Deep bass is better for blue whale love songs

Lookout Barry White, there's a new king singing romantic bass and he's 100 feet long and weighs 300,000 pounds. And he's blue and lives in the ocean.

Blue whale love songs are low in pitch, too low for humans to hear. Now researchers think they're getting lower because with more blue whales around, the competition is to see how low can they go.

I think that's Barry White chasing the blue whale in the picture, looking for tips.

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Dirty Beaches

NRDC's annual Testing the Waters report is out, detailing the numbers and causes for beach closures in 2007 (aqui en Espanol). Great Lakes, you're not looking so great.

I first encountered this report back in 1998, when I was looking at the data for the Heinz Center's national ecosystem report. When I started at NRDC, TTW was one of my earliest press duties; I'd get the summaries about 48 hours before they hit the streets and spend that time crunching numbers on Bay Area beaches. You can get as little or as much information as you want at the report site, by searching for your favorite beach or looking county by county at beach monitoring frequency, but the data resolution still leaves much to be desired.

That's because TTW suffers from the same problems as many long term environmental data sets. Beach monitoring and closure data isn't all collected in one central location, like at the EPA. Some of it requires calling counties and cities, each of which may have their own rules for what they monitor and how often. And those rules have certainly changed over the 18 years of TTW. While those policy changes can make long term trends difficult to tease out, a general trend is that the closer you look at water quality, the more fecal coliform you find. Water quality testing isn't necessarily expensive or difficult -- you can do it yourself as a Surfrider volunteer -- but it is one of those programs that tends to get cut when budgets are tight.

Keep that in mind the next time your municipality asks to upgrade its sewage system, because it's likely that those aging overflows and septic tanks are degrading your beach. Nothing ruins a "staycation" more than stomach flu.

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Do healthy reefs protect themselves?

The idea that intact trophic structures and diverse ecosystems are more resilient than their depauperate over-extracted kin has been tossed around in scientific circles for many years. The diversity = resilience hypothesis is getting new scrutiny in the oceans today because of the threats of acidification and warming temperatures. Can the seas survive better if they get to keep all their parts (even if we don't understand exactly how they work)?

The August issue of Current Biology has new evidence saying yes. Dr. Hugh Sweatman and many brave associates spent ten years being towed around the Great Barrier reef counting crown-of-thorns starfish. COTs are nasty, poisonous little buggers that swarm in waves, eating corals. Researchers found that areas open to fishing were 3.75 times more likely to have COTs outbreaks than no-take marine reserves in the same area. Adult fish aren't direct predators on the starfish -- since almost nothing can eat a 10" diameter helping of neurotoxins -- but having them around may protect invertebrates that prey on juvenile COTs. Time for more manta tows to figure out the causal mechanism and in the meantime, keep those marine reserves going.

You can get the full paper through the Australian Institute of Marine Science website.

Crown of Thorns photo © Alexey Bogdanov

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Still time for presidential suggestions

Blogfish is still looking for your suggestions for President McCain/Obama/Barr/Paul/Clinton. We know you've got ideas. Here's another one from us:

The X Prize for the oceans
I'd call it the O prize, but that would require Oprah's support (which isn't a bad idea, come to think of it). The X Prize competitions have inspired engineers and inventors to travel to space and improve automobiles. They are sorely lacking in anything involving saltwater. How about more efficient engines for small fishing boats and big container ships? Remote sensing devices that can count and identify fish without killing them? Or they could take something like Smart gear to the next level. Throw down the gauntlet of prize money and move ocean exploration forward.

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100,000 visitors to blogfish!

Blogfish turned 100,000 yesterday. That's right, we had visitor number 100,000 on Saturday at 11:53 am PDT.

Checking in from Bath, England, thanks to a google search on "spoiled tuna" and arriving at "Think that red tuna is fresh? Maybe not"

Who knew that the early days of a couple of dozen visitors per day would turn into this? Who would believe that I'd still be blogging over 2 years later?

Here's to the next 100,000 and thanks for stopping by.

Now that my 2 week vacation is over, it's back to business. Hope you missed me.

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