Tag: coral reefs
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Occupy Jamaica, Part 2: The lay of the reef
Discovery Bay, Jamaica. 8:23 PM. End of my second full (long) day since arriving Friday afternoon. Kristin, James, and Solomon had arrived Tuesday — three days ahead of me – and made good progress reconnoitering and sampling at the sites we’d worked in 2008. By this evening we had collected and processed over 100 samples…
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Coral Sea love
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/24594032[/vimeo] Julia Stone sings her beautiful song In the City of Lights, and Angus Stone and Isobel Lucas ask for your help to protect the Coral Sea. Visit Protect Our Coral Sea to support the campaign to strictly protect more of the Coral Sea – there’s 40 days left!
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Best invertebrate porn I’ve seen all week
I mean, not that I go looking for it or anything . . . but you will see from the video why they call it (no I am not making this up) penis fencing. And watch carefully: they each have two. Not sure exactly where they put them but, well, let’s not go there. Truth,…
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Occupy Jamaica, Part 1: Prelude
[Part 1 in the SeaMonster Expedition series: Jamaica. the team finalizes preparations for a 10-day research trip to Jamaica to solve the mystery of large, cooperative societies in lowly shrimp.] As ice skins over Timberneck Creek among the bare trees of Virginia, we are eagerly staging gear and making preparations for our first expedition of…
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Fact checking the 60 Minutes segment on Gardens of the Queen
60 Minutes ran a really great piece on Jardines de la Reina or Gardens of the Queen (GQ), last night. GQ is a spectacular reef off of Cuba’s south coast with abundant predators including goliath and black grouper and Caribbean reef sharks. My PhD student Abel Valdivia (seen in the video above) is from Cuba and GQ…
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Underwater “Paper Parks”?
From this week’s Nature: “The easiest way to create a nature reserve from a car park is simply to declare it as such. The land is then designated as protected, and counts towards the relevant government’s targets to set aside a certain amount of its territory from development. That is a ridiculous example, of course,…
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Coral Sea could become world’s largest marine reserve
Next week, the Australian Government is expected to announce plans to protect the Coral Sea, a huge area of ocean (around 1 million square kms) between Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Conservationists are hoping the government will grasp the opportunity to fully protect this extraordinary piece of…
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Marine biodiversity: The tip of the iceberg
Who doesn’t love whales, beautiful fishes, octopuses, corals — even sharks? You know that we do here at SeaMonster. But those charismatic megafauna, as they are rather cumbersomely known in the conservation science-geek community, are only the tip of the biodiversity iceberg. Down in the jumbled rubble on the floor of the reef, among the…
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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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Watch out tasty reef critters
Coral reefs are dangerous places to hang out if you’re small and tasty. There are many mouths out to get you and now there’s one more thing to worry about: mobs of fish rampaging the reef in search of dinner. Recently here at Seamonster we’ve had fish brandishing tools and now we have cunning fish…