Year: 2011
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Florida’s tiresome tire reef
Go for a dive a mile offshore from downtown Fort Lauderdale and you might find an enormous pile of old car tires, and not much else. The original idea in the 1970s was to transform them into an artificial reef – creating homes for all…
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How to take pictures of pygmy seahorses
Dr Richard Smith knows a thing or two about pygmy seahorses – those ever-so-cute and tiny members of the seahorse family. While researching for his PhD, he spent hundreds of hours watching them in their natural habitats clinging to coral fans on reefs in Southeast Asia. And he’s spent a long time watching people watching…
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A Window Into Early Earth
Even though it is permanently covered in a layer of ice, Antarctica’s Lake Untersee is home to a vibrant population of photosynthetic microbes. These little guys form the incredible conical structures you see in that photo above… aren’t they surreal? The cones – called stromatolites – are actually built by layers upon layers of bacteria…
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Meet the Scariest seamonster that ever lived
When it comes to scary seamonsters there’s no beating pliosaurs. OK, sure, they’ve not roamed the oceans for 65 million years, but in their heyday these enormous reptiles would have been truly terrifying to anything that got in their way. Check out this BBC video unveiling the largest, most complete pliosaur skull in the world…
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Clark Little catching waves on camera
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaNh7BHrMRI&feature=related[/youtube] Award-winning photographer Clark Little specializes in capturing breathtaking images of waves. And here’s how he does it. (I just got back from a surfing weekend in Devon – the waves weren’t quite as big as this but I can dream.)
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SeaMonster love
Mark Derewicz has a nice piece at Endeavors about his rediscovery of the ocean – thanks to his son’s passion for it – and some very kind words about SeaMontser: I’m falling back in love with the ocean, and I have my four-year-old son to thank. When I was a kid, every summer my parents took…
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Surfer Babes
The top hits in a Google search for “female surfers” include a list of The Nine Hottest Female Surfers and an article at AskMen.com which muses that females have attracted more fans to the sport because, after all, “what red-blooded male doesn’t like to watch sexy female surfers prep on the beach and get wet…
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Breaking news: Shark fishing banned in the Bahamas!
The BBC is reporting that shark fishing has been banned in the Bahamas! About time. My lab is working on the role of sharks and other top predators in coral reef food webs and one of the few places in the Caribbean that we can go to work with sharks is the Bahamas. This ban went…
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Thousands of baby octopus caught on camera
I’ll be honest with you. When I first clicked on this 7+ minute video at the Huffington Post, I didn’t expect to sit through the whole thing without skipping forwards to the action (around 3:24 we’re told). But I was completely sucked in by this moving footage of a female giant pacific octopus, nurturing her…
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Ove Hoegh-Guldberg on the state of the GBR
Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, has responded to Bob Carter’s recent characterization of the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef being in “fine fettle”, i.e., good health. What’s the current state of the GBR (i.e. is it really “in fine fettle”)? Despite being one of the best managed marine ecosystems…