The Guardian has an album of photos of deep sea creatures on its website, including this of a deep sea jellyfish from Japan. Apparently when attacked it creates bioluminescence to confuse predators.
Census of Marine Life scientists have drawn up an inventory of underwater creatures.
You can see a very small selection on the Guardian’s website.
In recent years, we seem to be seeing more and more lionfish in Hong Kong, and they are very welcome as they add a nice splash of colour to a dive. Not so in the Atlantic where they are eating vast amounts of young fish around coral reefs. Studies seem to show that their prey make no attempt to avoid them, presumably because they are a new, unfamiliar predator in the western Atlantic and Caribbean. Their victims include species that keep algae from overwhelming reefs, adding further pressure to the corals.
Sharks and other predators seem to avoid the pacific lionfish, whose population has exploded and is having a significant impact in the Bahamas and Cuba. And their range continues to expand.
Researchers are hoping that eventually native Atlantic species will react to the new invader, but that could take a long time. In some places divers are being asked to help control them, with tournaments to see who can bring back the most lionfish. One enterprising US company is trying to market lionfish to restaurants as an exotic dish.
You can read more from the Guardian’s website.
No marine life this time, but some spectacular wildlife photography, this time from the Guardian’s website.
Scott Linstead uses fast shutter speeds and special flash guns to capture some fantastic images of wildlife in flight, or capturing prey, including this bat over water.
You can see more from the Guardian’s website.
The BBC has some great photos of some bizarre marine creatures that have been taken some 1400 metres down near Osprey Reef.
It’s well worth a look on the BBC’s website.
Octopi come in also sorts of shapes and sizes, but the argonaut octopus must be one of the strangest. The females secrete a thin, white shell, which is called a paper nautilus, and it does make them look like a nautilus. They tuck themselves and their eggs into it and drift through the sea. Sometimes these paper nautiluses contain trapped air, and its function has been a mystery for many years. Some people have argued that the air is trapped accidentally and is a major problem for the octopus.
Julian Finn and Mark Norman have shown that they air is deliberately introduced by the females, and is used to acquire neutral buoyancy, meaning they can keep their position in the water column without having to expend any energy.
You can read more about it here.
Researchers have captured video footage of thresher sharks using their tails to swat smaller fish. This seems to be part of their hunting strategy. It might also explain why thresher sharks are often caught by their tails on long-lines.
Thresher shark tails can be up to half the length of the shark and until now there has been no documented evidence of why they had evolved to such a size. Recently a team from the Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research in California and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth towed 2 baited lines behind a boat. Over 27 separate days they filmed 33 common thresher sharks near the bait. 14 of these sharks attempted to hit the bait, with a success rate of 65%. This seems to confirm that the sharks use their tails to stun their prey, making it easier to catch.
So far this has only been observed in common thresher sharks, but it seems likely that the other two species of threshers use a similar strategy.
There is an article and some video from the BBC’s website.
I’ve been lucky enough to dive with them several times down at Malapascua with Trevor and Andreas of Thresher Shark Divers, from whose website I borrowed the photos above.
The Guardian has a series of winning shots from the British Society for Underwater Photographers 2010 competition. The winner in the British and Irish category is the Black-faced blenny shown above. It was taken under Swanage pier in Dorset by Arthur Kingdon.
But there are some other great shots. You can see more on the Guardian’s website. There’s also a write-up on the Telegraph’s website.
Taiji is the town in Japan that was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, the Cove, which I was fortunate enough to see a few weeks ago when SCDC showed it at one of their Thursday Club nights.I had been expecting it to focus on the gory dolphin clubbing. It did lead up to that, but the gore only formed a very small part of what was quite a powerful film, which, somewhat unexpectedly, I enjoyed.
Today the BBC website has an article by a girl who worked as a dolphin trainer in Taiji in the 1990′s. In it she writes of her reaction to the film and gives quite a lot of background on what happened there, and what it was like to work with captive dolphins. She is now opposed to dolphin hunting, and hopes that more Japanese people will see The Cove to raise awareness of what is going on.
The article is on the BBC website.
The BBC web site has some images from the Census of Marine Life (CoML). At the moment the CoML is focusing on tiny creatures, such as this blue/green alga which belongs to a group that are among the Earth’s oldest recognisable organisms, dating back to more than 3 billion years.
You can see more of these beautiful pictures on the BBC’s website.
There is also a press release on these tiny ocean creatures on CoML’s website, along with links to an image gallery and a video gallery.
A sad picture of what must have been a hugely impressive hammerhead shark. It was apparently caught off New South Wales after attempting to eat a smaller shark that had been hooked earlier. Unfortunately the accompanying article from news.com.au doesn’t mention what type of fishing boat it was or what they were fishing for.
The hammerhead apparently weighed 1200kg and was 5 metres long. Experts estimate that it was 40 years old.
Self-styled shark hunter, Vic Hislop, has bought it and has yet to decide whether to exhibit it at his Hervey Bay facility. During the mid-90s after several shark attacks in Hong Kong, he was brought up here for his expertise. I’m not sure it achieved anything more than garnering him some publicity.
Anyway it’s very sad to see this hammerhead hanging up on display rather than swimming around where it belongs.
You can read the full article here.
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), has been tagging great white sharks around Stewart and Chatham islands for the last 5 years. So far they have tagged 25 with tags that stay on for 6 – 9 months before floating to the surface. The biggest shark they have tagged is nicknamed “Shack” and is a 4.8 metre long. Shack has recently set a world record for the deepest known dive by a great white, of 1200 metres.
NIWA’s research has shown that between April and September the sharks are moving from New Zealand to warmer waters during the winter. One shark was found to have spent 6 months in Norfolk island, which is in the Pacific, north of New Zealand.
The research aims to improve our knowledge of the sharks’ behaviour and habits, which may help to prevent them being accidentally killed by the fishing industry. Although with the price of shark fin being what it is, I suspect it won’t help them being deliberately killed by the shark fin industry.
More on this in the New Zealand Herald.
This is a photo from the Guardian’s website. It is the first of a sequence of 5 of a great white shark investigating three divers in a cage in Mexico. Unfortunately they seem more interested in emphasising that one of the divers is “fending” off the shark, and punching it on the nose, when his hand doesn’t look as though it’s anywhere near its nose. Having said that his hand is definitely touching the shark. The second diver looks as though he would have got some close-up shots too. Meanwhile their mate is bravely hiding behind them both, at back of the cage – just where I would have been!
Anyway it’s quite a good sequence of photos in lovely clear blue water. You can see them on the Guardian’s website.