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SCUBA News...
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News, research and articles on scuba diving, travel and the marine environment.
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Cleaner fish create safe havens
Cleaner fish are well known to divers on the reef. They eat parasites from much larger fish, many of which are normally predators. Some of these predators let the little cleaners safely enter their mouth and gills. A single cleaner fish can clean more than 2,300 fish a day from over 130 species and each cleaner eats about 1,200 parasites daily. Most fish are cleaned daily, with some fish seeking cleaners around 150 times a day.
Both cleaner and cleaned fish benefit from this behaviour. Cleaner fish are also thought to benefit from immunity to predation. They stroke their "clients'" with their fins to help persuade the predators not to eat them. Researchers in Australia have found that the more stroking the calmer the predator. And it wasn't just the cleaner fish who benefited. Other fish nearby the cleaner station experienced less aggressive behaviour from the predators. The suggests that cleaner stations act as safe havens from predator aggression.
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Archaelogical Oceanography
New definitive book on the emerging field of deep-sea archaeology. Marine archaeologists have been finding and excavating underwater shipwrecks since at least the early 1950s, but until recently their explorations have been restricted to depths considered shallow by oceanographic standards. This new book describes the latest advances that enable researchers to probe the secrets of the deep ocean, and the vital contributions these advances offer to archaeology and fields like maritime history and anthropology.
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Air travel in the tropics is worse for climate
A typical flight to the tropics has a greater impact on global warming than a flight in temperate latitudes. As well as producing carbon dioxide and contrails, planes also produce nitrogen oxide, which triggers both the creation of the warming gas ozone, and the destruction of another greenhouse gas, methane. In mid-latitudes, these ozone and methane reactions cancel each other out and you get zero net warming from nitrogen oxide emissions. But the brighter sunlight in the tropics is very efficient at converting nitrogen oxide to ozone - in fact it creates ozone five times faster than in the air of mid-latitudes
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Issue 98 of SCUBA News Now Online
In this issue: Red Sea competition results, ocean facts, diving news from the Med, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and Britain plus the latest underwater research findings.
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ROV Finds New Coral Species
Researchers on the third-largest atoll in the world, the Saba Bank in the Netherlands Antilles, have discovered and collected two new species of soft corals (gorgonians) and documented severe anchor damage with the aid of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) from Seabotix. Experts collected 40 species of soft corals, seventeen of which were collected using the ROV.
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Update: Diving Thailand
Discover the best and worst dive operators in Thailand at the newly updated SCUBA Travel site.
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Barrier Reef 'no-take' zones see leap in fish numbers
A controversial decision to halt commercial and recreational fishing across vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef has proven remarkably effective for reviving coral trout numbers. "Everyone is a little surprised," admits Garry Russ, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville. "We've seen a consistent pattern of recovery of coral trout from just north of Cairns to as far south as Heron Island," he says. "It's an extraordinarily large area."
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The Royal Navy submarine implicated in dolphin 'suicides'
With initial tests showing the 24 dolphins who died after becoming stranded were fit and healthy, with no obvious injuries, dolphin experts are becoming increasingly convinced the creatures fled to shallow water after a disturbance at sea.The Royal Navy has admitted testing sonar equipment on a nearby warship and having an submarine on exercise - but says it is 'extremely unlikely' it was to blame for the strandings.
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Marine life on 'junk food' diet - and we're to blame
Overfishing and changes in the climate could be putting marine birds and mammals on a "junk food" diet. But unlike humans, marine animals eating junk food diet are losing weight.
As predatory fish such as cod have been removed from the sea in large numbers, fish lower down in the food chain, such as sprat, have increased in numbers. But individually the sprats weigh less, and these leaner fish, biologists say, are effectively junk food.
They are poor sources of energy for predatory birds and mammals, and as a result these animals are also losing weight, says Henrik Osterblom of the University of Stockholm in Sweden.
For Michael Fogerty of the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service the story is all too familiar. "There have been concerns on the East Coast of the US about the quality of prey for the bluefin tuna," he says.
Herring play a large part in the diet of tuna, but Fogerty and his colleagues have noticed that the herring too have increased in number but decreased in weight. This has resulted in a corresponding decrease in the weight of the tuna, they say.
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Mediterranean Sharks Decline by 97%
A new scientific study has concluded that sharks in the Mediterranean Sea have declined by more than 97 percent in abundance and "catch weight" over the last 200 years. The findings of the study published in the journal Conservation Biology, suggest several Mediterranean shark species are at risk of extinction, especially if current levels of fishing pressure continue. Study lead author Francesco Ferretti and his colleagues are concerned that the declines in sharks may have implications for the broader Mediterranean marine ecosystem.
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