Sea Turtle Gets Artificial Flippers
Friday July 10, 2009
A loggerhead sea turtle in Japan has been outfitted with artificial flippers in an attempt to prepare the turtle for life in the wild after rehabilitation.
The project is led by the Sea Turtle Association of Japan, which rescued the loggerhead turtle, whose front flippers were mangled presumably by a shark.
The turtle tested its flippers in a saltwater pond in June, and modifications will be made to the flippers until the turtle can swim stably. If the project is a success, it will be the first time artificial flippers have been successfully used on a sea turtle.
The loggerhead is a female estimated at 20 years old and has been nicknamed "Yu-chan."
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Loggerhead Sea Turtle Image Courtesy Juan Cuetos, Oceana
More Sharks Than Usual in Gulf of Mexico
Thursday July 9, 2009
News about sharks is not always bad. Researchers and fishermen are seeing more sharks than usual in the Gulf of Mexico this summer, and are hopeful that sharks are making a comeback.
Just as an example, researchers from Mote Marine Laboratory caught a record of 80 sharks from 8 species in 4 days during their quarterly shark-tagging trip, held last month. The species caught were the bull, blacknose, lemon, blacktip, nurse, great hammerhead, scalloped hammerhead, and tiger shark.
Scientists are not sure why sharks are so prevalent this year. Bob Heuter, director of Mote's Center for Shark Research, was quoted in a News-Press article, saying, "It could be a variety of things. It could be weather patterns. It could be the fact that we haven't had red tide for several years, so the system is rebounding, and there's a good amount of food out there for sharks. Shark regulations have gotten tighter and tighter over the last 15 years, so some of that is having an effect."
But, he cautioned, "we're still not seeing them in the numbers that we used to decades ago."
In a sidebar with shark tips, the paper said, "The increase in the number of sharks doesn’t mean they will start chewing people up along area beaches. A person is more likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark."
I commend the paper for using this news as a conservation story rather than hyping shark attacks. The article's side bar does have several tips for avoiding shark attacks, if you are interested in that information, as well as facts on some local species, including the bull shark, tiger shark and great hammerhead shark.
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More Orange Lobsters in New England
Monday July 6, 2009
I recently blogged about a yellow lobster discovered in Massachusetts in a Canadian lobster shipment. A yellow lobster is a color variation said to be a rarity that's found only once in 30 million lobsters. Now two orange lobsters have shown up in New England, again from Canada, and these arrived within 2 days of each other to a lobster pound in York, Maine.
Maybe these lobsters aren't so rare after all! Unusual coloration in lobsters is usually the result of a genetic defect. Tony LaCasse, communications director for the New England Aquarium, said in the Portsmouth Herald that he's heard of a "spate of lobsters that have shown up both on Cape Cod, on the South Shore and in Maine," and that "there might be a concentration of genetic variability in some area that is then getting distributed in New England."
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Disentangling Whales a Dangerous Job
Thursday July 2, 2009
I was fortunate enough to attend a talk on large whale disentanglement given by David Morin, who works for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and previously worked for the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (PCCS) in Provincetown, MA, an organization which has taken the lead on rescuing entangled whales along the East Coast of the U.S.
Entanglements in fishing gear are one of the major threats to whales. Luckily, there are people out there working to prevent entanglements in the first place, and to rescue those whales that get entangled.
Check out the photos on PCCS's web site, and you'll get an idea of what a dangerous job it is to disentangle whales. Imagine approaching a 40-foot humpback whale, who weighs as much as 500 people, and trying to cut off sometimes hundreds of feet of rope. It's not a job for an amateur!
Entanglements can be life-threatening to a whale. Entanglements may involve lines and/or buoys wrapped around various parts of a whale's body, including its flippers, tail and head. This may impair its ability to move, feed, or breathe. If the gear is there long enough, deformities and infection will result.
In some of the pictures and videos Morin shared with us today, whales were so damaged by gear that I reacted with a mixture of nausea and sadness, thinking about the huge impact we can have on these enormous creatures.
If you're interested in this issue, maybe you want to help out. One way we can all help is by knowing where our seafood comes from, and limiting consumption to fish that is caught in a more eco-friendly manner. There are also several interesting career paths and volunteer opportunities to learn about here, from supporting disentanglement efforts themselves to working on new gear technology that will limit harm to whales and other marine life.
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