Philippines government to take 1734 document to UN tribunal to support its demand that China leaves the Scarborough Shoal
A 281-year-old map from the collection of an English duke is to be put forward by the government of the Philippines to support its claim to islands in the South China Sea that are presently being fortified by China.
The Philippines government has said it will submit the map, drawn up in Manila in 1734 by Pedro Murillo Velarde, a Jesuit priest, to the United Nations Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in The Hague as soon as this week, according to the Vera Files website.
The map shows islands that are now known as Scarborough Shoals, marked as Panacot, as part of Philippines territory.
They are shown around 120 miles off the west coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon.
The map shows islands that are now known as Scarborough Shoals, marked as Panacot, as part of Philippines territory.
They are shown around 120 miles off the west coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon.
The map shows islands that are now known as Scarborough Shoals, marked as Panacot, as part of Philippines territory (Library of Congress)
The Philippine government is calling on the UN to recognise its claim to sovereignty over the islands and to call on Beijing to withdraw.
The map was sold at Sotheby's auction house in London in November at the request of the Duke of Northumberland.
The duke sold the map, along with around 80 other family heirlooms, after serious flooding affected his properties in April 2012. Media reports suggested that the duke faced a repair bill for £12 million after the waters subsided.
The map was put up for auction on November 4, with the Sotheby's catalogue describing the 44-inch by 47-inch engraved map as being "the first scientific map of the Philippines" of its time.
With light browning along the creases, the map is flanked by a series of 12 engravings depicting people in native costumes, a map of the island that is today known as Guam and smaller maps of cities and harbours in the Pacific.
Sotheby's estimated that the item would sell for between £20,000 and £30,000, but it quickly outstripped those predictions and was eventually sold for £170,500 to a Filipino businessman.
Mel Velarde, president of an information technology company called Now Corporation, said he first became interested in the map because he shared a family name with the priest who had first published it.
He told the Vera Files that his interest increased when he realised that it "proved" the Philippines' claim to the islands.
The bidding quickly reached the £80,000 limit that Mr Velarde had initially set himself.
But after a "vision" of Chinese soldiers occupying the islands, Mr Velarde said it "became a personal crusade" to buy the map because the Philippines' claim needs to be backed up by evidence.
Asked why he had paid so much for the map, Mr Velarde said, "There's a bully in the neighbourhood. He already took over our land."
Mr Velarde has decided to donate the original map to the National Museum but has had a number of copies printed.
He will present one of those copies to Benigno Aquino, the president of the Philippines, on June 12, the anniversary of the nation's independence.
Another copy will be delivered to the UN as Manila seeks arbitration in the territorial dispute.
The Philippines accuses China of seizing the islands in 2012, when ships of the two nations were involved in a stand-off.
When the smaller Philippine force had to withdraw, the Chinese occupied the islands.
In January 2013, the Philippines requested international arbitration in the case and, the following year, submitted a 4,000-page dossier to support its claim of sovereignty.
Beijing has ignored requests to take part in arbitration procedures.
Links :
CBSNews : A wealth of stories from the Murillo-Velarde map
World exclusive - filmed for the first time at Plymouth Marine
Laboratory, we dyed microscopic pieces of plastic with fluorescent dye
so you can see them being ingested by the plankton - scary stuff.
The effect of plastic microbeads, as found in toothpaste and
exfoliants, on microscopic marine life is unknown -- but we know now
that the substance is likely ingested by zooplankton along with their
diet of phytoplankton, thanks to a video by a team of filmmakers led by
Verity White of Five Films.
An
estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic makes its way into the
oceans every year, according to a study conducted by researchers at the
UC Santa Barbara National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, published in the journal Science
early this year.
Somewhere between 6,350 and 245,000 metric tons of tha
plastic is floating -- which means the rest of it ends up somewhere
beneath the surface.
And it's not all plastic bottles, six-pack rings and fishing
nets.
A lot of the plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from the
plastic microbeads
found in body wash and other personal care products.
Other discarded
plastics degrade pretty quickly, eroding into very small fragments.
