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10 Things Deadlier Than Sharks

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Ok, we get it — sharks are rather frightening if you don’t know much about them. It all started back in 1975 when the first-ever blockbuster film JAWS debuted; people saw razor-sharp teeth munching on the beach, and the unsure feeling that something was lurking beneath stuck forever in their brains. Sharks quickly became a national symbol of fear. But what if we told you sharks aren’t as harmful as you may think; that we actually do much more harm to them than they do to us?

Here’s the graphic realization, folks: For every human killed by a shark, humans kill 200 million sharks.

Luckily there are conservation efforts out there, such as Project AWARE and Shark Angels that do everything in their power to stop the decreasing shark population and get the message out there: sharks need saving, too. How would you feel if a popular movie portrayed you as a monster killer? In reality, there are only an average of five shark-related deaths per year.

Here’s a gallery of some everyday items that actually kill more people per year than sharks. In fact, we guarantee there’s a good chunk of them in your home. Some of them may shock you, some may scare you, but hopefully they get you thinking. You’ll see: sharks aren’t so deadly after all.

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Maritime History: See What Wrecks Were Discovered in 2015

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Brandi Mueller

Corsair wreck at Marshall Islands

New wrecks are being found around the world, and we’ve got the scoop.

WORLD WAR II AIRPLANE GRAVEYARD

Exploring one plane wreck is good — but 150 is better. That’s what awaits divers in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands, where more than 150 WWII aircraft were found in 130 feet of water. “They should have flown more, lived longer, but they were sunk in perfect condition,” Brandi Mueller tells guns.com. She discovered the site while diving of the coast of Roi-Namur in May 2015. Although this site is called a “graveyard,” these planes did not crash — rather they were pushed of a reef and into the ocean after the war.

SÃO JOSÉ-PAQUETE DE AFRICA

Lost off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1794, this Portuguese slave ship drew the attention of researchers who spent years searching for it — recently, the authenticity of the São José-Paquete de Africa was confirmed by the Slave Wrecks Project, which educates the public about the global slave trade. Now over 200 years old, the São José-Paquete de Africa sank after it ran into submerged rocks about 300 feet from shore, killing more than half of the 500 enslaved people on board, while it was on its way from Mozambique to Brazil. Surviving slaves were sold shortly after the tragic wreck incident. Divers can also explore nearby reefs.

USS INDEPENDENCE

After more than 60 years on the bottom, the “amazingly intact” USS Independence has been discovered of California’s Farallon Islands, though its depth — 2,600 feet — makes it undivable. Using an autonomous underwater vehicle and a 3-D-imaging sonar system, researchers created a detailed image of the 623-foot vessel. Independence was an American aircraft carrier during World War II; it was a target ship in atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

NELSON

Two hundred feet down on Lake Superior’s bottom lies a 115-year-old ship with its name still legible — Nelson. Found intact, the 199-foot three-masted schooner sank during a storm in 1899 while transporting coal to Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. While conducting a side-scan sonar search of the area, Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society researchers discovered the wreck in August 2014.

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Spotted: Hammerhead Sharks in Florida Waters

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Statues of Hammerhead sharks at Blue Heron Bridge

Tanya Burnett

Concrete shark statues weighing 1,500 pounds are a new attraction at Blue Heron Bridge.

Hammerhead sharks can now be found of the coast of Florida — the only downside: They’re not a very lively bunch.
On June 19, at Blue Heron Bridge in Riviera Beach, Florida, three concrete shark statues, weighing 1,500 pounds each, were downed to attract divers and snorkelers alike. Created and paid for by artist Tom McDonald, each statue measures 5 feet in length, and all are easily accessible in 10 feet of water.

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Marine Archaeologists Excavate Greek Antikythera Shipwreck

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Nuytco

Underwater Exosuit For Deep-Sea Exploration. Read more here.

Archaeologists excavating the famous ancient Greek shipwreck that yielded the Antikythera mechanism have recovered more than 50 items including a bronze armrest (possibly part of a throne), remains of a bone flute, fine glassware, luxury ceramics, a pawn from an ancient board game, and several elements of the ship itself.

