Cephalopodcast

Today is National Peguin Awareness Day. The official declaration is over at the Peguin Geek blog.

Unfortunately, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Penguin Cam is currently offline, so you can’t celebrate that way. But they are working on a new exhibit which should be open in March. In the meantime, try the other links below.

Penguins are birds. They have feathers, beaks and wings, and they lay eggs. Their closest relatives are other fish-eating seabirds: albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters.

There are currently 17 species of penguins. They range in size from the small two-pound (1 kg), 16-inch (41 cm) little blue penguin to the large 84-pound (38 kg), 51-inch (130 cm) emperor penguin. They’ve adapted to environments as different as Antarctic ice fields and the tropical Galápagos islands. Yet all penguins share their ancestors’ trait: they’re at home in the ocean.

• Penguin Geek: National Penguin Awareness Day
• Zapatopi: Penguicons
• MBAq: Become a Penguinologist
• Wikipedia: Penguin
• SeaWorld Education: Penguins
• Defenders of Wildlife: Adopt a Penguin
• Penguin Caffinated Peppermints

UPDATE: I composed this post rather quickly and did not do as much link research as I had hoped to do. If I had, I might have also discovered these other remarkable penguin Web sites:

• Penguin Science understanding penguin response to climate and ecosystem change (via kottke)
• Penguin of the Day: View a different penguin every day! You can also see the last week’s worth of penguins, just in case you missed one! (via Nicola Rickett’s Antarctic blog)
• Real-time penguin blogging with Viola Toniolo at Antarctic Journal: I’m working on my graduate research project on the foraging ecology of Adelie Penguins
• Penguinsland Blog: a blog for cute pictures, fun videos, news, and information about penguins

Now that the thanking and the giving is nearly over, take a look at this Wired article to see what the meal looked like under high magnification. There is turkey, gravy, cranberry, bread, beer, potato, peas.

Wired asked Mike Davidson, a biologist and expert photomicrographer at Florida State University’s National High Magnetic Field Lab, to turn his lenses on the all-American meal. The images aren’t particularly appetizing, and they probably won’t help you keep your gobbler moist this year (try brining), but at least you’ll be more intimate with the stuff that’s making you loosen your belt as you collapse on the couch.

• Wired Puts Your Thanksgiving Feast Under a Microscope

I came across the coastal wildlife illustrations of Patrick Lynch over on Flickr. These are taken from his current book, A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife, and its companion on Southeastern and Gulf Coast marine wildlife coming out in 2008.

Lynch is a man of many talents. But it took me a moment to remember where I had seen his name before. Then I remembered he was the illustrator of my ornithology textbook.

In his 35 years with Yale University Lynch has been a medical illustrator, biomedical photographer, audiovisual producer, and for the past 20 years a designer of interactive multimedia teaching, training, and informational software and Web sites.

• Flickr: Coastal wildlife illustrations
• Flickr: Patrick J. Lynch’s photos
• A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife: Marine Mammals, Seabirds, Fish, and Other Sea Life
• Creative Commons medical illustrations
• Wikipedia: Patrick J. Lynch

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]