These are ossicles, small calcareous elements embedded in the skin of the snake sea cucumber (Synapta sp). Ossicles are embedded in the dermis of the body wall of echinoderms, such sea cucumbers, sea stars, brittle stars, and sea urchins. They form part of the endoskeleton and provide rigidity and protection. These small structures varying in shape, size, and in number, depending on the species.
As permafrost in the North thaws, it’s releasing record levels of mercury into Arctic rivers and waterways, graduate students at the University of Alberta have found.
The study, published by the journal Environmental Science & Technology on Nov. 26,found that landslides caused by the rapidly thawing permafrost — also called thaw slumps — in Canada’s Peel Plateau deposit large amounts of mercury into rivers and streams.
The researchers took samples of water in 2015-16, upstream and downstream of permafrost slumps, and compared the concentrations of mercury.
Previous research has already shown that permafrost is one of the biggest storage hubs of mercury. As it thaws, there’s a fear in northern countries around the world that the toxic metal could find its way into the food chain, affecting wildlife and humans. Mercury is toxic at high levels.
Kyra St. Pierre, one of three lead authors on the study, said they found that the level of mercury downstream from the slumps was so high that “initially, we were wondering if there was something wrong with our calculation.”
As many as 6.2 million chinook salmon fry
died last weekend when a windstorm cut power to the Minter Creek
Hatchery in Pierce County and the facility’s backup generator failed.
The fry were in incubators at the Minter
Creek Hatchery operated by the Washington Department of Fish and
Wildlife (WDFW). The pump that supplies water to those incubators
stopped working when both the main power and backup generator failed.
WDFW staff tried to start the generator and
attempted to provide water to the incubators using other methods, but
those efforts were largely unsuccessful, said Eric Kinne, WDFW hatchery
division manager.
“This is a devastating loss,” Kinne said.
“The department is conducting an analysis to determine the root cause of
what went wrong so that we can improve procedures at Minter Creek and
our other hatcheries to help ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
An inventory of the fish lost includes:
4.2 million Deschutes fall chinook fry
1.5 million Minter Creek fall chinook fry
507,000 White River spring chinook fry
Kinne said the department was raising the
White River spring chinook as part of the state’s early efforts to
provide more food for southern resident orcas, which are listed as
endangered both federally and in Washington.
There’s a new attraction involving killer whales in Florida, but it’s got nothing to do with SeaWorld.
The exhibition, called Whale People: Protectors of the Sea,
opened earlier this month at the Florida Museum of Natural History in
Gainesville. On view there through May, its exhibits include an array of
historical indigenous objects such as totems, pipes, and platters
adorned with representations of orca whales. Whale People is the latest
collaboration between the Lummi Nation, an indigenous people of the
Pacific Northwest, and The Natural History Museum,
which produces “pop-up” exhibitions highlighting the impact of humans
on the natural world. The Florida Museum is only the most recent home of
The Natural History Museum, whose previous exhibitions have been hosted
by the Queens Museum in New York City, the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere.
The focus of Whale
People’s curators isn’t on the past, it’s the future—specifically, the
future of killer whales off the coast of Washington State and British
Columbia, which are threatened by resource extraction. The project is
meant to draw attention to the orca population of the Salish Sea, part
of the Lummi’s ancestral homeland. Already afflicted by industrial
pollution and commercial fishing, the Salish Sea is now threatened by
construction of the proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline,
which would transfer crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia for
export, bringing hundreds of massive oil tankers to the waterway.
“The Salish Sea orcas are a sort of ‘miner’s canary’ for the health
of the sea and the wider ecosystem,” says Beka Economopoulos, executive
director of The Natural History Museum. “The proposed Trans Mountain
Pipeline, which would bring 800 new oil tankers annually to the Salish
Sea, would mean game over for the 74 remaining resident orcas.”
The
Natural History Museum connected with a group of Lummi volunteers who
call themselves the House of Tears Carvers to create the centerpiece of
Whale People: the “Whale Rider,” a 4,000-pound, 16-foot hand-carved and
painted totem of a human riding an orca. The “Whale Rider” not only
represents the spiritual connection between the Lummi and the orca,
which they refer to as qw'e lh'ol mechen (“our people who live
under the water”), but other life in the Salish Sea too, like salmon and
raven, illustrating the interdependence of the ecosystem. Produced
using traditional techniques in the Pacific Northwest, the totem was
then transported to Gainesville by tribal members, who stopped for song,
ceremony, and public media events along the way.