“This shipwreck is far from exhausted,” reports project co-Director Dr. Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “Every single dive on it delivers fabulous finds, and reveals how the ‘1 percent’ lived in the time of Caesar.”

The shipwreck dates to circa 65 B.C., and was discovered by Greek sponge fishermen in 1900 off the southwestern Aegean island of Antikythera. They salvaged 36 marble statues of mythological heroes and gods; a life-sized bronze statue of an athlete; pieces of several more bronze sculptures; scores of luxury items; and skeletal remains of crew and passengers. The wreck also relinquished fragments of the world’s first computer: the Antikythera Mechanism, a geared mechanical device that encoded the movements of the planets and stars and predicted eclipses.

The 2015 expedition is part of a long-term research program at the site, which began in 2014. It was the first scientific excavation of the wreck, and launched the first comprehensive study of all of its artifacts. During the new multi-year program the team expects to recover artifacts and ancient artwork still buried in the seafloor, and recreate the history of the ship’s exquisite cargo and its final voyage.

An expedition mounted in 2014 the researchers created a high-resolution, 3D map of the site using stereo cameras mounted on an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Hampered by bad weather, the expedition included just four dive days for professional technical divers who recovered a series of finds on the surface sediment and proved that much of the ship’s cargo is indeed still preserved beneath the sediment.

By contrast, this year’s expedition included 40 hours of bottom time, with four professional archaeologists diving the site and performing controlled excavation to the highest scientific standard with specially designed equipment, and with the guidance of an exquisitely precise multi-dimensional map of 10,500 square meters of sea floor.

In addition to Foley, the 2015 exploration at Antikythera was conducted by the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities under director Dr. Ageliki Simosi and field archaeologists Dr. Theotokis Theodoulou and Dr. Dimitris Kourkoumelis.

The international team was in the field from 26 August to 16 September, following an autonomous robotic mapping effort conducted from 8-15 June in partnership with the University of Sydney, Australia. The project is the first-ever systematic excavation of this shipwreck, relying on the precise large-area map created by the robotic survey. Notably, this project marked the first time in the century since the wreck’s discovery that archaeologists were able to join specialist divers in descending to the 55-meter (180 feet) deep site. The ten-man dive team used advanced technical diving equipment including closed-circuit rebreathers and trimix breathing gases, performing 61 dives in 10 days of diving on the wreck. A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) monitored and recorded all diving activities, and served as a communications link between divers and support personnel on the surface.

Video of Mapping the Antikythera Shipwreck

The 2015 expedition has left the team with the best understanding yet of this unique shipwreck and its cargo. A metal detection survey of the site revealed that metallic targets are dispersed over an area of about 40×50 meters. This is thought to match the wreck’s debris field, indicating the vast size of the ship that sank off the forbidding cliffs of Antikythera.

Metal detectors revealed the presence of buried objects throughout the wreck site. The dive team recovered items including an intact amphora; a large lead salvage ring; two lead anchor stocks (possibly indicating the ship’s bow); fragments of lead hull sheathing; a small and finely formed lagynos (or table jug); and a chiseled rectangular stone object (possibly the base of a statuette) perforated by 12 holes and filled with an as-yet-unidentified substance.

During the project, the dive team carefully excavated a series of nine trenches in the seabed using a water dredge powered by a submersible pump. The divers recovered more than 50 artifacts, most deeply buried beneath a thick layer of coarse sand and massive deposits of broken ceramics. From among these fragments, the team recovered wooden remains from the hull of the ship; a section of bronze furniture, perhaps from a throne; part of a bone flute; a glass “chessman” board game element; bronze nails from the ship’s planks; and portions of bronze, iron, glass and ceramic objects.

“We were very lucky this year, as we excavated many finds within their context, which gave us the opportunity to take full advantage of all the archaeological information they could provide,” states diving archaeologist Dr. Theodoulou.

