marine, tourism, poachers, cyprus, fish, turtles, life, dolphins, artificial, reefs, pollution, environmental, sea, ocean
World Heritage Sites are places that are listed by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) as having either physical or cultural importance. They are recognised as providing outstanding universal value that should form part of the heritage of mankind. UNESCO’s World Heritage Fund provides money to these sites […]
5 Marine World Heritage Listed Sites Read More »
Eliza Muirhead
The SnotBot is on a mission to silently hover over whales while collecting their snot for research.
There’s a new drone in town, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. OK — maybe that’s exactly what it is. Dubbed the SnotBot, this data-collecting drone was created by Ocean Alliance and Olin College of Engineering and is designed to catch the spray emitted from whales’ blowholes.
The mucus-rich “blow” provides scientists with a wealth of information, such as hormone levels (which can indicate if an animal is stressed or pregnant), evidence of infections (from bacteria, viruses or even environmental toxins) and tissue samples that can be used for DNA analysis.
Ocean Alliance is running a Kickstarter to fund SnotBot, with a little help from former Star Trek actor Sir Patrick Stewart, who has given his support to the new technology.
“I’m asking you to support my good friend Capt. Iain Kerr at Ocean Alliance in their quest for better, more effective, less invasive, innovative research that will give us answers to some of the mysteries about the ocean and particularly whales,” Stewart says in the video.
Traditionally the “snot” was obtained by leaning over the railing of a boat with a 10-foot pole while chasing down the whales. This approach to data collection is invasive and can put undue stress on the animals, which could influence the information retrieved. The SnotBot is designed to study these marine mammals without disturbing them.
“Imagine if everything your doctor knew about your health came from chasing you around a room with a large needle while blowing an air horn,” the SnotBot team says on its Kickstarter page.
SnotBot will hover quietly above the whales and passively collect snot, using spongelike pads as the whales go about their business undisturbed — no chasing, prodding or other stress-inducing activities required.
Research projects of this nature require certain permissions, so Ocean Alliance is seeking approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service for its expeditions later this year.
SnotBots will be used to gather data on whales in three locations: Patagonia, the Sea of Cortez and Frederick Sound, Alaska. Researchers hope to collect snot from previously studied individuals in order to compare the SnotBot’s data to older data collected via traditional methods.
WHALE, WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? S’NOT WHAT YOU THINK
Banned in 1986, commercial whaling took a serious toll on whale populations through the years. Although few countries still engage in the activity, its lasting damage has already been done — leaving most whale populations reduced in size by 90 percent or more.
The result of this dramatic loss is that dwindling whale populations were left vulnerable to an ever-increasing throng of anthropogenic threats. Whale fatalities via boat collisions, ingesting plastic pollution, exposure to environmental toxins and entanglement in fishing gear are impacts that a prewhaling population could have shrugged off, but now they can put an entire species as risk.
Ocean Alliance is working to gather new data to better understand how these stressors are affecting whales and what we can do to help them — and SnotBot might help reach that goal.
SnotBot Drone Used to Collect Whale Data Using “Snot” Read More »
Guest post by Contiki Vacations It’s big, it’s blue, it’s beautiful – but what’s really going on down there? The ocean is arguably the most fascinating part of this planet, and these ocean facts prove it: There’s A LOT of ocean out there. Oceans cover about 70% of the earth’s surface, […]
These Ocean Facts Will Blow Your Mind Read More »
Nothing in life is guaranteed. Mantas are (gorgeous) wild animals, and they dance to their own tune. But on the west coast of Hawaii Island, mantas have been showing up to the party with fairly predictable regularity at a dive site just north of Kona Kailua, near the airport.
Imagine this: The fiery sun sets on the horizon. Soon, a flotilla of day boats arrives in the twilight, with their loads of divers and snorkelers nervously gearing up on their decks. These operators send down their divemasters to place some bright lights on the ocean floor, to shine up toward the surface. They also shine down lights from the boats, setting the stage for what is not unlike a light show at a rock concert. The site itself is a rubbly amphitheater on the flats, just above a pretty dive site called Garden Eel Cove.
The numerous divers and snorkelers start splashing into the ocean as darkness descends. The divers drop down to perch on the bottom in about 35 feet of water, lining up behind the lights, while the snorkelers orbit above.
And then, if you are lucky, the mantas show up.
They arrive in squadrons. Sometimes just a handful of animals come to thrill, sometimes a bounty. We hit the jackpot on our manta dive in September 2015, with at least 18 gorgeous, otherworldly rays being counted.
