Carbon dating for tree rings has been a well developed tool to study the age of a tree, but just recently scientists found that this same technique can be used to figure out where salmon go and what they have been eating when they travel out to sea to feed.
The University of Southampton researchers Dr Kirsteen MacKenzie and Dr Clive Trueman shows that the chemistry of fish scales will unlock the mystery of what the British salmon are eating. All British salmon do not migrate from their home rivers and end up in the same feeding grounds. Different salmon may respond differently to environmental change. Know one knows just yet.
Research shows that fish carry natural records of feeding location hidden in the chemistry of their scales.
The chemistry of animal tissues reflects the composition of food and water in the area where they live and feed, and can act as a natural tag. Using this idea, the Southampton team, working with scientists from the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), looked at the isotopes of carbon contained in historical records of scales of Atlantic salmon.
The scales grew while the salmon were feeding at sea, so the carbon isotope values of the scales reflect the values of their diet in the feeding grounds. The team compared the scale values through time with satellite records of sea surface temperature across the North Atlantic. The locations of sea where the time series match best are most likely to be the areas where the fish have been feeding.
“As every single salmon contains the natural chemical tag, we can now see where fish from individual rivers go to feed in the Atlantic,” lead author Dr Kirsteen MacKenzie said.
This may be the first step into unlocking the mystery of why the salmon population has been in a steady decline for years. It could help us conserve the species. Resources
The International Fund for Animal Welfare(IFAW), pet rescue team in Johannesburg has come across some desperate situations through the years. But this one stunned even them. They would like to share it with you.
In Africa, AIDS is at epidemic proportions. Sadly, there are many children left as orphans when their parents pass away from the awful disease.
At an AIDS hospice near to IFAW’s veterinary clinic, people suffering from AIDS receive emotional and financial
support for themselves and their families. Many of the needy are mothers with young children.
It was to this AIDS clinic that a desperately hungry woman arrived with a sweet puppy named Mixer. She was so desperate to feed her family, in fact, that she came to the clinic to trade their beloved puppy for food for her children.
The hospice, of course, gave assistance to her and her family. And they took in Mixer – not as payment for the food, but because they didn’t want Mixer to be a burden on the struggling family.
The hospice then called IFAW, and we immediately fetched Mixer and brought him back to our veterinary clinic.
Mixer is such a sweet puppy – and he has taken quite a liking to a litter of kittens also at the clinic. He curls up and sleeps with them and gently plays with them.
It’s heartbreaking to think of the struggle that so many families dealing with AIDS face every day. The work of the AIDS hospice and other human-aid charities is so needed.
Of course, the pets of these families, and many other animals in these impoverished communities, also face great hardship and desperately need help.Without us, these animals have chance for survival.
They’d likely end up on the street with no food, and they’d quickly face starvation. And they’d be easy targets for painful infections like mange, heartworm, and the many other diseases that afflict street dogs. Even if they did survive, they’d likely live a life of great suffering.
The IFAW’s clinic and friends like you have saved Mixer and his kitten friends and given them a chance to find loving new homes, free from the threat of starvation and painful diseases.
Spring has sprung across most of the USA now and flowers are everywhere. My roses abound after the freeze gave them a rest this winter in the Tucson desert. So much beauty and so little time in the desert to enjoy spring.
Time to invite those frogs and toads to the party of insects beginning to emerge in and around your garden. In Tucson generally we see lots of Colorado river toad around monsoon time in the summer, but where it is cooler frogs and toads will be heard croaking through the spring and summer into the fall.
Happy spring everyone. Remember to plant those flowers that the pollinators love to visit like the herbs, flowers, and flowering trees and bushes.
Gardening with the family helps the whole family and the planet.
Video courtesy of youtube.com and Cindy Hoffman of Defenders of Wildlife
At least seven cases of mature male polar bears eating bear cubs were spotted this year among the animals around Churchill, Man.
Ian Stirling, a retired Environment Canada biologist who specializes in the Churchill bears, calls it the highest incidence of cannibalization he has ever seen.
