The Austringer

See here for a few more comments on the photo.

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About 5 AM, I heard an owl outside the house. I went out to check, since owls and hawks don’t mix well. I wanted to make sure the owl wasn’t near Rusty. The owl turned out to be perched high in an oak tree in the front yard.

The owl proved to be a pretty cooperative subject, continuing to sit in the tree while I got together the camera, flash, and big 12V flashlight. Unfortunately, the owl was still about 75 feet away from the camera, so this is a pretty severe crop of the original image.

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There’s an article in the Austin American Statesman about the ongoing Gulf oil spill. It talks about the effects of the spill throughout the water column. The massive use of dispersants at depth is noted as being experimental: nobody knows exactly what outcomes you get by doing that. Well, other than that less of the oil washes ashore where it is convenient for photographers to document the pathetic demise of many a bird and marine mammal because of the oil. It is a lot harder to get cameras on the pathetic demise of benthic, nektonic, and pelagic animals, but those deaths count no less because they pass unseen. Nor is most of the problem going to be at the level of charismatic megafauna, as the authors point out. This spill is disrupting the food web from the lowest levels right up to the top predators. Further, they note that the bacteria that are relied upon to consume the oil over time do so in the presence of oxygen. As they metabolize the oil, they deplete the oxygen. High levels of methane gas are not helping, either. It doesn’t take much to make the inference that “dead zones” with low to no oxygen in the water will expand. What’s worse is that given the toxicity of what we’re dumping into the Gulf, they may well persist over time scales we have not experienced before.

It seems to me to be only common sense that off-shore oil drilling at any depth, if done at all, should be conditional on the principals demonstrating that they have the capacity on-hand to deal with even worst-case problems within a short time window. Turning loose the machinery and hoping for the best is no way to safeguard the public welfare.

As usual, this is only personal opinion.

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I’m working on setting up a citizen scientist project to document where snapping shrimp (family Alpheidae) are active pre- and post-contamination by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this post, I just want to introduce the basic concepts and provide an example sound file.

Snapping shrimp comprise a number of species, mostly distributed in tropical to temperate waters. They live in near-shore structured environments, including seagrasses, rocks, and coral reefs. They are predators on small, live prey, and they kill or stun their prey using a snap from a disproportionately large claw. The snap of the claw generates a cavitation event and, by the way, a high-amplitude, broadband transient sound that is also called a snap. The combined noise from the local population of snapping shrimp is a familiar feature not only to bioacoustics researchers, but to anyone who snorkels or SCUBA dives in areas with snapping shrimp.

Because of this noise and the role snapping shrimp play in the marine food web, they are an excellent candidate as an “indicator species”, a species that can be easily monitored and which provides a measure of the health of that part of the marine food web. Better yet, the monitoring and assessment can be done acoustically, by sound recording, to get a measure for a local population.

If I had a chunk of money to throw at this, a sophisticated way to do this would be to make a baseline of calibrated sound recordings and be able to characterize tidal and daily cycle effects on snapping shrimp sound activity, and thus be able to statistically determine a reduction in activity post-contamination. I estimate somewhere around $10K would be needed to set up a portable data collection system from scratch with that kind of capability. Not having that in spare change in my pocket, I’m looking at a somewhat different approach that a lot more people can get into with minimal outlay of funds and just a bit of do-it-yourself drive.

Because snapping shrimp noise is broadband, you can hear it even in plain audio recordings, though the peak frequencies are actually ultrasonic. This means any sort of audio recorder can be used to find out if snapping shrimp are present in a location: cassette tape recorder, digital recorders, and even video cameras. The thing that any of those will need is a microphone input. What to plug in for that recording? A hydrophone would be great, but most people don’t have those lying around. But one can also make a normal microphone water-resistant and use it. It is best to think of such a microphone as disposable, since better sensitivity also corresponds to the water-resistance being more fragile, and saltwater is great at destroying electronics. In another post, I’ll describe making your own hydrophone or water-resistant microphone. If you already have a recorder, the additional cost is under $50 to be able to record underwater sound. I’m not looking for this sort of recording to do as much, simply to say whether a snapping shrimp population is active or not.

Below is an example of a simple recording I made last night that demonstrates the presence of an active population of snapping shrimp at one location and time. I’m still working on what additional information should be noted along with the recording, but I think what I provide here may be sufficient.

