Watershed

AP: Sea Lions Like Fish

I recently went with a friend to the Miami Seaquarium, and one of the shows (along with jumping dolphins and Killer Whales) is a sea lion show.  Smart animals, those sea lions.  And they know an easy gig when they see one.

Crafty Sea Lion Befuddles Fish Biologists

By JOSEPH B. FRAZIER, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 31,  5:15 PM ET

CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. - In his way, C404 is kind of cute, with those sea-lion whiskers, soft brown eyes and furry little head. But to many he is a sea lion either from hell — or from Harvard.

C404 has driven the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Bonneville Dam to near distraction as he and his ilk sit at the base and munch salmon gathered to continue upriver to spawn.

Numerous sea lions head for the dam each spring, but C404 is in a class by himself.

He has figured out how to get into fish ladders that help fish past the dam — where endangered salmon and other fish become his easy prey.

The engineers have used everything legal to get rid of the California sea lion, who may weigh 1,000 pounds or more. They have installed grated exclusion gates and tried huge firecackers, rockets, rubber bullets, and noises sea lions don't like.

But C404 has given them the flipper.

...

Robert Stansell, a fish biologist at Bonneville with the Corps of Engineers, knows the lively and alert C404 all too well.

"If he were in a litter of puppies, he's the one you would pick," he said.

He said C404 has been showing up each year since at least 2003 and has learned to rub it in. Last year he appeared in a window where fish counters keep track of salmon migrating upstream. The data helps predict the size of future runs.

"He even rolled over a little so we could get a look at his brand," Stansell said.

Other marine mammals haven't learned to pull that trick off.

Stansell says the sea lions are intelligent and can be taught. He would rather they not be taught by C404.

Thank to my Dad for the pointer.

Shark Attack Rules

I am trying to remember if this is Shark Week on the Discovery Channel or not, but it is clearly Shark Day on SciFi.  So far, the variations that I've seen have included 1) packs of sharks; and 2) MEGALODON!  Checking the website, these appear to be Shark Attack 2, and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.  Hey, cool!  Guessed right!

Just like every kind of horror movie, the Shark Movie seems to have some basic requirements.  Cast includes:  heroic cop; skeevy capitalist oppressor; somewhat annoying shark expert; shark hunter with goofy accent; blonde woman; guy with bad hair who you can't stop looking at.  Generally, these elements are mixed and matched as needed.

In the current movie that's on, Shark Attack 3,  the Heroic Cop is a resort water patrolman for a Mexican resort (and has a sidekick, who appears to be doomed).  The Somewhat Annoying Shark Expert is also the Blonde.  The Skeevy Capitalist Oppressor is a developer, unlike Shark Attack 2, or the original Jaws, both of which had a Skeevy Capitalist Oppressor who was also the Mayor.

Shark Attack 2 had a nice touch, in that the Shark Hunter with the Goofy Accent (Quint from the original Jaws) is something of a takeoff on the Crocodile Hunter, including accent and instinct for the camera.

If you include the miniseries based on Peter Benchley's The Beast (about a giant killer squid, I believe), you generally should expect a military figure, too. 

Maybe most importantly, STAY OUT OF THE WATER!  If you've not one of the first two names listed in the credits, you should either put down money on a coffin now, or plan on how to live with only one leg.

Oh, and the Doomed Sidekick just got swallowed by the Megalodon.  Not just his arm, or leg, or his body, but HIS WHOLE BOAT.  This, from a shark that 10 minutes ago, only had a mouth as big as a parasailor's torso.

When you are working some lots of stock footage, it's hard to keep the sioze of the shark consistent.  OTOH, maybe it's a different shark.  Yeah, must be a different shark.  The other bad sharks are probably his posse.  Wait!   Just paid attention to the dialogue.  The bigger shark is the mother.  Just like the MEG books!  Oh, very nice.

As a rule, shark movies are bloodbaths.  And shark horror novels are, too.  Steve Aletn's MEG books are crazy in this respect.  The Meg destroys a whole submarine, rampages throughout the entire Pacific Coast, and seems to single-mouthedly stop all shipping coming out of California.

The Slaughter of the Surfers in Shark Attack 2 seems like small beer by comparison.

BTW, the next two movies in line are Jaws 2, Jaws 3, and Jaws The Revenge.   The last two has this in common:  both have significant advocacy as being the Worst Movies Ever Made.

(Gee, guess who got cable this past week?  And high speed internet at home!  Just like a real boy!)

Manatees!

Since I am about to leave for Orlando in a bit, I will leave today with some pictures of manatees, which everyone loves.  EVERYONE LOVES MANATEES!

