Cephalopodcast

[via TONMO]

PBS airs another oceanic special, this time on cuttlefish. My tentacles are tingling!

Cuttlefish: The Brainy Bunch by Kaufmann Productions
a film by Gisela Kaufmann & Carsten Orlt
Premiers Tuesday, April 3 at 8 pm

Join NOVA on a voyage beneath the waves, where you’ll discover a bizarre, alien-like creature like no other. It’s an animal with eight sucker-covered arms growing out of its head, three hearts pumping its blue-green blood, and a doughnut-shaped brain. It has the ability to change its color and shape to blend in with seaweed and rocks, and it has a knack for switching on electrifying light shows that dazzle its prey. Perhaps most surprising of all, this animal is quite intelligent, with a highly complex brain. In this program, underwater cameras capture the extraordinary, transformative powers of the cuttlefish.

• Cuttlefish camo videoclips
• Anatomy of a Cuttlefish (web interactive)
• Cephalopod links and books to accompany the program
• Teacher’s Guide: Kings of Camouflage (nb: taping rights-can be used up to one year after the program is taped off the air.)

I am thinking of hosting a webcast/Skypecast during this program. Would anyone be interested in joining a simultaneous conversation while the show is airing?

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Mi hombre no necesita huevos de tortuga
My man does not need turtle eggs.

The folks over at Deep-Sea News, along with Argentinian supermodel Dorismar, want to remind all Catholics that sea turtles are not fish and make an inappropriate option for Lent fasting.

Because of the common misconception of sea turtles as ‘fish,’ it is estimated that as many as 10,000 endangered green, loggerhead, and olive ridley turtles are taken for feast food each year during Catholic religious holidays. Other species, such as leatherbacks, are also at risk as their eggs are poached in massive quantities throughout Latin America.

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PBS is airing its tenth installment of Journey to Planet Earth series tomorrow. The show is hosted by Matt Damon, which is kind of annoying. Expect a disheartening survey of the many ills facing our planet’s oceans interspersed with optimistic words about mankind’s resourcefulness and the hope that technology and international cooperation will someday solve all these problems.

STATE OF THE OCEAN’S ANIMALS
Premiers March 28th, 2007 at 8pm on PBS
Check local listings

Nearly half the world’s marine animals may face extinction over the next twenty-five years. Global warming, over-fishing, and habitat destruction are emptying the world’s oceans. Join host Matt Damon as “State of the Ocean’s Animals” takes a hard look at the future of our watery natural world: the beauty, the incredible animals, and the dangers that threaten them.

Features scenes from the Pacific Northwest (whales, salmon and sea otters), Florida (sea level rise and its effect on loggerhead turtles), Japan (the slaughter of dolphins), China (shark fin trade), and the Antarctic (threats to Emperor Penguins).

• Journey to Planet Earth - State of the Ocean’s Animals
• Educational materials, including Teacher Guides.

In the tradition of Internet adages, I’d like to add another. In any discussion of sea life, no matter how rare, strange or disgusting, some knucklehead will always ask how well it goes with lemon or butter. I am calling this Gorton’s Law.

Now the more compelling question is to ask why this happens. Why do so many people consider the sea to be a smorgasbord? What difference is there between animals in the ocean and ones on land? For many, I suppose there is none. For example, on a swamp tour in Louisiana, our guide was kind enough to remind us that in his great state, if it bleeds, they eat it. However, Sylvia Earl, in her book Sea Change, makes the point that we often eat higher up on the oceanic food chain than we do on the terrestrial one. She equates eating tuna with eating bushmeat. But it is true that many cultures do not eat large carnivores. Is this just because lions, tigers and bears are comparatively rare in the environment? Is that just because we have already extirpated them in our past? Obviously, it is certainly more dangerous to tangle with them than a herbivore. And perhaps that is the key. Even the fiercest of oceanic predators are manageable once landed. It can be a struggle to get a grouper on board, but once on deck it doesn’t take much to subdue it. So maybe it’s just a matter of buoyancy.

