Upwelling and sea life

Upwelling, is an oceanographic phenomena where wind driven currents in the ocean are overturned causing the warmer and nutrient deficient surface waters to be replaced by colders and nutrient rich waters. The first diagram shows the how the process occurs and the second is a map of the world where upwelling occurs, which there is a direct relationship with the coasts.


More importantly there is an abundance of life in this area as the nutrients rich environments provide energy for all the creatures in the area. They are sights of great activity.

Cnidaria

I've always found this phylum super interesting. Cnidaria is a divese phylum of animals. Some members of this group are not thought of animals by some members of the general public such as corals, or Anthazoans. This phylum also includes the jellyfish, or scyphozoans. I find this amazing that corals are relatively closely related to Jellyfish.
The word Cnidaria is a derivative of the Greek word 'cnidos' meaning stinging needle. Most of members of this phylum have some sort of defense mechanism that is centred around having these stinging needles. As a phylum they are really interesting and beautiful.

Blue footed Boobies!

By far my favorite bird species that I know exists is the Blue Footed Booby (Sula nebouxii). This species has blue feet, lives primarily around the Galapagos Islands and has one of the craziest bird dance ever. From a biological perspective it is an example of pre-zygotic isolation which basically means it prevents other viable species from mating with these species thereby keeping this species alive. The booby dance is famed all around the world. Most importantly to this course however is the fact that they live off ocean fish and squid. They usually feed close to the coastline and can feed in groups that contain more than 1000 individuals. There is plenty of videos showing this feeding frenzy and it is an amazing site indeed. I just don't know how to post footage from youtube. they are really great birds and worth the research time.
here a nice link to more information about the bird.

Harmful Algal Blooms

Red tides are not tide related at all and as it turns out the term is being phased out and replaced with the more accurate term algal bloom. Blooms of phytoplankton occur near the surface of the water giving the water in which the bloom occurred its red colour. From what I read the red colour is due to a red pigment contained in certain phytoplankton species.
Red tides can be toxic to many organisms including homo sapiens sapiens. This occurs because the toxins contained in the algal blooms can move into the food web and thus creating toxins found in all parts of the web. There are various syndromes associated with eating foods contaminated by harmful algal blooms and for more information go to this website.

Smooshie!

One of my early childhood friends from 'home' had an interesting saga with a walrus. He is a trainer at Marineland in Niagara Falls Ontario. One of the walruses took a liking to him which attracted a lot of media and research attention. His story spawned alot of reasearch into imprinting capabilities of animals after they had a relatively stressful experience. One should check out his myspace site for more information. The last time I spoke to him Smooshie had been returned to live with the rest of the seals at the facilities because smooshie is now fully grown up. Anyways, I just thought this was a nice little post to put...somehow related to ocean creatures.

Elephant seals

Last months National Geographic had a short story about elephant seals which inspired this blog post. Apparently there are about 700 000 individuals in the circumpolar arctic ocean. Amazingly they can dive 3 200 feet. And I read in the national geographic article that they are starting to put cameras and ocean monitoring equipment that will help researchers understand more about ocean currents under the Antarctic sea ice which is amazing.



Male elephant seals can reach the four tonnes mark which is more than a small car. Beachmasters are a term given to male bulls whom have fought and won breeding rights to whomever lands on their beach. Sometimes beachmasters can have a harem of over 50 cows.These are really great animals living in some of the harshest climates on earth. I found some of the information from this article.

NEKTON Debate

This is a little post contrasting what we told in class. Nekton nekton, those creatures that move freely from currents, as opposed to plankton which move with currents. Nekton does in fact include all the vertebrates, that is the fish and sharks and whales and seals and and and all the creatures that may swim freely in the ocean. I guess it is just a catch all term. For more information go here.

Swim Bladder

One of the ways fish swim down to great depths is to use swim bladders, or gas bladders. These are basically air sacs located within fish to help them regulate their boyancy. The question becomes how does that help anyways?
Oxygen is much more plentiful in the atmosphere than in water. On average there is 210 cubic centimetres of oxygen in one litre of air compared to 10 units in water.
Swim bladders help fish dive to great depths and return to the surface. Some fish must inflate their swim bladders from the atmosphere and others can inflate it by diffussion of oxygen from their lungs. I wanted to quickly look at the evolutionary history of this fish and I found this interesting article that states swim bladders from fish that use the oxygen method to control buoyancy are all related. This means the evolution of this type of method evolved just once. So this is my little post. If you're dying for more biology related information go here.


The earliest fishes, as well as modern cyclostomes, sharks and rays all live without a swim bladder.

Seiches

This phenomena is basically a standing wave in an enclosed/partially enclosed body of water. It can seem to be lunar tidal related but I don't think it is. This phenomena is equivalent to the sloshing of water in a bathtub and there is a nice diagram explaining the phenomena here. It is basically the sloshing around of water in an enclosed area due to prevalent winds pushing water in one direction. Once the wind stops blowing the water returns from the direction it came from. The movement can seem tide like but it isn't directly related to the sun or moon, such is the case with neap and spring tides. As always, there is more information available from wikipedia.

Lunar Tides

Tides are basically the rise and fall of the sea surface relative to land. They are basically produced by gravitational forces from the Sun and the Moon. Two major lunar tide types are Spring Tide and Neap Tides. The NAOO has a nice little diagram of how both occur. Spring tides occur when the moon is full/new and the gravitational pull of the sun are combined. Neap tides occur when the moon and sun are at right angles of each other. The end result is that Spring tides have higher highs and lower lows and neap tides are less intense tides. Check out this site for more information.

HARBOUR WAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Harbour waves don't bring up the same mental imagery of a TSUNAMI but they mean the same thing. I also found the Canadian Geographic website, which has a great article about tsunamis and how they form. It also has air photos of before and after a tsunami struck. I just don't know how to link these into this blog thing.
I find the article interesting because it points out that the mental imagery of a tsunami is not really the same as the real thing. Tsunamis are not a single huge wave engulfing our coasts.
Tsunamis form by earthquakes or some other cataclysmic event that allows water to rise. In open oceans tsunami waves are barely visible, sometimes being no more than a meter or so high. They don't get dangerous until they hit the coast and it is the shallowing of the land near the coast that makes a tsunami bigger and consequently more dangerous.
That is my lesson for the day.Make sure to check out the photo's!

Octopus Origins

Found this article in the Globe and Mail that was pretty interesting. It says that the deep sea waters of Antartica's Southern Ocean is the home of most of the world's deep sea octopus. So I guess we can say that deep sea octopus had this out of antarctica movement that had occurred some 30 million years ago.
What is interesting that Canadians are involved in this. One researcher is from Memorial University, located on The ROCK.

Great little discoveries like this make my day so much brighter

Tsunami Institute

Following our class discussion on Tsunamis, I found this website of the Tsunami Institute. It has some pretty interesting pages like Tsunami Formation. The diagram shows the tectonic influence in tsunami formation. There is also a really nice section on Tsunami Occurence which shows a map of tsunamis from a world wide perspective. You can even subscribe, for a price!, to their Tsunami Alarm System which will send you a message via satellite if a Tsunami were to strike. The important thing though is that as we learned in class there must be a tsunami detection system in place for this to work.