File: s_sunshine_skyway_201006241851_WS_30006.wma
Recorder: Olympus WS-320M, ST HQ mode, CONF mic sensitivity
Transducer: Salvaged hydrophone from a sonobuoy
Transducer depth: Approximately 2 feet
Recording made by: Wesley R. Elsberry
Date: 2010-06-24
Time: 18:51 EDT
Latitude: 27.586371°
Longitude: -82.620388°
Location description: South Sunshine Skyway Bridge on road to south fishing pier, at overpass over water, north side, toward east end.

I’ll be posting more on this topic later.

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My parents send me interesting articles from my hometown paper, the Lakeland Ledger. One of the latest of these I got was an article by Eric Pera titled, A Special Kind of Air Patrol. It is about Polk county farmers employing American Bird Abatement Service (ABAS) to keep crops like blueberries safe from depredation by flocks of cedar waxwings and other birds. Their method? Fly falcons over the fields during the daytime. Check out the article; it has some nice pictures of the Aplomado falcons used by ABAS.

While reading the article I realized that I had a personal connection in the story: Jim Nelson, co-owner of ABAS, was quoted in there. Jim is a friend of Diane and I from back when we were living in eastern Washington state. Jim is an avid longwinger who nonetheless took time to help us train our then-new Harris’ hawk, Rusty. Rusty surprised Jim by showing enthusiasm for hunting upland birds and ducks. (Rusty also surprised him in having an absolute unwillingness to be or remain hooded.) We wish Jim and his colleagues all the best with the ABAS venture.

In the article, it says that ABAS’s “services aren’t cheap, costing as much as $600 a day for one falconer and up to four birds”. Well, I don’t know how one defines cheap here. It is likely that the falconer gets half or less of the day’s charge, so they are specialists with federal/state permits probably working for less than $40/hour. The other half would have to cover the costs of breeding, training, and maintaining the falcons. That is a not-inconsiderable expense in terms of materials and labor itself. There are travel costs and the costs of radio-telemetry for each falcon. Figure in also that ABAS likely does not have a full year-round schedule, so the days that do get paid have to cover the parts of the year that don’t. If the farmer gets about $2/pint of blueberries, and needs about a week’s protection to get the crop harvested, he comes out ahead if the falcons save him over 2,100 pints of blueberries.

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The Los Angeles Times reports on how the US Interior Department made a decision about sage grouse:

The Interior Department declared Friday that an iconic Western bird deserves federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, but declined to offer that protection immediately — a split decision that will allow oil and gas drilling to continue across large swaths of the mountainous West.

The department issued a so-called “warranted but precluded” designation for the greater sage grouse, meaning that the bird merits protection but won’t receive it for now because other species are a higher priority.

Yes, that’s right, sage grouse are an endangered species, but not so endangered as to have us do anything about it.

The “other species” bit is a particularly bogus piece of argumentation. The fact is that listing sage grouse as an endangered species would put most of the burden on developers, who would have far more stringent requirements to meet to show that their projects would not unduly impact sage grouse. Plus, I’d like to hear the list of endangered species that are getting better attention within the Department of the Interior because they don’t have to pay attention to sage grouse. That ought to be darkly amusing for a while as we contemplate what the Department of the Interior has done for them.

Now let’s have a look at what Department of the Interior head honcho Ken Salazar had to say:

“The sage grouse’s decline reflects the extent to which open land in the West has been developed in the last century,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in an issued statement.

“This development has provided important benefits, but we must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species’ survival while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources,” Salazar said. “Voluntary conservation agreements, federal financial and technical assistance and other partnership incentives can play a key role in this effort.”

Let’s see, Salazar correctly notes that the problem for sage grouse is one of habitat loss. Then, Salazar goes on to emit some bafflegab that doesn’t actually imply that anything will be done that has any effect on habitat loss. There’s already a history of “voluntary conservation” when it comes to sage grouse: I don’t think that the rate of habitat exploitation has even slowed due to this; I’d appreciate comments from people who have the numbers. The feds are broke, so there isn’t much that we can expect in the way of financial assistance there. The feds have given the technical assistance that would be of help (”If you build it, they will go away.”), and it has been ignored. I’m not sure what a “partnership incentive” is, but my suspicion is that it is merely pretty pettifoggery to try to obscure the fact that the Interior Department has decided that corporate interests are more important than the survival of the sage grouse as a species.

