Jaws : about adrenaline

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

Matt Meola and Albee Layer share their experiences paddling into massive Jaws.

Arctic Ocean: history and now

Arctic Ocean Seafloor Features Map: International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) annotated with the names of seafloor features

From Geology

Arctic Ocean: History and Now

The Arctic Ocean has played a minor role in world history.
Ice cover severely hinders navigation; the area is remote; there is almost no infrastructure; winters are dark and very cold; summer days are short and foggy.
These challenges make the Arctic Ocean a hostile and difficult area.

Today, we are at a time when interest in the Arctic Ocean is growing steadily.
A warming climate is thinning and shrinking the polar ice pack to allow increased navigation.
New oil and gas assessments have revealed an enormous energy resource.
And, the Law of the Sea Treaty has motivated nations to clearly define their exclusive economic zone in the Arctic Ocean.

The new interest in the Arctic Ocean is not confined to its surface; it extends to the bottom where information about its structure is needed by geologists, oceanographers, biologists and other people who work there.
The primary physical features of the Arctic Ocean seafloor are labeled on the bathymetry map above and described in the paragraphs below.
Maps below illustrate navigational, physical and mineral resource features.

Arctic Ocean Geography

The Arctic Ocean has a surface area of about 14.056 million square kilometers (5.427 million square miles), making it the smallest of Earth's five oceans. Baffin Bay, Barents Sea, Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, East Siberian Sea, Greenland Sea, Hudson Bay, Hudson Straight, Kara Sea, and Laptev Sea are generally considered to be part of the Arctic Ocean.
It is connected to the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait and connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the Labrador Sea and the Greenland Sea.

Lomonosov Ridge

The dominant topographic feature of the Arctic Ocean seafloor is the Lomonosov Ridge.
This feature is thought to be part of the Eurasian continental crust that rifted from the Barents-Kara Sea margin and subsided in early Tertiary time (about 64 to 56 million years ago).
The side of the Ridge facing Eurasia is bounded by half-graben faults and the side facing North America is gently sloping.

The Lomonosov Ridge traverses the Arctic Ocean from the Lincoln Shelf (off Ellesmere Island and Greenland) to the New Siberian Islands off the coast of northern Russia.
It divides the Arctic Ocean into two major basins: the Eurasian Basin on the Eurasian side of the ridge and the Amerasian Basin on the North American Side.
It rises over 3000 meters above the floors of these basins and at its highest point is about 954 meters below sea level. It was discovered by Russian scientists in 1948.

In 1982 a United Nations treaty known as "The Law of the Sea" was presented. It addressed navigational rights, territorial waters limits, exclusive economic zones, fishing, pollution, drilling, mining, conservation and many other aspects of maritime activity.
It was the first attempt by the international community to establish a formal agreement on a logical allocation of ocean resources.
Under the Law of the Sea, each country receives exclusive economic rights to any natural resource that is present on or beneath the sea floor out to a distance of 200 nautical miles beyond their natural shorelines.
In addition to the 200 nautical mile economic zone, each country can extend its claim up to 350 nautical miles for those areas that can be proven to be an extension of that country's continental shelf.

Nations could use the "Law of the Sea" treaty to determine who owns the Arctic Ocean seafloor. Russia has presented a claim to the United Nations that the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of Eurasia and that entitles Russia to an extended exclusive economic zone.
Canada and Denmark make similar claims to extend their control from the opposite side of the Arctic Ocean.

Amerasian and Eurasian Basins

The Lomonosov Ridge divides the floor of the Arctic Ocean into two major basins.
The Eurasian Basin is on the Eurasian side of the Lomonosov Ridge and the Amerasian Basin is on the North American side of the Lomonosov Ridge.

The Amerasian and Eurasian Basins have been subdivided by ridges.
The Gakkel Ridge, a spreading center responsible for the rifting of the Lomonosov block from the Eurasian continent, divides the Eurasian Basin into the Fram Basin on the Lomonosov side of the ridge and the Nansen Basin on the Eurasian continent side.
The Alpha Ridge divides the Amerasian Basin into the Canada Basin on the North American side of the ridge and the Makarov Basin on the Lomonosov side of the ridge.

Continental Shelves

The Amerasian Basin and the Eurasian Basin are surrounded by extensive continental shelves. These include the Chukchi Shelf and the Beaufort Shelf along North America; the Lincoln Shelf along northern Greenland; the Barents Shelf, Kara Shelf, Laptev Shelf and East Siberian Shelf along Eurasia.

Enormous amounts of natural gas are believed to be beneath the Barents Shelf and the Kara Shelf as parts of the East Barents Petroleum Province and the West Siberian Petroleum Province.
Oil and natural gas are believed to be beneath significant parts of the Chukchi Shelf, Beaufort Shelf and Canada Basin as part of the Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province and the Amerasia Petroleum Province.

