Marine Science - Tumblr Posts
hold up im reading more about the lionfish thing and this one island in Honduras has had such a huge problem with lionfish that the measures they have taken include
• getting special exemption from the Honduran government to allow divers access to harpoons and spears which are otherwise illegal in fishing
• public campaign to teach people how to prepare and eat lionfish (apparently they are very tasty once the poisonous spines are removed) (but watch out)
• holding lionfish combination hunting competition and cookout (reportedly they killed and cooked 1,700 in a day) (someone killed 60 of them with a rubber band spear gun???)
• most recently and apparently out of desperation, the divers in charge of culling the lionfish in the Roatan Marine Park just started. feeding the lionfish they killed to sharks. bc what else are you gonna do with it
• the sharks don’t seem to notice or be affected by the poison and begin hanging out with the divers
• the sharks then were seen hunting and killing the lionfish on their own
like this is nuts to me sorry. the sharks just had to be shown “hey this is food, did you know?? you can eat these!! here try one!!” we are possibly altering an entire foodchain bc we like feeding the big ocean wolves
In fact, science is increasingly revealing that fishes are intelligent, emotional beings—but the inflated value we tend to assign to all things human often prevents us from accepting such findings, says biologist Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows. Because fishes lack faces like ours, we assume that their mask-like features mean they do not experience feelings. And because fish cannot cry out, we interpret their silence as meaning they do not perceive pain—even as their gasping mouths and flopping fins on a ship’s deck indicate otherwise.
Science is increasingly revealing that fishes are intelligent, emotional beings.
“Their bodies are shaped differently, their eyes don’t blink, they’re bathed permanently in water and—while they make lots of sounds underwater—we don’t hear them because they’re transmitted in an aqueous environment,” Balcombe says. “But they are sentient creatures with the capacity to feel.”
Humans also tend to assume that because fishes are cold-blooded (put more precisely, ectothermic) and began evolving around 100 million years before land animals, they must be “primitive.” But evolution is anything but static, and fishes’ early start actually means they’re the most highly evolved of all vertebrates, Balcombe points out. Many of the world’s 33,000-plus known species of fish possess incredible senses and abilities, some of which we are only just beginning to understand.
Leopard Shark, Triakis semifasciata.
One of the most popular animals at MSI is the leopard shark. We keep 8 or 9 baby leopard sharks in our aquarium at a time. We catch the sharks when we take our 90 foot research vessel out on the San Francisco Bay. The leopard shark is a beautiful animal covered with dark saddles and splotches. The top of the animal varies in color from silver to a bronzed gray. Leopard sharks are most commonly found in shallow bays and estuaries but sometimes live in the kelp forest, usually staying near the bottom.
Leopard sharks love to eat benthic invertebrates like mussels, clams, crabs, and worms. Male leopard sharks can grow to be 5 to 6 feet long while the females can grow to be 6 to 7 feet long! These sharks are very gentle creatures and both kids and adults love getting the chance to touch the sharks when they come to visit MSI!
DOLPHIN MOMS DO ‘BABY TALK’ WITH THEIR CALVES
Baby talk or Motherese/ Parentese is a speech pattern nearly universal across cultures and languages in human caregivers interacting with children. It is characterized by a higher than usual pitch, exaggerated intonation, repetition, calling attention to objects and use of slow stretchy speeches. What we know about baby talking in other nonhuman species is sparse. Now, researchers have found evidence for baby talk in bottlenose dolphin, a species that shows parallels to humans in their long-term mother–offspring bonds and lifelong vocal learning.
Researchers analyzed audios from made wild bottlenose dolphins in waters near Sarasota Bay, Florida, United States, and found that females produced signature whistles with significantly higher maximum frequencies and wider frequency ranges when they were recorded with their own dependent calves.
This finding provide an example of convergent evolution of motherese in nonhuman mammals, and may help us understand how motherese can facilitate vocal learning and bonding in nonhumans as well as humans.
Photo by Carli Brush Stoll
Reference: Sayigh et al., 2023. Bottlenose dolphin mothers modify signature whistles in the presence of their own calves. PNAS