tagged w/ aquatic life
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"Durrell's vontsira is the first new carnivorous mammal discovered in Madagascar in 24 years. Little is known about the species, which is roughly the size of a cat""Durrell's vontsira is the first new carnivorous mammal discovered in... more
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Shark survivors team up to save species
Some lost limbs, but they now lobby U.N. for protections
Photo - Diane Bondareff / AP - Shark attack survivors organized by The Pew Environment Group gather outside the United Nations in New York on Sunday.
By JOHN HEILPRIN
updated 9/13/2010 3:04:12 PM ET
UNITED NATIONS — They have the scars and missing limbs that make it hard to forgive, but these victims are tougher than most. And now they want to save their attackers.
They are shark attack survivors, a band of nine thrown together in an unlikely and ironic mission to conserve the very creatures that ripped their flesh, tore off their limbs and nearly took their lives.
They want nations to adopt a resolution that would require them to greatly improve how fish are managed, including shark species of which nearly a third are threatened with extinction or on the verge of being threatened.
"If a group like us can see the value in saving sharks, can't everyone?" asked Florida shark bite victim Debbie Salamone, 44, whose Achilles tendon was severed in a 2004 attack that temporarily halted her ballroom dance hobby.
Salamone, a former journalist, initially made plans to eat shark steaks in revenge. Then, she said, she turned tragedy to something productive by joining the Washington-based nonprofit Pew Environment Group and recruiting like-minded shark attack survivors to work for shark conversation.
The group gathered at U.N. headquarters Monday hoping to win new protections globally for the ocean's top predators.
"We do not have scientific management plans for how many sharks can be caught," Matt Rand, director of Global Shark Conservation for the Pew Environment Group told reporters at the United Nations. "There are no limits."
Speaking with the attack survivors at a news conference held to draw attention to the world's dwindling shark population, Rand said the U.N. and its member nations must do more to resolve the problem.
Among the group's goals is to end the practice of shark finning, which kills an estimated 73 million sharks a year. Fishermen slice off shark fins, which sell for hundreds of dollars a pound for use in soup mostly in Asian markets, but dump the animal back in the water where it drowns or bleeds to death.
Because sharks are slow growing, late to mature and produce few young, they are unable to replenish their populations as quickly as they are caught, Rand said in an earlier interview. Shark attack survivors also have sought U.S. legislation to close what they view as loopholes in the country's shark finning ban.
The survivors, ages 21 to 55, say being in the wrong place at the wrong time needn't diminish their love for the ocean, where they enjoyed surfing, swimming and diving and knew the risks.
They now see greater risks to the sharks and are asking the U.N. to halt fishing of threatened and near-threatened shark species and adopt shark conservation plans to study and impose scientific limits on shark catches.
Former lifeguard Achmat Hassiem, 29, of Cape Town, South Africa, lost his foot when a shark attacked him during rescue practice four years ago and said he now believes certain things happen for a reason.
"My dream was to one day become a marine biologist and focus on helping and protecting Earth's aquatic life. To participate in this event is an honor," he said.
More than a decade ago, nations agreed to voluntarily produce shark management plans, but only about 40 of some 130 nations followed through. International trade restrictions are in place for only three shark species: basking, whale and white sharks.
"Do we have the right to drive any animal to the brink of extinction before any action is taken?" asked Navy diver Paul de Gelder, 33, of Sydney, Australia, who lost his right hand and right lower leg in an attack last year during antiterrorism exercises.
"Regardless of what an animal does according to its base instincts of survival, it has its place in our world," he said. "We have an obligation to protect and maintain the natural balance of our delicate ecosystems."Shark survivors team up to save species
Some lost limbs, but they now lobby U.N. for... more
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By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.
Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP’s use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known as Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.
The dispersal agent Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco Holding Company of Naperville, Illinois that is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm). In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed. Even worse, according to this report, with higher water temperatures, like those now occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, its toxicity grows.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in discovering BP’s use of this dangerous dispersal agent ordered BP to stop using it, but BP refused stating that their only alternative to Corexit 9500 was an even more dangerous dispersal agent known as Sea Brat 4.
