Dirty Fighing Emptying Ocean

In June, along the shoreline of Mauritania, in northwest Africa, scientists made a gruesome discovery: the carcasses of 230 dolphins, a pilot whale, and 15 endangered hawksbill and leatherback sea turtles.
"Because of the mixture of species found, and the fact that some of them were entangled in sections of fishing nets, it is likely that these animals were killed as bycatch," said Jean-Christophe Vie, deputy coordinator of the World Conservation Union's species program, based in Gland, Switzerland.

Across the world's oceans, large commercial fishing boats haul aboard huge nets and 60-mile (97-kilometer) lines teeming with unwanted creatures—bycatch, sometimes referred to as "bykill" or "dirty fishing."
Bycatch is a mix of young or low-value fishes, seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles, often considered worthless and tossed overboard—dead or dying.
Collateral Damage
The collateral damage amounts to about 30 million tons (about 27 million tonnes) of sea life each year, says marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University—about one-third the total global catch. Among the worst offenders are shrimp trawlers, who often discard up to 10 pounds of sea life for each pound of shrimp they catch.
"If a hunter is hunting for elk, he's not killing sparrows, eagles, coyotes, and pronghorn," said Elliott Norse, president of Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI) in Redmond, Washington. "That's different in the sea. We fish blindly—and it's an exceedingly wasteful way of doing things."
A recent barrage of scientific reports detail alarming declines in many fish and other marine animal populations. One of these, published in the journal Nature, states that just 10 percent of swordfish, sharks and other large, predatory fish remain in the world's oceans after just 50 years of commercial fishing.
Without immediate action, they could go the way of the dinosaurs, warns study author Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist from Dalhousie University in Hallifax, Nova Scotia.
High-Impact Fishing
Bottom trawling inflicts the most damage on the undersea environment, according to an MCBI report funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts titled "Shifting Gears." Trawlers drag weighted nets up to a quarter-mile wide along the ocean floor, bulldozing deep-sea coral reefs and other seafloor ecosystems where many sea animals live or breed. It is the equivalent of clear cutting forests to hunt deer, said Norse.
The study also classified gill nets and longline fishing as "high impact". With these methods, "you're catching and killing everything that swims by," says Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. (all info from Nationalgeographic.com)

Sable Island

Sable Island is a small Canadian island situated 180 km (111mi) southeast of Nova Scotia in the Atlantic Ocean. As of 2001, the island is home to around 15 people. Sable Island is specifically mentioned in the Constitution of Canada as being the special responsibility of the federal government, but for many political purposes it is part of District 13 of the Halifax Regional Municipality.

Sable Island is a narrow crescent-shaped sandbar with a surface area of about 3400 ha. Despite being nearly 42 km or 26 mi long, it is no more than 2 km or 1.25 mi across at its widest point. It emerges from vast shoals and shallows on the continental shelf which, in tandem with the area's frequent fog and sudden strong storms including hurricanes and northeasters, have caused over 300 recorded shipwrecks. It is often referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, as it sits astride the great circle route from North America's east coast to Europe. The nearest landfall is 160 km to the northwest near Canso, Nova Scotia.
Sable Island was named after its sand—'sable' is French for 'sand'. It is covered with grass and other low-growing vegetation. Sable Island is believed to have formed from large quantities of sand and gravel deposited on the continental shelf near the end of the last ice age. The island is continually changing its shape with the effects of strong winds and violent ocean storms. The island has two freshwater ponds on the south side between the station and west light. There are frequent heavy fogs in the area due to the contrasting effects of the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream. During winter months, the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream can sometimes give Sable Island the warmest temperatures in Canada.
Sable Island should not be confused with Cape Sable Island in southwestern Nova Scotia.

The island is home to over 250 free-roaming feral horses which are protected by law from human interference. The best evidence for the origin of the horse population is that they are descended from horses confiscated from Acadians during the Great Expulsion and left on the island by Boston merchant Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock.
In the past, excess horses have been rounded up and shipped off the island for use in coal mines on Cape Breton Island, or to be sold, but the Government gave full protection to the horse population in 1960, and they have been left alone ever since.
Several large bird colonies are also resident; Arctic terns, and Ipswich sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps), a subspecies of the Savannah Sparrow that breed in no other location. Harbour and Grey seals also breed on the island's shores. There is also a species of freshwater sponge (Heteromeyenia macouni) found only in ponds on the island. (all info from Wikimedia Inc.)

