Animals
Off Long Beach, a blue whale made what may have been the first above-surface vocalization ever witnessed, and NBC News happened to have cameras rolling.
A camera crew from NBC News captured what may be a first and aired it tonight: the song of a blue whale above the water. It is a low groan but you can hear it loud and clear.
The extraordinarily rare performance occurred off the coast of Long Beach, where four blue whales treated a boatful of whale watchers and the news crew to a wild show few people have ever seen.
Alisa Schulman-Janiger, an American Cetacean Society researcher, told Pete Thomas Outdoors it was a once in a lifetime experience.
"We heard it through the air, loud and clear," she said. "It was a strange, alien sound. It really was an extraordinary thing."
Three smaller male blue whales were pursuing one large female blue whale. They were swimming faster than normal and in tight circles when the female surfaced along side the Christopher out of Harbor Breeze Cruises.
© Getty Images
A school of Chinook salmon. New research shows the fish could vanish from many rivers by the end of the century.
A school of Chinook salmon. New research shows the fish could vanish from many rivers by the end of the century.
A warming climate is likely to wipe out spring-run Chinook salmon in at least one California watershed by the century's end, found a new study.
No matter which climate projections the researchers used, warmer waters spelled major trouble for the fish in the coming decades if people do nothing to help the fish. And the findings are likely to apply to a variety of salmon species up and down the West Coast, especially in California where temperatures are closest to the tipping point.
"I saw the results almost a year ago, and I just sat at my desk and cried," said Lisa Thompson, a fisheries biologist at the University of California, Davis. "Fish weren't making it through to the end of the century in almost all cases."
"Things look grim," she added. "But there are things we can do."
For the last five years, Thompson and colleagues have been studying spring-run Chinook salmon in the Butte Creek watershed, in the Central Valley of California. These types of fish are particularly sensitive to climate change because adults spend their summers in freshwater streams before spawning in the fall. And compared to the Pacific Ocean, where the fish spend the rest of the year, streams are far quicker to warm up in hot conditions.
More than a million spring-run Chinook used to live in the waters of the Central Valley, Thompson said. Today there are fewer than 10,000 of them -- a decline of 99 percent.
© University of Gothenburg
Sea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all.
Sea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all.
Most animals react to light and have developed a very sophisticated way of seeing complex images so that they can function in their surroundings. Good examples include insects' compound eyes and the human eye. Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were bewildered by the eye's complexity and wondered how this kind of structure could have evolved through natural selection.
But some creatures, such as sea urchins, can react to light even though they do not have eyes. Previous studies of sea urchins have shown that they have a large number of genes linked to the development of the retina, which is the light-sensitive tissue in the human eye. This means that sea urchins have several genes that are coded for a widely occurring eye protein, opsin.
© ABC, Australia
Biologists say a number of whales did not migrate north over winter as usual.
Biologists say a number of whales did not migrate north over winter as usual.
Marine biologists are baffled by a change in the behaviour of whales visiting Victorian bays this year. The Dolphin Research Institute says a number of humpback whales remained in Western Port and Port Phillip bays throughout the migration season instead of travelling north.
Institute spokesman Jeff Weir says scientists are unsure what has caused the change in their migration pattern. He says they also saw the animals competing for the first time off Mount Martha and Mornington.
"These are big animals, the size of tourist buses, playing demolition derby under the water and then sometimes reaching the surface banging into each other jostling for position in the pod," he said.
Mr Weir says it is the kind of behaviour normally seen when the animals are mating in northern Australia.
"I mean, it possibly is simply numbers of whales are picking up again and the populations are increasing," he said.
"Maybe they're just spreading themselves more evenly around our coast. The critical thing will be to monitor it in the years to come."
They say wonders will never cease. And residents of jomvu village in Mombasas Changamwe constituency woke up to a shocking incident this morning.The discovery that a goat had given birth to a miracle kid with human features.
© NOAA
Global warming is the most likely cause of a growing number of king crabs that have been marching along the sea floor toward West Antarctica, according to a report by biologists on Wednesday.
