My ocean tweet roundup
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
If you’ve been watching my tweets lately, you’ll probably already have noticed I like to link to ocean stories from around the web.
So I thought I’d give you some thoughts on my favourite ocean tweets from the past week.
For starters, it seemed to be a week of great seahorse fecundity with the announcement of baby seahorses being born in two English aquariums. We had spotted or yellow seahorses in Chester – a species native to the Indo-Pacific.
And then the patter of tiny fins could be heard in Hastings with the arrival of 200 baby short snouts. These are European seahorses that live around the UK coastline and down into the Mediterranean.
Seahorses have been having babies in British aquariums since Victorian times, so this is nothing especially new. But it obviously still exciting.
Photo by Kelly Graham/Marine Photobank
As I discuss in Poseidon’s Steed, keeping seahorses in aquariums helps spread the word about these extraordinary creatures and of course raises awareness about the problems they face in the wild. And with breeding programmes like these two, and many others around the world, aquariums don’t have to rely on wild caught seahorses for their displays.
On a more worrying note, if you haven’t already, then take 30 seconds out of your day to watch a video on the Guardian website showing the sea ice at the north pole shrinking from 1978 to 2008.
Back in the late seventies, satellites first started taking pictures from space of the extent of sea ice over the arctic. Since then, the sea ice has fluctuated annually but overall has been contracting, with 2009 being the 3rd lowest extent on record.
And despite the slight recovery from 2008, scientists are still convinced that in the next few years the arctic will become completely ice-free during the summer.
Arctic Sea ice age in February 2008 compared to the average for 1985-2000. NASA.
Believe what you will about climate change, but this to me is stark evidence of the changes that have been taking place in the environment in the past few decades, and a worying sign of the changes still to come.
And finally…
This week we saw a cheery bit of ocean trivia. A video of bottlenose dolphins getting up to some strange jellyfish tricks has been doing the rounds.
Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). NASA.
The footage came from Tremadog Bay in Wales, and you can see the researchers onboard laughing themselves silly at the spectacle.
It’s not too obvious on the video clip but when the dolphins got a good aim, they flipped the jellyfish clear out of the water.
It’s behaviour that’s never been see before, but perhaps goes some way to explaining why captive dolphins know what to do when a beach ball is thrown at them.
And why are they doing it? Well, who knows. I’d like to think they were just having a bit of fun.
Thanks for reading. More from me and the ocean world soon.
If you’ve been watching my tweets lately, you’ll probably already have noticed I like to link to ocean stories from around the web.
So I thought I’d give you some thoughts on my favourite ocean tweets from the past week.
For starters, it seemed to be a week of great seahorse fecundity with the announcement of baby seahorses being born in two English aquariums. We had spotted or yellow seahorses in Chester – a species native to the Indo-Pacific.
And then the patter of tiny fins could be heard in Hastings with the arrival of 200 baby short snouts. These are European seahorses that live around the UK coastline and down into the Mediterranean.
Seahorses have been having babies in British aquariums since Victorian times, so this is nothing especially new. But it obviously still exciting.
Photo by Kelly Graham/Marine Photobank
As I discuss in Poseidon’s Steed, keeping seahorses in aquariums helps spread the word about these extraordinary creatures and of course raises awareness about the problems they face in the wild. And with breeding programmes like these two, and many others around the world, aquariums don’t have to rely on wild caught seahorses for their displays.
On a more worrying note, if you haven’t already, then take 30 seconds out of your day to watch a video on the Guardian website showing the sea ice at the north pole shrinking from 1978 to 2008.
Back in the late seventies, satellites first started taking pictures from space of the extent of sea ice over the arctic. Since then, the sea ice has fluctuated annually but overall has been contracting, with 2009 being the 3rd lowest extent on record.
And despite the slight recovery from 2008, scientists are still convinced that in the next few years the arctic will become completely ice-free during the summer.
Arctic Sea ice age in February 2008 compared to the average for 1985-2000. NASA.
Believe what you will about climate change, but this to me is stark evidence of the changes that have been taking place in the environment in the past few decades, and a worying sign of the changes still to come.
And finally…
This week we saw a cheery bit of ocean trivia. A video of bottlenose dolphins getting up to some strange jellyfish tricks has been doing the rounds.
Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). NASA.
The footage came from Tremadog Bay in Wales, and you can see the researchers onboard laughing themselves silly at the spectacle.
It’s not too obvious on the video clip but when the dolphins got a good aim, they flipped the jellyfish clear out of the water.
It’s behaviour that’s never been see before, but perhaps goes some way to explaining why captive dolphins know what to do when a beach ball is thrown at them.
And why are they doing it? Well, who knows. I’d like to think they were just having a bit of fun.
Thanks for reading. More from me and the ocean world soon.