Stirling says evidence suggests the cubs are being killed for food, not just so the male can mate with the sow.
He says the Hudson Bay sea ice, which the bears use to get at the seals they need to fatten up for winter, isn’t appearing until weeks later than it used to.
In a melting Arctic, polar bears must travel hundreds of miles to find food or confront starvation, drowning and even cannibalism. Their pups enter the world to face collapsing dens of thinning ice and often too little food.
Despite publicly recognizing the disastrous impact of global warming on polar bears, Interior Secretary Salazar has not pursued policies to save them. Worse, he’s sided with Big Oil and the Bush administration. He has continued to allow risky oil exploration in America’s Polar Bear Seas—the Chukchi and Beaufort, even though these fragile and remote seas could not withstand a fraction of the Deepwater Horizon’s spill.
Secretary Salazar’s determination to deprive the polar bear of needed protections wins praise from wildlife foes in Congress, such as Representative Doc Hastings (R-WA) who called polar bear protections, “excessive regulations” and from powerful oil and gas industry lobbyists.
“We welcome the administration’s decision.”-Jack Gerard, President of the American Petroleum Institute.
Polar bears have enough threats from illegal hunting, toxic pollution and climate change. They don’t need an adversary in the Cabinet. Help us continue to pressure the Obama administration to become stewards of polar bears before it’s too late by making your holiday donation today.
Our friends at the Earth Friends Conservation Fund have given us a generous grant challenging us to raise $150,000 by the end of the year. Your contribution will help us reach this goal and protect endangered species.
This is a great time to become a member of the Endangered Species Coalition and take advantage of this challenge grant and contribute to the Polar Bear Pledge.
Thank you for standing with us in our fight for wildlife and wild places.
Endangered Species Coalition and Nature’s Crusaders
A new breed of oil eating microbes is thriving around the Deep Water Horizon site in the Gulf of Mexico. Seems these blessed little critters are reproducing and loving the oil filled seas they are living in.
Mother Nature's allies to clean up Gulf oil
Microbes from the sea bed vent community are enjoying eating oil droplets and happily reproducing faster then others of their kind. Temperatures are quite toasty in their zone hover around 5 degrees Celsius, the pressure is enormous, and there is normally little carbon present. They are even living on reduced oxygen so the waters of the Gulf are not turning into a dead zone.
“Two research ships were sent to collect data to determine the physical, chemical and microbiological properties of the Deepwater oil plume. The oil escaping from the damaged wellhead represented an enormous carbon and toxins being put into the water column ecosystem.
The lead scientist was Dr. Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and principal investigator with the Energy Biosciences Institute, who has studied numerous oil-spill sites in the past, is the leader of the Ecology Department and Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division. He conducted this research under an existing grant he holds with the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) to study microbial enhanced hydrocarbon recovery. EBI is a partnership led by the University of California (UC) Berkeley and including Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP.
phylochip=microbe detector
After careful analysis of more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2, 2010. Sample analysis was boosted by the use of the latest edition of the award-winning Berkeley Lab PhyloChip is a unique credit card-sized DNA-based microarray that can be used to quickly, accurately and comprehensively detect the presence of up to 50,000 different species of bacteria and archaea in a single sample from any environmental source, without the need of culturing. Use of the Phylochip, enabled Hazen and his colleagues to determine that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales family, particularly Oleispirea antarctica and Oceaniserpentilla haliotis.
These oil-degrading microbial populations and their associated microbial communities play a significant role in controlling the ultimate fates and consequences of deep-sea oil plumes in the Gulf of Mexico.
Cleaning up a man made mess. Working together to redress the insults to Mother Earth.
“The problem is the Everglades are our water supply.” Eric Buermann, Southern Florida Water Management District. “And there’s only 40 percent of the natural Everglades left after man’s drainage and decimation of the natural environment.”
