Author: Helen Scales
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How to spot a mimic octopus
Love this ID chart from xkdc. HT to Ben Shearon.
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Coral reefs get the CSI treatment
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6TqPxxvWvc[/youtube] It’s a shame Sherlock Holmes never learned to Scuba dive because he could have put his sleuthing skills towards bringing in coral reef villains. Pioneers in the field of underwater forensic investigation are the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) and the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) who are working together on the Coral Reef CSI project.…
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Helen Arney sings ‘Animals’ (with moderate levels of fish-related naughtiness)
I’ve just about finished washing off the mud after spending the weekend getting rained on in a field in Suffolk (England). Among the festival of delights at Latitude – awesome music, literature, comedy etc – was the wonderful songwriter/comedian/science geek Helen Arney. Here’s Helen singing about animals and the things they get up to make…
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Crabes et crevettes (1929) – Part I
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP16_fgkePE&feature=related[/youtube] It seems we only have room in our hearts for one pioneering French underwater filmmaker because few people remember the life and works of Jean Painleve. He began making underwater movies in the 1920’s – some on location and some in aquarium tanks – and was renowned (in France at least) for his offbeat blend…
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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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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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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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Shark tagging – the low down
I wrote already about some of the latest technologies that are letting scientists get useful data out of a shark without killing it (including shark ultra-sound and DNA fingerprinting their partially digested puke), and of course there’s a whole lot we can find out by sneaking up on a shark and sticking a tag…