Report Cards Are In, We’re Failing “Oceans”

The Joint Ocean Commission released its 2006 oceans report card today, accompanied by a letter to President Bush urging more progress, backed up by more funding, to protect oceans and the fish in them.
How did we do? Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be bringing this one back to show my dad.
Our nation’s lackluster [...]

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Submarine Alvin? This Is Outer Space, Over

At about 11:45 Scribbler time today, NASA astronaut Suni Williams picked up her radio and made the first ever space-to-deep-sea phone call, to Woods Hole oceanographer Tim Shank.
Williams was nearly 250 miles up in space, aboard the International Space Station. Shank was about 2 miles deep in the Pacific Ocean, aboard Woods Hole’s deep-sea [...]

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Brazilian nuthatch snow party

Just want to send you over to Contemplative Nuthatch for a fantastic piece of DIY nature show. A recent cold winter morning brought droves of birds out to the Contemplator’s suet feeder. He was ready with his digital camera and 1-Gb flash card.
The budding Atten-boy produced a nature show for the new millennium (or at [...]

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Housecats Slap Otters with 78 Tons of Dung

Sea otters – those fantastically adorable, overgrown weasels of the kelp – are highlights of any sightseeing trip along the California coast. But recent years have seen dozens die of toxoplasmosis, a parasite that reproduces in cats and causes neurological problems when it finds its way into otters. That happens when parasite eggs contained in [...]

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Eddie Bauer Stretches Claims a Bit

I’m on record as being happy that climate change has finally become an issue that regular folks can sit up and take notice of. People other than career climate scientists now seem to recognize ideas such as (a) sea levels are rising, (b) warmer waters are to hurricanes as gasoline is to a barbecue, and [...]

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New stars found in constellation of ocean life

 
It may look like a deep-space photo from the early days of the Hubble telescope. But it’s actually a new – and very small – kind of life from the ocean, measuring about 2 microns across. The discovery is one of two fantastic but largely overlooked ocean discoveries reported in this week’s Science.
The hubbub comes [...]

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Sold to developers for $150 million

Point Conception, the grand elbow in California’s coastline, has been sold along with more than 25,000 acres of undeveloped coastal ranches. Surfline has the story along with a prognosis.
Sitting some 50 miles west of Santa Barbara, Point Conception is where Southern California officially begins. The privately held ranches always served as a sort of insulation [...]

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Birds fall from skies in two hemispheres

Two curious episodes of mass bird deaths are bewildering authorities and the public in Austin, Texas, and in Western Australia. In Austin on Monday, about 60 dead pigeons, sparrows, and grackles (pictured) looked sufficiently creepy for police to cordon off 10 downtown blocks. The best guess for the cause of death so far is poisoning [...]

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Mammals 2, Birds 0

Two regrettable recent stories, each with mammals in the villain’s role: The humble mouse terrorizes seabird populations on a remote island; and Dutch shorebirds abandon a marine reserve because of shellfish dredging.
In far and away the more macabre story, on tiny Gough Island in the South Atlantic, thousands of endemic albatrosses and hundreds of thousands [...]

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Knowledge = (Cheaper) Power

In an understated stroke of genius, some clever folks have proposed that we start paying attention to our power meters.
You know, those cobwebby boxes that cling under your eaves like big gray fruit bats. The ones with the quaint row of dials quietly ticking off your power usage with analog precision. It wouldn’t stretch the [...]

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