A few weeks back a number of us were down in Baja California visiting the friendly whales of San Ignacio Lagoon. For those not familiar with this mysterious and delightful phenomena, the gray whales of Baja seem to enjoy frolicking…
The Song of the Sea
Rutgers professor of Estuary and Marine Ecology. And OCR friend Judith Weis sent us an article about how the environmental health can be determined by listening. The paper by Katherine Indeck (et al.) described in the article explored the sounds…
2016 Progress Report – A thick year!
It has been my habit to keep our newsletters “short and sweet” – less than 500 words so they can be read in a minute or so. But I just finished compiling a progress report for our institutional funders to…
Long distance calling!
While there are a number of varied species of baleen whales that are adapted to their particular habitats and natural histories, there are a few things they have in common; they’re all much larger than we are, they all graze…
The sound of climate disruption
It has been known for quite some time that excessive anthropogenic carbon dioxide is modifying ocean chemistry, increasing acidity, and compromising shell growth in calciferous sea life. The effects of this have been confirmed in sea snails, corals, and oysters,…
The way ahead
For those of you “just waiting for the other shoe to drop” on the “election collusion” inquiry with the hopes that it will somehow stop – or at least slow down the rapacious industrial policies being thrown at us by…
The Mills of the Gods grind slow…
This Friday morning (1/6/17) we were met with the fabulous news that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has denied the six seismic survey permits that were pending under the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf Five Year Plan. My…
What WUZ that sound?
We’ve heard much about how little we know about the ocean; that “we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the sea,” or that “less than 5% of the ocean has been explored.” Of course…
The enigma of the one-tooth unicorn
For a creature that figures so well into European mythology, the Narwhal carries with it surprisingly few myths of its own. As its Linnaean taxonomic binomial infers, Monodon Monoceros (one tooth, one horn) the narwhal was described by Europeans as…