Love them Manatees!

The Pernicious Effects of Jaws and Shark Week

So, like a lot of kids who were pretty young when Jaws came out, I was freaked out by large bodies of water.  Even though I spent every summer on Lake Michigan, a FRESHWATER lake, and I was fully aware that sharks were salt water animals, I would still have moments when I would lurch out of the water, convinced that the brush of a piece of seaweed was a Great White sizing me up.

Damn Bull Sharks.  Turns out they like fresh water fine.  Damn National Geographic, for telling me about it.

Bull Shark Threat: They Swim Where We Swim

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

[B]ull sharks have special physiological adaptations that enable them to live in fresh water. Their kidneys recycle the salt within their bodies and special glands, located near their tails, also aid in salt retention.

While scientists have learned how the animals survive in fresh water, it is less clear why bull sharks, almost exclusively, developed this amazing ability.

Heithaus, of Florida International University, speculates that "probably the biggest reason is that [freshwater tolerance] allows the juveniles, the little guys, to be in a place that's relatively safe from being eaten by other sharks."
...
Heithaus said a big question for him is what bull sharks gave up to acquire their unique ability to survive in fresh water. "If they were a master of all trades, in both fresh and saltwater, we should see bull sharks dominating coastal waters," the marine biologist said. "There must be some cost to having that amazing ability."

OTOH, I'm basically living around salt water now.

Where bull sharks are also common, especially in shallow water.

Just can't win.

The Spooky Theme Continues...

Some days, posts just seem to come in categories.  The Dead Zone was spooky, but the video of all these crabs going hog wild (What?  Ah, never mind, the animal metaphor makes enough sense.) is tons spookier.  Click the video for some serious freaky hot crab-on-crab action.

Thousands of spider crabs spotted on ocean floor

Optional Punchlines

I clipped the image and healdine below from the Environmental news page at the National Geographic website.

That combination of image and headline is just horrifying, and leads to these optional stupid punchlines:

"Low quantity, yes, but high quality."
"Those are some scary looking chemicals, maaaaaaaaaaan."
"Even if the sperm gets through, the kids will look like Beluga whales."
"I may not have much sperm left, but what I do have can kick your ass."

Feel free to fill in your own punchline.

Oh, and:  the low sperm count was noticed in rural Missouri, where they think the tapw ater is more polluted with agricultural chems.  In other areas of the country, Nat'l Geo says, chems are killing leopard frogs and beluga whales.  Hence, the picture.

"Bioprospecting"

Cure Hunters

 

"The thesis was that we were looking for antibiotics. At that time, anything you picked up had new chemicals in it. These organisms were bathed in bacteria, so they probably had antibiotics in their body chemistry in order to survive.

"If you keep collecting everything you can find, you'll get thousands and thousands of compounds. It's a giant pyramid and maybe one of them will be useful."

This stuff makes for an interesting article, but I wonder how serious it really is.  It seems so much like eating soup wioth a spoon, to just kick along and document everything.  The documenting sounds cool, but hoping for medically useful outcomes seems like a ongoing long shot experiment.

And Raymond Andersen, one of the guys profiled here has the same attitude.  Cool.

"I tell my students that the probability of developing a drug or even getting a drug to clinical trials is approximately zero," he says. "I long ago realized that if you set your bar of success as a drug that is used to treat humans, you're doomed to failure.

"If it were that easy - if people really thought the cure for AIDS was in these organisms - there would be more people doing it. The drug companies would be doing it themselves. It's not that simple.

"There could easily be a million species of invertebrates, and tens of millions of bacteria. After 20 years of prospecting, looking at 4,000 organisms out of X thousand species, we got two drugs to clinical trials. We've been very, very lucky.

 

Marlin (or Dolphin) Perkins Interlude

I have a distinct impression of the Ganges River, in India, as a dirty, dirty body of water.  I'm pretty sure that impression comes straight from an issue of The Invisisbles, by Grant Morrison.

Comic influenced or not, the attitude feels confirmed when I hear about freshwater dolphins dying off because the river is so polluted. 

`Save river dolphins for better aquatic environment'

Luckily, WWF-India is there, to raise awareness with a motorboat rally.  Guess the pollution must be so bad that it won't matter if a dolphin or gets cracked in the noggin.

Ganges dolphins struggling for existence

Oh!   I almost forgot.  I hadn't realized or remember that there are freshwater dolphins.  Turns out there's four species:  Amazon River, Franciscana (in coastal waters of eastern South America), Indus and Ganges River, and the Yangtze River.