Showing 6 posts tagged Pacific Ocean
Swim down under Hawaiian waters with PBS Digital Studios’ UnderH20 team to watch how lava from the rumbling Kilauea crater bursts into the Pacific Ocean, and then quickly cools to form what’s called pillow lava.
Another underwater adventure in the archives: diving under a lake covered with Antarctic ice.
What is a gyre? And how does this natural phenomenon demonstrate the impact of our plastic trash? Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres Institute explain how we can understand the international issue while acting locally:
“It is impractical to try and scoop out trash out of the ocean. What we can do is wait for it to wash ashore. So to clean a gyre, clean your beach, clean your watershed, clean your street. As close as you can get to the source, is a better way we can solve the problem of plastics in the ocean”
This short, silent video shares a few behind-the-scenes moments from the ”fish tornado” photograph, titled David and Goliath, taken in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico by photographer Octavio Aburto.
“As people have seen this image, I have been getting a lot of messages in my inbox and phone calls asking me “is this photo real?” And “how did you congregate all these fish in one place to take the photo?”
“My response to these questions has been this — of course it is real. Fish, as is the case with many other animals, have certain behaviors that they perform when they reproduce. For example, when monarch butterflies mate they travel hundreds of thousands of kilometers, crossing from Canada down through Mexico to form unbelievable congregations. Sea turtles also have unique reproduction behavior —some travel the entire Pacific just to return to the beaches where they originally hatched. Birds fly hundreds of kilometers to certain areas to nest as well. These behaviors are well known within terrestrial animals and within the scientific community we have also known of these behaviors with fish and other marine creatures for many years. In Cabo Pulmo for example, blacktip reef sharks and mobula rays also congregate in large numbers to mate during the winter season.
“Even after I explain this unique behavior and the spectacular spawning aggregations of fish that occur naturally, some people don’t believe this image is real.
“In some ways I think this photo, and others like it, force people to think about the environment and more specifically in this case the ocean, dwindling fish populations the health of marine ecosystems worldwide and our role in it all.”
via EarthSky.org.
From the BBC series Life, meet the Sarcastic Fringehead as Sir David Attenborough narrates.
More from Discovery.com:
This small, scrappy fish found along the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Baja California, Mexico, maintains a relatively small zone of personal space around its home, usually a shell, a can or a bottle. When an intruder invades that space, the fringehead attacks fearlessly and aggressively, baring its teeth and snapping its jaws…
Why invest so much time and energy into keeping away unwanted solicitations? Because in the fringehead’s preferred habitat — on sandy or muddy ocean bottoms just beyond the breaker zone — competition for resources is fierce. To ensure they get their fair share of food and space, fringeheads stake out a territory that they can realistically defend… Some scientists estimate they consume almost 14 times their body weight per year.
via Neatorama.
This is the swima bombiviridis, a bioluminescent “Green Bomber” that was found in deep Pacific waters in 2009 by Karen Osborn of Scripps Oceanography. From ScienceMag.org:
Thousands of meters below the sea, a tiny worm wriggles through the darkness, its dozens of paddle-shaped bristles moving in beautiful coordination. Suddenly, a hungry predator appears. The worm releases a glowing green sac, and the fish homes in on this bright new trophy. By the time the fish realizes the sac is no meal, the worm is long gone.
From MBARI.org.
