Tag: biodiversity
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Top Ten Sea Monsters (OK, make it a dozen)
We couldn’t have done this better ourselves. Meet the “12 most bizarre and frightening sea creatures“, courtesy of Asylum UK. This is so good I had to reproduce it: The planet Earth is full of scary stuff. Not just like the threat of bird-flu and unemployment, but even scarier things like angry bears and bity…
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The Sea Hag: Ugliest creature on earth?
As marine biologists we consider it our solemn duty to celebrate and sing of the beautiful and charismatic animals that live beneath the waves (see for example here and here). But every now and then one has to face the fact that some animals are, well, just plain disgusting. Alas, not everyone can be a…
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Post oil: Can rigs become reefs?
As ocean oil rigs run dry, the nemesis of many environmentalists may produce a silver lining. Defunct oil rigs are popular dive spots in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas (such as the Celebes Sea) because of the rich communities of reef life and fishes these structures attract on otherwise sandy bottoms. They are…
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Whale culture dispersed by traveling minstrels
New research shows that the legendary songs of humpback whales evolve rapidly as they’re spread throughout the world’s population by traveling males whose new songs are adopted by listeners along their migration routes. Male humpbacks have a highly stereotyped, repetitive, song that functions in sexual selection, either through mate attraction or male “social sorting”. Males…
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Diversity: It Matters! (for plants & algae)
I recently blogged about a new paper (a meta-analysis of hundreds of published experiments) on the influence of plant species richness on ecosystem functions, namely primary production. One of the co-authors – Dr. Jarrett Byrnes, a marine biodiversity expert – wrote a great post about the paper, explaining what they found and why diversity matters. You…
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Microdocs: Diversity
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuSJBYsku_8[/youtube] See more microdocs here
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Life and death of a real sea monster
No, this is not Nessie, or any of the other dubious beasts reported by sailors who got a bit too deep into the grog. This is a real live Sea Monster — well, OK it’s a real dead one. And has been for 150 million years. But it may be the biggest marine predator that…
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The fish that launched a thousand ships, then disappeared
A recent analysis clinches the growing evidence that the North Atlantic is a unique region of the world ocean, and helps explain both its special vulnerability to fishing, and perhaps also its fundamental importance in the historical expansion of European influence around the globe. This is a big fish tale. Scientifically speaking, the body size…
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An antidote to gloom ‘n’ doom: Ocean chill
The Blue Planet set to music. Lean back . . . [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jema_dTA8wM[/youtube]
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Have we reached “peak fish”?
During the 20th century fishing became a heavy industry, expanding rapidly to the global scale, and fishing pressure now appears to be near—if not beyond—the ocean’s capacity to provide. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recently reported that “the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been…