Investing almost $1 billion the state for Florida has instituted a research program to correct the growing problem. Engineers hope to apply what scientists learn to get water running again where there’s too much of it and let it flow into places where there’s much too little of it, like the Everglades National Park
Will this work to save the unique habitat be damaged by the oil approaching the Everglades?
Cherrios are helping to save the the watery wetland’s water flow patterns. Check out the video.
An underwater tour of the Gulf of Mexico by submarine and scuba, highlighting the vast diversity of marine life throughout the Gulf, from the surface to depths of nearly 2,000 feet. The tour begins in the northern Gulf, tracks south along the west Florida shelf, to northwestern Cuba and finally west to Veracruz, Mexico. This video was produced for the opening ceremony of the first “State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit” held in 2006 in Corpus Christi, Texas.
This video was also shown at the May 19, 2010 U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “Deepwater Horizon: Oil Spill Prevention and Response Measures, and Natural Resource Impacts” as part of the testimony of Dr. Sylvia A. Earle.
Chair and Program Coordinator, Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies and a marine biologist Sylvia Earle has been an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society since 1998. Named “Time” magazine’s first “hero for the planet” in 1998, Earle has pioneered research on marine ecosystems and has led more than 50 expeditions totaling more than 6,000 hours underwater. She was the former chief scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Resource
Video courtesy of YOUTUBE.com/1planet1ocean
Another mega-company Anglo American and Mitsubishi wants to turn the pristine area near Bristol Bay, Alaska area over to be mined.
The Pebble Mine is run by another Japanese mega corporation the Mitsubishi Corporation. Please sign our new Petition of Protest so that your voice can be heard loud and clear at Mitsubishi’s annual Shareholders Meeting in Tokyo on June 24, 2010. Click here to let your voice be heard.
Killer whales may go extinct
Mitsubishi and its share holders wake up! SAVE BRISTOL BAY
Bristol Bay is a unique American natural treasure.
Beluga whale
Home to orcas and beluga whales, wild moose and caribou, and one of only two populations of freshwater harbor seals in the world
It’s world-class salmon runs that support thousands of sustainable jobs in fishing and tourism as well as Alaska Natives who depend on the salmon for food. Click here to let your voice be heard.
What do they propose to do?
Put a 2,000-foot-deep open-pit mine in the heart of America’s wilderness in a known earthquake zone.
The Pebble Mine’s colossal earthen dams are supposed to hold back some 10 billion tons of mining waste mixed with toxic chemicals. These dams never work forever. These dams are disasters waiting to happen.
Problems in the exploration phase
In April 2010 even without the mine in full swing, the companies had taken water from 45 unauthorized stream segments, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The exploration was temporarily halted.
Permits have been reinstated allowing Pebble Limited Partnership to continue exploring copper and gold deposits in southwest Alaska, the state Department of Natural Resources said Friday.
But the partnership still needs permission from the state’s Department of Fish and Game to work in fish habitat in order to begin drilling again this year. All ready the Pebble Mine before it goes into full-scale operation, it will permanently destroy over 60 miles of salmon habitat.
If salmon runs collapse, so could the entire ecosystem and the communities that rely on salmon for their very subsistence.
Please stand with the Alaska’s Native communities and lovers of nature everywhere by making your voice heard at Mitsubishi’s Shareholders Meeting.
Don’t allow this mega corporation that sells so many cars, trucks, and electronics in the United States sacrifice one of America’s most spectacular pieces of endangered wilderness and the bioms dependent on it. Click here to let your voice be heard.
Will Mitsubishi rethink this destructive venture when faced with worldwide opposition?
Possible this is the first time in 200 to 300 years that a Grey whale has been seen off the coast of Israel. It is an adult mammal a mature whale measuring some 12 meters (39 feet) and weighing around 20 tons.
grey whale
The Grey whale was first sighted off Herzliya in central Israel on Saturday May 8. It is possible that it traveled thousands of miles from the north Pacific through the melting ice of the Bering Straights looking for food. It appears to be underweight, and might have gone astray.
“It’s an unbelievable event which has been described as one of the most important whale sightings ever,” said Dr Aviad Scheinin, chairman of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center which identified the creature.