Arctic Oil and Natural Gas Provinces Map: Over 87% of the Arctic's oil and natural gas resource (about 360 billion barrels oil equivalent) is located in seven Arctic basin provinces: Amerasia Basin, Arctic Alaska Basin, East Barents Basin, East Greenland Basin, West Greenland East Canada Basin, East Greenland Rift Basin, West Siberian Basin and the Yenisey-Khatang Basin. Map by Geology.com and MapResources.

Rift Basins

Greenland is flanked by two rift basins: the East Greenland Rift Basin and the West Greenland Rift Basin.
These basins connect the Arctic Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean.
Each of these basins is thought to be underlain by a significant oil and natural gas resource.

Navigation Through the Arctic Ocean

Two potentially important navigation channels pass through the Arctic Ocean.

In September 2011, sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record.
In this image, Ice-covered areas range in color from white (highest concentration) to light blue (lowest concentration).
Open water is dark blue, and land masses are gray.
The yellow outline shows the median minimum ice extent for 1979–2000 (areas that were at least 15 percent ice-covered in at least half the years between 1979 and 2000). Image and caption information by NASA's Earth Observatory

The Northwest Passage is a sea route that connects the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean across the northern coast of North America and through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The Northern Sea Route is a similar route that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across the northern coast of the Eurasian Continent.

Map showing the geographic extent of the Arctic Ocean (as a darker blue tint).
The Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route are two important seasonal waterways that connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
In recent years the polar ice pack has thinned allowing for increased navigation through these routes and raising the possibility of future sovereignty and shipping disputes among countries bordering the Arctic Ocean.
Image by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Both of these routes have been virtually impassable in the past because they are covered by thick, year-round sea ice.
However, they have been relatively ice-free for a few weeks in recent years (see map in right column) and have attracted a small amount of commercial shipping.
Each of these routes cuts thousands of miles off of a trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Both routes face jurisdictional problems and questions over who has a right to use them and under what conditions.

Links :

• The Artic Institute
• TheGuardian : Arctic oil rush will ruin ecosystem, warns Lloyd's of London
  

Floating laboratory follows plankton around the world in 938 days

From TheGuardian (This article originally appeared in Le Monde)

Tara yacht finishes two-and-a-half-year expedition to track and research marine micro-organisms

Last month a strange yacht with an aluminium hull returned to a warm welcome in the port of Lorient, after a two-and-a-half-year absence.
During that time the Tara, a floating laboratory, had sailed round the world, covering some 115,000km as it crisscrossed the oceans tracking invisible marine micro-organisms.


The ambition of the Tara Oceans project is to build up a database of these complex, yet little-known ecosystems.
For the scientists behind the undertaking, to see the Tara, with its twin orange masts, back in its home port in Brittany, north-west France, is a victory in itself, given how crazy the project seemed at its outset.

"When it started, we did have some doubts, particularly regarding funding," says Eric Karsenti, the expedition's senior scientist and a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany.
"When the Tara left Lorient in 2009 we weren't entirely sure we had enough money to complete the expedition."

Some €9m ($11.9m) later – drawing on public and private funds – and despite the voyage being cut short by several months due to a lack of resources, the wager seems to have paid off, straying far from the conventional sea lanes of scientific research.
"The other big challenge we faced was to succeed in getting scientists from very different backgrounds to work together," Karsenti says.

Major scientific missions investigating marine ecosystems usually focus on a single line of research.
A typical instance was the expedition initiated by the US genetician Craig Venter.
From 2003 to 2006 his own yacht, the Sorcerer II, sailed round the world in an attempt to collect as much DNA from marine micro-organisms as possible, scooping up in the process more than 6,000 new genes and identifying about 1,700 protein families.

The Tara Oceans project opted for a far-reaching multidisciplinary approach, with microbiologists, oceanographers, geneticians and engineers from all over the world – 35 nationalities in all – working on the Tara at various times during its odyssey.
At each port of call some of the 15 crew members – comprising scientists, sailors and journalists – were replaced.
"Each crew writes its own story," says the skipper, Loïc Vallette.
"The Tara is a hybrid vessel, organised like a typical oceanographic ship, but crammed into a much smaller space."
It operates on slightly different lines too, requiring researchers to do more than just fulfil their scientific duties.
Everyone does their bit to keep place ship-shape, doing maintenance work and the washing-up, and even taking night watches.
"It has been a fabulous human adventure," Vallette adds.


But the main objective was to gain a greater understanding of plankton.
"To begin with we wanted to mount a proper scientific expedition, and at the same time use it to reach out to the general public," Karsenti explains.
"We soon hit on the idea of plankton, which includes little known, little studied organisms, particularly on a global scale."

