Author: Emmett Duffy
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Florida: haven for illegal immigrants
OK, so strictly speaking this has nothing to do with the Sea, except insofar as the Everglades are a semi-aquatic environment that drains at some remove into salt water. Still, it involves a large cold-blooded predator exhibiting a classic ecological interaction in a vivid and, well, somewhat appalling way. Which is good enough for me.…
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The real faces of science
I know you’re busy. But this will only take a moment of your time. Really. And afterwards you will feel buoyed, empowered, brighter, stronger, smarter, more luminous. Well, relieved anyway. These, my friends, are Women Scientists Making Faces. And some of them work at sea. Watch out Hollywood movie stars, they’re coming after ya. Roll…
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Chesapeake resurrection? Dead zones coming back to life
Living here on the shores of the great Chesapeake Bay it’s sometimes challenging to keep the old chin up and maintain a positive attitude, what with the constant drumbeat of failing report cards, increasingly murky water, receding acreage of seagrass meadows, and ever growing list of once fabulously abundant fish and shellfish that are now…
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Kelp me
We’ve done plenty of fluid inspirational coral reef videos and surf videos. How about one from the kelp forest — with soundtrack? [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11200197[/vimeo] Hat tip to Jarrett Byrnes. Video by Gary Hawkins.
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A price tag on Paradise?
How much is nature worth? We can put a price tag on a fish (say, $350,000 for a prime condition bluefin tuna in Tokyo), or even on a salt marsh if it provides a breakwater out front of the house that reduces one’s flood insurance premium. But what about the value of Nature per se–the…
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Rising seas – coming to get ya
Strictly speaking, we don’t know to what extent this dramatic cliff failure can be traced to climate change and rising sea levels. But we can be reasonably confident that we’re looking forward to more of the same in the coming decades. SeaMonster’s own Helen surfs in this vicinity from time to time — good thing…
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Shark fins banned in world’s 2nd largest market — California
Yes, America, the California market for shark-fin soup is the largest outside Asia. Which means that much of the carnage John has documented in previous SeaMonster posts (see here, here, and here) is washing up right here in your backyard. Read it and weep. But the sun also rises. The California legislature passed the shark-fin…
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Rough seas for National Ocean Policy
Last summer, to the excitement of ocean policy wonks and yawns by pretty much everyone else, President Obama unveiled a new National Ocean Policy. The basic idea was to cut through the impenetrable tangle of regulations governing marine activities like fishing, shipping, oil drilling, and conservation that have sprouted up willy-nilly in the various agencies…
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Fish – the tool user
Used to be us primates. Then the birds, and now this. Watch your back–the lower vertebrates are getting uppity: The perpetrator was an an orange-dotted tuskfish. The deed was caught on film by Giacomo Bernardi of UC Santa Cruz. From the story at Science Daily: ‘”What the movie shows is very interesting. The animal excavates sand…
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Yeti crab – the Movie!
Live from the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Aberdeen, it’s . . . Yeti Crab – the Movie! Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order. We’re live (sort of) in Aberdeen with 953 of our closest friends and colleagues, catching up on the cutting edge of research on the wondrous and varied life…