Seeking shelter

Marine life is showing up along Gulf beaches in high densities, apparently as they retreat in the face of oncoming oil.  Unfortunately, they're running out of water.

At what point...

...does one cross over the line between party loyalist and downright dumbass?  Haley Barbour objects to the President's demand that BP set up a $20 billion dollar escrow account to pay claims to oil spill victims on grounds that it will prevent BP from paying claims to oil spill victims...

"If they take a huge amount of money and put it in an escrow account so they can't use it to drill oil wells and produce revenue, are they going to be able to pay us?"

The art of fish

One of the topics that my fish guys are investigating is the role of our finned friends in art, literature, and popular culture.  Here, Trishonna shares some information about one of the most accomplished fish illustrators out there.

Fish artist Joseph R. Tomelleri was born in Kansas City in 1958. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Biology from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. Although broadly trained in aquatic biology, he previously worked as a botanist. However, in 1986, Tomelleri turned his full focus towards illustrations of fish. Since that time, he has traveled more than 150,000 miles to collect live fish species for his scientific renderings. Tomelleri has illustrated 800+ species. His drawings are executed in Berol Prismacolor pencil and detailed with graphite. His attention to detail and unparalleled mastery of color, textures and hues has earned him world-wide recognition as a pre-eminent illustrator. His gift is in capturing the details that distinguish the various fish species. This makes Tomelleri’s illustrations of fish very rare, because few artists have the talent to produce drawings that are technically accurate and beautiful as well. He has mastered the skill of illustration. His drawings are done in a manner that is impossible photographically. He captures the fishes faithfully with accurate life colors, scale and fin ray-counts, illustrating a full spread of the fins. He is recognized by many ichthyologists as the finest scientific illustrator of fishes in the world. While in the field, he preferreds to photograph fresh live-caught fish to draw and depict their true life colors. His methods of capturing the specimens included hook-and-line, gill netting, seining, electro-shocking, and trawling. Tomelleri’s art has been featured prominently in more than 350 publications and advertisements. Several of his illustrations were included in a book that he helped co-author with Mark Eberle, Fishes of the Central United States. A compilation of his work was also published in Trout and Salmon of North America, written by Bob Behnke.

Check out Joe Tomelleri's web site here.  And buy something.

Fish o' the Day - bowmouth guitarfish

Gradually catching up on processing my students work in their fish class.  Bear with me, guys.

Visitors to the Georgia Aquarium are usually queued up to see the whale sharks.  Personally, I thought the most fascinating fish in the building was this guy.  Contribution from Jason...
 
Located mostly in the shallow waters near coral reefs and mangroves is an odd-looking fish called the bowmouth guitarfish, Rhina ancylostoma. Looking closely at them, they have the appearance of half shark and half ray. The bowmouth guitarfish‘s flat, broad, arc-shaped head spreads into two distinct triangular pectoral fins. The nostrils, mouth, and gill slits are located on the ventral surface of the head and the eyes and large spiracles on the dorsal side. The jaws are heavily ridged with crushing teeth arranged in wave-like rows. Behind the head, the body tapers into a more streamlined shape, much like that of sharks. There are sturdy ridges of heavy, sharp thorns next to the eyes, in the middle of the back, and above the pectoral fins. It has two large, triangular dorsal fins, the second smaller than the first. The body terminates in a small but powerful caudal fin with an upper lobe that is larger than the lower. Dermal denticles cover the body giving the rough skin a velvety appearance.

