Ocean Photography by Japan’s Ryo Minemizu

Countdown to Calving at Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf

Cracks growing across Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf are poised to release an iceberg with an area about twice the size of New York City, (about 604 square miles). It is not yet clear how the remaining ice shelf will respond following the break, posing an uncertain future for scientific infrastructure and a human presence on the shelf that was first established in 1955.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen, with image interpretation by Chris Shuman (NASA/UMBC).

The above image, from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the area on January 23, 2019. The crack along the top of the image—the so-called Halloween crack—first appeared in late October 2016 and continues to grow eastward from an area known as the McDonald Ice Rumples. The rumples are due to the way ice flows over an underwater formation, where the bedrock rises high enough to reach into the underside of the ice shelf. This rocky formation impedes the flow of ice and causes pressure waves, crevasses, and rifts to form at the surface.

The more immediate concern is the rift visible in the center of the image. Previously stable for about 35 years, this crack recently started accelerating northward as fast as 4 kilometers per year.

Calving is a normal part of the life cycle of ice shelves, but the recent changes are unfamiliar in this area. The edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has evolved slowly since Ernest Shackleton surveyed the coast in 1915, but it has been speeding up in the past several years.

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Two porpoise carcasses found on separate Hong Kong shores, bringing number of cases this year to 15 – an alarming trend, green groups warn

Ernest Kao - February 12, 2019

Two porpoise carcasses were found on separate Hong Kong shores on Sunday, bringing the total number of stranded cases involving the marine animal to 15 this year – a figure that was alarming, conservationists warned. The severely decomposed bodies of an adult male and male calf, measuring 1.66 metres and 1.36 metres respectively, were found in Tap Mun and Sai Kung, with the latter having a 34cm wound on its abdomen. Both belong to the finless porpoise species.

The incidents were reported to the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation, which helps the government respond to and investigate all stranded cetacean cases.

“The causes of death are yet to be determined,” a foundation spokesman said. “[The foundation] has transported the carcasses to Ocean Park for further necropsy.”

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Me reading academic papers: incoherent nonsense. Bullshit. I could write better than this in my sleep

Me writing academic papers: this sentence is 206 words long and contains 19 commas & a semicolon, fuck you

all species of conch look utterly suspicious and vaguely terrified their entire lives

Pantone predicted this.

and now, perhaps the most vital work I will ever do: using colordistance to objectively prove which David Bowie outfit most closely matches a given sea slug. congratulations to ceratosoma trilobatum, the coral family of colors, and also to me, for peaking early pic.twitter.com/ZaMypDB8dx

— Hannah Weller (@hannahiweller) February 6, 2019

While his connection to whales is one he feels in his heart, Inslee said, it is also one he understands as rooted in ecology. From reducing toxins in the water to boosting salmon in the rivers, “When we are taking care of Tahlequah, we are taking care of us,” Inslee said.

His proposals include:

• Nearly $363 million in the capital budget for salmon recovery, culvert removal, water-quality and water-supply projects around the state.

• $296 million in the Washington State Department of Transportation budget for culvert repairs to respond to a federal-district court injunction requiring the work, a judgment affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

• $12 million to boost hatchery production of chinook, the orcas’ primary food much of the year.

• $750,000 to support evaluation by a task force of breaching the Lower Snake River dams as a way to increase chinook for southern resident orcas. The group is directed to examine the economic and social costs and benefits and ways to mitigate breaching effects for shippers, irrigators, utilities, ports, tribes, fishermen and others.

Bow tie  by: Ashley Dowle

Warm blooded creature: wow I’m chilly

Warm blooded creature: *vibrates*

apparently one whale years ago was observed doing this for hours and now more and more whales in the area are seen copying it so we think it’s a whole new behavior and it seems to be a response to shrinking food sources.

