinity to DIC ratio of any region along the eastern seaboard, meaning that it would be especially vulnerable to acidification should CO2 levels rise in those waters.

While it’s unclear exactly why the ratio of alkalinity to DIC is low in those northern waters, Wang thinks part of the issue may be linked to alkalinity sources to the region. For example, the Labrador Coastal Current brings relatively fresh, low alkalinity water down from the Labrador Sea to the Gulf of Maine and Middle Atlantic Bight.

If this current is the major source of alkalinity to the region, he says, it may mean that the Gulf of Maine’s fate could be linked to changes in global climate that, through melting sea ice and glaciers, increase the flow of fresh water to the Gulf of Maine. However, whether this freshening is accompanied by a decreases in seawater alkalinity and “buffer” capacity remains unknown.

Wang, far right, and his students and lab members (clockwise from far left, Elliott Roberts, Kelly Knorr, Katherine Hoering, Sophie Chu, and Nick Tuttle) at sea around a CTD rosette. CTDs measure conductivity or salinity, temperature, and depth and are a common tool of oceanographic research. Water samples are collected in each of the rosette’s canisters at various depths and then chemically analyzed in the lab.
(photo by Taylor Crockford, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Since the waters of the northeast U.S. are already susceptible to rising acidity, Wang says this raises big questions about how species of marine life—many of which are important to the commercial fishing and shellfish industry there—will fare in the future. “For example, how are oysters going to do? What about other shellfish? If the food chain changes, how are fish going to be impacted?” Wang asks. “There’s a whole range of ecological and sociological questions.” There is a great need for need for more robust coastal ocean chemistry monitoring and coastal ocean acidification studies, he adds. A better understanding of the changing chemistry will help fisheries regulators to better manage the stocks.

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Coelacanth and pup smithsonian

A new model suggests that inhospitable hydrodgen-sulphide rich waters could have delayed the spread of complex life forms in ancient oceans. The research, published online this week in the journal Nature Communications (FInd the Original paper HERE), considers the composition of the oceans 550-700 million years ago and shows that oxygen-poor toxic conditions, which may have delayed the establishment of complex life, were controlled by the biological availability of nitrogen.

In contrast to modern oceans, data from ancient rocks indicates that the deep oceans of the early Earth contained little oxygen, and flipped between an iron-rich state and a toxic hydrogen-sulphide-rich state. The latter toxic sulphidic state is caused by bacteria that survive in low oxygen and low nitrate conditions. The study shows how bacteria using nitrate in their metabolism would have displaced the less energetically efficient bacteria that produce sulphide – meaning that the presence of nitrate in the oceans prevented build-up of the toxic sulphidic state.

The model, developed by researchers at the University of Exeter in collaboration with Plymouth Marine Laboratory, University of Leeds, UCL (University College London) and the University of Southern Denmark, reveals the sensitivity of the early oceans to the global nitrogen cycle. It shows how the availability of nitrate, and feedbacks within the global nitrogen cycle, would have controlled the shifting of the oceans between the two oxygen-free states – potentially restricting the spread of early complex life.

Dr Richard Boyle from the University of Exeter said: “Data from the modern ocean suggests that even in an oxygen-poor ocean, this apparent global-scale interchange between sulphidic and non-sulphidic conditions is difficult to achieve. We’ve shown here how feedbacks arising from the fact that life uses nitrate as both a nutrient, and in respiration, controlled the interchange between two ocean states. For as long as sulphidic conditions remained frequent, Earth’s oceans were inhospitable towards complex life.”

Today, an abundance of nitrate, in the context of an oxygenated ocean, prevents a reversion to the inhospitable environment that inhibited early life. Determining how the Earth’s oceans have established long-term stability helps us to understand how modern oceans interact with life and also sheds light on the sensitivity of oceans to changes in composition.

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Critically endangered leatherback sea turtle populations in the western Pacific Ocean may be losing their last foothold of survival on the beaches of Indonesia, according to a paper published today in the scientific journal Ecosphere by an international group of scientists.

Researchers from the State University of Papua Indonesia, NOAA Fisheries Service, University of Alabama at Birmingham and World Wildlife Fund Indonesia released a report today documenting the continued decline of leatherback sea turtle nesting in the western Pacific Ocean.

