You can call me M. Here for...stuff. Marine stuff. Aquatic stuff. Conservation stuff. Anti-captivity. Pro-nuanced discourse. Anti-assholery. In cahoots with dynamicoceans and occasional guest contributor to todropscience. Please be advised: if you remove photographer credit from photos that I post here, you will be reported and blocked.
These are ossicles, small calcareous elements embedded in the skin of the snake sea cucumber (Synapta sp). Ossicles are embedded in the dermis of the body wall of echinoderms, such sea cucumbers, sea stars, brittle stars, and sea urchins. They form part of the endoskeleton and provide rigidity and protection. These small structures varying in shape, size, and in number, depending on the species.
Photo: Sea-cucumber skin by Christian Gautier, Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition
"It remains to be seen how this level of mercury will affect northern waters and the wildlife therein, or how much mercury will actually get into the food chain, said St. Pierre."
As permafrost in the North thaws, it’s releasing record levels of mercury into Arctic rivers and waterways, graduate students at the University of Alberta have found.
The study, published by the journal Environmental Science & Technology on Nov. 26,found that landslides caused by the rapidly thawing permafrost — also called thaw slumps — in Canada’s Peel Plateau deposit large amounts of mercury into rivers and streams.
The researchers took samples of water in 2015-16, upstream and downstream of permafrost slumps, and compared the concentrations of mercury.
Previous research has already shown that permafrost is one of the biggest storage hubs of mercury. As it thaws, there’s a fear in northern countries around the world that the toxic metal could find its way into the food chain, affecting wildlife and humans. Mercury is toxic at high levels.
Kyra St. Pierre, one of three lead authors on the study, said they found that the level of mercury downstream from the slumps was so high that “initially, we were wondering if there was something wrong with our calculation.”
As many as 6.2 million chinook salmon fry died last weekend when a windstorm cut power to the Minter Creek Hatchery in Pierce County and the facility’s backup generator failed.
The fry were in incubators at the Minter Creek Hatchery operated by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). The pump that supplies water to those incubators stopped working when both the main power and backup generator failed.
WDFW staff tried to start the generator and attempted to provide water to the incubators using other methods, but those efforts were largely unsuccessful, said Eric Kinne, WDFW hatchery division manager.
“This is a devastating loss,” Kinne said. “The department is conducting an analysis to determine the root cause of what went wrong so that we can improve procedures at Minter Creek and our other hatcheries to help ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
An inventory of the fish lost includes:
4.2 million Deschutes fall chinook fry
1.5 million Minter Creek fall chinook fry
507,000 White River spring chinook fry
Kinne said the department was raising the White River spring chinook as part of the state’s early efforts to provide more food for southern resident orcas, which are listed as endangered both federally and in Washington.
Read more here.
Provided by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
The Natural History Museum is popping up across the country to draw attention to the struggle of the Lummi Nation in the Pacific Northwest.
There's a new attraction involving killer whales in Florida, but it's got nothing to do with SeaWorld.
The exhibition, called Whale People: Protectors of the Sea, opened earlier this month at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. On view there through May, its exhibits include an array of historical indigenous objects such as totems, pipes, and platters adorned with representations of orca whales. Whale People is the latest collaboration between the Lummi Nation, an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, and The Natural History Museum, which produces "pop-up" exhibitions highlighting the impact of humans on the natural world. The Florida Museum is only the most recent home of The Natural History Museum, whose previous exhibitions have been hosted by the Queens Museum in New York City, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere.
The focus of Whale People's curators isn't on the past, it's the future—specifically, the future of killer whales off the coast of Washington State and British Columbia, which are threatened by resource extraction. The project is meant to draw attention to the orca population of the Salish Sea, part of the Lummi's ancestral homeland. Already afflicted by industrial pollution and commercial fishing, the Salish Sea is now threatened by construction of the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline, which would transfer crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia for export, bringing hundreds of massive oil tankers to the waterway.
"The Salish Sea orcas are a sort of 'miner's canary' for the health of the sea and the wider ecosystem," says Beka Economopoulos, executive director of The Natural History Museum. "The proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline, which would bring 800 new oil tankers annually to the Salish Sea, would mean game over for the 74 remaining resident orcas."
The Natural History Museum connected with a group of Lummi volunteers who call themselves the House of Tears Carvers to create the centerpiece of Whale People: the "Whale Rider," a 4,000-pound, 16-foot hand-carved and painted totem of a human riding an orca. The "Whale Rider" not only represents the spiritual connection between the Lummi and the orca, which they refer to as qw'e lh'ol mechen ("our people who live under the water"), but other life in the Salish Sea too, like salmon and raven, illustrating the interdependence of the ecosystem. Produced using traditional techniques in the Pacific Northwest, the totem was then transported to Gainesville by tribal members, who stopped for song, ceremony, and public media events along the way.