Instead of expending any energy actively hunting, the whale just holds its mouth open wherever fish are being hunted by birds. To escape the birds, the fish try to hide in the whale’s mouth because it’s a darker area that looks like shelter. …They’re turning into giant, sea-mammal pitcher plants.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/mms.12557?referrer_access_token=bXLTS5BeSw_vlIKHkM0bYIta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC654HjreJ8D19K86UreR5JPsSRb0CuGhiJSV1L1ht-N1Gf_K_1a9MREFzQGU9oJDNctsKDin_HXcYEdsLg3EbcTl

This tweet from scientist Jacquelyn Gill (@JacqelynGill) went viral, and for good reason. The war on science continues, and she summed up this story perfectly into 3 sentences on Twitter. 

Read the full article: http://bit.ly/2AxVBf3

Take action to keep standing up for science: http://bit.ly/2gOFm5N

We can now add belugas and narwhals to the list of animals that undergo menopause! This phenomenon is known to exist in humans, killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, and possibly false killer whales.

Here’s the link to the full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31047-8

This is a how a shark nursery looks like. A team of marine scientists have discovered a Blackmouth catshark (Galeus melastomus) nursery, 320 km west of Ireland while investigating Ireland’s deep ocean territory.  Despite blackmouth shark are common, this is a rare finding. Using ROVs (Remote Operated Vehicle), researchers captured underwater images of an area dominated by blackmouth sharks, images show a very large numbers of egg cases filmed on the seafloor at depths of up to 750 metres. What strongly suggests this area as an breeding zone, where sharks meet and copulates, and where females may gather in the area to lay their eggs.

Video source: marineinstituteIRL

[Gif 1 and 2 description: blackmouth catshark are small and thin. Are swimming near the bottom, surrounding a large number of egg case]

The day I found out just how much a whale weighs...

Okay, so here’s a little behind-the-scenes: marine biologist edition

The day we necropsied the entangled humpback whale, we had set up a perimeter of caution tape to give us some room to work. A little portion of the whale’s tail fluke stuck out beyond it just enough to inspire young children to curiously touch it (@ parents please keep your children from touching the literal corpse rotting on the beach it’s actually a biohazard) so anyway we’re taking body measurements and removing samples of blubber and such from the animal and preparing them for dispersal to their respective laboratories for analysis, including some internal organs as well to find out if it had eaten while it was entangled. This means we have to remove a large enough portion of blubber to get inside and lemme tell you whalers were probably ripped to hell because getting inside of a whale is literally the most physically exhausting task on earth. So later on our stranding coordinator asks me for a photograph of the flukes so we could possibly identify the deceased whale, it’s valuable information for us.

Now I’m thinking to myself “wow, what a perfect opportunity to move the whale’s tail just a short ways back to pull it behind the caution tape, that’ll keep the kids from touching it” because for some reason my coffee and food deprived college brain didn’t think twice about the fact that this whale is as long as a damn semi truck and weighs 30 metric tons. And so while my coworkers were up at the head of the whale, I went over to the tail when the crowd had kinda left and I already had my gloves on from earlier so I just figured okay let’s get that photograph and I knelt down and grabbed onto one of its flukes (which collectively are about you know approx. 10 feet wide or something) and I nonchalantly proceeded to try and hoist it over to the side.

The whale fluke absolutely did not move anywhere but I did however rip the most passionate fart of my life.

you KNOW we scavenging the sea floor for nutrients

Killing of baby orca raises questions about whales’ social structure

Christopher Dunagan - Mar. 31, 2018

By now, you might have heard about the male transient killer whale who attacked and killed a newborn orca while the baby was swimming next to its mother.

Jared Towers, a researcher with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, witnessed the killing. He said he was both “horrified and fascinated” by the event, which he described as the first case of infanticide ever reported among killer whales. The incident took place in Canadian waters near the north end of Vancouver Island.

Jared told reporter Bethany Lindsey of CBC News that the distressing scene is something that he will never be able to unsee, but he did his best to observe and record the rare incident.

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