Exxon Valdez

Exxon Valdez was the original name of an oil tanker owned by the former Exxon Corporation. It gained widespread infamy after the March 24, 1989 oil spill in which the tanker hit Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef and spilled an estimated 11 to 30 million U.S. gallons (50,000 m³ to 150,000 m³) of crude oil: the Exxon Valdez oil spill, or the EVOS. As a result of the spill thousands of animals perished in the following months. The best estimates are: 250,000 sea birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 orcas, and billions of salmon and herring eggs. In addition, the oil killed off a majority of the plankton supply in the sound. Many centers were set up to clean animals but they were too late in many cases. The captain of the Exxon Valdez, Joseph Hazelwood, was then found guilty of negligence — he admitted he had been drinking vodka before boarding the vessel — and in 1991 a federal judge approved a $1.1 billion settlement reached by Exxon, the federal government, and Alaska.
The vessel had an all steel construction, built by National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego. A relatively new tanker at the time of the spill, it was delivered to Exxon in December 1986. The tanker was 300 m long, 50 m wide, and 27 m in depth (987 ft by 166 ft by 88 ft), weighing 30,000 tons empty and powered by a 31,650 shp (23.60 MW) diesel engine. The ship could transport a maximum of 1.48 million barrels (200,000 t) at a sustained speed of 16.25 knots (30 km/h) and was employed to transport crude oil from the Alyeska consortium's pipeline terminal in Valdez, Alaska, to the lower 48 states of the United States. The vessel was carrying about 1.26 million barrels, or about 53 million gallons, when it struck the reef. The accident would have been contained, but the captain only reported it as a minor accident.
After the spill, the Exxon Valdez was towed to San Diego, arriving on July 10 and repairs began in July 30, 1989. Approximately 1,600 tons of steel were removed and replaced. In June 1989 the tanker left harbor after $30 million of repairs.
Exxon operated the tanker in Europe to avoid further publicity, renaming it the Exxon Mediterranean, and later the Sea River Mediterranean (under the Exxon subsidiary SeaRiver Maritime). The Sea River Mediterranean remains in service, with its name further shortened to S/R Mediterranean, then to simply Mediterranean under the Marshall Island flag but is prohibited by law from entering Prince William Sound. The vessel may face scrapping in the near future, due to a global ban on single-hulled tankers, despite the ship being only about halfway through its operational life expectancy. (all info from Wikimedia Inc.)

Coral Reefs

Coral reefs are aragonite structures produced by living organisms, found in shallow, tropical marine waters with little to no nutrients in the water. High nutrient levels such as that found in runoff from agricultural areas can harm the reef by encouraging the growth of Algae. In most reefs, the predominant organisms are stony corals, colonial cnidarians that secrete an exoskeleton of calcium carbonate (limestone). The accumulation of skeletal material, broken and piled up by wave action and bioeroders, produces a massive calcareous formation that supports the living corals and a great variety of other animal and plant life. Although corals are found both in temperate and tropical waters, reefs are formed only in a zone extending at most from 30°N to 30°S of the equator; the reef-forming corals do not grow at depths of over 30 m (100 ft) or where the water temperature falls below 22 °C (72 °F).

Coral reefs can take a variety of forms, defined in following;
Apron reef — short reef resembling a fringing reef, but more sloped; extending out and downward from a point or peninsular shore.
Fringing reef — reef that is directly attached to a shore or borders it with an intervening shallow channel or lagoon.
Barrier reef — reef separated from a mainland or island shore by a deep lagoon; see great Barrier Reef.
Patch reef — an isolated, often circular reef, usually within a lagoon or embayment.
Ribbon reef — long, narrow, somewhat winding reef, usually associated with an atoll lagoon.
Table reef — isolated reef, approaching an atoll type, but without a lagoon.
Atoll reef — a more or less circular or continuous barrier reef surrounding a lagoon without a central island; see atoll.
Bank Reef — Bank reefs are larger than patch reefs and are linear or semi-circular in outline.

(All info from Wikimedia Inc.)

Grand Banks

The Grand Banks are an important aspect of Atlantic Canadian culture due to their economic impacts and the lesson learned by the overfishing of this area and the subsequent depletion of one of the largest fish stocks in the world. I took a Canadian history course at Mount Royal College in Calgary and we discussed the implication of the overfishing of the Grand Banks in detail and after this I understood how awful it was and how bad it looked on the Canadian government that we were not able to control this problem. The Grand Banks are a group of underwater plateaus southeast of Newfoundland on the North American continental shelf. These areas are relatively shallow, ranging from 25 to 100 metres in depth. The cold Labrador Current mixes with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream here.The mixing of these waters and the shape of the ocean bottom lifts nutrients to the surface. These conditions created one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Fish species include Atlantic cod, haddock and capelin. Shellfish include scallop and lobster. The area also supports large colonies of sea birds such as Northern Gannets, shearwaters and sea ducks and various sea mammals such as seals, dolphins and whales.
In addition to the effects on nutrients, the mixing of the cold and warm currents often causes fog in the area. Canada is currently performing the hydrographic and geological surveys necessary for claiming the entire continental shelf off eastern Canada, under the auspices of the latest United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Once this aspect of UNCLOS is ratified, Canada will presumably control these remaining parts of Grand Banks which are outside of its EEZ jurisdiction.
Petroleum reserves have also been discovered and a number of oil fields are under development in this region, most notably the Hibernia, Terra Nova, and White Rose projects; the harsh environment on the Grand Banks also led to the Ocean Ranger disaster.

