Tool use found in octopuses

From Wired

After years of surprising scientists with their cleverness and smarts, some octopuses appear to also use tools.

Veined octopuses observed off the coast of Indonesia carried coconut shell halves under their bodies, and assembled them as necessary into shelters — something that wasn’t supposed to be possible in their corner of the animal kingdom.

“To date, invertebrates have generally been regarded as lacking the cognitive abilities to engage in such sophisticated behaviors,” wrote Museum Victoria biologists who described the octopuses in a paper published Monday in Current Biology. “The discovery of this octopus tiptoeing across the sea floor with its prized coconut shells suggests that even marine invertebrates engage in behaviors that we once thought the preserve of humans.”

In captivity, some species of octopuses have solved mazes, remembered cues and passed other cognitive tests typically associated with advanced vertebrates. More anecdotally, they’re known for popping aquarium hoods, raiding other tanks and demonstrating what might be called mischief.

All this has come as a bit of a surprise to scientists. After all, octopuses are descended from mollusks. They’re more closely related to clams than to people. They’re not supposed to be smart. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence, and in recent years, researchers have grappled with the possibility that octopuses can even use tools.

That debate has focused on octopuses seen barricading their den openings with stones. In the end, that behavior wasn’t accepted as genuine tool use, because it seemed more instinctive than calculated. (Another contested invertebrate behavior is the use of shells as homes by hermit crabs. According to the conventional wisdom, tools require direct manipulation, so the shells are no more tools than are human houses.)

Such definitions are inevitably ambiguous. But there’s no ambiguity in the veined octopuses found flushing mud from buried coconut shells, stacking them for transport — an awkward process that required the octopuses to walk on tiptoe with the upturned shells clutched beneath them — and finally turning them into hard-shelled tents.

“The fact that the shell is carried for future use rather than as part of a specific task differentiates this behavior from other examples of object manipulation by octopuses,” wrote the researchers.

With their tents, the veined octopus has joined chimpanzees, monkeys, dolphins and crows in the ever-expanding menagerie of non-human tool users. But as significant as the finding may be, the moment of discovery wasn’t exactly solemn.

“I could tell that the octopus, busy manipulating coconut shells, was up to something, but I never expected it would pick up the stacked shells and run away. It was an extremely comical sight,” said Julia Finn, a Museum Victoria biologist, in a press release. “I have never laughed so hard underwater.”

Links :

• YouTube : Skilled octopus opens bottles
  

Divers find 230-year-old champagne in Baltic shipwreck

The ocean as your wine cellar : sunken treasure never tasted so good

From NewsDiscovery

Divers have found bottles of champagne some 230 years old on the bottom of the Baltic which a wine expert described Saturday as tasting "fabulous".

Thought to be premium brand Veuve Clicquot, the 30 bottles discovered perfectly preserved at a depth of 55 metres (180 feet) could have been in a consignment sent by France's King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.

If confirmed, it would be by far the oldest champagne still drinkable in the world, thanks to the ideal conditions of cold and darkness.

"We have contacted (makers) Moet & Chandon and they are 98 percent certain it is Veuve Clicquot," Christian Ekstroem, the head of the diving team, told AFP.

"There is an anchor on the cork and they told me they are the only ones to have used this sign," he said, adding that a sample of the champagne has been sent to Moet & Chandon for their analysis.

The group of seven Swedish divers made their find on July 6 off the Finnish Aaland island, mid-way between Sweden and Finland, near the remains of a sailing vessel.

"Visibility was very bad, hardly a metre," Ekstroem said. "We couldn't find the name of the ship, or the bell, so I brought a bottle up to try to date it."

The handmade bottle bore no label, while the cork was marked Juclar, from its origin in Andorra.

According to records, Veuve Clicquot was first produced in 1772, but the first bottles were laid down for 10 years.

"So it can't be before 1782, and it can't be after 1788-89, when the French Revolution disrupted production," Ekstroem said.

Aaland wine expert Ella Gruessner Cromwell-Morgan, whom Ekstroem asked to taste the find, said it had not lost its fizz and was "absolutely fabulous".

"I still have a glass in my fridge and keep going back every five minutes to take a breath of it. I have to pinch myself to believe it's real," she said.

Cromwell-Morgan described the champagne as dark golden in colour with a very intense aroma.

"There's a lot of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead," she said of the wine's "nose".

As for the taste, "it's really surprising, very sweet but still with some acidity," the expert added, explaining that champagne of that period was much less dry than today and the fermentation process less controllable.

"One strong supposition is that it's part of a consignment sent by King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court," Cromwell-Morgan said. "The makers have a record of a delivery which never reached its destination."

That would make it the oldest drinkable champagne known, easily beating the 1825 Perrier-Jouet tasted by experts in London last year.