And,
while it is estimated that plastics cause the death of over a million
seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals every year, the effect it has on
life under the ocean is difficult to gauge.
Zooplankton and flourescent plastic microbeads. Screenshot by Michelle Starr/CNET
The Plymouth Marine Laboratory
in Plymouth, England is studying the impact these microplastics have on
marine life, with a particular focus on zooplankton.
It was at the PML
that White and her team shot the film.
The action takes
place in a single drop of water over the course of about three hours,
condensed down into less than a minute of footage, reports New Scientist.
Several copepods -- a type of zooplankton -- were surrounded by microscopic fluorescent polystyrene beads.
Copepods
feed by moving their legs to direct food towards their mouths.
While
they can reject the wrong type of phytoplankton (algae), the film
clearly shows some of the beads get caught up and ingested by the
animals.
This can cause problems for the zooplankton, as
the plastic can remain in their bodies for up to seven days.
This
negatively impacts the rate at which the zooplankton can consume algae,
which in turn could impact their ability to survive.
This,
according to the film, is a cause for concern not just for the
zooplankton, but for other species as well. Zooplankton are at the
bottom of the food chain, so if zooplankton populations drop, the
animals that eat zooplankton will have a harder time finding food.
Moreover, what zooplankton ingest often ends up ingested by their
predators, all the way to the top of the food chain.
The
Plymouth Marine Laboratory has released this week a suite of videos and
other educational materials on the impact of microplastics on the ocean.
Sailors and travellers, including Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle, have often reported seeing "ballooning" spiders flutter from the air into the sails of their ships, far away from any shore.
Dispersing spiders are known to use strands of silk to remain airborne in gusts of wind, but what happens if they are swept offshore and land in water?
We thought they would drown, but it turns out they are as adept at sailing as they are aeronautics.
"It was like an illusion," says Morito Hayashi of London's Natural History Museum, who first noticed common UK spider species sailing in the lab.
He was studying their flight, trying to figure out how they take off when he spotted the sailing behaviour.
"I was amazed that these common spiders, found in everyone's gardens, had such skilful sailing behaviour that no one had noticed before."
Water tolerance and tiptoeing.
The relationship between tiptoeing, sailing and the ability to float on water.
All
tiptoeing individuals were also sailors, except for two individuals,
suggesting that the sailing behaviour is almost completely associated
with, and possibly a requirement for, the aeronautic behaviour
"One of the most amazing things is that no one had noticed this behaviour before," says his colleague Sara Goodacre of the University of Nottingham, UK.
Some species of spider form diving bells out of silk to enable them to breathe under water, while others are known to catch and eat fish.
But until now, no one realised that common
spiders can sail, probably because the species that do it are small,
typically just a couple of millimetres long.
"Water was always thought to be the
ultimate barrier to dispersion," says Goodacre.
"Now, we know they can
survive in water, so with this get-out-of-jail card, they can move far
greater distances than we thought."
To find out how they do it, Goodacre,
Hayashi and their colleagues observed the sailing skills of 325 spiders
of 21 species caught at random on islands in ponds and lakes in various
nature reserves around Nottingham in the UK.
Back in the lab, they placed individual
spiders on small water trays and then used small air pumps to expose the
spiders to breezes of between 3 and 80 centimetres per second.
All the spiders were able to stand on
water thanks to their water-repellent legs.
And 201 of them, covering
most species, showed off sailing skills.
Spider behaviour on water surface. Sailing behaviour: linyphiid (a, c) and tetragnathid (b, d) spiders moving on the water surface with their legs (a, b) or abdomen (c, d) used as sails. When the abdomen was used the behaviour was referred to as upside-down sailing. A spider can sail stably even on turbulent sea salt water. Anchoring behaviour: use of silk as anchor to slow down or stop movement on water surface by linyphiids (which dropped the anchoring silk) (e) and the tetragnathid (which dragged the anchoring silk after it caught a floating object) (f). Each scale bar represents 1 mm
Most attempted to catch the wind and cruise forward by making "sails"
from parts of their bodies. Some pointed two forelegs up in a V-shape, while others thrust their abdomen skyward – the
equivalent of a handstand on the water.
