Blogs / Discoblog

NASA researchers have released 90 rubber ducks into the Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier—the same glacier that may have sunk the Titanic a century ago—in an attempt to understand why glaciers move faster in the summer and why sea levels change.

Because the Jakobshavn Glacier is known to discharge as much as seven percent of Greenland’s melting icesheets, NASA researchers are specifically interested in knowing how the meltwater moves through the glacier. While they can clearly see how the icebergs fall into the ocean, it’s impossible to see exactly how the water flows. In theory, as the sun warms the ice in the summer, the top layer of the glacier melts and flows through a hole in the glacier until it reaches the other side. As such, the researchers suspect the rubber ducks will end up in the surrounding water in Baffin Bay.

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Start spreading the news: Whales want to be a part of New York.

Cornell University researchers have detected whale song in the waters near New York City. The team, led by Chris Clark, hoped to track the migrations of humpback, fin, and North Atlantic right whales on their migrations from their calving waters in Florida to their feeding areas in the waters off New England. This week their detectors, deployed only 13 miles outside the entrance to New York harbor, heard their first traces of the marine mammals singing.

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Now that they know some fish can see red, ichthyologists might be a little red in the face.

Because water tends to absorb long wavelengths of visible light, long-wavelength red photons don’t penetrate much past the top 30 feet of ocean. So fish experts had assumed that red just wasn’t part of the underwater world, and fish probably couldn’t see it. But a new study led by German researcher Nico Michiels concluded quite the contrary—numerous species of fish can produce their own red light through luminescence.

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If you went to Cheers to pour a few back with Norm and Cliff, could you get a plate of fish and chips? Probably not, if Ted Danson had anything to say about it.

One of the ways that Danson has been keeping busy, now that “Cheers” and “Becker” are long since canceled, is by heading up Oceana, the ocean conservation organization he started two decades ago. Danson is hopping mad that a rare species of shark called the spiny dogfish has been hunted to the brink of extinction, and he faults, for one, the British love affair with fish and chips.

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Last week we covered the paper released by the Japanese Whale Research Program (JARPA) showing that minke whales in the Antarctic were getting thinner, and we also covered their research methods—taking measurements from more than 4,500 slaughtered whales. This week National Geographic has an update, interviewing two American researchers who say that killing the whales wasn’t necessary for the research.

Scott Baker, from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, said researchers could have made the same finding by genetic testing, biopsy—removing a small piece of tissue for sampling—or simply through photographic evidence. And Stanford University’s Stephen Palumbi disagreed with the Japanese scientists over the importance of the finding, saying that whales getting a little skinnier might not matter that much, and the study’s findings weren’t statistically significant enough to be useful.

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If a creature was big, slow, and delicious, there’s a good chance that early humans hunters found it too good to pass up.

Researchers combing the Red Sea have identified a new species of clam, a giant one that could measure more than a foot in length and may have been one of our ancestors’ favorite meals. The oversized mollusk went undiscovered for so long because it accounts for only one percent of the current population of clams. However, checking the fossil record, the scientists found that the giant clam once made up 80 percent of the population, then dropped off precipitously around 125,000 years ago, a date that roughly coincides with early humans coming out of Africa.

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Environmentalists have been all over Japan’s “scientific” whaling for years, with some organizations saying the program is unnecessary or little more than commercial whale hunting in disguise. But now Japanese scientists have published new research in Popular Polar Biology, and their findings aren’t good: whales are getting skinnier, and global warming might be at fault.

The scientists measured the amount of blubber in minke whales captured since the 1980s and found that the level has dropped off precipitously since then. Why are they pointing the finger at global warming? Because krill, the tiny crustacean at the base of the food chain, have declined in Antarctic areas by 80 percent since the 1970s. Part of the problem is warming waters, but over-fishing for krill to use at fish farms and the ozone layer hole have contributed to the drop as well.

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A person’s first thought of a giant squid might be the bloodthirsty behemoth that attacks seafarers in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But the animal’s reputation is a little over-inflated—the giant squid discovered last year might have been just a docile blob.

A New Zealand boat fishing in the Antarctic brought in the 1,000-pound female squid, and scientists have been studying the sea creature over the last year. But looking at its biology, they found that it’s unlikely the animal was a great ocean predator. Rather, the female squid bore quite a mother’s burden; the thousands of eggs she carried caused her to expand into a big blob as she got older, says marine biologist Steve O’Shea.

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Viruses, those strange, quasi-alive chunks of genetic material, are usually bad news for the cells that they invade. A virus uses its host’s genetic machinery to replicate itself, often sickening or destroying the host in the process. But scientists might have found helpful viruses deep in the ocean, in one of the world’s oddest ecosystems.

Eric Wommack from the University of Delaware was studying the hot waters around hydrothermal vents in the Pacific Ocean when he found that viruses there, rather than replicating and destroying their hosts, often just hang around and cause no harm. When its bacterial host finds itself under stress, the virus comes alive. But while going about its business of replicating itself, the virus can interact and exchange DNA with the bacterium.

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Yesterday we wondered whether the U.S. Navy’s plan to intentionally sink some of its old warships, so that they’d become new homes for fish and attractions for recreational divers, would be such a great idea in the long run. Today, a new study looking at a different shipwreck suggests that not only might intentionally sinking old ships be a bad idea, but officials might have to remove shipwrecks from sensitive ecosystems before they cause too much harm.

Back in 1991, a 100-foot-long ship sank in Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge near Hawaii. Now, 17 years later, scientists studying the area say the coral reef is under attack by an organism called Rhodactis howesii. It is a corallimorph, a relative to anemones and corals that clears out competitors with it stinging tentacles. Rhodactis is an invasive species to the Palmyra Atoll, and it doubled its presence between 2006 and 2007, pushing out the diverse mix of corals that is native there.

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