Once the Grey whales were plentiful in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but the population of the Atlantic Grey whales became extinct in the 17th or 18th centuries. Until this sighting the only remaining colonies live in the western and eastern sectors of the north Pacific.
The Pacific Greys annually travel 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) round trip from the northeastern Pacific rim in October to warmer waters around the Gulf of California and back.
So it is possible that this whale when autumn came, began travelling south, keeping the land mass on the left and heading for the Californian Gulf with the aim of “turning left” into the bay.
But instead, it reached Gibraltar and turned left into the Mediterranean and ended up off the shores of Israel, Scheinin said.
“The question now is: are we going to see the re-colonisation of the Atlantic?” he said. “This is very important ecologically because of the change of habitat. It emphasises the climate change that we are going through.”
So far, the whale seems to be happy enough in the waters off the shores of Israel, he said.
“It is pretty thin, which indicates the trip was quite harsh, but we think it can survive here,” he said. “Grey whales are very generalist in what they feed on.”
Is this the first of many Greys to relocate? Keeping waterways clean can foster the re-habitation of many species.
The potential effects of the crude oil itself on the health of the entire biome, man through the tiniest of sea creatures, from the spill is long term. The crude oil is toxic if inhaled, ingested or if one is coated with it. Everyone’s being touched by it could suffer respiratory, skin reactions and cancers of various types are some of the possibilities. Toxicity from hydrocarbon (crude oil/petroleum) exposure depends on which organ system is predominately involved. Organ systems that can be affected by hydrocarbons include the pulmonary, brain and nervous system, cardiac, embryological, gastrointestinal, hepatic, kidney, dermatologic, and hematologic systems. The respiratory system seems to be most effected with pneumonia.
As the crude oil is dispersed by wind, weather and the sea, micro organisms ingest it and as larger animals up the food chain eat the smaller ones thus spreading the residues from the oil into their body tissues. These are the dangers to living systems (without even considering the land, shoreline and soil communities.) is if no one uses dispersant.
The effects of dispersants
In a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, the dispersants and the oil they leave behind can kill fish eggs. A study of oil dispersal in Coos Bay, Ore. found that it accumulated in mussels. Another study examining fish health after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 found that PAHs (dispersant) affected the developing hearts of Pacific salmon. The acute toxicity of dispersants is generally attributed to the effects on biological membranes; usually the dispersant disrupts the outer membrane of respiratory cells, often causing electrolytic and/or osmotic imbalance within the cell.
There is insufficient understanding of the fate of dispersed oil in aquatic ecosystems.
A version of Corexit a dispersant was widely used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and, according to a literature review performed by the group
the Alaska Community Action on Toxics,
Corexit a dispersant was later linked with
health impacts in people including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders.
surface-active compounds in the dispersant likely affect the embryonic membrane. This is evidenced by the fact that developed, abnormal larvae were virtually nonexistent at the end of experiments, observers either found fully developed, normal larvae or embryos that had been arrested at the multicell stage, often appearing as only loose aggregations of cells. These observations are consistent with known effects of surfactants on biological membranes. The dispersant increases permeability, loss of barrier function, and osmotic imbalance Some other abnormalities have been seen in developing embryos in marine echinoderms and other gastropods. Some mysid mortality may seem to be asphyxiated through damage to respiratory structures
The dispersants used today are less toxic than those used a decade ago. Toxic still. Maybe they accumulate slowly, or disrupt the hormonal systems of animals and humans less-no one has bothered to research these toxins in long term studies to find out. Possible Russian roulette with the Gulf’s version of Texas Tea.
For a little bit of levity on the oil rupture check out Stephen Colbert. Resources
Excerpts courtesy of http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/821143-overview Excerpts courtesy of http://www.madsci.org Excerpts courtesy of www.pwrc.usgs.gov/infobase/topbibs/petroleum.pdf
used to figure out where salmon go and what they have been eating when they travel out to sea to feed.