When exposed to a breeze on solid ground, they showed
none of the behaviours, which suggests these are used specifically for
sailing.
The spiders sailed just as well on salt and fresh water, and were able to manoeuvre even in turbulent water.
Some also created the equivalent of an
anchor by throwing out strands of silk for attachment to surfaces, such
as the side of the water tray.
They may use these to haul themselves
onto objects from water, or onto a suitable landing spot.
Goodacre thinks that size is a limiting
factor – only those not too heavy can skim across the water – which
means this behaviour is not common.
"I'd say the limit is probably
around 5 millimetres long," she says.
Her team now hopes to show that spiders sail in natural conditions, too.
Also, they want to examine what this means
for evolution and geographic dispersion, given that spiders may be able
to travel much further than thought.
"This may help explain why spiders are among the first species to colonise new habitats like islands," says Stefan Hetz of Humboldt University in Berlin.
"Spiders were thought to colonise exclusively by air; maybe they are good sailors too."
Deep beneath the waves of the Red Sea, scientists have discovered corals that fluoresce in a range of colors, likely because it helps their algae friends.
Deep beneath the surface of the Red Sea, a rainbow of glowing corals have been discovered that's unlike anything scientists have ever seen.
"I was indeed surprised to find such a great color diversity at these greater depths," said Jörg Wiedenmann, a marine biologist at the U.K.'s University of Southampton.
Wiedenmann was especially amazed because the shallow-water corals on the same reef only give off a green color. (See more stunning coral pictures.)
Corals generally get their glow from fluorescent pigments that act as
sunblock.
The sun's intense rays, which can sunburn swimmers and divers
that flock to these reefs, cause similar damage to coral and
zooxanthellae, the symbiotic algae that lives inside coral.
Although bright sunlight at shallow depths can make the pigments hard
to see with the naked eye, they can be visible if the coral makes lots
of them, says Wiedenmann, who led a new study on the corals published June 24 in PLOS ONE.
Though these pigments are well studied, scientists hadn't looked much
at fluorescence in deeper dwelling corals, since they're not as exposed
to sunlight.
Which begs the question: Why were the Red Sea corals so colorful?
Rainbow Bright
In 2014, Wiedenmann teamed up with Israel's Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences to study mesophotic reefs—or those reefs that are between 100 feet (30 meters) to more than 330 feet (100 meters) deep—near Eilat, Israel (map).
At these depths, very little sunlight reaches corals.
The few
lightwaves that do make it this far are almost all in the blue range,
the other colors having scattered.
(Also see "As Oceans Heat Up, a Race to Save World's Coral Reefs.")
The fluorescence of this Lobophyllia coral can change from green to red when exposed to blue or ultraviolet light.
Photograph by Professor J Wiedenmann
The researchers found that some of the corals at these depths glowed an intense green or orange. After photographing them in their natural environment, Wiedenmann packed samples of 16 different species of coral into plastic bags and brought them back to his lab in England for further study.
When Wiedenmann illuminated the corals with blue or ultraviolet light—mimicking what's found in the ocean depths—he found that they could also glow red or green.
Interestingly, Wiedenmann also discovered that the corals could produce these pigments in the absence of any light at all.
This, combined with the general lack of sunlight at these depths, means that these pigments weren't acting as a sunscreen.
Instead, the researchers believe that the pigments help make more light for their symbiotic algae, which need it for photosynthesis.
Happy algae translates to more oxygen and other benefits for the coral.
Red Sea corals glow in a rainbow of hues, a process that likely boosts the algae living inside them.
"To me, the most interesting part of the study is the range of colors you can find in very closely related species," Dimitri Deheyn, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who wasn't involved in the research.
He expected that similar corals would have similar colors, rather than the array that Wiedenmann found.
The corals' rainbow of hues is more than just a feast for our eyes—they may someday play a role in improving human health.
Wiedenmann says that these pigments could help scientists do
everything from tagging certain types of cells to look at them under the
microscope to helping physicians better see cancer cells in the body.