The main differences between Corexit 9500 and Sea Brat 4 lie in how long these dangerous chemicals take to degrade into their constituent organic compounds, which for Corexit 9500 is 28 days. Sea Brat 4, on the other hand, degrades into an organic chemical called Nonylphenol that is toxic to aquatic life and can persist in the environment for years.
A greater danger involving Corexit 9500, and as outlined by Russian scientists in this report, is that with its 2.61ppm toxicity level, and when combined with the heating Gulf of Mexico waters, its molecules will be able to “phase transition” from their present liquid to a gaseous state allowing them to be absorbed into clouds and allowing their release as “toxic rain” upon all of Eastern North America.
Even worse, should a Katrina like tropical hurricane form in the Gulf of Mexico while tens of millions of gallons of Corexit 9500 are sitting on, or near, its surface the resulting “toxic rain” falling upon the North American continent could “theoretically” destroy all microbial life to any depth it reaches resulting in an “unimaginable environmental catastrophe” destroying all life forms from the “bottom of the evolutionary chart to the top”.
Note: For molecules of a liquid to evaporate, they must be located near the surface, be moving in the proper direction, and have sufficient kinetic energy to overcome liquid-phase intermolecular forces. Only a small proportion of the molecules meet these criteria, so the rate of evaporation is limited. Since the kinetic energy of a molecule is proportional to its temperature, evaporation proceeds more quickly at higher temperatures.
As over 50 miles of the US State of Louisiana’s coastline has already been destroyed by this spill, American scientists are warning that the damage may be impossible to repair, and as we can read as reported by the Associated Press News Service:
“The gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the Gulf Coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife, government officials and independent scientists said. Officials are considering some drastic and risky solutions: They could set the wetlands on fire or flood areas in hopes of floating out the oil. They warn an aggressive cleanup could ruin the marshes and do more harm than good.”
And to understand the full import of this catastrophe it must be remembered that this disaster is occurring in what is described as the “biologically richest waters in America” with the greatest amount of oil and toxic Corexit 9500 set to come ashore in the coming days and weeks to destroy it completely for decades to come.
Reports are also coming from the United States that their government is secretly preparing to evacuate tens-of-millions of their citizens from their Gulf of Mexico States should the most dire of these scientific warnings start to come true.
To the greatest lesson to be learned by these Americans is that their government-oil industry cabal has been just as destructive to them as their government-banking one, both of which have done more to destroy the United States these past couple of years than any foreign enemy could dare dream was possible.
But to their greatest enemy the Americans need look no further than their nearest mirror as they are the ones who allowed these monsters to rule over them in the first place.
www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1374.htm
© May 23, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved
[Ed. Note: Western governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagrees with in believing that it is every human beings right to know the truth. Due to our missions conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ against us has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit and which is addressed in the report “Who Is Sorcha Faal?”.]By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A dire report prepared... more
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I am not surprised in learning that the Atlantic Ocean’s garbage patch has now been discovered. Researchers carried out a two decade study in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic off of the US coast – the longest study on record of plastic marine debris conducted in any ocean basin. The maximum finding in an area being 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer, comparable to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This data has just recently been released by the Sea Education Association (SEA) who report over 6,100 tows having been performed in the aformentioned areas. The majority of specimens found were plastics used to make consumer items, as well as a bevvy of plastic bag remains, all no more than 1 cm across but large in number in some areas.
Dr. Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association explained, “We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time. More than 80% of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate.” (See picture above.)
(Read the rest of the article by visiting the original post.)I am not surprised in learning that the Atlantic Ocean’s garbage patch has now... more
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At the Leesburg Pharmacy, located in a Loudoun County strip mall, a big, round fish tank sits atop the prescription counter. There are no fish inside, not even any water: The tank is a repository for unused medications. People can drop off the Vicodin that didn't get used once the pain of a root canal subsided. Or the heart pills remaining after a grandmother's death. Or an asthma inhaler that had passed its expiration date. Or an antidepressant that turned out to have unpleasant side effects.
Once a week, the tank is emptied; the drugs are packed in cartons by pharmacy personnel and ultimately incinerated by a commercial waste firm.
"Our customers are thrilled because they had no idea what else to do with this stuff," said Cheri Garvin, chief executive of the employee-owned pharmacy.