Many who would recognize the absurdity of a plan to sustain large and growing numbers of people by hunting and gathering from the land buffalol, deer, wild birds, rabbits, squirrels, roots, and berries seem to disengage their power of reason when it comes to the sea, apparently believing, somehow, that ocean systems are fundamentally different from those on the land, that they can year after year yield huge, comercially viable takes of wild-caught organisms and rebound indefinitely.

-Sylvia Earl, Sea Change

The Great Backyard Bird Count starts today and runs through this weekend, February 16-19, 2007.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent. Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps the birds.

• Great Backyard Bird Count

OceansLive.org is a NOAA outreach program affiliated with Bob Ballard and company. It’s difficult linking directly to their content because it’s partly tied up in Flash. But one of the videos worth noting is under their ARCHIVED VIDEO section. It is a dissection of a dead Laysan Albatross chick on the Kure Atoll. It’s a pretty graphic depiction of the problem of plastic in our oceans. The parents mistake the floating debris for food items and instinctively regurgitate them to the young. The chicks can become so impacted that they die of malnutrition. Or in the case of the bird in the video, the plastic punctured the stomach and acid burned the liver and blackened the lungs.

It is remarkable and sad how much garbage the researchers pull from one dead chick. The other absurdity is just how remote Kure Atoll is from the rest of civilization. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, but still affected by our conspicuous consumption.

• To see the video, go to oceansLive.org, click ARCHIVED VIDEO, then scroll down to ALBATROSS NECROPSY
• See also, Free Resources for Educators and the Community: “Are Seabirds What They Eat? Plastics and Seabirds” [PDF]

The Delaware SeaGrant program produces short radio announcements on ocean topics called SeaTalk. They have material going back to 1998 in wav and mp3 formats. Wouldn’t take much to syndicate this stuff and turn it into podcasts. How about it Delaware? Don’t keep your content bottled up. Let me know if you need help.

As a public service in conjunction with more than 35 area radio stations, Delaware Sea Grant produces SeaTalk, a bimonthly series of 30- and 60-second radio announcements on subjects ranging from sharks to sand dunes to current marine science research. The series has been in production at the University of Delaware for more than 30 years.

SeaTalk Sampler

• 2007 stingray shuffle [.mp3]
• 2002 marine worms [.mp3]
• 1999 sea turtles [.mp3]
• 1998 tautog [.wav]

Judging by the submissions to the website, I’d reckon that the admin over at Faunapolis lives in the Tampa Bay area.

Faunapolis is a place where you can share interesting photos and stories about animals that live in this new kind of jungle we call town, city, or even backyard. If you have a photo of an animal and need to find its species, this is the place to post that picture and get help. These creatures are learning to live with us, and new symbiotic relations between them and us are creating an entirely different ecosystem. Will we ever be able to coexist?

The site is run using Drupal and uses the Google API for adding geo-location info on animal sightings. Unfortunately, it does not include Creative Commons info for submitted pictures. Still, it wouldn’t take much more to turn this into an effective crowd sourcing effort for tracking the introduction and spread of exotic and invasive species.

There is also an unrelated Flickr group to share pics of urban wildlife.

Wildlife that lives in our cities or in our homes: pigeons, foxes, squirrels, rats, insects, spiders, seagulls, etc.

Many are dismissed as pests; most are ignored or unappreciated. Yet they manage to coexist with us despite (or in many cases, because of) increasing urbanisation.

There is definitely a vertebrate bias in the submission, with chubby squirrels and mallards well represented.

Finally, the Environmental Literacy Council has a few links to lesson plans on urban wildlife. Scroll all the way to the bottom.

With the updates to iTunes 7, I noticed the EcoGeeks podcast promoted on the front page of the directory. It is a video podcast from the folks at TheWildclassroom.com. From their about page:

As an organisation built by a group of next generation scientists, The Wild Classroom and sister site Explore Biodiversity work to promote an interest in conservation, ecology and biology in a manner appealing to our youth and young at heart.

As they say in their intro video, they are passionate about science and sharing their enthusiasm with students. The production values on their shows are pretty good, almost to the point where I wondered if it was a creation of Discovery Communication. But as far as I can tell, it is an independent, grant-funded production that is free for educational use.