Marine micro-organisms account for 98% of the oceans' biomass, but scientists have only studied a tiny part of this population.
Indeed the term plankton covers a huge variety of very diverse organisms, ranging from jellyfish to micro-algae.
Traditionally, species are organised on the basis of their anatomical or genetic similarities.
But plankton is defined by its ecological niche, its way of life in a particular environment, or more precisely the particularity of living suspended in a water column, with no ability to swim against the current.
This definition encompasses a myriad of species: zooplankton (animal) comprising fish larvae, small molluscs or crustaceans; phytoplankton (plant), comprising micro-algae but also countless types of virus and bacteria.
Such huge diversity demands the largest possible scientific reach in order to understand complex plankton ecosystems.
But for many years the scientific community shunned them, slow to realise the essential role plankton plays in our oceans and for the planet as a whole.


Plankton forms the basis of marine food chains.
But it also makes a crucial contribution to regulating the climate and affects the Earth's geochemical cycles.
Awareness of these marine organisms came a bit late.
In recent decades the global plankton concentration has declined.

To sample and analyse plankton efficiently the Tara was fitted out to accommodate a battery of scientific equipment.
Alongside the ship, long pipes trailed downwards, pumping up seawater, which then passed through a succession of filters.
On the stern deck a dozen nets, each with a specific mesh, were deployed at various depths.
Each catch was then transferred to a wet laboratory on deck.
Samples were labelled and, for the most part, dipped into liquid nitrogen to be stored for study on land.
But some samples were examined straightaway in the onboard laboratory, equipped with a whole range of imaging instruments.
To round off the proceedings the Tara's key exhibit, referred to as the "rosette" was lowered into the sea.

This contraption was fitted with sample bottles for trapping water at predetermined depths and an array of sensors measuring the temperature, oxygen and salt content.
Loaded with 350kg of equipment, the rosette was the centre of attention each time the Tara stopped to take samples, an operation which sometimes lasted several days.
"Each field station brings new challenges and the stress is permanent," says Sarah Searson, an oceanographer and one of the few scientists to spend several months onboard."
There are so many things to be taken into account I sometimes felt like I was juggling, staying perfectly concentrated at all times."

Thanks to this operation, tens of thousands of test tubes filled with precious samples were collected from the 153 field stations investigated by the Tara: sufficient to occupy the land-based scientists for years.
"It often felt like a real marathon," Searson said. "
One of the achievements was keeping all the equipment in perfect condition."
The yacht is now being prepared for another expedition in 2013, in the Arctic Ocean, the only part of the sea that Tara Oceans did not sample.

Deep Intellect : inside the mind of the octopus

From OrionMag

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality.
I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

Athena the octopus at New England Aquarium, Boston

For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses.
No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange.
Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink.
But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me—and if so, what was she thinking?

Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy.
How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion?
Octopuses are, after all, “only” invertebrates—they don’t even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts.
Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.

Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind.
But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities.
Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

I had always longed to meet an octopus.
Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction.
In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. If she consented, I could touch her.
The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds.
One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity.
The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it.
We think of our world as the “real” one, but Athena’s is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there.
Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena.

The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other.

She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor.
Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine.
I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface.
Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine.
“She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.

As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers.
Each arm has more than two hundred of them.
The famous naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive.
“I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle,” he confessed.

But to me, Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed.

Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth.

This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus.

An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns.

One name for the species is “devil fish.”

With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom.

The pressure from an octopus’s suckers can tear flesh (one scientist calculated that to break the hold of the suckers of the much smaller common octopus would require a quarter ton of force).

One volunteer who interacted with an octopus left the aquarium with arms covered in red hickeys.

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone.

One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer.

Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance.

Later, she quit her volunteer position for college.

But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

Athena was remarkably gentle with me—even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones.

She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank.

Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly.

But at this point, I asked Dowd if perhaps I should try to detach from some of the suckers.

With his help, Athena and I pulled gently apart.

I was honored that she appeared comfortable with me.

But what did she know about me that informed her opinion?

When Athena looked into my eyes, what was she thinking?

Octopus Walks on Land at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

WHILE ALEXA WARBURTON was researching her senior thesis at Middlebury College’s newly created octopus lab, “every day,” she said, “was a disaster.”

She was working with two species: the California two-spot, with a head the size of a clementine, and the smaller, Florida species, Octopus jobbing.

Her objective was to study the octopuses’ behavior in a T-shaped maze.

But her study subjects were constantly thwarting her.

The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive.

The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal.

But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them—and eat each other.

Or they’d mate, which is equally lethal.
Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia.

“They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won’t look you in the eye or attack prey,” Warburton said.

One senile octopus crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried up, and died.