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The regional National Ocean Sciences Bowl, the Spoonbill Bowl, happens this next Saturday, March 6th, 2010. The location is at the USF Marine Sciences and Fish and Wildlife Institute (100 SE 8th Ave., St. Petersburg, Florida 33701). It gets going pretty early in the morning. This is a quiz competition with each game pitting two teams of four players against each other. There are two rounds of toss-up questions requiring fast responses, with bonus questions for correctly answered toss-ups. In between, there are two “team challenge” questions that give each team a set time to collaborate on answering more involved questions. The questions are drawn from topics contributing to marine science, including

1. Biology
2. Chemistry
3. Geography
4. Geology
5. Math
6. Physics
7. Marine Policy
8. Social sciences (including economics, history and human interactions)
9. Technology (including instrumentation, remote sensing, & navigation)
10. Current Events

The public is welcome to attend the event.

I’ve volunteered to help with the event, where I will be one of the moderators. I think that we are planning on running eight rooms for the round-robin initial phase of the event. The final phase will be run as a double-elimination tournament. I’m really looking forward to this. In April, the NOSB nationals will be held here in St. Petersburg, where teams winning at the regional competitions around the country will compete.

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This past Monday, Diane was out house-hunting. She checked out a listing for a house that was interesting in part because it was close to a park. After looking at the house, Diane went over to the park to have a look at it, too. This was Sawgrass Lake Park in St. Petersburg, Florida, near I-275 and Gandy Boulevard. She took Ritka, our Vizsla, walking with her. Diane and Ritka were near the water’s edge at about 4:30 PM when Diane saw the water churn. She immediately called to Ritka and started moving away from the water. Ritka’s usual behavior is to run ahead, and that’s just what Ritka did. Diane, though, slipped on the slope and fell to her hands and knees, perhaps in part due to the slip-on “Crocs”-like shoes she was wearing at the time. The churning water was, indeed, a sign of a gator making a lunge, coming out of the water. The gator didn’t connect with anything on his first lunge, but he grabbed Diane’s left calf with his second lunge.

Diane turned and grabbed the gator’s jaw to discourage it from ripping her calf muscle. The gator then released her calf, but when it snapped its jaws shut the second time, Diane’s left thumb was caught there by a tooth. She says that she didn’t care to play tug with a gator, not with just her thumb as the part in the middle. She reached over with her right hand and grabbed the gator’s eye ridge. Diane says that after maybe 30 seconds to a minute of this standoff, the gator opened his jaws, releasing Diane’s thumb. Diane released the gator’s eye ridge. She says that she briefly had considered trying to hold the gator’s jaws closed and using Ritka’s leash to tie it up, but that she didn’t think that she was up to any more tussling with the gator. So the gator headed back to the water and Diane on up the bank and away.

Diane then went back to the van with Ritka, and called to find out about where the nearest medical facility that would treat a gator bite and take our insurance for payment was. She then drove there, to the Morton Plant Bardmoor emergency facility at Starkey and Bryan Dairy Road. Her parents and then I caught up with her there. Her bite wounds were cleaned and dressed, and somewhere around there she had a bout of nausea, sometime about two hours post-attack. The medical staff gave her IV anti-nausea medicine, morphine, and then Vancomycin. They decided she should have observation for the next 24 hours, so they arranged for admittance at Morton Plant Mease in Clearwater. On Tuesday, she received more anitbiotics, since gator bites almost always get infected, and the infections can themselves be fatal. The principal pathogen to be countered is apparently Aeromonas hydrophila. Two orthopedic surgeons had a look and concurred that she would not need surgery. Diane was discharged around 5 PM on Tuesday.

Diane has a couple of weeks of oral antibiotics to continue with, plus twice-daily changes of the wound dressings. We are watching for fever or any sign of infection in the wounds, but so far she is doing fine. She is sleeping a good chunk of the day. That is, when the reporters will leave her alone. She has marks from about two dozen gator teeth on her calf, ranging from scratches through scrapes, tears, and full punctures. She has a pretty big puncture on her left thumb. She had some cuts and abrasions on her right hand.

