WaterNotes

Males? Who Needs ‘Em

I’ve always loved the life history quirks of the mangrove rivulus. Unfortunately its a little too quirky for the likes of my regular students who are certainly too young or too silly to hear the scoop. And why am I intrigued by them? Well, most of the little fish - found in the IRL system - are hermaphrodites. Yep!

Come to find out though, through the EEL website, that my favorite killifish has an adventurous side. When normal habitat for rivulus starts to dry out during the winter season (ahem, now) they’ll bury themselves into galleried decaying wood in the area and hole up until the water returns. First we had plankton in the sequoias, now there’s fish out of water in mangrove driftwood.

Of course now I want to go on a rivulus expedition!

Maybe They’ll Find A License Plate

The Auckland Museum got ahold of a white shark that was caught in a gill net and died in the Kaipara Harbour area on Monday of last week. In an attempt to learn something from the unfortunate death of this predator in an entanglement (something that imperils thousands if not milions of sea animals each year) the Museum plans to broadcast the necropsy of the female shark online.

The webcast starts tomorrow, January 7th from 5-7pm for the United States’ right coasters. (On Auckland time that’s actually afternoon on Thursday the 8th, which is hard for me to wrap my mind around. It does however remind of something Charles Schulz is rumored to have said: “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”)

Carnival of the Blue #20

Carnival of the Blue #20 is now up over at the Biomes Blog.

Build A Squid!

File this under terribly addictive: Build A Squid.  The Colossal Squid Exhibition has an interactive online websource where you can build your own squid - complete with fancy colors and patterns - and then track them!  My squid’s name is “Oohla” and if you want to, you can track him as well!  Last I saw he had had a fight with a leopard seal.  Since Oohla is only a single kilogram I’m sort of wondering how he survived that interaction. 

And for a nerdy side note, did you know that the leopard seal is one of the few phocid species where females regularly grow larger than males?  Its true.

Patterns of Baitballing

Hundreds of ocean predators take advantage of a natural tendency of swarms to coalesce and to behave as a large synchronized group despite a lack of higher ordered thought or direction.  Steven Strogatz gave a beautiful presentation about this natural patterning in fireflies, swallows, and so many schools of fish, particularly as they evade predators.  Certainly worth a listen if only for the beautiful photos of baitballs converging out in the open ocean and to hear the hilarious demise of a bridge in England because of unintentional synchronized behavior in humans. 

Sequoia Supported Plankton In The Forest

True or false: not all rainforests are found near the equator?  True!  The Pacific northwest is home to some of the largest species of trees on Earth, the redwoods.  Richard Preston gave a consuming speech on Sequoia for TED recently and pointed out a few tantalizing details about these giants not the least of which is that as large as they are - easily 30 feet across at the base - they start out life as a tiny seed roughly 1/6th the size of an American dime.

Preston is the kind of science writer I hope one day to become.  Maybe in the future you’ll hear me expounding the wonders of Apistogramma species evolution at TED after an expedition into Amazon floodplains to track them down.  Much like the tributaries of the Amazon, redwoods seem to support their own localized populations inside their individual canopies within the greater forest.  Can you imagine a copepod - as in plankton - living in the canopy soil of a redwood hundreds of feet up in the air?  I can’t, not really, but Preston sheds light on this fantastical truth as well as others.

Caught in the Seine: Sargassumfish

Camouflague anyone?  The spires, spines and cirri on this little sargassumfish are hard to spot out of the water but he’s beautifully adapted to living within floating mats of Sargassum macroalgae out in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Sargasso Sea off of Florida’s coastline.  Its not terribly common to spot these beauties in the Indian River Lagoon, but near the inlets when Sargassum mats are pushed in at the right tides you can find them hitching along for the ride along with other Sargassum denizens including filefish and seahorses. 

Caught in the Seine: Spotted Seatrout

Spotted seatrout are a prized gamefish in the Indian River Lagoon system, even supporting several tournaments during the year.  But they, like so many others, start out life at a terribly small size.