It seemed to Warburton that some of the octopuses were purposely uncooperative.

To run the T-maze, the pre-veterinary student had to scoop an animal from its tank with a net and transfer it to a bucket.

With bucket firmly covered, octopus and researcher would take the elevator down to the room with the maze.

Some octopuses did not like being removed from their tanks.

They would hide.

They would squeeze into a corner where they couldn’t be pried out.

They would hold on to some object with their arms and not let go.

Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline.

They’d leap off the mesh and onto the floor—and then run for it. Yes, run.

“You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,” Warburton said. “It’s so weird!”

Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency.

While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish—upon whom they have usually been dining.

Even though the Middlebury octopuses were disaster prone, Warburton liked certain individuals very much.

Some, she said, “would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you.” Though in their research papers the students refer to each octopus by a number, the students named them all.

One of the joubini was such a problem they named her The Bitch.

“Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes,” Warburton said.

“She’d grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn’t get her out. It was awful!”

Then there was Wendy.

Warburton used Wendy as part of her thesis presentation, a formal event that was videotaped.

First Wendy squirted salt water at her, drenching her nice suit.

Then, as Warburton tried to show how octopuses use the T-maze, Wendy scurried to the bottom of the tank and hid in the sand.

Warburton says the whole debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going to happen.

“Wendy,” she said, “just didn’t feel like being caught in the net.”

Data from Warburton’s experiments showed that the California two-spots quickly learned which side of a T-maze offered a terra-cotta pot to hide in.

But Warburton learned far more than her experiments revealed.

“Science,” she says, “can only say so much. I know they watched me. I know they sometimes followed me. But they are so different from anything we normally study. How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?”

MEASURING THE MINDS OF OTHER creatures is a perplexing problem.

One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains.

But size doesn’t always match smarts.

As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized.

Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate.

Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully.

That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons.

The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain.

A human has 100 billion.

But this is where things get weird.

Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses.

For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

Mimic octopus pretending to be a flatfish

“Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.”

Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes.

One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body.

Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae.

Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away.

For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface.

The deepest layer passively reflects background light.

The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black.

The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds.

But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn?

Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility.

Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye.

In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Bats can see with sound.

Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes.

Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat.

And a bat is a fellow mammal like us—not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own.

Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it’s like to be an octopus.

JENNIFER MATHER SPENT MOST of her time in Bermuda floating facedown on the surface of the water at the edge of the sea.

Breathing through a snorkel, she was watching Octopus vulgaris—the common octopus.

Although indeed common (they are found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide), at the time of her study in the mid-1980s, “nobody knew what they were doing.”

In a relay with other students from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, Mather worked to find out. Sometimes she’d see an octopus hunting.

A hunting expedition could take five minutes or three hours.

The octopus would capture something, inject it with venom, and carry it home to eat.

“Home,” Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time.

A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship.

One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms.

Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den.

Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock.

Then it chose a third.

Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front.

Then it went to sleep.

What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: “Three rocks are enough. Good night!”

The scene has stayed with Mather.

The octopus “must have had some concept,” she said, “of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep.”

And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning—and perhaps even tool use.

Mather is the lead author of Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate, which includes observations of octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars.

Coauthor Roland Anderson reports that octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles—a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees.

In another experiment, Anderson gave octopuses plastic pill bottles painted different shades and with different textures to see which evoked more interest.

Usually each octopus would grasp a bottle to see if it were edible and then cast it off.

But to his astonishment, Anderson saw one of the octopuses doing something striking: she was blowing carefully modulated jets of water from her funnel to send the bottle to the other end of her aquarium, where the water flow sent it back to her.

She repeated the action twenty times.

By the eighteenth time, Anderson was already on the phone with Mather with the news: “She’s bouncing the ball!”

This octopus wasn’t the only one to use the bottle as a toy.

Another octopus in the study also shot water at the bottle, sending it back and forth across the water’s surface, rather than circling the tank.
Anderson’s observations were reported in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

“This fit all the criteria for play behavior,” said Anderson.

“Only intelligent animals play—animals like crows and chimps, dogs and humans.”

Aquarists who care for octopuses feel that not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys.

An Octopus Enrichment Handbook has been developed by Cincinnati’s Newport Aquarium, with ideas of how to keep these creatures entertained.

One suggestion is to hide food inside Mr. Potato Head and let your octopus dismantle it.
At the Seattle Aquarium, giant Pacific octopuses play with a baseball-sized plastic ball that can be screwed together by twisting the two halves.

Sometimes the mollusks screw the halves back together after eating the prey inside.

How to obtain fish from the inside of a closed parmesan cheese container
at Florida Oceanographic Coastal Center

At the New England Aquarium, it took an engineer who worked on the design of cubic zirconium to devise a puzzle worthy of a brain like Athena’s.

