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Stop illegal fishing

Editor — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:47:21 +0100

Music - John Debney - Resurrection
seahorse birth - Rico at http://www.youtube.com/user/buschtall
Craig Smith, Michael Martinez, and Eric Sumner - Damaged Reef footage
Coral Reef Adventure - Microsoft
The Living Sea - Microsoft
blast fishing footage - ilewellynvanessen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C2c2e...
dead coral pic - Trevor McDonald www.nhpa.co.uk
dead seahorse - glaucus.org.uk
dead seahorses - http://www.jonlee.ca/wp-content/uploa...

Deep sea submersible in Curaçao

Arnold — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:50:45 +0100

Deep-sea observatory goes live

Arnold — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:57:48 +0100

Using dual- frequency sonar to detect juvenile Goliath grouper

Editor — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:56:30 +0100

Juvenile E. itajara in mangrove undercut (DIDSON). This video includes the DIDSON frame from Fig. 2. Here, undisturbed swim and resting behavior can be observed. The DIDSON video stream begins with a long shot of a mangrove undercut. A juvenile E. itajara enters the field of view (FOV) at the 1.5 m marker on the right of the image, and remains in the area delimited by the 1.5 m a 2.0 m markers at either side of the FOV. At time 44 s a second E. itajara enters the FOV at the 1.5 m marker on the left side of the image, remaining parallel to the first fish, and then exits the FOV on the left side along the 2.0 m marker at time 1 m 12 s. The remaining E. itajara exits the FOV on the right side below the 2.0 m marker at time 1 m 15 s.

Using dual-frequency sonar to detect juvenile goliath Grouper

Editor — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:42:05 +0100

Palm Beach Coral Reef Sustains Catastrophic Damage

Arnold — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:18:09 +0100

"This is the worst I've ever seen from a single event," Steve Spring, project manager for Reef Rescue, told AHN during a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon.

New life beneath sea and ice

Arnold — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:08:37 +0100

At a European Science Foundation and COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) 'Frontiers of Science' meeting in Sicily in October, scientists described apparently productive ecosystems in two places where life was not known before, under the Antarctic ice sheet, and above concentrated salt lakes beneath the Mediterranean. In both cases, innumerable tiny microbes are fixing or holding onto quantities of organic carbon large enough to be significant in the global carbon cycle.

Lakes under the ice
Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, in the US, told the conference about the microbes living within and beneath the ice on Antarctica. In the last decade, scientists have discovered lakes of liquid water underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. So far we know of about 150 lakes, but this number will probably increase when the entire continent has been surveyed. These lakes occur as a result of geothermal heat trapped by the thick ice, melting it from underneath, and the great pressure from the ice above, which lowers the melting point of water.

The largest subglacial lake, Lake Vostok, lies beneath the coldest place on the planet, where the temperature at the surface often falls below -60*C. "It's the sixth largest freshwater lake on the planet by volume, and about the size of Lake Ontario," says Christner. "If you were on a boat in the middle of the lake, you would not see shores."

Christner has examined microbial life in ice cores from Vostok and many other global locations. While direct samples of water from subglacial Antarctic lakes have yet to be obtained, the lower 80m or so of the Vostok ice core represents lake water that progressively freezes onto the base as the ice sheet slowly traverses the lake. "Microbial cell and organic carbon concentrations in this accreted ice are significantly higher than those in the overlying ice, which implies that the subglacial environment is the source," says Christner.

Based on accumulating measurements of microbes in the subglacial environment, he calculates that the concentration of cell and organic carbon in the Earth's ice sheets, or 'cryosphere', may be hundreds of times higher than what is found in all the planet's freshwater systems. "Glacial ice is not currently considered as a reservoir for organic carbon and biology," says Christner, "but that view has to change."

Salt below the sea
Beneath the Mediterranean lurks a similar surprise. Michail Yakimov of the Institute of the Coastal Marine Environment, Messina, Italy is a project leader for the European Science Foundation's EuroDEEP programme on ecosystem functions and biodiversity in the deep sea. His team studies lakes of concentrated salt solution, known as anoxic hypersaline basins, on the floor of the Mediterranean. They have discovered extremely diverse microbial communities on the surfaces of such lakes.

The anoxic basins, so called because they are devoid of oxygen, occur below 3,000 m beneath the surface and are five to ten times more saline than seawater. One theory says they exist uniquely in the Mediterranean, because this sea entirely evaporated after it was cut off from the Atlantic around 250 million years ago. Its salt became a layer of rock salt, called evaporite, which was then buried by windblown sediment. Now the sea is filled again, the salt layer has been exposed in some places, perhaps by small seaquakes, and the salts from the ancient Mediterranean have dissolved again, making the water very salty.

Despite the harsh conditions, hypersaline brines have been shown to possess a wide range of active microbial communities. Together with other international partners, Yakimov's team has already identified more than ten new lineages of bacteria and archaea (these are ancient bacteria-like organisms), which they have named the Mediterranean Sea Brine Lake Divisions.

There is ample life at the boundary between the concentrated basin and the ordinary seawater. "Because of the very high density of the brine, it does not mix with seawater," he explains, "and there is a sharp interface, about 1m thick."

In that layer, microbial diversity is incredibly rich. The research shows that these microbes largely live by sulphide oxidation. Like the communities at hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, they can survive independently of sunlight and oxygen. But they are an important store for organic carbon. "The deep-sea microbial communities in the Mediterranean fix as much or even more carbon dioxide each year as those in the surface layers," says Yakimov. "This carbon sink should be taken into account at the global scale."
This research was presented at the "Complex Systems: Water and Life" Frontiers of Science conference, organized by European Science Foundation and COST, 29-31 October, Taormina, Sicily. http://www.esf.org/research-areas/life-earth-and-environmental-sciences/....

Researchers trace octopuses’ family tree

Arnold — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:48:06 +0100

These huge climatic events created a ‘thermohaline expressway’ - a northbound flow of deep cold water, providing new habitat for the animals previously confined to the sea floor around Antarctica.

Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved. Some octopuses lost their defensive ink sacs because there was no need for the defence mechanisms in the pitch black waters more than two kilometres below the surface.

Dr Allcock, who was assisted on the study by Dr Jan Strugnell and Dr Paulo Prodöhl from Queen’s, said: “It is clear from our research that climate change can have profound effects on biodiversity, with impacts even extending into habitats such as the deep oceans which you might expect would be partially protected from it.

“If octopuses radiated in this way, it’s likely that other fauna did so also, so we have helped explain where some of the deep-sea biodiversity comes from.”

This revelation into the global distribution and diversity of deep-sea fauna, to be reported this week in the respected scientific journal Cladistics, was made possible by intensive sampling during International Polar Year expeditions.

The findings form part of the first Census of Marine Life (CoML), set to be completed in late 2010. It aims to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the oceans, past, present and future.

The findings of a study funded by the National Environment Research Council and led by Dr Louise Allcock at Queen’s School of Biological Sciences and colleagues from Cambridge University and British Antarctic Survey were reported at a conference in Spain this week.