"We need the people of the Pacific Northwest to learn to love the health of their own environment to the extent that they recognize it as an inherent duty to protect the rights of their own children to inherit a healthy environment," says Jewell James, the head carver with the House of Tears. "Protection of the Salish Sea, the orcas, and the salmon should be the legacy they collectively leave to their own children."
Read more here.
Written by Arvind Dilawar
Photo by Not an Alternative / The Natural History Museum
Good news in conservation: A pair of Madeiran storm petrel (Oceanodroma castro) nested for the first time in Berlenga Island, off Peniche coast, Portugual, following the conservationist effort for eradicating its predator, the black rat.
Only one of the 20 artificial nests that project LIFE Berlengas team installed for Madeiran storm petrel has one egg, it sounds not big, but it is the result of a lot of effort.. Hopefully this egg will hatch by January. Until today there were no records of this species nesting in the island, only in nearby islets.
Artificial nests are made of ceramic vases, slightly buried on the ground, with a hole for birds to come in and out.
To help attract nesting pairs, LIFE Berlengas team also installed a system that reproduced typical sounds of a Madeiran storm petrel colony. Also in each nest the team placed a cloth bag used in previous ringing campaigns of this species, since Madeiran storm petrels have a very strong and characteristic smell.
Photo: Madeiran storm petrel, by Pedro Geraldes.
more at wilder
[Photo description: A Madeiran storm petrel resting on a rock. These seabirds are adapted to touch land only during breeding season. So its position when resting look a little clumsy on the ground.]
Current rules protect Alaska’s Teshekpuk Lake and its throngs of waterbirds. The Trump Administration is rewriting them.
Each spring, hundreds of thousands of birds from five continents follow an ancestral tug toward Teshekpuk Lake, a 320-square-mile marvel surrounded by ponds, wetlands, and soggy tundra in far northern Alaska, where shorebirds raise chicks and geese hunker down to molt their feathers. They’re not the only ones lured to the remote spot. For decades, energy companies have eyed the same swath of coastal plain, an area as rich in oil as it is in bird life—and recent fossil-fuel discoveries have intensified their interest.
This tension between wildlife and energy is inherent to the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the nation’s biggest chunk of federal land. Although the reserve was created in 1923 as an oil resource for the U.S. Navy, Congress later broadened its purpose to provide “maximum protection” for wildlife and subsistence hunting. That includes the birds and herds around Teshekpuk Lake, in the NPR-A's northeastern corner.
Balancing those two uses is tricky, but the U.S. Department of the Interior tried to do so when in 2013 it finalized a management plan for the NPR-A. The plan reserved about half of the NPR-A for bird nesting areas and caribou calving grounds, and allowed oil-and-gas leasing on 11.8 million acres, an area roughly twice the size of Vermont. It also expanded the boundaries of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, a designation that doesn’t necessarily prohibit development but prioritizes habitat protection. The special area more than doubled in size, from 1.75 to 3.65 million acres, and the agency put 3.1 million of those acres off-limits for oil and gas leases.
Unlike other parts of Alaska's oil-rich North Slope, development in the reserve is still in its infancy. The first NPR-A oil production began on Alaska Native land in 2015, and oil started flowing from a federal NPR-A lease this past October. But it’s likely to accelerate soon as the Trump administration prepares to write a new management plan for the NPR-A.
Happy Cephalopod Week! One of the most famous dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History depicts a battle between two gigantic animals: the sperm whale and giant squid. But unlike most dioramas in the Museum’s halls, this scene has never been witnessed. Paleontologists Neil Landman and John Flynn explain how we know that this encounter does happen–and whether we humans will ever catch it in real time.
Cephalopod Week is the annual celebration of all things tentacled. Learn more at sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek and cephalopodweek.tumblr.com
Unist’ot’en camp staying put as company puts on pressure to step aside
Tucked within the forest down a dirt logging road in the central interior of British Columbia is the Unist’ot’en Camp.
It’s the Unist’ot’en clan’s re-occupation of Wet’suwe’ten traditional lands.
Freda Huson built the camp to reconnect with her Indigenous culture and to teach land-based wellness.
“People keep calling this a protest camp and it’s not a protest camp,” said Huson. “It’s a homestead, we actually live here and we get visitors from all over the world that want to learn about what we are doing.”
The only access to Huson’s homestead is a bridge that is protected by a large gate.
It blocks the road that leads to the future Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Although Huson welcomes some visitors – not all are welcome.
She said she wants nothing to do with workers from the oil and gas business.
“Our medicines, our berries, the wildlife, the salmon, the water, the air we breathe, a lot of those are not replaceable,” she said. “If they destroy those and wipe out those species then they are wiping out our food and our way of life.”
Huson built the first cabin along the Morice River almost 10 years ago.
It’s location was strategic – the front line of a battle that continues to this day.
“The number one reason that I moved back out was because of my dad,” she said. “He said the only way we are going to win and protect our territory is you have to occupy.”
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