Wilson Menashi, who began volunteering at the aquarium weekly after retiring from the Arthur D. Little Corporation sixteen years ago, devised a series of three Plexiglas cubes, each with a different latch.

The smallest cube has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse stall.
Aquarist Bill Murphy puts a crab inside the clear cube and leaves the lid open.

Later he lets the octopus lift open the lid.

Finally he locks the lid, and invariably the octopus figures out how to open it.

Next he locks the first cube within a second one.

The new latch slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket.

The third box is the largest, with two different locks: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one like a lever arm, sealing the lid much like the top of an old-fashioned glass canning jar.

All the octopuses Murphy has known learned fast.

They typically master a box within two or three once-a-week tries.

“Once they ‘get it,’” he says, “they can open it very fast”—within three or four minutes.

But each may use a different strategy.

As part of the New England Aquarium's "Killer Instincts" program, aquarist Bill Murphy interacts with a "friendly" giant Pacific Octopus.

George, a calm octopus, opened the boxes methodically.

The impetuous Gwenevere squeezed the second-largest box so hard she broke it, leaving a hole two inches wide.

Truman, Murphy said, was “an opportunist.”

One day, inside the smaller of the two boxes, Murphy put two crabs, who started to fight.

Truman was too excited to bother with locks.

He poured his seven-foot-long body through the two-inch crack Gwenevere had made, and visitors looked into his exhibit to find the giant octopus squeezed, suckers flattened, into the tiny space between the walls of the fourteen-cubic-inch box outside and the six-cubic-inch one inside it.

Truman stayed inside half an hour.
He never opened the inner box—probably he was too cramped.

Three weeks after I had first met Athena, I returned to the aquarium to meet the man who had designed the cubes.

Menashi, a quiet grandfather with a dark moustache, volunteers every Tuesday.

“He has a real way with octopuses,” Dowd and Murphy told me.

I was eager to see how Athena behaved with him.

Murphy opened the lid of her tank, and Athena rose to the surface eagerly.

A bucket with a handful of fish sat nearby.

Did she rise so eagerly sensing the food?

Or was it the sight of her friend that attracted her?

“She knows me,” Menashi answered softly.

Anderson’s experiments with giant Pacific octopuses in Seattle prove Menashi is right.

The study exposed eight octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium shirts.

One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick.

Within a week, at first sight of the people, most octopuses moved toward the feeders and away from the irritators, at whom they occasionally aimed their water-shooting funnels.

Upon seeing Menashi, Athena reached up gently and grasped his hands and arms.

She flipped upside down, and he placed a capelin in some of the suckers near her mouth, at the center of her arms.

The fish vanished. After she had eaten, Athena floated in the tank upside down, like a puppy asking for a belly rub.

Her arms twisted lazily.

I took one in my hand to feel the suckers—did that arm know it had hold of a different person than the other arms did?

Her grip felt calm, relaxed.

With me, earlier, she seemed playful, exploratory, excited.

The way she held Menashi with her suckers seemed to me like the way a long-married couple holds hands at the movies.

I leaned over the tank to look again into her eyes, and she bobbed up to return my gaze.

“She has eyelids like a person does,” Menashi said.

He gently slid his hand near one of her eyes, causing her to slowly wink.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human.

Canadian zoologist N. J. Berrill called it “the single most startling feature of the whole animal kingdom” that these organs are nearly identical: both animals’ eyes have transparent corneas, regulate light with iris diaphragms, and focus lenses with a ring of muscle.

Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye.

But intelligence is another matter.

“The same thing that got them their smarts isn’t the same thing that got us our smarts,” says Mather, “because our two ancestors didn’t have any smarts.”

Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons.

Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently.

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting.

The octopus mind and the human mind probably evolved for different reasons. Humans—like other vertebrates whose intelligence we recognize (parrots, elephants, and whales)—are long-lived, social beings.

Most scientists agree that an important event that drove the flowering of our intelligence was when our ancestors began to live in social groups.

Decoding and developing the many subtle relationships among our fellows, and keeping track of these changing relationships over the course of the many decades of a typical human lifespan, was surely a major force shaping our minds.

But octopuses are neither long-lived nor social.

Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years.

If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other.

Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent?

What is its mind for?

Mather thinks she has the answer.

She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell.

Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility.

Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers.

And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy.

Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set:

Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack?

Shoot through the sea for a fast chase?

Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off.

Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so.

Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory.

“In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather.

But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him.

The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it.

This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”

So what does it feel like to be an octopus?

Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia.

“They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said.

“It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather.

“Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

IN MAY, I VISITED Athena a third time.

I wanted to see if she recognized me.

But how could I tell?

Scott Dowd opened the top of her tank for me.