Portuguese Mon O' War

Since we were discussing these creatures today in class, I decided I would make a blog on the Portuguese Mon O' War. I remember when I was younger my parents went on a cruise and when they came back they told me that there was a swing on the boat that you could swing off of to jump into the water, and an unfortunate individual jumped onto a Man O' War and was in rough shape. It is also interesting that a creature that is not a predator can be so harmful to humans.

The Portuguese Man O' War (Physalia physalis), also known as the blue bubble or bluebottle, is commonly thought of as a jellyfish but is actually a siphonophore—a colony of four sorts of polyps.The Man O' War's float is bilaterally symmetrical with the tentacles at one end, while the chondrophores are radially symmetrical with the sail at an angle. Also the Man O' War has a siphon, while the chondrophores do not. The Portuguese Man O' War has an air bladder; known also as a pneumatophore or sail, that allows it to float on the surface of the ocean. It has no means of propulsion and is pushed by the winds and the current. The sail is filled with air, but may build up a high concentration of carbon dioxide (up to 90%). The bladder must stay wet to ensure survival; every so often it may roll slightly to wet the surface of the float. To escape a surface attack, the pneumatophore can be deflated allowing the Man O' War to briefly submerge.

The sting from the tentacles is potentially dangerous to most humans; these stings have been responsible for several deaths, but usually only cause excruciating pain. Detached tentacles and specimens washed up on shore can sting just as painfully as the full creature in the water, for weeks after detachment. The venom can travel up to the lymph nodes and may cause, depending on the amount of venom, more intense pain. In extreme cases medical attention is necessary.
According to a study done by Dr. Geoffrey Isbister of Newcastle, Australia's Mater Hospital in 2003 through 2005, the best treatment for a sting is to apply hot water to the affected area. Hot water used in the study was fixed at 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit). The hot water eases the pain of a sting by denaturing the toxins.
Applying ice to the area of the sting is also a fairly effective way to suppress the pain. Ice works by making the toxins less active and reduces the sensation and therefore pain of the area of skin around the ice. Additionally, ice constricts blood vessels, reducing the speed at which the poison travels to other parts of the body, including the brain; heat has an opposite effect. It was originally thought that applying ice was the best way of dealing with Man O' War stings before the study was done. Lifesavers around the world still use ice to treat the stings of this species.

(All information for this blog entry is from Wikipedia)

Zeolites of the Bay of Fundy

Zeolites are an important industrial mineral that are found in only a few areas around the world. They have very unusual chemical properties. The two main areas worldwide known for their rich zeolite abundances are in the Bay of Fundy and in the Poona Field in India. Zeolites are found in amygdaloids and veins in the North Mountain volcanic basalt formation. They are normally found in between zones of successive lava flows. The zeolites were deposited after the crystalization of the basalt and have a hydrothermal origin. The north mountain dates to the Jurassic Era, making it around 190 million years old. The north mountain is composed of many tilted layers dipping toward the Bay of Fundy, and the zeolites are normally found along the top layers of the lava flows. The basalt is exposed along the south side of the Bay of Fundy, especially near Parrsboro, and various local islands.

Zeolites have an interesting chemistry composed of hydrated aluminosilicates with alumina and silica linked with oxygen atoms. They also contain some calcium and/or sodium. Zeolites are framework silicates that are related to the feldspar family. However, they form under lower pressure and in more temperate environments. Zeolites contain ports, or open lattice structures in the zeolite molecules that make passageways. For example, in a half pound of zeolite, there is enough surface area from the pores to cover an entire football field. The pore diameter and characteristics are homogeneous. There are several types of zeolites found along the Bay of Fundy. These are:

1. Analcite which has a hardness of 5.5 and are found on Two Islands, Amethyst Cove, Cap d'Or, and Swan Creek.

2. Apophyllite which has a hardness of 4.5-5.0 and is found on Amethyst Cove, Sheffield Bluff, Isle haute, Port George, and Murray Brook. Apophylltes are not actually zeolites, but are closely related.

3. Chabazite which has a hardness of 4.5 and is found in Wassons Bluff, Partridge Island, and Moose Island.

4. Gmelinite which has a hardness of 4.5 and are found on Two Islands, Pinnacle Island, Wassons Bluff, and Partridge Island.

5. Heulandite which has a hardness of 3.4-4.0 and are found in Harbourville, Bennett Bay, Sheffield Bluff, and Wassons Bluff.

6. Mesolite which has a hardness of 4-5 and are found in Port George, Margaretsville, Halls Harbour, Amethyst Cove, and Cap d'Or.

These are just a few of the many zeolites that are found along the North Mountain.

(all information for this entry was taken by a handout from Dr. G. Pe-Piper in the department of Geology, as well as from Wikipedia).