“We need the
people of the Pacific Northwest to learn to love the health of their own
environment to the extent that they recognize it as an inherent duty to
protect the rights of their own children to inherit a healthy
environment,” says Jewell James, the head carver with the House of
Tears. “Protection of the Salish Sea, the orcas, and the salmon should
be the legacy they collectively leave to their own children.”
Good news in conservation: A pair of Madeiran storm petrel (Oceanodroma castro) nested for the first time in Berlenga Island, off Peniche coast, Portugual, following the conservationist effort for eradicating its predator, the black rat.
Only one of the 20 artificial nests that project LIFE Berlengas team installed for Madeiran storm petrel has one egg, it sounds not big, but it is the result of a lot of effort.. Hopefully this egg will hatch by January. Until today there were no records of this species nesting in the island, only in nearby islets.
Artificial nests are made of ceramic vases, slightly buried on the ground, with a hole for birds to come in and out.
To help attract nesting pairs, LIFE Berlengas team also installed a system that reproduced typical sounds of a Madeiran storm petrel colony. Also in each nest the team placed a cloth bag used in previous ringing campaigns of this species, since Madeiran storm petrels have a very strong and characteristic smell.
[Photo description: A
Madeiran storm petrel
resting on a rock. These seabirds are adapted to touch land only during breeding season. So its position when resting look a little clumsy on the ground.]
Each spring, hundreds of thousands of birds from five continents
follow an ancestral tug toward Teshekpuk Lake, a 320-square-mile marvel
surrounded by ponds, wetlands, and soggy tundra in far northern Alaska,
where shorebirds raise chicks and geese hunker down to molt their
feathers. They’re not the only ones lured to the remote spot. For
decades, energy companies have eyed the same swath of coastal plain, an
area as rich in oil as it is in bird life—and recent fossil-fuel
discoveries have intensified their interest.
This tension between wildlife and energy is inherent to the
23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the nation’s
biggest chunk of federal land. Although the reserve was created in 1923
as an oil resource for the U.S. Navy, Congress later broadened its
purpose to provide “maximum protection” for wildlife and subsistence
hunting. That includes the birds and herds around Teshekpuk Lake, in the
NPR-A’s northeastern corner.
Balancing those two uses is tricky, but the U.S. Department of the Interior tried to do so when in 2013 it finalized a management plan for the NPR-A.
The plan reserved about half of the NPR-A for bird nesting areas and
caribou calving grounds, and allowed oil-and-gas leasing on 11.8 million
acres, an area roughly twice the size of Vermont. It also expanded the
boundaries of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, a designation that
doesn’t necessarily prohibit development but prioritizes habitat
protection. The special area more than doubled in size, from 1.75 to
3.65 million acres, and the agency put 3.1 million of those acres
off-limits for oil and gas leases.
Unlike other parts of Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope, development in the reserve is still in its infancy. The first NPR-A oil production
began on Alaska Native land in 2015, and oil started flowing from a
federal NPR-A lease this past October. But it’s likely to accelerate
soon as the Trump administration prepares to write a new management plan
for the NPR-A.
Happy Cephalopod Week! One of the most famous dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History depicts a battle between two gigantic animals: the sperm whale and giant squid. But unlike most dioramas in the Museum’s halls, this scene has never been witnessed. Paleontologists Neil Landman and John Flynn explain how we know that this encounter does happen–and whether we humans will ever catch it in real time.
Cephalopod Week is the annual celebration of all things tentacled. Learn more at sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek and cephalopodweek.tumblr.com
Unist’ot’en camp staying put as company puts on pressure to step aside
Tucked within the forest down a dirt logging road in the central interior of British Columbia is the Unist’ot’en Camp.
It’s the Unist’ot’en clan’s re-occupation of Wet’suwe’ten traditional lands.
Freda Huson built the camp to reconnect with her Indigenous culture and to teach land-based wellness.
“People keep calling this a protest camp and it’s not a protest
camp,” said Huson. “It’s a homestead, we actually live here and we get
visitors from all over the world that want to learn about what we are
doing.”
The only access to Huson’s homestead is a bridge that is protected by a large gate.
It blocks the road that leads to the future Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Although Huson welcomes some visitors – not all are welcome.
She said she wants nothing to do with workers from the oil and gas business.
“Our medicines, our berries, the wildlife, the salmon, the water, the
air we breathe, a lot of those are not replaceable,” she said. “If they
destroy those and wipe out those species then they are wiping out our
food and our way of life.”
Huson built the first cabin along the Morice River almost 10 years ago.
It’s location was strategic – the front line of a battle that continues to this day.
“The number one reason that I moved back out was because of my dad,”
she said. “He said the only way we are going to win and protect our
territory is you have to occupy.”
