Thomas Vignaud of Marseille, France took this photograph, labeled Young fish dart by a jellyfish in the sea, in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2007. With it, he won the Natural World Category of Smithsonian magazine’s 5th Annual Photo Contest.
Have you taken an amazing photograph? Hurry up and enter our 7th Annual Photo Contest. The deadline is Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at 2pm Eastern Standard Time (EST).
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Scientists from Britain and Japan used sophisticated techniques to study the feeding behavior of the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophrys) at sea. A lot of useful information came out of this study, but the single item you will likely hear most about is a really cool photograph, taken by the albatross itself, of a killer whale.
It is difficult to study albatross because they fly hundreds of kilometers across open ocean, flying faster than a boat can sail, to find food. Since you can’t just follow them, and since their open ocean feeding area is very large, observing albatross feeding behavior can’t be done reliably.
The new study addressed this problem by using miniature digital cameras attached to the backs of four birds breeding at colonies on Bird Island, South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. The resulting pictures showed albatrosses foraging in groups while at sea to collect food for their chicks. The cameras included a depth meter and a thermometer. The depth information was intended to indicate when the albatross would dive underwater for food, and the temperature meter indicates when the bird is settled on the sea surface or dives into water.
The following diagram shows what these information resulting from an instrument-fitted albatross flight looks like:
Diagram of albatross flight, courtesy of PLoS One
The X-axis is time, showing that this particular flight that took over two hours. The squiggly line along the top indicates temperature and the vertical lines along the lower part of the chart indicate depth. The bird appears to make four dives and later on sits on the water for a while (indicated by the cooling down without a dive event). The camera took photographs on a regular basis, and the Xes in the diagram indicate a photograph with another organism in it, generally another albatross. This shows that the albatross tracked in this diagram dived and presumably fed in the vicinity of other birds. The X with the red circle indicates a photograph of special interest, this one:
Albatrosses following an orca. Courtesy of PloS One
Here you can see two birds, one higher and one lower than the bird with the camera, and the three birds together seem to be closing in on a whale. This is an orca, a.k.a. killer whale.
This image showed that the killer whale broke the surface and that three other albatrosses were also apparently following the whale. This image was, unfortunately, followed by subsequent images that were obscured by feathers. However, the rapidly decreasing external temperature suggests that the bird landed on the sea surface after the encounter with the killer whale…
The camera is small, weighing about 82 grams. Although the camera slightly changes the aerodynamic shape of the albatross, it did not affect the breeding success of the study birds. In all, over 28,000 pictures were taken with the albatross mounted cameras. According to Dr Richard Phillips from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), “These images are really interesting. They show us that albatrosses associate with marine mammals in the same way as tropical seabirds often do with tuna. In both cases the prey (usually fish) are directed to the surface and then it’s easy hunting for the birds.”
I’m Greg Laden, and I usually blog at here at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine. I’m a biological anthropologist interested in human evolution, the biologies of race and gender, human hunter-gatherers, science education and African prehistory. I’ve been asked to fill in here at Surprising Science for a couple of weeks, and I promise to try not to break anything while I’m here. On to my first post.
The Eastern Pacific black ghost shark. Photo courtesy of California Academy of Sciences
A new species of fish has been named from specimens collected over the last several decades off the coast of California. It is called Hydrolagus melanophasma, and will go by the common name “Eastern Pacific black ghost shark.” This is the first new species of cartilaginous fish to be described from California waters since 1947, and is a member of the Chimaeridae family. Technically, according to ichthyologist Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences, Hydrolagus melanophasma is “a big weird looking freaky thing. They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark.”
Chimaeridae is a family of fish related to sharks. Sometimes they are called ratfish. Sometimes they are called ghost sharks. Some have a venomous spine on their backs. They live in the ocean, usually quite deep, and the most recently discovered species in this family is gaining fame because it is said to have its sex organ on its head.
The ghost shark's tentaclum on its head is used to facilitate copulation with a female. It is not sufficient for reproduction. Photo courtesy of California Academy of Sciences
This “sex organ on the head” is actually quite normal for ghost sharks, though it is one of the big differences this sort of fish has with sharks. The feature in question is a tentaculum. A tentaculum is any of several sensory organs found on fish. In male ghost sharks the tentaculum is specially adapted as a grasping organ used during mating. So it is not the male’s penis, but rather, a grabby thing that the male uses to facilitate copulation with the female. So, referring to the ghost shark’s tentaculum as a “sex organ” on “its head” is a little like calling a finely chosen wine and just the right music a sex organ …. perhaps related to sex, but not sufficient for reproduction, anatomically speaking.
Hydrolagus melanophasma, was described in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa by a research team including California Academy of Sciences David Ebert (also with Moss Landing Marine Laboratories) and Douglas J. Long (also with the Oakland Museum of California) and Kelsey James, a graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and Dominique Didier from Millersville University in Pennsylvania.
The closest living relatives of the Chimaeras are sharks, and the Chimaera-shark split is probably about 400 million years ago, which is a long time ago by any standards. Chimaeras have cartilage instead of bone for skeletons, as do sharks. Chimaeras were once a very diverse and abundant group of species, and today are present in all oceanic waters though rare in any given locality.
