petnoyer
Posts by this author
May 16, 2008
There's a whole series of these animations from RG studios posted at YouTube, including Polar Bears hang gliding, playing golf, and on vacation in Easter Island. We would like to think they can rest easy now that they're listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), but…
May 15, 2008
It feels strange to rejoice the listing of polar bears to the Endangered Species Act, because its nothing to be happy about, really. They are now officially in danger of extinction. I would be more ecstatic if they were being removed from the list, actually. But ESA is a powerful legislative…
May 9, 2008
"Dead men tell no tales" - Hiriam Breakes
Hiriam Breakes was a Dutch pirate, the second son to the Councillor of the Island of Saba in the Netherlands Antilles. In his twenties, he stole the ship and cargo of his employers and renamed the vessel The Adventurer. Almost immediately he came upon the…
May 3, 2008
Well, all good things must come to an end, so this is it for Coral Week. I wanted to finish things on a high note with the "naked coral" hypothesis. Does it sound like something out of an Austin Powers movie? Really, folks, its in Science! It probably won't save corals from global ocean overturning…
May 3, 2008
There remains a cause for optimism. Shallow-water corals have weathered a host of insults over the last 18,000 years. The Atomic Age is just one in a long list. Since the Pleistocene Era, sea levels rose ~100m to the current sea stand. This literally drowned once thriving tropical reefs. You can…
May 3, 2008
This is the fifth of five articles about the shared characteristics of shallow and deep-water corals. It's far from complete, I'm afraid.
Deep corals are out of sight, but not out of reach. The commercial fishermen working above just trawled an old growth sea forest near New Zealand. The bubblegum…
May 3, 2008
a special guest post by John Guinotte, Marine Conservation Biology Institute
The answer is uncertain as very few manipulative experiments have been conducted to test how deep-sea corals react to changes in temperature, seawater chemistry (pH), water motion (currents), and food availability. It is…
May 2, 2008
This is the fourth in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals.
Shallow water corals reefs have been called "the rainforests of the sea" because nooks and crannies created by reef building corals form micro-habitats for other animals,…
May 2, 2008
How does Coral Week end? With a bang or a whimper? Can you tell? I still don't know.
Three stories still sit on my desktop. While I polish them off, consider this:
Coral reefs are in decline around the world, and species are disappearing every day. But new species are being discovered, too. So,…
May 2, 2008
Marine aquarists have a photographic edge on field photographers. Their work is fixed, dry, and well-lit, while field photogs slosh back and forth with one finger on the camera and one on the reef while trying to avoid fire coral and maintain buoyancy. No wonder aquarists get such sharp focus.
A…
May 1, 2008
Always thoughtful Mark Powell of Blogfish says corals are "the canary in the coal mine", and points out a list of political actions you can take to help preserve fragile coral reef habitats.
Commenter Jives from the The New Blue contributes two stories about the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England…
May 1, 2008
Speaking of explosives, the nematocyst, or stinging cell, is one character that binds all cnidarians together. The nematocyst is "high tech cellular weaponry", the unparalleled apex of organelle specialization (Boero et al 2007), and the fastest known biological structure (Tardent, 1995). From…
May 1, 2008
News outlets enjoyed a field day last month reporting on the amazing vitality of Porites sp. coral colonies in the South Pacific Bikini Atoll where Americans tested the fifth most powerful atom bomb ever exploded 54 years ago. The Bravo bomb was a 1000 times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima…
April 30, 2008
Since the first day of Coral Week we've been joking that a proper invertebrate carnival should include recipes, especially if its Scallop Week or Oyster Week.* Alas, nobody eats coral, even as a snack. Yes, people eat sea anemones and jellyfish, but they would have to be seriously, deliriously,…
April 30, 2008
This is the third in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals.
by Michael J. Risk
Image of the Devonian seafloor from "Evolution of Life"
The coelenterates, corals and their relatives, are very ancient, and in fact may be the oldest…
April 29, 2008
One of the challenges of deep coral research is convincing people that deep corals form habitat for other animals, animals of particular concern, like fish or crabs, or endangered species like the Hawaiian Monk Seal. Precious coral beds with large colonies of Gerardia sp. 550m deep in the French…
April 29, 2008
Bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea) never looked so... cuddly. It's amazing. Who would believe someone could knit a sea fan and do it so well? Ecology Action Center in Halifax brings a unique perspective to the deep coral movement. They go straight to the fishermen for the information that…
April 29, 2008
This is the second in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics between deep and shallow water corals
Special guest post by Christina A. Kellogg
Just as humans have beneficial bacteria living on our skin and in our intestines, corals have symbiotic microbes in their mucus,…
April 28, 2008
Figure reprinted from Cairns, 2007 in Bulletin of Marine Science
One of the central questions in marine biogeography asks "why are there more species of coral and fish in the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle than anywhere else in the world?" By many accounts, this is the global epicenter of marine…
April 27, 2008
This is first in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics in deep-sea and shallow-water corals.
Deep-sea corals are benthic suspension feeders in the classes Anthozoa and Hydrozoa. They share the Phylum Cnidaria along with the jellyfish, sea anemones, and the siphonophores…
April 27, 2008
Coral is a polyphyletic term for polypoid animals in the cnidarian classes Anthozoa and Hydrozoa that secrete either 1) a black, horn like proteinaceous axis or 2) carbonate skeletal material in the form of either a) continuous skeleton or b) an assemblage of microscopic, individual sclerites (…
April 26, 2008
This is Coral Week. Not to be confused with International Year of the Reef 2008. The goal of this week is to pull you away from the reef, actually, down into the deeper, darker parts of the ocean where corals still thrive. We want to introduce you to the other corals, the maligned and neglected…
April 25, 2008
Modern ocean prophet Wallace J Nichols presented the first ever Ecodaredevil Award to Duke University graduate student Elliott Hazen this past April 22nd, on Earth Day. Elliott received the award for on-campus activism at Duke Marine Lab, co-founding GreenWave, a student led sustainability movement…
April 24, 2008
Chris Mah's Echinoblog is off and running with a wealth of weirdness. Today he features the crinoidea, or crinoids, with some terrific images of open and close-fisted crinoid forms I've never seen before, and frankly, scare the daylights out of me (see the image from Charles Messing at Chris'…
April 24, 2008
If you look at the Mediterranean Sea on a globe, you may get the impression that its just one contiguous water mass, but really its not. There are thirteen seas in the Mediterranean Sea. The Alboran Sea is the one closest to the Straits of Gibraltar, between Spain and Morocco. The Straits are shown…
April 23, 2008
Shiver me timbers! The RV Tangaroa has a poet on board, and he's makin' jingles at sea.
The mate is there up on the bridge, steering us south down the Ridge. It's blowing a lot when he gets to the spot, so he alters the course, just a smidge.
The deckhands are standing about, so the bosun is…
April 22, 2008
Last year, DSN asked readers to remember the deep-sea on Earth Day by celebrating the goblin shark. This year's poster child is the gulper shark, pictured left.
Gulper sharks are a group of 15 species of squaliform sharks in the Family Centrophoridae. They occur globally in tropical to temperate…
April 21, 2008
Help me, somebody, please. I get the feeling from this press release that Walt Disney Co. made a deal with the Aliens. Earth inhabitants are now... just ...entertainment.
In a bid to cash in on the appetite for so-called green entertainment, Walt Disney Co. launched Disneynature, a new film label…
April 21, 2008
Gaelin Rosewaks was one of a dozen people who changed my ideas about what it means to live an inspired life when I dropped out of the film business after ten years in Hollywood, and enrolled in the summer session at Duke University Marine Lab looking for a way to turn my life around, get back to…