The Monterey Bay Aquarium

Over the holiday break (and while I had family in town) we went down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for an afternoon of under-the-sea adventures. My two favorite exhibits were the jellys (they are always my favorite!) and a new one on seahorses. Take a peek at some of my best shots;)

Playing God

(Photo borrowed from article linked below)

This morning I read an article that I found disturbing. I've seen it many times before with different animals, but the story is basically the same. We (humans) mess up a habitat which causes something to go awry within the ecosystem. Then we try to fix it, but really have no idea of the implications of our actions. Then we think we have the right to eradicate one animal, that we decided is somehow the bad guy and doesn't belong, while going out of our way to protect the one that we claim is unfairly being predated and needs to be saved. We compound one wrong by slapping another one on top of it.
This time it involves whales and seagulls. Apparently in Argentina there was an explosion of seagulls due to copious amounts of trash left exposed in landfills and by humans. These particular seagulls are special in that they discovered (about 10 years ago) that they could snack on right whales when they surfaced to breath. So in addition to eating week old french fries and garbage, they also dine on fresh whale meat. It's called adaption, and it's a remarkable, and beautiful thing that life does. It wasn't so bad (for the whales) when the population was small, the whales could stave off a few birds, and the birds got a good meal. But now it is a different story. The birds are many, and not only do they attack adults they also attack the infant whales, creating open sores that are prone to infections. Now the whales are in trouble. Now the gulls are "bad".
The attacks are so intense that whale watching trade has gone down because people are "horrified" to see the birds converge upon the whales as they breach the surface to take a breath.
So what are they going to do? Shoot the seagulls. Can you believe that? There is actually a plan to spend a hundred days following the whales and shooting every seagull that tries to take a bite.
This makes me angry. Not because I don't feel bad for the whales, but because I do feel bad for the gulls. They aren't doing anything wrong. They are doing exactly what any animal in a position of overabundant food  source and no predation would do. Expand and multiply. For crying out loud WE do it, as can been seen by the 6 billion people that inhabit our planet. Should we start shooting people because we take advantage of other animals? We are worse than the gulls.
And it makes me angry that instead of immediately implementing a plan to cut down on the trash left in the open (which would quickly bring the population back into equilibrium, and which they are planning but not till later), they opt to just shoot a bunch of innocent birds.
I think this is not only irresponsible, but just plain stupid. The article I read made the gulls seem like the villains, and the whales like the victims. But that's not true. WE are the villains. The whales and the gulls are both victims. Maybe the gulls a little more so since they will get no sympathy from those of us who get to play god.

For the full article click HERE.

The Agulhas Leakage

Image from NOAA showing Agulhas leakage.

I know I have made a ridiculous number of posts this month, but I have been doing a lot of reading/ and thinking, and have even been catching up on a few subjects that I've been meaning to write about for a while, but didn't have time to.
Anyway something interesting I read in the Book Atlantic by Simon Winchester, was about a thing called the Agulhas leakage. I had never heard of it before, and so I did some searching around on the Internet to learn more. Basically it is warm water from the Indian Ocean that is curling past the tip of South Africa, and entering the Atlantic.
But a little bit of history is needed to really understand why it is referred to as a leakage versus a current.
In the southern hemisphere between the latitudes of 30 and 60 degrees are winds called the "westerlies". (And big surprise they blow from the west!) Anyway, the strength of these winds has declined over the last 30 years and no one really knows why. Some folks think they are moving farther south and filling in where there hole in the ozone was created, but it's still pretty inconclusive at this point. The thing is that the westerlies used to keep the water from the Indian Ocean out of the Atlantic. But with the weakening of the winds, that is no longer the case, and so the warm and extra salty waters are seeping in, and slowly making their way up the west coast of Africa.
No one knows really what the effects of this will be, but since the oceans of the world are run on very strange and sensitive relationships between temperature, salinity and weather, the consequences could be anywhere from negligent to quite severe. I read the abstract of an article published in Nature that links the leakage with the change in the winds, and they say that should the Gulf Stream shut down, the Aguihas leakage could provide Great Britain with an alternative source of warmth.