A second nuisance complaint from the same park was called in Wednesday. A trapper went out and found a gator that had no fear of people at the site of Diane’s attack. He measured it at 6′ 9″ and noted that it was missing about a foot of tail, making it overall about an eight-footer. In looking at past records of fatal attacks, those have been done by gators as small as 6′ 6″. Diane was very fortunate to have come out of this with as little damage as she did.

Here’s some of the coverage of Diane’s story so far:

BayNews 9, with video of their broadcast

The Lakeland Ledger

St. Petersburg Times. This one is slightly inaccurate in places, but was filed before Harwell did an in-person interview with Diane, so we are hoping for a better article later.

Diane says that she wouldn’t mind going to an alligator-free place for a while, so please go vote for our bid to blog an Antarctic trip next February.

Update: ABC News has taken the story to the national audience. Fox News had a segment, but I don’t know if that was regional or national.

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Just noticed this at Florida Animal Law:

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) had requested comments from the public regarding plans to delist the peregrine falcon, as well as any economic and social factors that should be considered in managing the falcons in Florida (WCTV).

The falcons are slated to be delisted from the state’s imperiled species list. Comments can be submitted to Peregrine Falcon Management Plan Comments, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Northeast Region, 1239 SW 10th St., Ocala, FL 34471-0323 or e-mailed to peregrine@MyFWC.com. Comments must be received by 5 p.m., Aug. 12, 2008.

August 12th is approaching rapidly. Get those comments in.

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Quark Expeditions has a contest going. They are making a promotion out of sending a blogger to Antarctica on an expedition next year, and have a voting system set up so that each blogger can have people vote for their bid to go on the trip.

I found out about the whole thing a bit late, when PZ Myers on Pharyngula endorsed Grrrlscientist’s bid. So I’m in a bit of a hole at the moment in the voting. Please take a moment to go vote for my bid. You can change your vote later, if you decide to go with another blogger in the running. The voting ends September 30th, 2009.

Back around 1997, Randy Davis at Texas A&M University was putting together an Anatarctic expedition to observe the behavior of diving Weddell seals, including both physiological and bioacoustical measures of what was happening. I got an invitation to go along to assist in the research, but I had to turn that down because of my chronic ulcerative colitis. As my doctor said, though, ulcerative colitis can be cured, and my colon got removed back in 2004. (See the first messages on this blog for the gory details of going through surgery and recuperation.) So now I’m in shape where I can contemplate having an adventure, and I’d like to get the chance to find out part of what I missed due to chronic illness earlier. Please give me a hand: vote for my bid, and pass it on to people you know. And if you do, I’d be grateful to hear from you in the comments here, too.

I should point out that the contest gives the winner a two-person expedition to Antarctica. My partner for the trip is Diane J. Blackwood. Diane’s academic background is also interdisciplinary. She has a BS in zoology, another BS in electrical engineering, an MS in biomedical engineering, and a Ph.D. in wildlife and fisheries sciences. We both went through the same Ph.D. program together at Texas A&M University. Diane has a lot of research experience, from respiratory studies in infants through G-induced loss of consciousness in fighter pilots, from behavior of lekking prairie chickens and sage grouse to reaction times of whales and dolphins in hearing tests. A vote for my bid gets you, the blog reader, an additional expert perspective on the expedition.

Gearing up for Antarctica

It’s a pleasant fantasy to think about what to take along on an Antarctic expedition. One has to balance weight versus value for these sorts of trips, so the first pass will simply be to list off useful things, and later I’ll work on winnowing that down.

Computer gear:

Laptop computer, probably my Gateway MT6458 for me and the old IBM Thinkpad A30 for Diane.
External drive(s), probably one or two 1.5TB USB drives
USB card reader(s)
USB flash drive(s), have one 8GB, will likely stock up on more
Aim to have one or two USB drives pre-loaded with Ubuntu and Knoppix systems for booting and system rescue
CD set of disks for system recovery/reinstallation
GPS with waypoint logging

Toolkit:
Screwdrivers, straight flat blade, Phillips #2, interchangeable tip with tip assortment, miniature screwdriver set
Eyeglass repair kit (2)
Needle-nose pliers
Needle-nose Vise-Grip
Forceps, curved and straight
Dikes, small and medium
C clamps (2)
Gaffer’s tape
2″ PVC pipe tape
Scotch Super-33 electrical tape
Wire-wrap tool
Wire-wrap wire
Hook-up wire, 24 gauge
15W pencil soldering iron
Solder