The team created 3D virtual reconstructions of many artifacts on the seafloor, and 3D-modeled all of the major recovered artifacts once on shore. A series of scientific analyses are now being conducted on these artifacts, including ancient DNA analysis of ceramic jars to identify the 2,000 year-old food, drinks, perfumes, and medicines contained in them. Isotopic analysis of lead objects will determine where the lead was mined, to reveal the home port of the ship.

Previously recovered artifacts from the Antikythera Shipwreck will be displayed in a special exhibition “Der Versunkene Schatz das Schiffswrack von Antikythera” [The Sunken Treasure of the Antikythera Shipwreck] at the Basel Antiquities Museum in Switzerland from 27 September 2015 to 27 March 2016. This is the first time that these ancient treasures have been allowed to leave the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

The 2015 project team includes Greek and foreign archaeologists, technical divers, engineers, photographers, filmmakers, technicians, etc. (Y. Bitsakis, D. Conlin, J. Fardoulis, N. Giannoulakis, C. Kaiser, Μ. Kelaides, E. Kovacs, C. Lees, D. Manoliadis, Ε. O’Brien, O. Pizarro, D. Romios, B. Seymour, P. Short, G. Smith, Α. Sotiriou, A. Tourtas, Μ. Tsimperopoulos, S. Williams). The robotic mapping surveys were conducted by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics of the University of Sydney. The research team expressed gratitude to supporters of their project including the Swiss premier horology company Hublot S.A., the Swordspoint Foundation (USA), the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, Jane and James Orr, private sponsors of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Costa Navarino, the Municipality of Kythera and the community and residents of Antikythera, and OTE-Cosmote, which provided telecommunications in the field.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Relations Office
media@whoi.edu
September 24, 2015
(508) 289-3340

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Almost All Seabirds to Have Plastic in Gut by 2050

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The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird’s stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.

The researchers predict that plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world’s seabird species by 2050, based on current trends.

The scientists estimate that 90 per cent of all seabirds alive today have eaten plastic of some kind.

This includes bags, bottle caps, and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes, which have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Birds mistake the brightly coloured items for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death.

“For the first time, we have a global prediction of how wide-reaching plastic impacts may be on marine species – and the results are striking,” senior research scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Dr Wilcox said.

“We predict, using historical observations, that 90 per cent of individual seabirds have eaten plastic. This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution.”

Dr Denise Hardesty from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere said seabirds were excellent indicators of ecosystem health.

“Finding such widespread estimates of plastic in seabirds is borne out by some of the fieldwork we’ve carried out where I’ve found nearly 200 pieces of plastic in a single seabird,” Dr Hardesty said.

The researchers found plastics will have the greatest impact on wildlife where they gather in the Southern Ocean, in a band around the southern edges of Australia, South Africa and South America.

Dr van Sebille, from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the plastics had the most devastating impact in the areas where there was the greatest diversity of species.

“We are very concerned about species such as penguins and giant albatrosses, which live in these areas,” Erik van Sebille said.

“While the infamous garbage patches in the middle of the oceans have strikingly high densities of plastic, very few animals live here.”

Dr Hardesty said there was still the opportunity to change the impact plastic had on seabirds.

“Improving waste management can reduce the threat plastic is posing to marine wildlife,” she said.

“Even simple measures can make a difference, such as reducing packaging, banning single-use plastic items or charging an extra fee to use them, and introducing deposits for recyclable items like drink containers.

“Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time.”

Chief Scientist at the US-based Ocean Conservancy Dr George H. Leonard said the study was highly important and demonstrated how pervasive plastics were in oceans.

“Hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world come face-to-face with this problem during annual Coastal Cleanup events,” Dr Leonard said.

“Scientists, the private sector and global citizens working together against the growing onslaught of plastic pollution can reduce plastic inputs to help protect marine biodiversity.”

The work was carried out as part of a national marine debris project supported by CSIRO and Shell’s Social investment program as well as the marine debris working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, with support from Ocean Conservancy.

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