The intruder, 'Neolithodes yaldwyni Ahyong and Dawson', a bright-red deep-sea predator that had previously been spotted only in the Ross Sea, on the other side of West Antarctica, is now living and reproducing in abundance on the western edge of the icy continent.
Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists said the crabs are currently thriving in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf. They believe the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.
The crabs are ravenous predators on the sea floor and could likely change the ecosystem profoundly if they spread further, researchers warn. The crab is known as an "ecosystem engineer" because it digs into the sea floor to feast on worms and other tiny animals, an activity that can have repercussions across the marine food web if these crabs continue to multiply and spread out.
A team of scientists, led by Laura Grange of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, lowered a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), named the Genesis, into the Palmer Deep in March of last year as part of a long-term probe into biodiversity in the waters off Antarctica.
© McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Offshore orcas
Offshore orcas
The [orcas] were hyperventilating, arching their backs and diving deep.
On the hydrophone, [Canadian scientist John] Ford could hear their excited songs.
Minutes passed and then a chunk of tissue -- about 250 grams in size and later proven to be part of a liver -- floated to the surface, coming to rest in a slick of oil.
More and more tissue and oil soon appeared, covering an area of ocean in a sheen hundreds of metres in size and flattening the water's ripples.
Thankfully not a china shop.
Now, after recent events we're starting to think that cows in general have hired a highly efficient new PR agency. We've seen Yvonne, the fugitive cow, the cow that managed to get his head stuck in a fence and Luna, the cow that thinks she's a horse.
The aggressive campaign to unseat cats as the most written about of all animals continues, thanks to Laura, the cow that likes to shop.
Now, after recent events we're starting to think that cows in general have hired a highly efficient new PR agency. We've seen Yvonne, the fugitive cow, the cow that managed to get his head stuck in a fence and Luna, the cow that thinks she's a horse.
The aggressive campaign to unseat cats as the most written about of all animals continues, thanks to Laura, the cow that likes to shop.
© Wei Peiquan / Xinhua
A fisherman in Gutian county, Fujian province, checks his pond, which is covered by dead fish.
A fisherman in Gutian county, Fujian province, checks his pond, which is covered by dead fish.
Xiamen - Fish farms along the Minjiang River in the Shuikou Township section of East China's Fujian province have been hit by a wave of fish kills in recent days, but the cause has yet to be determined, local authorities said on Sunday.
Some 9,000 tanks of fish, including about 8,000 in Shuikou town and some 1,000 in Huangtian town, were reported dead as of Saturday, according to a release from the government of Gutian county, which administers the two townships.
One tank usually holds 3,500 to 5,000 fish.
"We're calculating the number of the dead fish and economic losses," said Zeng Lisheng, a Gutian publicity officer.
The river's Shuikou section is Fujian's largest freshwater fish cultivation base, and it provides local markets with about 100,000 kilograms of fish a day during harvest seasons.
Zeng said that local fishery and environmental protection departments are investigating the case and examining the water, but the reasons for the fish die-offs are unknown.
"We're mobilizing people, ships and vehicles to scoop up the dead fish, and we will bury them deeply under nearby hills with quicklime to prevent them from harming the environment," he said.
A shark bit the legs off a bodyboarder at a popular surfing spot in western Australia on Sunday, killing the man, police said. Authories were reportedly searching for the shark as well as the man's missing limbs.
The man in his early 20s was bodyboarding with five friends when the shark attacked, a police spokesman said.
He died at the scene in the surfing haven known as The Farm, off Bunker Bay near the western town of Dunsborough. The beach was closed after the attack.
The man in his early 20s was bodyboarding with five friends when the shark attacked, a police spokesman said.
He died at the scene in the surfing haven known as The Farm, off Bunker Bay near the western town of Dunsborough. The beach was closed after the attack.
Comment: Another case to add to the growing list of unusually aggressive behavior exhibited by infamous marine predators starting from August this year.
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