Athena had been in a back corner but floated immediately to the top, arms outstretched, upside down.

This time I offered her only one arm.

I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank.

Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers.

Her hold on me was remarkably gentle.

I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena’s personality to me as “feisty.

“They earn their names,” Murphy had told me.

Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy.

She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. “Athena could pull you into the tank,” Murphy had warned.

“She’s curious about what you are.”

Was she less curious now?

Did she remember me?

I was disappointed that she did not bob her head up to look at me.

But perhaps she didn’t need to.

She may have known from the taste of my skin who I was.

But why was this feisty octopus hanging in front of me in the water, upside down?

Then I thought I might know what she wanted from me.

She was begging. Dowd asked around and learned that Athena hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, then allowed me the thrilling privilege of handing her a capelin.

Perhaps I had understood something basic about what it felt like to be Athena at that moment: she was hungry.

I handed a fish to one of her larger suckers, and she began to move it toward her mouth.

But soon she brought more arms to the task, and covered the fish with many suckers—as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal.

A WEEK AFTER I LAST VISITED ATHENA, I was shocked to receive this e-mail from Scott Dowd: “Sorry to write with some sad news.

Athena appears to be in her final days, or even hours.

She will live on, though, through your conveyance.”

Later that same day, Dowd wrote to tell me that she had died.

To my surprise, I found myself in tears.

Why such sorrow?

I had understood from the start that octopuses don’t live very long.

I also knew that while Athena did seem to recognize me, I was not by any means her special friend.

But she was very significant to me, both as an individual and as a representative from her octopodan world.

She had given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know.

I was eager to meet more of her kind.

And so, it was with some excitement that I read this e-mail from Dowd a few weeks later: “There is a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest. Come shake hands (x8) when you can.”

The author discussed this article with a panel of animal intelligence experts during an Orion live web event.
There’s a new octopus in Sy Montgomery’s life!

The author of this article has now met Octavia, Athena’s successor at the New England Aquarium, and her experience teaches us even more about these intelligent beings. New on our blog.

Links :

• ScienceMag : Octopuses rewrite their RNA to beat the cold
• GeoGarage blog : Tool use found in octopus / Evolution of mimicry in octopuses

Climate control: tiny switches, big effects

From BBC

Computer models reveal how small geographic features like the Bering Strait can have a profound impact on the Earth’s climate.
It is no surprise that some scientists seeking to develop better computer models that could help us understand and even forecast economic crises are turning to climate modellers for advice and inspiration.
Modelling the global climate is as difficult and vexing a problem.
You have got to take account of a lot of different factors all at once, not all the relevant processes are well understood, and little things can make a big difference.

Climate scientists have long realised that their computer models cannot be like those commonly used to simulate processes in, say, chemistry: one size doesn’t fit all as it often does (bar minor details) for chemical reactions, and your best bet is to come at the problem from many different angles and pool the findings.

It is for this reason that reporting the results of any climate modelling study is a delicate business.
Any one study is typically best viewed not as a prediction of what the Earth’s climate system will definitely do under particular circumstances – without ice caps or the Amazon rainforest, say – but as an example of the range of possibilities.
This type of fuzziness does not fit the common perception of science as providing precise answers, and it allows any sceptics who may not properly understand the scientific process to imply that climate models are just ill-informed guesswork.

US NOAA nautical chart of Bering Strait
>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

Strait switch

All this is by way of saying that the striking conclusions of a modelling study of ocean circulation during an ice age should be seen primarily as an indication of how subtle geographic features can have unexpected, far-reaching impacts on climate.

Imagery Nasa

The work suggests that the 50-mile (80-km) -wide Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska acts as a sort of valve that can permit or shut down rapid changes in climate.
With the Bering Strait open, as it is at present, say Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues, it is less likely that we will experience the kind of rapid fluctuations between cold and warmer global climate seen during the last ice age.

In other words, the idea that the climate could suddenly swing back and forth in just a few decades seems to be one thing we do not need to worry so much about in a world overheated by greenhouse gases.

Flow charts

The discovery of such abrupt jumps in climate, called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, shocked climate scientists when they saw their chemical signature in columns of ice drilled from the Greenland ice sheets.
These ice columns, which provide records of climate going back a few hundred thousand years, revealed that at least 25 of these episodes of sudden warming and cooling occurred during the last ice age, sometimes with regional average temperatures changing by as much as 8C (14F) in 40 years.
That sort of leap in today’s world would be catastrophic.

It is still not clear what caused these sudden changes, but palaeoclimatologists (who study ancient climate) generally agree that it has something to do with the way water circulates in the North Atlantic Ocean.
This circulation is like a gigantic conveyor belt that carries warm water polewards in an upper-ocean current, where it cools and becomes denser, sinking to the deep ocean and flowing back towards the equator.
These currents shift huge amounts of heat across the planet, and so strongly affect climate.