Photography:
Camera bodies
Nikon D2Xs (digital SLR)
Fuji S2 (digital SLR)
Nikon F2 (manual film SLR)
(May want to get a full frame digital SLR for the trip)
Lenses:
Nikkor VR AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8
Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Nikkor AI-S 24mm f/2.8
Micro-Nikkor AI-S 105mm f/2.8
Nikkor AI-S 50mm f/2
Sigma AF 18-200mm
(May want to add a 500mm mirror lens or other long lens)
Flash:
Nikon SB-800 (2)
Accessories:
Wireless remote for D2Xs
Gossen Luna-Pro light meter
Compact flash cards
SD to compact flash adapters (2)
Ultrapods (2)
Nikon flash cord
Diffuser for macro work
Custom panorama head
(Need to get a travel tripod)
(More stuff to be listed)

Acoustics:
EDO Western 6166 hydrophone (good for audio through high frequency sound)
Sonobuoy salvage hydrophones, various
Geophone (low frequency and vibration response, has suction cup)
Aiwa miniature stereo mic
Shotgun mic
Olympus WS-320M voice recorder
Archos AV320
Custom hydrophone pre-amps
Battery-powered pre-amps and amplifiers
GT-1000T Amp/monitor speaker
(Will look for flash memory data recorder before trip)

Other:
Hydrometer
Thermometer
Secchi disk
(There are some simple bits of science that can be done with the above tools concerning the state of the sea surface and how the Antarctic peninsula differs from the starting point in Argentina.)

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This came across MARMAM just now.

Subject: [MARMAM] Six Beaked Whales stranded in Azores (URGENT)
From: “marc fernandez”
Date: Sat, June 27, 2009 5:47 am

Dear Colleagues,

I want to report an unusual situation occurred during the last week and a
half in São Miguel island, Azores, and ask for help in order to get some
clear conclusions.

During the last two weeks a total of *6 beaked whales stranded* on this
small island, a really unusual fact. Of these *6 two were dead and 4
stranded alive *and returned to the open sea. From the first two animals
(the dead ones) we only can get one identification and it was a Cuvier's
Beaked Whale, probably an immature male. The other four animals stranded on
a beach and they were returned to the sea immediately by the lifeguards and
the coastal guard, for these reason we don't have a lot of information, but
for the pictures they send us probably were Sowerby's Beaked Whales, we only
now that they stranded alive and probably they were immature animals also,
due to the body lenght (about 3.5 meters).

We don't have any notice about military activities in the area, but is
really difficult to get this kind of information, for this reason i want to
ask you for help to find if there is any military or seismic prospection on
the area that could affect these animals.

Thanks for your help.

All the best,

Marc Fernandez Morron
Universidade dos Açores

Marc Morron is asking about military exercises because there is a known correlation between use of mid-frequency military sonar and injury to beaked whales. If anyone has any information, please leave a comment.

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Sirenian International, a manatee conservation and public outreach organization, now has a Facebook group.

SI also has a field course in Belize that one can sign up for:

Ecology, Behavior & Conservation of Manatees & Dolphins
A Unique Field Course in the Drowned Cayes, Belize
Host: Caryn Self-Sullivan
Type: Education – Class
Network: Global
Start Time: Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 12:00am
End Time: Friday, June 12, 2009 at 5:00pm
Location: Spanish Bay Conservation & Research Center
Street: Drowned Cayes
City/Town: Belize, Belize

Description

Want to be a Marine Mammal Biologist? Want to be a Behavioral Ecologist?

Here’s your chance to join our research team for two intense weeks of total immersion into the world of Animal Behavior, Antillean manatees, and bottlenose dolphins in Belize!

REGISTER EARLY! SAVE $100 WHEN YOU REGISTER BY MARCH 10th!

Become totally immersed into island living, behavioral ecology and marine biology through lectures and learning activities, literature review, debate, projects, and field research. This unique field course combines an overview of the ecology, behavior, and conservation of sirenians and cetaceans with hands-on manatee & dolphin research in the Drowned Cayes, Belize.

Get out of the classroom! You’ll spend 3-4 hours on the water each day learning about the environment as we explore a labyrinth of mangrove islands, seagrass beds, and coral patches searching for elusive manatees and charismatic dolphins. You’ll collect behavioral and environmental data and learn about photo-id techniques; you’ll develop a Fact Sheet or Activity Booklet about a related topic to be published by the Hugh Parkey Foundation for Marine Awareness & Education and/or Sirenian International. Extra-curricular activities include diving or snorkeling at Turneffe Atoll, and exploring an ancient Maya City.