These are customers who are trying to do the responsible thing. Over the years, Americans have been alerted to the dangers of a lot of problematic waste materials -- paint thinner, batteries, air conditioners. But leftover pills can seem so small, so easily disposable, that many people routinely flush them down toilets, wash them down sinks or throw them in trash that goes to a landfill.
And then they often end up in places where they shouldn't be, like the public water supply.
The average American takes more than 12 prescription drugs annually, with more than 3.8 billion prescriptions purchased each year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The most commonly cited estimates from Environmental Protection Agency researchers say that about 19 million tons of active pharmaceutical ingredients are dumped into the nation's waste stream every year.
The EPA has identified small quantities of more than 100 pharmaceuticals and personal-care products in samples of the nation's drinking water. Among the drugs detected are antibiotics, steroids, hormones and antidepressants. Last year, the Associated Press reported that trace amounts of drugs had been found in the water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas; water piped to more than a milllion people in the Washington area had tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.
The EPA does not require testing for drugs in drinking water and has not set safety limits on allowable levels. While the minute quantities now being detected appear not to pose an immediate health risk, according to federal authorities, "there is still uncertainty about their potential effects on public health and aquatic life" over the long term, the EPA's water chief, Benjamin Grumbles, told a Senate committee last year. But the impact of long-term exposure of drugs on humans as well as on other species is less clear. Hormone-disrupting pharmaceuticals, for example, are one possible cause of a high incidence of "intersex" fish in the Potomac River basin: male smallmouth bass producing eggs, females exhibiting male characteristics.
Until recently, federal guidelines recommended that surpluses of highly toxic medications be flushed down the toilet; the same advice applied to drugs with a high potential for abuse or "diversion" -- the industry's word for what happens, for example, when kids help themselves to the OxyContin or Percocet in their parents' medicine cabinet. For other drugs, consumers have been directed to adulterate the medication by mixing it with an unpalatable substance -- such as cat litter or coffee grounds -- and put it out with the household trash.
But this spring, concerns about pharmaceuticals in the water supply led the Office of National Drug Control Policy to amend its advisory, telling consumers to avoid flushing unless the label or patient information specifies that method of disposal. The new guidelines still describe the cat-litter method of putting drugs in the trash, but they also encourage consumers to make use of community drug take-back programs.
Article Continued at: http://climate.weather.com/articles/wpolddrugs_newtricks.html?page=2At the Leesburg Pharmacy, located in a Loudoun County strip mall, a big, round fish... more
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The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks, two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter, date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period.
The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.
Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, explained Loren Babcock, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.
"We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in the Ediacaran -- soft corals, some arthropods, and flatworms -- but the evidence has not been totally convincing," he said. "But if you find evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs -- an animal walking around -- then that makes the possibility much more likely."The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at... more
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Are aliens attacking the Sea of Japan? Not exactly. But these gigantic blobs are unwelcome visitors from another place. Called Nomura's jellyfish, the wiggly, pinkish giants can weigh up to 450 pounds (204 kilograms)—as heavy as a male lion—and they're swarming by the millions.
The supersize sea creatures—normally found off the coasts of China and North and South Korea—occasionally drift east into the Sea of Japan to feed on tiny organisms called plankton. But now one hundred times the usual number of jellyfish are invading Japanese waters. And local fishermen are feeling as if they are under siege.
The fishermen's nets are getting weighted down, or even broken, by hundreds of Nomura's. The jellies crush, slime, and poison valuable fish in the nets, such as the tuna and salmon that the fishermen rely on to make a living.
No one knows for sure what's causing this jellyfish traffic jam. It's possible that oceans heated by global warming are creating the perfect jellyfish breeding ground. Another theory is that overfishing has decreased the numbers of some fish, which may allow the jellies to chow down without competition for food. For now, all the fishermen can do is design special nets to try to keep the jellies out. Some of them hope to turn the catastrophe into cash by selling jellyfish snacks. Peanut butter and jellyfish, anyone?
Fast Facts
Baby Nomura's jellyfish change from the size of a grain of rice to the size of a washing machine in six months or less.
Jellyfish are 95% water.
Jellyfish aren't actually fish, they're invertebrates—animals without backbones.
Text by Ruth A. MusgraveAre aliens attacking the Sea of Japan? Not exactly. But these gigantic blobs are... more
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