The genus Hydrolagus means “water rabbit‚” and is so named because of its grinding tooth plates that resemble a rabbit’s front teeth. The term “melanophasma” means “black ghost” which is a refernce to the common term “ghost shark” as well as its dark, nearly black color. Hydrolagus melanophasma was originally collected as early as the mid 1960s, but went unnamed until now because its taxonomic relationships were unclear. This fish is found in deep water and is believed to range from the coast of Southern California, along the western coast of Baja California, and into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). This species is known from a total of nine preserved museum specimens, and from video footage taken of it alive by a deep-water submersible in the Sea of Cortez.
The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering hosted a photography contest earlier this year, and the winners have just been announced. The photo above, Project Pebble, won first prize. Two engineering students, Ben Sheppard and Robbie Howshall, set out to design a low-cost, deep-sea photographic vessel (current vessels for taking pictures deep underwater are far from cheap) and came up with Pebble, which cost only £1800 (about $3000). The photo above was taken during pool trials. Pebble was deployed in the sea North of Scotland (59˚ 03.76 N 07˚ 13.17 W) on May 21. Sadly, when the researchers returned to the site the next day, Pebble was gone. They suspect that a fishing vessel picked it up accidentally.
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Golden jellyfish in Palau's Jellyfish Lake (credit: Michael Dawson, University of California at Merced)
Most of the organisms living in the oceans are tiny, but they have a big effect on ocean mixing, according to a new study in Nature. Bioengineers from CalTech investigated this effect in Palau by adding a fluorescent dye to water near jellyfish to see what would happen when the jellies swam through. To the scientists’ surprise, the dye traveled along with the jellyfish for long distances. Jellyfish and other marine organisms regularly migrate to the ocean surface during the day. Extrapolating from their experiment, the bioengineers calculated that the amount of mixing from this migration is as much as a trillion watts of energy, about equivalent to the effects of the winds and tides.
Earlier this year, I read Flotsametrics and the Floating World, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, about ocean currents, how they have influenced history, and human impacts on the vast seas. (We published an excerpt, “Borne on a Black Current,” earlier this year.)
Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, is perhaps best known for his work tracking bath toys and sneakers to map the ocean’s flow. But it was the chapters in which he and Scigliano described the acres and acres of plastic junk floating across the seas, washing up on distant shores by the ton and being consumed by wildlife, that I found most disturbing. And it’s not just the plastic that we toss away that’s the problem. Those bath toys and sneakers have come from container ships that lost their cargo. Other lost shipments are not nearly so innocent, Ebbesmeyer writes:
Greenpeace estimates that 10 percent of the 100 million tons of plastic produced each year worldwide ends up in the sea. That global production includes, by various estimates, 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags. It takes just one bag to choke a hungry sea turtle. If that 10 percent estimate holds for bags, then enough drift into the sea each year to kill all the sea turtles in the world thousands of times over. One shipping container holds about 5 million plastic bags, and I know of at least two such containers lost in the Turtle Gyre [in the North Pacific]. No one knows what happened to their 10 million bags. The shipping industry is proud that it’s reduced its annual loss rate from about ten thousand to two thousand containers out of roughly 100 million shipped each year. I tell them it only takes one to cause a catastrophe.
Captain Charles Moore, of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, found the Great Pacific Garbage Patch during a 1997 yacht race. (Ebbesmeyer has tallied eight garbage patches in total: four in the Pacific, three in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean.) Since then, he has worked to understand how the plastic influences marine life and to make people aware of the problem. He gave the Ted Talk above in February of this year. The pictures are gut-wrenching.
The new clouded leopard was born on July 9. (credit: Mehgan Murphy/Smithsonian
The tourists visiting the Smithsonian museums may not realize it, but there is a ton of fascinating research going on, sometimes within just a few feet of where they are standing. And in addition to the museums and the zoo, there are researchers at the astrophysical observatory in Massachusetts, the Environmental Research Center in Maryland, the Tropical Research Institute in Panama, a field station in Belize, a marine station in Florida, the wildlife conservation center in Virginia and probably other research facilities that I don’t yet even know about. Smithsonian scientists are a large and busy bunch.
A new web site, Science at the Smithsonian, can help you keep up with what is going on, with highlights of ongoing projects throughout the institution. Just this past week, for example, at the Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia, a new clouded leopard, Przewalski’s horse and red panda cub were born.
Between Around the Mall and Surprising Science, Smithsonian magazine online tries to keep up with all of the amazing science going on at the Institution, but there’s so much to read about and Science at the Smithsonian should be another great resource.
Pacific coral, Acropora millepora, under fluorescent light. (Courtesy of Misha Matz, The University of Texas at Austin.)
The ocean is getting warmer, higher and more acidic due to climate change. How well will coral reefs respond to such stresses?
To find out, a team of researchers led by the University of Texas at Austin is looking to corals’ genes. Sequencing a genome can take years, but a new method developed by the UT researchers reduced that time frame to one month. They focused on the nearly 11,000 genes that the coral actually uses, instead of the unused genes and DNA bits that make up most of the organism’s genome.
The scientists tested their method on the Pacific coral, Acropora millepora, and hope to see an explosion in research about coral adaption and evolution as a result.
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