That just sounds cool.

Dr. Self-Sullivan was one of my fellow grad students back when Diane and I were at Texas A&M University. She’s terrific and has years of experience with the marine mammal populations in Belize, so if you have the time and inclination, I’d suggest signing up pronto.

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Nature (7228, p.361) had notice of an article in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society (96, 82-102, 2009) that demonstrates the use of biosonar in several species of parasitic wasps. These wasps seek out beetle larvae in trees, using hammer-like ends of the antennae to produce sound.

So far as I know, this is the first group of invertebrate species to be shown to use biosonar.

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Mike Majerus, the Cambridge zoologist and lepidopterist, died overnight between this past Monday and Tuesday. Majerus patiently rebutted both religious antievolutionist and scientific misunderstandings of the evidence for evolution provided by industrial melanism seen in the peppered moth, Biston betularia.

NCSE has a summary rebuttal to antievolutionist claims about resting places of moths mostly based on the research of Majerus.

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NPR reports on the latest “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” (PETA) publicity campaign, this one aimed at reducing fishing and use of fish as food. One can imagine the PETA brainstorming session for this: what might make people treat fish differently? And some unknown genius there got the idea that they could rename “fish” as “sea kittens”.

“PETA thought that by renaming fish sea kittens, compassionate people who would never dream of hurting a dog or a cat might extend that sympathy to fish, or sea kittens,” PETA campaign coordinator Ashley Byrne says.

Byrne says that rebranding fish as sea kittens was obvious.

“Fish not only have the same ability to feel pain as a dog or a cat, but they also communicate with one another,” she says. “They have complex social interactions; they form bonds; they express affection by gently rubbing against one another.”

That’s an anthropomorphic mess there. Fish certainly can feel pain, but the “same ability” statement just doesn’t do anything. As for the communication thing, fish often do defend territories and attract mates. Maybe that’s what is meant by “complex social interactions”. I don’t know what fish-rubbing Byrne has witnessed, but there’s a lot of fin-nipping and worse out there as well.

A child’s response disputed PETA’s view of fish mentality:

“It just doesn’t look right,” Harmony says. Harmony, the fourth generation of a commercial fishing family, looks at the cartoon fish and reads through the information on the site. “They say that they’re intelligent, but they’re not really,” Harmony says. “They have tiny, tiny little brains. Very miniature.”

I wouldn’t agree with the dismissal made there, either. I’ve been able to use operant conditioning to train fish myself, and C. Scott Johnson wrote a book about training goldfish with the same techniques that are used for training dolphins (which seems to have become a collectors item). I certainly long ago discarded the Cartesian view of animals as automatons, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating a couple of catfish filets with lemon juice and butter.

The issue of job loss in the commercial fisheries has a PETA answer:

But Byrne says that even if people lose jobs in the fishing industry through the success of the campaign, they could find work in more sea-kitten-friendly environments.

“So as there is less of a demand for foods like fish, there is more of a demand for other foods, and jobs open up in those industries,” Byrne says.

So how many soybean and peanut farmers does the country need, especially now in the recession we’ve got going? PETA doesn’t mention what “other” food industries might take in the former fishermen, but one can bet that they don’t mean anything that comes near a domestic animal.

Though PETA’s regard for fishermen is likely on a par with the 72 to 90% of animals they euthanize at PETA-run shelters, it may well be the case that many commercial fishermen will be out of work anyway. Perpetual stock mis-management by politics and hope rather than biology has put many commercial fisheries into the danger zone. Idiotic campaigns about “sea kittens” is not a substitute for actual biology-based stock management.

Remember, PETA’s long-term goal is a world in which all humans are obligate vegans, all domestic animals of any sort are extinct, and no human use of wildlife happens. It’s sometimes easy to overlook in those cases where PETA hops on a convenient bandwagon (”Puppy mills are bad!”), but stunts like this “sea kittens” thing help make the point that these folks are far, far removed from where most people in the USA are at.

Hat tip to “Spottedwind” at AtBC.

