Diving Thoughts

8 Taiwanese divers were rescued 48 hours after they went missing off Taitung. Full story is in this Taiwan News article, and there’s a China Post article too. They had drifted over 100 km from where they were diving and they were found largely due to 32 year old dive coach, Ting Po-ling, who swam 5 km in strong currents to give the emergency services a better idea of where they should be searching. The swim took him 11 hours.

It sounds as though they were incredibly lucky.

Scientists in New Zealand are defrosting a 10 metre long Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis), and when it has fully defrosted scientists will defrost it. It was caught in the Ross Sea in Feb 2007. You can read the full details at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7367774.stm. These squid are very rarely found, but are believed to live in the Antarctic and grow up to 15 metres in length. The first one was identified in 1925 after 2 tentacles were discovered in a sperm whale’s stomach.

The dissection will be shown live on a webcam which you can get to here. There is also an associated blog here.

They are also thawing out a smaller Colossal Squid and a giant squid. There are references to that on the blog and also some photos.  I’m a big calamari fan and it’s making me wonder how many portions you’d get out of that at Lamma or Po Toi.

I’ve just received an email from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Hong Kong regarding their Save Our Seas petition. I’ve reproduced it here for anyone who wants to sign up.

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Dear friends,

Thank your very help for your support to WWF in all these year. We need your help again to protect our marine environment.

WWF now is running a Save Our Seas (SOS) online petition signature campaign to ask the government to give a better protection to our marine heritage.

Please click to the below link , sign your name and send the link to your friends. You signature will be presentation to the Chief Executive in early June.


http://www.wwf.org.hk/chi/conservation/sos/petition2008.php

More details about the campaign are on our website.


WWF Hong Kong

http://www.wwf.org.hk

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In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, the coral spawning in Palau occurred on schedule with the full moon. You can read a BBC report here. The BBC article doesn’t mention any details of the experiments going on to seed coral reefs, but let’s hope that the captive coral that they have been collected also spawned successfully and that the scientists involved were able to collect the larvae they need. Anyway there is quite a good description of the spawning, as well as a video on the BBC website.

There’s a good article from the BBC about coral spawning, and some attempts to try seeding reefs that are not in good shape. The URL is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7357121.stm.

There is a full moon on 20th April 2008, which is expected to trigger mass coral spawning in Palau. Perhaps we need to try and arrange future Palau dive trips to coincide with that. Researchers have been collecting coral and moving them to a controlled environment in the hope that they can capture the coral larvae that are released. When they are mature enough, the plan is to pump them over areas of colonisation. They will then be monitored and compared with control sites to see whether this helps to boost the number of corals over the long-term.

The techniques they are using are deliberately low tech, as the hope is that they can be applied easily and simply by developing countries. The eventual target is reefs which are under threat due to pollution or over-exploitation. First removing the threat and then seeding with coral larvae will hopefully give such reefs a chance of recovering. This is a first step to see if it is workable. Fingers crossed.