The water density also depends on how salty it is.
One popular idea is that the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles happen when an ice age starts to wane, causing massive amounts of ice to break off from the polar ice sheets and melt.
This injects fresh water into the North Atlantic, and the less salty water is less apt to sink at the turning point of the conveyor belt.
So the circulation gets much weaker, or perhaps even switches off.
As warm water then no longer flows towards the pole, temperatures there drop abruptly and the glacial climate recovers its grip.

Bering factor

Water entering from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait also affects the North Atlantic circulation, since this water contains relatively less salt.
The Bering Strait seems to have opened up between seven and four million years ago.
But it is quite shallow, and when sea levels dropped profoundly during the last ice age because so much water was locked up in the great ice sheets, the strait became a land bridge again between America and Asia.

Noting that the existence of this land bridge coincides with the period of Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, Hu and colleagues ran a climate model to see whether the two are connected.
They found that the weaker circulation in the North Atlantic while the strait is open does not have the on/off modes that are probably responsible for sudden climate change.
The potential for switches only occurs when the Bering Strait is closed by a fall in sea level.
The details are complicated, but in essence an injection of fresh water into the North Atlantic by ice-sheet break-up cannot then flow (in part) into the Pacific, and so the circulation is more liable just to get switched off.

This is not the first suggestion that the Bering Strait represents a climate switch.
Two years ago Hu’s team simulations showed that the same factor – turning on and off the influx of fresh North Pacific water through the strait – can affect the growth and decline of the great ice sheet covering much of North America during an ice age, with consequent changes in sea level.
But only now do they make the link to abrupt climate change.
Quite aside from offering a shred of comfort in the face of global warming – there is enough to worry about already – the work offers a reminder of how much climate can depend in subtle ways on the very lie of the land.

Canada CHS update in the Marine GeoGarage

4950 Iles de la Madeleine

46 charts have been updated (Apr 2, 2012) :

• 1202 CAP ETERNITE TO SAINT-FULGENCE
• 1203 TADOUSSAC TO CAP ETERNITE
• 1226 ANCHORAGES AND HARBOURS INSTALLATIONS / HAUTE COTE-NORD
• 1233 CAP AUX OIES TO SAULT-AU-COCHON
• 1234 CAP DE LA TETE AU CHIEN TO CAP AUX OIES
• 1236 POINTE DES MONTS TO ESCOUMINS
• 1320 ILE DU BIC TO CAP DE LA TETE AU CHIEN
• 1350A SOREL - TRACY TO RUISSEAU LAHAISE
• 1350B RUISSEAU LAHAISE TO SAINT-ANTOINE-SUR-RICHELIEU
• 1350C SAINT-ANTOINE-SUR-RICHELIEU TO ILE AUX CERFS
• 1350D ILE AUX CERFS TO OTTERBURN PARK
• 1430 LAC SAINT-LOUIS
• 1509A RIVIERE DES PRAIRIES/ ILE BIZARD TO PONT-VIAU
• 1509B RIVIERE DES PRAIRIES PONT-VIAU TO ILE BOURDON
• 1510A LAC DES DEUX MONTAGNES
• 1510B LAC DES DEUX MONTAGNES
• 3052A OKANAGAN LAKE - PENTICTON TO KELOWNA A - B
• 3052B OKANAGAN LAKE - KELOWNA TO VERNON B - C
• 3461 JUAN DE FUCA STRAIT EASTERN PORTION
• 3492 ROBERTS BANK
• 3513 STRAIT OF GEORGIA NORTHERN PORTION
• 3527 BAYNES SOUND
• 3744 QUEEN CHARLOTTE SOUND
• 3892 MASSET HARBOUR AND NADEN HARBOUR
• 3902 HECATE STRAIT
• 3927 BONILLA ISLAND TO EDYE PASSAGE
• 3936 FITZ HUGH SOUND TO LAMA PASSAGE
• 3939 FISHER CHANNEL TO SEAFORTH CHANNEL AND DEAN CHANNEL
• 3946 GRENVILLE CHANNEL-COMPARTMENT A-B
• 3956 MALACCA PASSAGE TO BELL PASSAGE
• 3957 APPROACHES TO PRINCE RUPERT HARBOUR
• 4003 CAPE BRETON TO CAPE COD
• 4015 SYDNEY TO SAINT-PIERRE
• 4016 SAINT-PIERRE TO ST JOHN'S
• 4023 NORTHUMBERLAND STRAIT
• 4049 GRAND BANK NORTHERN PORTION TO FLEMISH PASS
• 4233 CAPE CANSO TO COUNTRY ISLAND
• 4363 CAPE SMOKEY TO ST PAUL ISLAND
• 4367 FLINT ISLAND TO CAPE SMOKEY
• 4406 TRYON SHOALS TO CAPE EGMONT
• 4472 BAIE DES HOMARDS TO ILE DE LA GRANDE PASSE
• 4530 HAMILTON SOUND EASTERN PORTION
• 4626 SAINT-PIERRE AND MIQUELON (FRANCE)
• 4827 HARE BAY TO FORTUNE HEAD
• 4857 INDIAN BAY TO WADHAM ISLANDS
• 4858 GREENSPOND HARBOUR TO POUND COVE
• 4862 CARMANVILLE TO BACALHAO ISLAND AND FOGO
• 4905 CAPE TORMENTINE TO WEST POINT
• 4906 WEST POINT TO BAIE DE TRACADIE
• 4950 ILES DE LA MADELEINE
• 4956 CAP-AUX-MEULES
• 4980 BLANC-SABLON