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A news item notes that President Bush signed three new national monuments into effect and is being praised by various people for the action. Somewhat less prominent is the information that the area of these monuments, all in the Pacific Ocean, is a fraction of what marine biologists had requested receive protection. 2.2 million square kilometers were designated, and Bush protected about a quarter of that, 505,000 square kilometers.

The move, which has become known as Bush’s Blue Legacy, tops his 2006 designation of 360,000 square kilometers of ocean off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a national monument.

“Bush’s Blue Legacy”? Tell me you’re kidding me, Christopher Pala. Who, precisely, told you that anyone besides a Bush flunky is using that phrase?

The article ends with this inane sound bite:

“This move, coupled with the strong team the Obama Administration is putting in place, gives the ocean a fighting chance,” said Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C.

I think that better oversight may help improve things, but I don’t see any obvious reason to think that simply designating little-used ocean acreage as a “monument” does much by itself to help with the problems that beset ocean habitat. Is there any indication that any government agency is tasked with actually enforcing the paper protection that area has received? Or is it possible that an already overstretched part of our government has been tasked with that, meaning that their enforcement of regulations where known problems are occurring becomes more spotty and less effective? I certainly feel entitled to a modicum of cynicism where “conservation” and “George W. Bush” are mentioned in proximity to one another.

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A Duke University press release notes the discovery of a large (1 inch diameter) marine amoeba that moves slowly and leaves distinctive tracks behind.

The distinctive trail that the Gromias leave is identical to mud tracks found in the fossil record, which throws a big wrench into one long-standing argument in biology. The fossil tracks pre-date the so-called “Cambrian explosion” 530 million years ago, which was a blossoming of multicellular life and complex body plans from what had previously just been simple, blobby life forms. Many paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have argued that such a trail couldn’t possibly have been made by a simple organism, meaning complex body plans were around before the Cambrian explosion. But the Gromia show that simple blobs can indeed move and make tracks in the light, silty bottom.

We’re confident that drawing attention to these bizarre mega-protists will provide a powerful new spin to the debate,” said biologist Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin, who is first author on the paper in Current Biology. Matz worked out the genetics of the new creature and found it’s a giant amoeba closely related to similar blobs found in the Gulf of Oman, near Antarctica, off Guam, and in the Mediterranean. None of them are known to move.

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Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times treats this story of a Missouri farmer receiving a rare Presidential pardon as just one of those “human interest” features. So, what was the fellow pardoned of?

Mr. Collier’s crime was unlikely and, he said in an interview, unintended. While hunting, he began noticing the reappearance of wild turkeys, decades after they were believed to have died away. But he feared that a pack of coyotes in the area would not give them a chance to breed. “I got it in my head that if we got rid of the coyotes, the turkeys would get off to a better start,” Mr. Collier said. So he laid a trap of ground beef laced with the pesticide Furadan, which, under federal law, may not be used as animal poison.

Seven coyotes died after eating the beef. But several other animals fed on their carcasses and died as well, including the bald eagles.

The dead eagles were found by a passerby who alerted the federal authorities who, in turn, identified the poison that killed them and tracked its purchase to Mr. Collier. He pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and to the misdemeanor charge of illegal use of a pesticide.

With no prior criminal history, he was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

As a convicted felon, Mr. Collier would have to give up his collection of hunting guns, a blow to his lifestyle. “We kind of got a hunting heritage in this family,” he said. “It’s what we do.”

It seems to me that the miscarriage of justice in this case lies in the granting of the pardon to an unworthy recipient, not in the original charge and conviction of an indiscrimant poisoner. What did the victims go through? This description gives an idea…

The poison works more like nerve-gas by paralysing the nervous system resulting in twitching, trembling, paralysed breathing, convulsions and, if the dose is enough, death. It gets into the body through swallowing, inhaling or touching. Furadan is responsible for the consequential death of millions of birds in the US. Birds which consumed dead grasshoppers and other insects (eliminated using Furadan on croplands) and those which ingested the chemical directly died en masse. in 1989 for instance, 1,985 ducks, 97% of northern pintails and 3% of green-winged teal were found dead in Colusa, California in an area where Furadan had been used.

Or this page, giving the symptoms for recognizing when a human has been poisoned. Other mammals would have much the same symptoms.

The carbamate insecticide group contains carbaryl insecticides, such as Sevin, that have low mammalian toxicities, and aldicarb and carbofuran, such as Temik and Furadan, that have a high mammalian toxicity.