The color of bowmouth guitarfish changes with age. Young fish have brown bodies, pale ring-shaped spots covering their pectoral fins, and black bars between the eyes. .The body of the adult is charcoal or pale gray body with small white spots. The face bars fade to dark gray with age, becoming faint and indistinct. Some adults have a bluish coloration. The white ventral side in both adult and juvenile phases provides these rays with protective counter-shading.  Bowmouth are viviparous and are aplacental, generally bearing around 4 pups. While they have been known to grow to lengths of 8 feet, most are closer 6.5 or 7 feet. Bowmouths prefer a relatively shallow habitat with a muddy or sandy substrate, and their primary food sources are crustaceans and mollusks. A quick look at their dentition might allow you to deduce that without ever seeing them in action.  Unlike many oceanic species, bowmouths are not cosmopolitan.  Found mostly in waters of Southeast Asia, they do range into the oceans off East African and are also found along the Indian coastline. 
They’re not currently on the IUCN red list, but there’s a push beginning to see that happen. They’re not fished for their meat, but rather for their dorsal fin. – often the living fish is thrown back into the water to die. In addition, bowmouths sometimes become entangled in gill nets due to their odd shape. 

One interesting idea is being kicked around in taxonomic circles. Bowmouths are often described as prehistoric in appearance, and are considered by some to be a ‘missing link’ between sharks and rays. This belief is based on the ray-like placement of the mouth and gill openings and disc shape of the front part of the body and the shark-like streamlined appearance of the rest of the body and the powerful tail. Is this true? Maybe.

The Strand

A highlight of the Subtropical Ecology field trip is our visit to Fakahatchee Strand, the "Amazon of North America," and park biologist Mike Owen.  That's a couple of my guys from a past class - we'll be there again in November.  Enjoy this from the Tuscaloosa News.

FOD...

...should return tomorrow.  I've turned that responsibility over to my students for the duration of the summer.  They meet tomorrow.

In the meantime, how about some night music.  Old Number 7.

Warm-blooded beasts

My fish guys will be talking out thermal relationships tomorrow, and we'll discuss the way in which certain fish like tuna are able to maintain body temperatures considerably higher than ambient.  This gives them a significant advantage in hunting down the other fish on which they feed.  Which makes this new Science paper particularly interesting.  Seems that some of the marine reptiles that were so dominant in Mesozoic seas may have used the same strategy.  The French researchers who led the work employed stable isotopes of oxygen in the phosphates of tooth enamel from fossil ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs.  They compared the ratios to those of fish fossils from the same time period.  Isotope ratios in the poikilothermic fish can be used as a gauge to water temperatures - 18O/16O ratios increase with decreasing water temperature.  The results demonstrated that the body temperature of the aquatic reptiles remained relatively constant, even in changing water temperatures.  The reptiles maintained body temperatures in the neighborhood of 35-39 degrees Celsius, while water temperatures ranged as low as 12 degrees.

No surprise...

...but discouraging nonetheless.  A research vessel from the University of Miami has detected a 23-mile long plume of oil off of Florida's southwestern coast.  The plume is being carried by the Loop Current toward the Dry Tortugas and the Florida Keys.

It would appear...

...that some of my friends in Louisiana are positioning themselves to spend BP's money examining the long-term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill.  LSU and the Louisisana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) have signed an MOU with Wood's Hole to form a consortium "to work cooperatively to plan, secure funding for, execute and report on a program of scientific research to describe and quantify the effects of the oil spill...". 

It's a beautifil marriage.  Combining the skills and political clout of WHOI with the regional influence and ideal positioning of the LUMCON facilities should generate some answers about just how much damage has been done to these fragile systems.  The project expects to receive "significant" support from BP. 

Hot

The last few days have been hot - really hot.  But we've been preparing for that, for a long time.  The thermal hypothesis of human evolution suggests that various aspects of our history, including bidedalism and the loss of fur, could be related to the extremely warm climates that we ultimately hail from.  Of course, for that idea to work we have to assume that our ancestral home was, in fact, hot as Hades.  That was the goal of a study by a group from Johns Hopkins, published recently in PNAS. 


Lead author Benjamin Passey and his group used a geochemical approach to evaluate past temperatures in the Turkana Basin on Kenya, a region that was home to ancestral hominids for much of our early history.  The group applied istopic analysis to carbonate minerals in the soil, looking specifically at ratios of Carbon-13 and Carbon-18.   This ratio provides a clue to the temperatures at the time of mineral formation.  The analysis revealed daytime temperatures over 90 degree Fahrenheit.  Temperatures such as this make the thermal hypothesis a viable idea.