The Kona Aggressor has a great routine for this very special night dive. The boat anchors on its usual mooring for the site, and its passengers have dinner and then leisurely get ready for the dive. Meanwhile, the masses from the many day boats are already enjoying their manta experience. As those divers and snorkelers begin to be wrangled back onto their boats, the Aggressor’s divers jump in off the dive deck, descend, and swim towards the glow of lights in the distance.
And what a scene it is. As I said above, it was not unlike a rock concert, only strangely silent — many beams of light traveling up and down, through the water, lighting up the virtual stage, and the clouds of plankton. Huge stealth bomber-like, black-and-white beasts soaring and zooming and doing tight barrel rolls in front of and over the audience, at times bumping into each other, and occasionally into the divers perched on the bottom. It is beautiful chaos.
It is hard to describe the absolute joy, and awe, of being in the water with these massive, graceful animals. I have been very fortunate and have seen mantas in several locations in my dive travels, besides this recent trip to Hawaii — in Australia, Indonesia, Palau and Thailand. They awe with their size, their sheer poetry of motion, their incredible agility (they can turn on a dime, and give a nickel in change), their strangely beautiful eyes, set far apart on the sides of their wide heads, their gaping mouths as they vacuum up the tiny zooplankton that are attracted to the lights, and their odd cephalic (chin) fins which they can roll up when cruising — or deploy when they are feeding to help to direct the plankton to their mouths. They are truly weird and wonderful critters.
Manta rays are filter feeders (so no big teeth!) and have no other defense mechanism (unlike their cousin the stingray with its treacherous tail), other than their large size — they can grow more than 20 feet in wing span! They feed by opening their cavernous mouths, taking in huge volumes of water and its tiny inhabitants, and filtering out the food through a large amount of spongy tissue in the back of their gullets, while the water passes over their gills.
They come to the site at Garden Eel Cove because of the lights. The nearby night-lit airport, and the added lights from boats and divers, attracts the zooplankton, which makes for fairly easy pickings for the mantas.
And so, unlike seeing mantas beautifully winging their way down a reef, or seeing mantas coming to a cleaning station on a reef to be de-loused (both are also great experiences), the manta night dive in Kona is pretty much a feeding frenzy. It is an exhilarating dive, and the 90 minutes or so that we had to enjoy the show passed so quickly. As we were the last divers in the water, and took our lights with us when we left, several of the mantas actually followed us back to the boat, and hung around off the swim grid for several hours, taking advantage of the lights shining off the stern of the boat to keep the food coming.
So, three final words about the Kona Manta Night Dive: Just Do It. Hawaii diving is lovely, if not hugely diverse. I will be writing more about the nice reef diving and endemic critters, and sharing pictures of both of these in an upcoming article. Kona’s easy accessibility from the west coast of North America makes it a good dive destination. The Manta Night Dive makes it a great one.
Judy G is a traveling underwater photographer. Check out her blog HERE and follow her on Facebook: Judy G Diver
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Black Magic: Night Diving with Manta Rays in Kona, Hawaii Read More »
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Metalhead Sharks
Could great white sharks be attracted to rock music?
Humans might not be the only ones head-banging to heavy metal — sharks might enjoy the jams too.
While filming the documentary Bride of Jaws, part of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, the film crew was searching for a 16-foot great white shark known as Joan Of Shark. Matt Waller, owner of Australian dive operator Adventure Bay Charters, suggested playing heavy-metal music through an underwater speaker in order to attract the shark to their location. Much to the documentary team’s surprise, it worked. Although they didn’t find the giant they’d set out for, two large great whites soon appeared to investigate the music of Darkest Hour, a metal band out of Washington, D.C.
Waller developed this attraction technique in 2011. Tales of music altering shark behavior in Isla Guadalupe inspired him to mount underwater speakers to his shark cages, and he discovered that he could attract sharks by blasting classic hits such as AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back in Black.” He also noted that the sharks behaved differently while music was playing; they became more inquisitive, sometimes rubbing their faces against the speaker.
Waller doesn’t consider himself a shark expert, but he believes that the thick tones used in heavy metal, such as vocalists’ “death growls,” intense drum beats and guitar riffs, mimic the low-frequency noises created by injured fish. Sharks sense the fish frequencies with their lateral line, a sensory organ that runs along the length of their bodies that detects vibrations and changes in pressure. There haven’t been any scientific studies to prove this theory, so it’s possible that sharks just enjoy the chance to rock out.
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Dive Operators Use Music, Not Chum, To Attract Great White Sharks Read More »