Early symptoms of carbamate poisoning include weakness, dizziness, and sweating. Headache, salivation, vomiting, and diarrhea are also common. Later symptoms include constricted pupils, lack of coordination, and slurred speech. As with organophosphates, tightness in the chest and coughing may precede lung failure or fluid entering the lungs.

The symptoms of a carbamate insecticide poisoning appear more quickly, are more easily reversed, and persist for a shorter time than do the symptoms of an organophosphate poisoning. Its fast action makes it imperative for a person to seek immediate medical treatment at the first sign of a poisoning. While the amount of carbamate or organophosphate required to produce symptoms may be the same, a greater amount of carbamate active ingredient is usually required to threaten the victim’s life. Importantly, blood tests do not easily identify carbamate in the body, so taking the label or MSDS to the hospital can be especially critical. The antidote for carbamate poisoning is atropine, which may have to be given in large doses.

Did Mr. Collier do anything to keep pet dogs and cats away from the poisoned meat? The story doesn’t say, nor does it relate exactly what other animals succumbed to the poison.

Why is the New York Times reading more like the local rag in its reporting? Are they going soft? Rutenberg spent precious column-inches on the history of the presidential pardon, and more on the particulars of Collier’s request going through the system. There is no sign that Rutenberg contacted any wildlife authority in writing his story. There’s no indication that Rutenberg did any research on effects of casual attempts at poisoning wildlife, residence times of Furadan, incidental risk to water supplies, or any of a number of things that could have — or should have — featured prominently in any such story.

The pardon is of a piece with Bush Administration policies concerning wildlife, a blatant disregard for any restrictions at all on human exploitation or destruction of wildlife. It’s not all that surprising that the “stingy” Bush happened to dole out a pardon for a good ol’ boy.

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Given the confusion over the Queen Conch photograph I recently pointed out, I was looking at gastropod pictures via Google Images. I ran across this page that supposedly pictures a Florida Fighting Conch (Strombus alatus), a common conch species. However, I think they’ve misidentified this gastropod. Given the picture, I think it is much more likely to be the Crown Conch (Melongena corona), an even more common gastropod of Florida’s bays and inshore waters.

Some clues are handy. There is the nearly-oval operculum seen in the photo. Melongena corona are commonly exposed during low tide, and the operculum makes a pretty good seal with the shell, preventing the snail from drying out too rapidly. By contrast, strombid opercula are usually sickle-shaped, and do a poor job of sealing the aperture when the snail retracts into the shell. The shell structure is overall lighter than in the strombids. There is a series of raised flutes near the anterior end of the shell, which are absent in Strombus alatus. There is no strombid notch, the gap in the line of the outer edge of the shell that a strombid uses to extend its stalked eye through when the whole shell rests on a sandy bottom.

The two species differ in more than shell morphology. The strombids feed on algae and detritus, but the Melongena corona are important predators of various species of bivalves. Melongena spp. have a very long proboscis with scraping radular teeth. Once they are able to weaken a bivalve and insert the proboscis, it is game over for the bivalve. Keeping a few of these snails in a tank meant that I could have cleaned-out bivalve shells any time I wanted, plus they don’t bore a hole in the bivalve shell like the moon snails do.

Of course, I’m reaching back about thirty-five years to when I was actively visiting the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean around Florida, and these mollusks were all good acquaintances of mine. I looked for an email address for the person credited with the page, but wasn’t able to find it.

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Check out the picture of the Queen Conch on p.34 of the November/December 2008 Florida Wildlife magazine. It shows the incredibly rare sinistral form of this gastropod. Most gastropod shells have a turn to the right, or dextral, form. A well-known species of gastropod in Florida that typically has a turn to the left, or sinistral, form is the Lightning Whelk, a very common inhabitant of Florida’s bays and inshore waterways. But the Queen Conch doesn’t go to the left that often. One can only imagine the trouble Florida Wildlife photographers had to go through in order to find not just a sinistral Queen Conch, but a live sinistral Queen Conch. The conch page at the website shows the normal, dextral form.

Either that, or the editor “flopped” the photo. Rembrandt famously did the same thing, although carving a whole etching is rather more involved than flopping a photo.

Queen Conchs are a protected species, so please leave them where they are when you visit Florida.

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