Cambridge University based The Naked Scientists have just launched Naked Oceans, a great new podcast devoted to marine science sponsored by Save Our Seas. They’re off to a strong start, with episodes focusing on climate change and oil spills already available for free online and through iTunes:
The problem of oil spills
To launch this brand new podcast series, Naked Oceans ventures beneath the waves to investigate the impacts of oil spills on the marine environment. We hunt down the hidden world of microbes in Louisiana wetlands, trace the fingerprint of oil in the open oceans, and discuss the likely fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And 14 years on, we meet some of the survivors of the Sea Empress Oil Spill in the Welsh coast. And we invite Carl Safina to choose our first Critter of the Month.
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Climate change and the Oceans
Join us as we dive into the science of climate change in the oceans. What changes are we already seeing, what affects are they having on marine life, and what are the prospects for the future? We call in on the Arctic and the Antarctic to find out what’s going on in some of the most vulnerable parts of the oceans, and we meet some extraordinary critters from the bottom of the sea at the bottom of the world.
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You can easily stay up to date with the latest episodes by subscribing (for free!) here. Click here to learn more about Naked Oceans, or download the full press release.
Image credit: Cedric Guigand, University of Miami RSMAS Marine Photobank
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The subject of shark bites was our last day of conference wake up call – a subject that the media worldwide is completely obsessed with. Dr John West, the keynote speaker, described how the general attitude to sharks has turned from “The only good shark is a dead shark” to a dawning that sharks are a natural component of our ecosystem and people now don’t automatically call for the death of sharks after there has been an incident. In fact today, most of the time the victims and their family are the first to call for the protection of sharks. We have certainly witnessed this changing attitude in both the public and the media around Cape Town. The amount of people using the ocean has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. More people are surfing and with efficient wetsuits – they are surfing for longer, and SCUBA diving continues to increase in popularity, as does swimming and snorkeling.
Dr. Shivji wins the Student's Choice Award (Photo: Cheryl-Samantha Owen / SOSF)
The rest of the morning was a lucky dip of talks from human-shark interactions, a media analysis of the changing attitudes of divers towards sharks to the use of a remotely operated vehicle to study shark behaviour. Shark filming legends Ron and Valerie Taylor, who attended the conference, were once champion spear-fishermen before they turned into marine and shark life advocates. “Marine life belongs to all of us, not just the fishermen, and we should be able to see them (the sharks and other fish) anytime we want,” Valerie exclaimed to me with twinkling eyes ready for another shark expedition or underwater adventure.
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It was the day after World Ocean’s Day and not a scientist was stirring in the arctic temperatures of the Sharks International’s conference rooms. Instead we were celebrating underwater in the warm Coral Sea and exploring the tremendous diversity of coral life, which forms the Great Barrier Reef.
The next day we were immersed once again in a series of talks about the status of sharks on our blue planet and the many ways that researchers are uncovering their secrets. The morning began on a very different note – with a talk on shark control programs (including the shark nets off South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal) by Geremy Cliff from the South African Shark Board. After listening to a series of rather depressing talks all morning on the animals caught in shark safety nets (fishing gill nets), targeted large-shark fisheries and illegal shark fisheries we were treated to an afternoon focused on genetic and molecular techniques in shark research.
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Cheryl-Samantha Owen reports from Day 2 at the Sharks International Conference in Cairns, Australia.
Our keynote speaker, Dr. Christopher Lowe, described how major advances in our knowledge of shark behaviour have been achieved over the last 25 years thanks to the evolution of some key technologies. The original interest to better understand shark behaviour was driven by the military’s interest in protecting personnel and equipment from sharks. Early behaviour research focused on sharks’ sensory systems and basic biology, subjects about which very little was known.
Sharks International Delegates. (Photo: Cheryl-Samantha Owen / SOSF)
Sharks are global travellers and observing them in the wild is no easy task. The biggest change to shark behaviour research arrived with the advent of acoustic and satellite telemetry. These technologies, which use tags to record a wide array of sensory data, enable scientists to track the exact locations of where individual sharks travel and the temperature, depth, and light levels that they experience on their journeys. Through telemetry we have expanded our knowledge of movement patterns, feeding and mating behaviour, as well as an understanding of the physiology that drives these behaviours. There has been a growing trend in the number of scientists using telemetry technology and in fact, over 20 per cent of the talks at this conference include the use of telemetry. On your next dive if you are lucky enough to come across a shark decorated with a research tag it could belong to one of the scientists attending the conference here. Blacktip reef sharks, whitetip reef sharks, whiptail stingrays in the Amazon estuary, shovelnose guitarfish, manta rays, bull sharks, blue sharks, whale sharks and white sharks are the main characters of some of the tags here that are well on their way to unraveling some of their species’ mysteries.
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Today is World Oceans Day (not to mention World Brain Tumor Day — in the spirit of which, for the curious: “Why don’t all whales have cancer?“) To celebrate, we’ve created a real-time Twitter visualisation around around the topic, but we also want to let you know about some other ocean-related news and initiatives today:
- Sarah Chasis, Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Ocean Initiative, lays out a strong case for why the US needs a national ocean policy.
- Oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes on CNN: “In light of the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill, never has there been a more critical time to reflect on the importance of the oceans to humanity, and more importantly, to work together to save the Earth’s blue heart.”
- A new TED talk: underwater photographer Brian Skerry talks about his experiences (and shares some powerful photos) chronicling the damage being done to ocean life through overfishing and pollution.
- The Ocean Project: find a World Oceans Day event near you.
You don’t have to be a scientist or photojournalist to do something to help save our seas! It’s the small things that make a big difference — like making sure that you only eat responsibly-sourced seafood, using less plastic, and getting the word out to others.
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