Marine Science Browsings by Dr. H.

Love this - dolphin "enrichment" at a whole 'nother level...

(click on link above for article)

Research just published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), has shown that when separated, dolphins call out to other closely associated dolphins using the separated dolphin's unique "name" - a unique acoustic whistle. 

Honestly, this does not surprise me - dolphins are extremely intelligent, are aware of themselves and show altruism, play, and many other behaviors that only humans and other primates show.  It is only because we cannot fathom their style of acoustic language that we don't understand what they are saying.

(click title above to watch video and read about the logistics going into filming it)

I'd heard about these but never could find a video of one... Leave it to BBC Nature's cameramen and specialists to finally record a time-lapse video of a brinicle (seawater icicle) forming and wreaking havoc on the poor unsuspecting sea stars and sea urchins below.  The brinicle forms as hypersaline (super-salty) water sinks, and the water that is slightly less salty freezes at the hypersaline/slightly-less-hypersaline boundary.  Worth the 1.5 minute watch - one of the best time-lapse videos I've seen, bar none. 

The Tongue-Eating Parasite, Cymothoa - NOVA video

Here's a video of the lovely Cymothoa, a marine isopod (think "sea roach") that parasitizes a fish by attaching its legs to the fish's tongue, cutting off the blood supply so that the tongue withers and falls off, and then "becoming" the tongue of the fish to access food and other morsels.  This is pretty darn high up on my list of "Things That Give Me the Willies," a short list to begin with since I think pretty much all biology is just darn cool.  But yeah, ee-YEW.  Video is from NOVA. Image below is from http://oddstuffmagazine.com/ that shows what the isopod looks like.

So, if you're a paleoclimate science geek like me and follow climate change, and read / study / breathe paleoclimate-related anything, you know that the longest ice core recovered to date extends back to nearly 800,000 years, recovered from Dome C in Antarctica by the European's EPICA Project back in 2004 (see here for the 2004 news article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=record-breaking-ice-core, and European Science Foundation's slightly scientific-writing but great explanation of the EPICA site's history and discoveries.)  It was a big, BIG deal, hyoouge, when that happened (still is), as it gave us climate resolution across eight glacial-interglacial cycles at a temporal resolution of ~1000 years or so (pretty darn high resolution for hundreds of thousands of years of ice compacted under miles of even more ice, yes?).  Now, U.S. scientists have recovered an ice core that is only a paltry 68,000 years 'long' in age.  "Yawn", you say?  How about if I then tell you, that this core's temporal resolution is ... ANNUAL.  Yeah, annual, as in, yearly bands of ice that can be counted, yeah, COUNTED (!) back more than 30,000 years.  And measured for oxygen and deuterium isotopes, dust, CO2, all those fun-climate-chemistry-toys.  Heck, this level of resolution is difficult to find in the present day ocean sediments, much less the 60,000 years through the past!  

Drilling for ice core climate records in Antarctica (image source:  http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/643/)

An ice core (this one happens to be from Greenland's GISP2 site).  Image source: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:GISP2_Ice_Core_jpg. 

Remember when you were six, and you were afraid to swim in the ocean because you might accidentally drink fish pee? (Okay, maybe it was just me.)  Well the shoe is now on the other, um, fin, as it were.  It might surprise you that water treatment plants CAN'T filter out medications from our waste-water (don't have the chemical technology to do so at large scales), so all those medications (anti-depressants, hormones, anxiety meds, you name it), remain in the "cleaned" water that gets return to waterways (rivers, lakes, and eventually the ocean).  Scientists have shown for decades (encouraged by the public's response to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring book in 1962, which started the environmental movement - if you haven't read this book, you should), that these compounds can accumulate to toxic levels, and permanently, when ingested via food by other organisms (called bioaccumulation).  A study just published in the eminent journal Science shows exactly that, but more importantly, they experimentally showed that fish behavior altered significantly with a large increase in the tissues of this anti-anxiety drug.  Scary stuff folks, and it's only going to get worse.

Horrific images - the shark-finning trade is still going strong as evidenced by a CNN photo documentary.

From a picture caption: 

"Several thousand shark fins laid out to dry were found on the rooftop of a building housing seafood suppliers in Kennedy Town in central Hong Kong. Photographer Gary Stokes from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society received a tip from an unnamed person on January 1 and took these pictures." 

