Have to say...

...I'm asking the same question.

Why is BP still in charge?

Night music

Music has a unique ability to take you back to a certain time and place. This song certainly does. The memories have taken a beating, but the message still resonates.

Fishing strategies

Been reading/hearing Callum Roberts' An Unnatural History of the Sea, which documents the millenium-long history of our overexploitation of marine resources. Which makes this new paper in PNAS more intruiging. It suggests that we may be using the wrong model. The buzz-phrase these days is "ecosystem-based fisheries management", an approach designed to minimize the impact of fishing on marine ecosystems. The prevailing line of thought in such fisheries has been to employ highly selective methods that remove only certain species of specific sizes. The new work from a group of authors led by Shijie Zhou of CSIRO suggests that less selective methods might actually have lower impact. Zhou suggests that "production could actually increase through the better use of non-target species, while reducing unsustainably high catches of target species...".

More hammerheads

Currently, the hammerhead sharks are represented by eight (or nine, depends on who you listen to) species in the Family Sphyrnidae. Although all of them have the characteristic "cepahalofoil", the distinctive, flattened head from which the group draws its name, they show a lot of diversity in both size and in the shape of the head. The bonnethead (Sphyrna tiburo) reaches lengths of about a meter and has a fairly narrow, spade-shaped cephalofoil. The great hammerhead (Sphyrna mokarran), on the other end of the spectrum, sports the classic "hammer" and can reach 6 meters in length. New research appearing in Molecular Phylogenetics and Systematics describes work done by researchers at the University of Colorado and the University of South Florida employing DNA analysis to analyze the family tree of the hammerheads. The researchers used both mitochondrial (4 genes) and nuclear DNA (3 genes) in their examination of the evolutionary history of the group. They discovered that the ancestral hammerhead appeared relatively suddenly some 20 million years ago. It was a big fish, comparable to the larger of the living species. Small size apparently evolved twice in the development of today's smaller sharks. The cepahalofoil has been strongly acted upon by natural selection to create divergence in the lineages leading to modern hammerheads.

Fish o' the Day - Southern stingray

It's proving difficult to get back into a routine. Lots of news items sitting here on my desk, but still feeling residual laziness. Not gonna worry about it too much - summer semester will be here soon enough. For now, the return of FOD.

Spent quite a bit of time wade-fishing Santa Rosa Sound last week, and saw plenty of stingrays. They're almost like alligators in the Everglades - very impressive to see such a high density of a large predator. Dasyatis americana is widely distributed through the tropical and temperate Atlantic and in the Gulf and the Caribbean. They can be big, reaching a "wingspan" of as much as 6 feet. A really big one may push 200 pounds in weight. Their claim to fame, of course, is the "sting" or barb, which is a modified denticle found about a third of the way down the long, whip-like tail. Grooves on the barb carry a proteinaceous poison which can certainly cause some problems for someone unfortunate enough to be "stung." It's rare, however, as stingrays will usually do whatever they can to avoid a confrontation. The most dangerous situation occurs when a wader or snorkeler steps on or swims over a partially buried stingray in shallow water. The toxin can be partially denatured by hot water, and this is a fairly effective first aid prior to a visit to the doctor.

Southern stingrays feed primarily on crabs and mollusks, although they'll take an occasional small fish if they can get one. They're ovoviviparous, meaning that they give birth to live young. After the smaller male impregnates the female, the eggs hatch out internally. The female then gives birth to five or so young rays.

On Monday, I kept an eye on a good-sized ray, perhaps three feet across, that shared with me the sandy edge of a Santa Rosa Sound seagrass bed in about two feet of water. I assume she was keeping an eye on me as well, and eventually she took flight into the deeper waters of the Sound.

OK, back at it...

...after a much-needed break with a very unique, very special family. Plan to crash tonight, and then start doing some catching up tomorrow.

I confess to complete confusion regarding the Deepwater Horizon mess. The Florida panhandle, as of today, has yet to see landfall. But there's a tremendous amount of oil out there, and it going to wind up on someone's marshes, beaches, reefs, etc. Right now, we're in that nasty mode of thinking - send it somewhere else. We see the same line of thought with hurricanes, at least since the devastation of the last decade reminded Gulf Coast residents that a hurricane is not a reason to party. This spill is different - there's a sense of dread all up and down the coast, and we'll no doubt all suffer. I'm currently thinking about my friends in the Keys who are dependent on healthy reefs. It appears likely that the Florida Loop Current will take a significant amount of oil their way. There are few ecological systems more fragile. I guess it's appropriate to say, "Hope for the best." I'm just not sure what the best is right now.

There were a few unusual aspects of beach life this week, but I want to do a little background work before getting into them.

See you tomorrow.