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This week in ocean news

Fish living in trees and underwater pumpkin carving

Posted by Andrew Sharpless (Guest Contributor) at 12:41 PM on 27 Oct 2007

Read more about: oceans | wildlife | fishing

... in his weekly radio address, President Bush spoke on conserving fisheries. "The most important thing is not the size of your catch but the enjoyment of the great outdoors," he said ...

... conservationists said that talks at a recent international convention devoted to bluefin tuna recovery were derailed by Japan, resulting in no meaningful progress ...

... an MIT researcher designed new equipment to gather scallops from the sea floor with hopes that it would be less damaging than the dredges in use now ...

... the U.S. Senate approved a resolution directing the government to negotiate an international agreement for managing fish stocks in the Arctic Ocean ...

... the U.S. Congress considered a bill that would reduce the debt of Caribbean nations that pledge to protect coral reefs and marine ecosystems, as well as forests ...

... scientists have discovered that the mangrove killifish, found in the Caribbean, can modify its biological makeup so it can breathe air and live in trees for months at a time ...

... the South Carolina Aquarium released "Edisto," its first rehabilitated adult male loggerhead turtle, into the Atlantic. Edisto had been discovered with injuries from a crab trap rope ...

... three miles of Galveston beach will be restored at a price of $13.5 million in the largest coastal erosion project in Texas history ...

... scientists reported that coral reefs use primitive photoreceptors to detect the light of the full moon and release eggs and sperm bundles in a worldwide underwater blizzard ...

... meanwhile, another group of scientists reported that the North Atlantic had dramatically slowed its carbon dioxide uptake between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, a more sudden change than the one that been documented in the Southern Ocean ...

... European Union fisheries commissioner Joe Borg proposed more stringent restrictions on bottom trawling in E.U. waters ...

... Jacksonville, Fla., suffered from a red tide, an outbreak of toxic algae that kills fish and can affect respiratory health of humans ...

... the federal government declined to bail out New England fishermen who applied for disaster relief. "The majority of groundfish fishermen are making less money than they were before. We have taken that into account," said the deputy director of the Fisheries Service. "That is not the same thing as to say the commercial fishery has failed."

... and an underwater pumpkin-carving contest took place in Florida. The contestants discovered that pumpkins are naturally buoyant, making underwater carving an extra challenge. The winning entrant had fangs.

Hurray Edisto!

And thanks to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.  But it is ethically fossilized, that the care of sea turtles should be the responsibility of an agency with so anthropocentric-sounding a mission:

<<
DNR protects and manages South Carolina's natural resources by making wise and balanced decisions for the benefit of the state's natural resources and its people.
>>

Is an animal, e.g. a sea turtle, a "resource"?  Still, it is something for which we should be very thankful, that wildlife experts, with a sincere concern for the welfare of individual animals, can find occasions to do good work, such as the rescue, rehabilitation and return of Edisto, while working for state agencies.

On photoreceptive corals, and tree-dwelling mangrove killifish: It just goes to show, we have barely begun to appreciate how wonderful the Earth's biodiversity is.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

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