Cromwell-Morgan estimated the opening price at auction of each bottle at around half a million Swedish kronor (53,000 euros, 69,000 dollars).

"But if it's really Louis XVI's wine, it could fetch several million," she added.

The remaining bottles, which could number more than the 30 uncovered by the divers, will remain on the seabed for the time being. Their exact location is being kept secret.

Meanwhile local authorities on Aaland will meet Monday to decide who legally owns the contents of the wreck. The archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia belongs to Finland, though it enjoys autonomy from Helsinki and its inhabitants speak Swedish.

Louis Roederer, one of France’s oldest and last independent family-owned champagne makers is the first bubbly producer to test underwater aging of their product. In 2008, they have placed several dozen bottles underwater, about 50 feet deep, in the bay of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. They are experimenting to see if the increased pressure, cold seawater at a constant temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, filtered sunlight and gently rocking currents will improve the taste of the champagne over that of cellar-stored bottles. (TheGuardian)

A Chilean still wine producer, Vina Casanueva already produce the Cava Submarinas wines which have been aged at the bottom of the ocean.

Crowdsourcing ocean navigation data

MCZ project interactive map

The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 created a new type of Marine Protected Area (MPA), called a Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ).

Together with other types of existing MPAs in England, MCZs will help to deliver the Government's aim for an 'ecologically coherent network of well managed Marine Protected Areas'.

What is the MCZ Project Interactive Map?

The Interactive Map is a web based Geographic Information System, which is essentially a way of displaying interactive maps online.
The MCZ Project Interactive Map allows you to view maps of the United Kingdom and display additional relevant information above it, using layers selected from our marine spatial planning database.
The tool also allows you to add your own information to the map by drawing and labelling areas that you use or have information about.

Using the Interactive Map to achieve two goals:

1. To communicate the diversity and range of information that is being used by the MCZ Project. We hope that you find the investigation of the spatial data to be an interesting experience and that you discover more about the relationship between mankind and the coasts and seas of the United Kingdom.
2. To collect information from stakeholders who are using the seas around England; these include groups such as sea anglers, divers, wildlife watchers, charterboat owners, recreation and leisure users as well as commercial fishermen. Using the Interactive Map, users and commercial fishermen. Using the Intercative Map, users can draw and label areas they use or places where they know certain species and habitats occur.

The Marine Conservation Zone Map is an online crowd-sourcing map project that allows different users to participate through marking-up how they are using the marine environment and coast lines. Several individual layers are included in the project.
The demand for information on status and trends of the European environment is continuously increasing.
The general public, decision makers and researchers are major interest groups in this context.


Other crowdsourcing projet : TeamSurv, the do-it-yourself survey project.

TeamSurv is a self-help community that shares depth and position information, collected from the boat’s own GPS and depth sounder, as you go about your normal cruising.

How does it work?

1. As a TeamSurv data logger, the user is provided with a data logger that automatically records the data from your instruments. If you use a PC on board then this is a software logger, or otherwise we will loan you a hardware logger. During each trip a log file is automatically created, and once ashore you upload it to the TeamSurv web site.
2. The logged data is loaded into our database and then corrected for various factors, including tide and sea level height. Tracks and point data can then be displayed overlaid over Google Maps.
3. As we collect more data for an area, we will be able to convert it into a bathymetric model and create a detailed chart. All data is made anonymous, so privacy is assured.
   

TeamSurv welcomes data submitted from anywhere in the world, but to ensure that TeamSurv uses the project's resources well the project is initially concentrating on a number of trial areas, e.g. in the UK this is from Poole to Chichester on the South Coast, and the Thames Estuary to the Wash on the East coast.
Within these areas TeamSurv can supply the hardware loggers on free loan, and these will be the first areas for which TeamSurv will be producing charts.
Outside of the trial areas the user is free to use the software logger, or to purchase a hardware logger.


But an important question remains regarding all these crowsourcing data for their contributors : what kind of data license is used for these different projects ?
Open Database License (ODbL) would be an excellent initiative and would also help to develop another crowsourcing project : OpenSeaMap.

Links :

• European Marine Information System: portal of European marine information
  

Ship tracks reveal pollution's effects on clouds

From NASA

NASA's MODIS satellite instrument is revealing that humans may be changing our planet's brightness. Pollution in the atmosphere creates smaller, brighter cloud droplets that reflect more sunlight back to space and may have a slight impact on global warming.

This narrated visualization illustrates how we can study the effect against a clean backdrop by looking for zones of pollution in otherwise pristine air - in this case the North Pacific Ocean near the Aleutian islands.
On an overcast day, the clouds look uniform.
However, MODIS' sesor reveals a different picture - long skinny trails of brighter clouds hidden within.

