100leaguesunderthesea:

Schooling Yellowtail - Jervis Bay by Rowland Cain on Flickr.

What a great shot! Yellowtail are so cool.

unconsumption:

Los Angeles became the largest city in the nation Wednesday to approve a ban on plastic bags at supermarket checkout lines, handing a major victory to clean-water advocates who sought to reduce the amount of trash clogging landfills, the region’s waterways and the ocean.

Egged on by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and an array of environmental groups, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to phase out plastic bags over the next 12 months at an estimated 7,500 stores. Councilman Bernard Parks cast the lone no vote.

“Let’s get the message to Sacramento that it’s time to go statewide,” said Councilman Ed Reyes, who has focused on efforts to revitalize the Los Angeles River.

Read the rest: LATimes

Previous bag-ban coverage here. 

As a native Angeleno, I’m so game for this!

laboratoryequipment:

Study Tracks Carbon Cycle in the Arctic Ocean

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have conducted a new study to measure levels of carbon at various depths in the Arctic Ocean. The study, recently published in the journal Biogeosciences, provides data that will help researchers better understand the Arctic Ocean’s carbon cycle—the pathway through which carbon enters and is used by the marine ecosystem. It will also offer an important point of reference for determining how those levels of carbon change over time, and how the ecosystem responds to rising global temperatures.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Measurements-of-Carbon-in-Arctic-Ocean-Help-Track-Cycle-052212.aspx

scienceyoucanlove:

The Great Blue Hole is a large submarine sinkhole off the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 70 km (43 mi) from the mainland and Belize City. The hole is circular in shape, over 300 m (984 ft) across and 124 m (407 ft) deep.^[1] It was formed during several episodes of Quaternary glaciation when sea levels were much lower - the analysis of stalactites found in Great Blue Hole shows that formation took place 153,000, 66,000, 60,000, and 15,000 years ago.^[2] As the ocean began to rise again, the caves were flooded.^[3] The Great Blue Hole is a part of the larger Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a World Heritage Site of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).^[4]

thepoliticalnotebook:

kqedscience:

Keystone Ladies

A few of the women fiercely defending ecosystems the world over.

There are some really, really amazing women on this list.

wwf:

This is a really cool collaboration between kiwi surfers and WWF-New Zealand with the goal to save the endangered Maui dolphin.

(Source: facebook.com)

mothernaturenetwork:

Daniell Washington: Bringing ocean awareness to young people
She’s barely out of college but this young marine conservationist already has a thriving nonprofit that’s teaching kids about the importance of the Earth’s oceans.

Cool!

mad-as-a-marine-biologist:

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Here are some presents from Conservation International’s facebook page. 

I think the Philippines knows it’s already Earth Day, and has turned off the electricity at 1am in  solidarity. Yes, I’m sure that’s what it is. Thanks Philippines, didn’t want to sleep anyway. 

discoverynews:

Mutant Crabs Showing Up in the Gulf

BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may be related to the eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs and other deformed animals now found in the Gulf, reported Al Jazeera. Fishers and marine biologists believe tremendous amounts of highly toxic chemicals may have had a negative effect on creatures that are constantly bathed in them, contrary to what BP asserts.

Al Jazeera quoted numerous fisherman who had pulled warped crustaceans from the waters where nearly 5 million barrels of oils spewed forth after the 2010 explosion that cost 11 mens’ lives on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

• “I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Keath Ladner, a seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
• Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, found eyeless shrimp and: “We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
• “We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills,” Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana said.

keep reading

prothy-the-prothean:

laurbits:

jtotheizzoe:

The Secret of the Ooze: Two Years After the Spill

Al Jazeera has a frightening, damning, and infuriating report on the ongoing damage to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It’s been nearly two years since the Macondo well was ruptured, spilling almost 5 million barrels of oil and requiring almost 2 million barrels of dispersants to clean it up.

Fishermen are reporting shrimp catches full of eyeless shrimp, as well as fish and shellfish with oozing sores and black gills. The damage doesn’t seem limited to oil, either. Manganese-heavy drilling mud and dispersant lefotvers are showing up at even higher rates than petroleum.

Head over to Al Jazeera to read the full article. The Gulf has not recovered, and it will likely take most of a lifetime to do so. It’s important that scientists continue to get financial support to monitor the area and that the government keep pressure on BP to do their part. Not just this year, but until the mistake is fixed.

This is one of the most diverse and fruitful ecosystems in America, and we must repair it.

This is bone chilling. 

D:

This is very disturbing. 

climateadaptation:

Looks like about 200 orangutans were killed. I’ll post more in the am.

sexyactionplanet:

Sumatran Orangutan: “It is no longer several years away, but just a few months or even weeks before this iconic creature disappears”
Hundreds of orangutans are believed to have died in fires deliberately lit by palm oil companies in the last few weeks. Conservationists say the rare Sumatran orangutan could now be wiped out within weeks.

Read more here.

nrdc:

Gulf Dolphin Die-Off Is Unprecedented

What is happening to the dolphins? The rosy predictions that some have made since the Deepwater Horizon was plugged, in July 2010, have been belied by the sickening, relentless washing up of dead bottlenose dolphins on the beaches of the Northern Gulf.

With the spill’s second anniversary just around the corner, NRDC reviewed past dolphin strandings in the Gulf and compared them to the present one.  Our conclusion is that the current die-off is simply unprecedented:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began to systematically investigate “unusual mortality events” (UMEs) of marine mammals twenty years ago, after a number of highly publicized mass strandings.  Since then, the Gulf’s bottlenose dolphins have gone through 11 high mortality events aside from the present ones—accounting for one-fifth of all the UMEs that NOAA has declared for marine mammals nationwide.  The dolphins’ involvement in so many of these events suggests how vulnerable they are to environmental disturbance, and perhaps how likely, as coastal mammals, they are to strand.  But never have the dolphins experienced a die-off that has lasted as long, involved as many animals, or afflicted as many calves.

Read more.

discoverynews:

Why Are Alaska Polar Bears Losing Their Fur?

Scientists are trying to determine why some polar bears in Alaska are suffering from fur loss and skin lesions, and whether the phenomenon is related to a disease that has been killing seals in the region.

According to United States Geological Survey (USGS) chief biologist Tony DeGange, scientists examined 33 bears during routine field studies in the southern Beaufort Sea region near Barrow in late March and early April; of those, nine had fur loss, or alopecia, and other skin lesions. DeGange says that, while it is not atypical to find some bears with those symptoms, it is unusual to discover the ailments in so many in such a short time.

“The first day we observed it was on March 21st and we had three captures and two of them had alopecia, and so it was like, ‘Oh that’s interesting,’” he told the Alaska Public Radio Network. “Then we started picking it up on other animals in later March so it was like, this is more than normal.”

keep reading

crookedindifference:

Shark Extinction: The Shocking Truth

Ocean lovers everywhere, we are at crisis point. The top predator species in the food chain of our oceans is being hunted to extinction. Some shark specie populations are estimated to have declined by over 99% since the 1970′s!

The repercussions for marine eco-systems are dramatic and have devastating consequences down the food chain. To name but one example, species of Rays and Skates can explode leading in turn to the shocking decline of shellfish fisheries and a rapid reduction in water quality. And that’s just for starters!

anticapitalist:

MIT researchers predicted the death of capitalism—in 1972.

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.

However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint. Prominent economists disagreed with the report’s methodology and conclusions. Yale’s Henry Wallich opposed active intervention, declaring that limiting economic growth too soon would be “consigning billions to permanent poverty.”

Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. He found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”