Google has partnered with the scientific group Catlin Seaview Survey to produce panoramic images of major coral reefs, added to Google's Street View service in its maps.  Users can navigate around the coral reefs as if they were actually underwater (and minus the worry about getting low on air!).  The Catlin Seaview Survey is a project studying the health of the reefs, including the impact of global warming.  Google has previously offered computer-generated views of the sea floor terrain, but this is the first time it has incorporated underwater photographs into its mapping product.  Locations include Australia’s Great Barrier Reef near Heron Island, Lady Elliot Island and Wilson Island, as well as Hawaii’s Hanauma Bay and Molokini Crater and the Philippines Apo Island. 

Click here for the summary article about Google's Underwater

YOU can help explore the ocean floor... the HabCam team and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution need your help!

Identify species and ground cover in images of the seafloor, and help create a library of seafloor life in the habitats along the northeast continental shelf through this crowdsourcing project from Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), the team behind Galaxy Zoo and other citizen science initiatives available on Zooniverse.org.  These methods of data collection produce excellent, peer-reviewable, publishable science, and you can be a part of it!

The Science of Seafloor Explorer

HabCam (Habitat Mapping Camera System)

(From Seafloor Explorer's "About" page):

HabCam is a cabled optical and acoustic imaging system that is "flown" from a ship traveling at 5 knots at an altitude of 1 to 3 meters off the bottom ... collecting high resolution still images at a rate of six images per second.

...This allows for construction of image mosaics of the seafloor. ... Over 30 million images (>30 Terabytes) have been collected in less than one year of sea time, which demonstrates how quickly this quantity of data can accumulate.

For the past five years, study areas [include] measurements of all visible macrofauna, and characterization of benthic fauna and flora, oceanic properties (salinity, temperature, nutrients) and substrate type, providing the baseline of an exceptional and unique ecological time series.

Key to extracting useful ecological information from this ever expanding library of image data is the development of tools for rapid and accurate ... classification of ... organisms and substrate ... through a Geospatially-explicit, queryable database.  

Enter Seafloor Explorer

The data now exist to answer ... ecologically critical questions, but it is buried in hundreds of TBs of images that need to be processed ...

Seafloor Explorer is allowing us to capture data on the distributions of ... commercially important species as well as defining the substrate and habitat in which they live. This information has never before been acquired on such an expansive (1000s of km) yet high resolution (1mm pixel resolution) scale. ... The development of tools for automated ... classification is lagging orders of magnitude behind the rate at which image data are currently being ... manually classified.

Using data from Seafloor Explorer we can now begin to build training sets of images and data that will provide the foundation for (HabCam automation). These tools must be developed if the untapped wealth of information available in optical imagery is to be fully realized. 

This is where the Seafloor Explorer program and you, the public, come in - your identification and classification is not only used for research information and ecological understanding, but also to develop the automated program that will be used by the HabCam in the future.

There is still so much we don't know!

Zebrafish are the "white lab rats" of marine biologists.  Recent research shows that warmer temperature water actually improves their "hardiness" and tolerance to temperature changes as adults.

"Research shows the fish are hardier after being raised in a warm-water nursery, and raises the question of how far the temperature can rise before the advantage becomes a liability, as inevitably it will, Scott says.

“What limits are there to their coping abilities? That’s what we’re really trying to understand,” says Scott, a specialist in animals’ adaptation to challenging environments. “If we want to appreciate how the natural world is affected by climate change, that’s what we need to know.” "

Click on the title above or here for the review article from Consortium for Ocean Leadership, full article at ScienceDaily .

A compound from from marine organisms that is toxic to humans normally could provide important medical applications. 

A new study found that a toxin produced by the single-celled marine algae Karenia brevis, a dinoflagellate that produces brevitoxin during red tide bloom conditions, could aid in the recovery of brain function after a stroke.

The compound, brevetoxin-2, stimulated nerve cell growth and plasticity in cultured mouse neurons.  Increased plasticity around the damaged part of the brain is what causes the nerve cells to ‘rewire’ after a stroke or severe brain damage.

New research reveals that lethal stings from the box jellyfish can be treated with zinc gluconate and may prevent death if administered immediately.