They offer companion lesson plans for educators and give permission to use their videos in the classroom. However, I could not find the exact terms of usage spelled out on their website (is this Creative Commons licensed?). They also need input from teachers to help determine future programming.

This is pretty exciting stuff, kind of like a next generation JASON Project but without the cruft.

via BoingBoing.net

Found out that September 7 is National Threatened Species Day in Australia. Australia is home to many unique critters, and one of the strangest was the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf/Tiger. It was actually a marsupial, and the last known living one died in captivity on this day in 1936.

[The] National Threatened Species Day…concept was developed by the Threatened Species Network, a community based program of the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Commonwealth Government’s Natural Heritage Trust, as a way to showcase Australian threatened species. By focusing attention on the plight of many of our threatened animals and plants, Threatened Species Day aims to encourage greater community support and hands-on involvement in the prevention of further losses of Australia’s unique natural heritage.

Well, one of the extant Australian creatures that is currently under threat is Neoceratodus, the Australian Lungfish. According to PZ Myers, “[t]he Australian government is planning to dam the last rivers on which these spectacular vertebrates live, and that will be it for them. We’ll be left with nothing but bones and tissue samples and few relics in aquaria.” Myers lists several ways folks can act to help save this species. You can also sign the petition.

• thePetitionsite.com - A Very Special Fish – Australian Lungfish under Threat
• The Thylacine Museum - films

I listen to the Earthwatch Radio Podcast. It’s a nicely produced, short-format show originally meant for broadcast. A recent episode was called Screening Out Nature, and briefly covers the decline in visits to America’s national parks. One can conjecture about the many reasons for the decline, but according to the The Nature Conservancy, it directly correlates with a rise in the consumption of electronic media and a rise in oil prices. The episode gives more attention to the former and concludes that “parents need to get their kids away from the video games and computers and send them outside.” There is certainly a lot of alarmist ink spilt on the topic of “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

But I wonder why video games and the outdoors have to be mutually exclusive concepts. They aren’t oil and water. Maybe it is just the antiquarian nature of many environmentalists’ worldview? It should be possible to make the digital and the organic world live together in one experience. Geocaching comes to mind as one example. Anyone else have others?

• Is Wireless a Natural for National Parks?
• Wireless tour guides for national parks

Box Lunch Media offers video resources for marine educators. I have not had any pesonal experience with them, but their media products look interesting:

• Biodiversity
• Biomes
• Education Models
• Marine & Coastal
• Native American Stewardship
• Rain Forest
• Stewardship
• Wetlands
• Teachers Guides

I am thinking about ordering the Journey of the Loggerhead DVD created by Environmental Media. Anyone ever seen this video, or have experience with Box Lunch Media? Let me know. Thanks!

When first looking for a hosting provider for the Cephalopodcast, it seemed only natural to go with Laughing Squid. It seems there is something about cephalopods that inspires us all. Now they have a place to catalog it:

Welcome to “Squid“, Laughing Squid’s blog for all things squid. You want squid info, we got it.

Do you have any squid news, contact:
tentacle (AT) squid (DOT) us

please, no calamari recipies

From the Flickr blog, an interesting opportunity for citizen scientist and a novel use of Flickr:

“People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called Humpback whale flukes. I volunteer at Allied Whale which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by GeorgeK.

George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005. It matched with HWC#2943 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catolog ….. this whale was seen only once before in March 1984!!! on Silver Bank (the breeding grounds North of the Dominican Republic).

This is what flickr has the power to do.”

The wife and I recently went exploring through our little piece of the local watershed. It’s really just a man-made ditch that runs north-south along the property line. It appears to be under tidal influence. Nonetheless, we found an alligator snapping turtle in the depression of a culvert outfall. I would not have expected it. During all my years living on a lake, I never actually saw one of these. They are so prehistoric looking.

It reminded me of a childrens’ book I came across last year by Holling C. Holling called Minn of the Mississippi. Just like the turtle, I am surprised I never came across his books while growing up.

• Here’s a little larger image of the turtle’s habitat. Hope it likes TV.
• All About Turtles, from the Gulf of Maine Aquariums