So 790 charts (1677 including sub-charts) are available in the Canada CHS layer. (see coverage)

Note : don't forget to visit 'Notices to Mariners' published monthly and available from the Canadian Coast Guard both online or through a free hardcopy subscription service.
This essential publication provides the latest information on changes to the aids to navigation system, as well as updates from CHS regarding CHS charts and publications.
See also written Notices to Shipping and Navarea warnings : NOTSHIP

What's happening under Gibraltar?

The Strait of Gibraltar, which lies between the southern coast of Spain and the northern coast of Morocco, is the only place where water from the Atlantic Ocean mixes with water from the Mediterranean Sea.
Credit : ESA

From OurAmazingPlanet

The ground beneath Portugal, Spain and northern Morocco shook violently on Nov. 1, 1755, during what came to be known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake.
With an estimated magnitude of 8.5 to 9.0, the temblor nearly destroyed the city of Lisbon and its lavish palaces, libraries and cathedrals.
What wasn't leveled by the quake was mostly demolished in the ensuing tsunami and fires that raged for days.
Altogether, at least 40,000 people were killed.

More than 250 years later, geologists are still piecing together the tectonic story behind that powerful earthquake.
A unique subduction zone beneath Gibraltar, the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, now seems to be culprit.
Subduction zones are the spots where one of Earth's tectonic plates dives beneath another, often producing some of the world's strongest earthquakes.

"At a global scale, subduction is the only process that produces magnitude-8 or -9 earthquakes," said Marc-Andre Gutscher, a geologist at the University of Brest in France.
"If subduction occurred, and is still occurring here, then it's highly relevant to understanding the region's seismic hazards."

Small but powerful

Gutscher's work, discussed in the March 27 issue of the journal Eos, has shown that sunken ocean lithosphere — a layer that comprises Earth's crust and upper mantle — lies beneath Gibraltar, and that it's still attached to the northern part of the African Plate.
Other teams have found crumpled ocean crust and active mud volcanoes in the Gulf of Cadiz, where water within the buried lithosphere mixes with sediments and boils up to the surface.

Altogether, these lines of evidence make a pretty convincing case for subduction, Gutscher said.

But unlike the textbook examples of huge subduction zones found at the Mariana Trench or under Alaska's Aleutian Islands, this subduction zone is comparatively tiny.
"Its very small size and ultra-slow motion make the Gibraltar subduction zone unique," Gutscher told OurAmazingPlanet.
"It's probably the narrowest subduction zone in the world — about 200 kilometers [120 miles] wide at most — and it's moving at far less than a centimeter per year."

What's happening under Gibraltar is an example of something called rollback subduction: As the sliver of lithosphere sinks into the mantle, the line where it's still "hinged" to the African Plate rolls back further and further, stretching the crust above it.

Seismic danger zone?

If subduction under Gibraltar is a thing of the past, there's little danger of future earthquakes. But that's not true if it is still happening — as Gutscher and many others believe to be the case.

That's because subduction has already created a tiny tectonic block, or microplate, between the African and Eurasian Plates.
Researchers using GPS have shown that this microplate is still moving a few millimeters westward every year, thanks to ongoing rollback subduction.

The boundaries of this microplate lie in southern Spain and northern Morocco.
Like California's San Andreas Fault, they're strike-slip boundaries (but smaller and slower-moving), so they're capable of generating earthquakes every now and then, Gutscher said.
For example, a magnitude-6.3 quake struck the city of Al Hoceima, Morocco, in February 2004, killing nearly 600 people.

But as far as another Great Lisbon Earthquake, residents of this region can breathe easy — at least for another millennium or so.
"Given the very slow motion of the faults in the area, you need many centuries to build up enough slip to generate such a great earthquake," Gutscher explained.
"A magnitude-8.5 or -9 earthquake is probably pretty much out of the question, since the last such tremendous event was only 250 years ago."