“At least 75 percent of all Leatherback turtles in the western Pacific Ocean hatch from eggs laid on a few beaches in an area known as Bird’s Head Peninsula in Papua Barat-Indonesia,” said Peter Dutton of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the researchers who co-authored the paper. “Our analysis indicates the number of leatherback turtle nests on this beach has declined 78 percent over the last 27 years.”

Leatherbacks are the largest of all marine turtles and the largest living reptile in the world weighing up to 2000 pounds and over six feet in length. Female leatherbacks lay clutches of approximately 100 eggs and typically nest several times during a nesting season. After about two months, the hatchlings emerge from the nest and enter the ocean where they mature and may migrate as far away as California to feed on jellyfish; a distance of about 6,000 miles.

Scientists believe there are a number of reasons why the leatherback turtle populations have continued to decline over the past three decades. Extensive harvesting of eggs, predation of nests by feral pigs and other predators, and the accidental capture in commercial fisheries are the primary factors involved.

Ricardo Tapilatu, lead author on the Ecosphere paper, and co-authors Manjula Tiwari and Dutton, began assessing and developing a nesting beach census and management plan over a decade ago as part of an international partnership to halt the species decline.

“The turtles nesting at Papua Barat, Papua New Guinea, and other islands in our region depend on food resources in waters managed by many other nations for their survival,” said Tapilatu. “It is important to protect leatherbacks in these foraging areas so that our nesting beach conservation efforts can be effective”.

“The international effort has attempted to develop a science-based nesting beach management plan by evaluating and addressing the factors that affect hatching success such as high sand temperatures, erosion, feral pig predation, and relocating nests to maximize hatchling output,” said Manjula Tiwari, a researcher at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, in La Jolla, California.

The conservation value of nesting beach protection has also been recognized by groups like the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) that have raised funds from industry-affiliated members including tuna canners and processors, to help support UNIPA’s nest protection program with the local communities on Bird’s Head Peninsula.

“NOAA Fisheries Service is committed to doing our part in the international effort to recover the leatherback turtle through advancing science, implementing our recovery plans and management efforts such as the establishment of critical habitat off California,” said Cisco Werner, Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “Reducing threats on the nesting beaches and at leatherback foraging areas will require continued international cooperation and action if we hope to save Pacific leatherbacks from extinction.”

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Hello Nico. I like your website and I appreciate your comment that algae biofuels is an idea worth spreading. I should mention however, that it’s very important that we do not set up false expectations or create a credibility gap. You should know that the “algae fuels” number you cited for algae production in gallons/acre/year (10,000) is too high by a factor of at least 2x. It is suggested that 5,000 gal/acre/yr is achievable, but it’s never been achieved. A more realistic number is 2,000 gal/acre/yr and even that is still fantasy because algae have yet to be properly domesticated. There are currently few serious people in the field who think algae biofuels are economically viable and I agree, unless it’s part of a larger sustainability effort.

source: NASA

I invite you to watch his fascinating TED talk about his research that leads to what is becoming a more common philosophy in the field of sustainable energy, where the answers to our problems lies in combining multiple sustainable operations (wave, wind and solar energy combined to algae culture and aqua culture as explained in this talk)

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Watch Video more info after the wave:

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image by scott gardner

The first video of tool use by a fish has been published in the journal Coral Reefs by Giacomo Bernardi, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bernardi shot the video in Palau in 2009.

“What the movie shows is very interesting. The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell,” Bernardi said. “It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it’s a pretty big deal.”

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Give it to the Portuguese, a once powerful maritime nation, to bring to us the coolest and the first water drone in the Mundo. After watching the videos of this hydrospeeder-drone-meets-Tamagotchi, I have to admit I want one. Not only is this thing fast and cute, but it has an onboard HD camera the ticket for your dry and personal ocean explorations. What makes complete sense is its rolly polly fucntion which prevent your proud vessel to stay stuck on its back when a wave rolls it. An essential function in the high seas.

Let’s watch the concept first:

then let’s see the prototype in action:

Now that you too have fallen for the Ziphius go vote for it  on Engadget insertcoin contest!

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