As ships travel across the ocean, pollution in the ships' exhaust create more cloud drops that are smaller in size, resulting in even brighter clouds.
On clear days, ships can actually create new clouds.
Water vapor condenses around the particles of pollution, forming streamers of clouds as the ships travel on.

The ship tracks themselves are too small to impact global temperatures, but they help us understand how larger pollution sources such as industrial sites or agricultural burning might be changing clouds on a larger scale.

Links :

• Earthweek : Ship trails of the Pacific
  

Far from Mexico Gulf, a spill scourge 5 decades old

From NY Times

Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land.
The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.
The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico.
It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks.

The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage.
In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest — soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses — but mostly resentful resignation.

Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever farther — “There’s nothing we can catch here,” said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat — and market women trudge through oily streams.
“There is Shell oil on my body,” said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.

That the Gulf of Mexico disaster has transfixed a country and president they so admire is a matter of wonder for people here, living among the palm-fringed estuaries in conditions as abject as any in Nigeria, according to the United Nations.
Though their region contributes nearly 80 percent of the government’s revenue, they have hardly benefited from it; life expectancy is the lowest in Nigeria.

“President Obama is worried about that one,” Claytus Kanyie, a local official, said of the gulf spill, standing among dead mangroves in the soft oily muck outside Bodo.
“Nobody is worried about this one. The aquatic life of our people is dying off. There used be shrimp. There are no longer any shrimp.”

In the distance, smoke rose from what Mr. Kanyie and environmental activists said was an illegal refining business run by local oil thieves and protected, they said, by Nigerian security forces.
The swamp was deserted and quiet, without even bird song; before the spills, Mr. Kanyie said, women from Bodo earned a living gathering mollusks and shellfish among the mangroves.

With new estimates that as many as 2.5 million gallons of oil could be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day, the Niger Delta has suddenly become a cautionary tale for the United States.

As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the last five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report.
By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.

So the people here cast a jaundiced, if sympathetic, eye at the spill in the gulf.
“We’re sorry for them, but it’s what’s been happening to us for 50 years,” said Emman Mbong, an official in Eket.

The spills here are all the more devastating because this ecologically sensitive wetlands region, the source of 10 percent of American oil imports, has most of Africa’s mangroves and, like the Louisiana coast, has fed the interior for generations with its abundance of fish, shellfish, wildlife and crops.

Local environmentalists have been denouncing the spoliation for years, with little effect.
“It’s a dead environment,” said Patrick Naagbanton of the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt, the leading city of the oil region.

Though much here has been destroyed, much remains, with large expanses of vibrant green.
Environmentalists say that with intensive restoration, the Niger Delta could again be what it once was.

Nigeria produced more than two million barrels of oil a day last year, and in over 50 years thousands of miles of pipes have been laid through the swamps.
Shell, the major player, has operations on thousands of square miles of territory, according to Amnesty International.
Aging columns of oil-well valves, known as Christmas trees, pop up improbably in clearings among the palm trees. Oil sometimes shoots out of them, even if the wells are defunct.

“The oil was just shooting up in the air, and it goes up in the sky,” said Amstel M. Gbarakpor, youth president in Kegbara Dere, recalling the spill in April at Gio Creek.
“It took them three weeks to secure this well.”

How much of the spillage is due to oil thieves or to sabotage linked to the militant movement active in the Niger Delta, and how much stems from poorly maintained and aging pipes, is a matter of fierce dispute among communities, environmentalists and the oil companies.

Caroline Wittgen, a spokeswoman for Shell in Lagos, said, “We don’t discuss individual spills,” but argued that the “vast majority” were caused by sabotage or theft, with only 2 percent due to equipment failure or human error.

“We do not believe that we behave irresponsibly, but we do operate in a unique environment where security and lawlessness are major problems,” Ms. Wittgen said.

Oil companies also contend that they clean up much of what is lost.
A spokesman for Exxon Mobil in Lagos, Nigel A. Cookey-Gam, said that the company’s recent offshore spill leaked only about 8,400 gallons and that “this was effectively cleaned up.”

But many experts and local officials say the companies attribute too much to sabotage, to lessen their culpability.
Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

On the beach at Ibeno, the few fishermen were glum.
Far out to sea oil had spilled for weeks from the Exxon Mobil pipe.
“We can’t see where to fish; oil is in the sea,” Patrick Okoni said.

“We don’t have an international media to cover us, so nobody cares about it,” said Mr. Mbong, in nearby Eket. “Whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here.”

Links :

• TheGuardian : Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
• BBCNews : Nigeria, 'World oil pollution capital'
• Amesty Int.: Oil industry has brought poverty and pollution to Niger Delta
• National Geographic : Nigerian oil
• Africa Review : In Nigeria's oil delta, spills and gushes raising fewer eyebrows