New feature : share Marine GeoGarage places

Share feature at the bottom left corner of the screen

How 'geogaraging' areas ?

Marine GeoGarage proposes right now a social bookmarking service allowing you to share the place of your choice (including the nautical map overlay and the selected zoom level) via a variety of services :

URL link with URL shortener to copy and paste
to share a specific place on the Marine GeoGarage
sending it by Email or using it on personal blogs

Share it on Facebook

Tweet it

Google bookmarks

Google buzz

Delicious

New feature : photos from Ocean in the Marine GeoGarage

View of geotagged photos
(button 'photos' in the 'content settings' menu)

Marine GeoGarage proposes right now to display the photos from Panoramio, the geolocation-oriented photo sharing website.

The site's goal is to allow Marine GeoGarage users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users have taken at that place.

Effectively, since october 26th, Panoramio adds photos from the Ocean :

This is an excellent way for Marine GeoGarage users to showcase all the imagery captured onboard but also underwater, in order to share them with the other users.
Panoramio is accepting oceans photos, so upload them and leave a comment below to share some of your most interesting pictures.

For more details go the Panoramio forum.
If you’ve never geo-tagged a photo, watch this video to learn how easy it is to add photos to the Panoramio layer in Google Earth.

By the way, Panoramio announced a monthly Photo Contest.
To enter your photo, sign up and click on “Submit to the contest” and choose a category.

Good luck and we can’t wait to see your photos!

Female fish turned on when boyfriends win a fight

In this composite image, two male cichlids face off while a female watches.
Credit: Todd Anderson, Stanford University News Service

From LiveScience

If you're a male African cichlid, it pays to be a brawler.
A new study finds that female fish get a reproduction-related charge when their preferred mate wins a fight against another male.
When her beau loses a slugfest, the female becomes more anxious.

"It is the same as if a woman were dating a boxer and saw her potential mate get the crap beat out of him really badly," study co-author Julie Desjardins said in a statement.
"She may not consciously say to herself, 'Oh, I'm not attracted to this guy anymore because he's a loser,' but her feelings might change anyhow."

Desjardins, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Stanford University, and her fellow researchers reported their results online Nov. 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fish fistfights

To find out how female fish react to male fights, the researchers studied 15 female fish, dissecting their brains immediately after each fight.

The researchers used a fish tank split into three compartments by transparent barriers.
In each case, two males of comparable size and weight were put into the sections at either end, and the female went into the middle section.

For two days, the fish were given 20 minutes to bond.
Typically, this involved the female interacting with whichever male she preferred.

"We know that she prefers a particular male, because she will display some mating behavior and he will try to do the same on his side," Desjardins said.

The female's preference didn't change on the second day, the researchers found.

On the third day, the female remained in the middle section of the tank, but both male fish were put into a section together.
Because African cichlids are territorial, it never took long for a fight to erupt.

Female reaction

The researchers separated the fish after 20 minutes of fighting.
They then dissected the female's brain, measuring levels of RNA (a molecule similar to DNA) to judge activation in various areas of the brain.
The scientists focused on RNA for two genes associated with reproduction.
They found that in the females who'd seen their preferred male lose, areas associated with anxiety were extra-active.
In females whose potential mates had emerged victorious, activity increased in areas of the brain associated with pleasure and reproduction.

"In this case, she is turning on her body to get ready to physically mate with this male that she previously chose," Desjardins said.

The researchers don't know whether females would still have chosen to mate with a loser male, because the females were dissected immediately after the fight.
Examining the effect of fish fights on actual mate choice is the next step, Desjardins said.

The researchers suspect the brawl effect will reach beyond fish, said study co-author Russ Fernald, a Stanford biology professor.

"Our intuition is that this response is likely to occur under similar conditions in humans," Fernald said in a statement, " because the brain areas involved are present in all vertebrates and perform comparable functions."

Links :

• Wired : the enemy within, male fish dislike their refections more than competitors
  
• Russell Fernald Lab at Stanford University : other articles
  

Zoom In on Top Ultra High-Resolution marine panaramas

Credit: GigaPan/Stephanie Jenouvier

Adélie Penguin Colony

Stephanie Jenouvier, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, shot this 1.39-gigapixel panorama of an Antarctic Adélie penguin colony.
Tucked away in the image are surveying researchers, hungry birds and countless waddling penguins.
The colony spreads across Cape Crozier, one of the easternmost tips of Ross Island in Antarctica, a location many scientists call home for months at a time.
Jenouvier "has really gone in and captured how we do research in Antarctic with her images,” Nourbaksh said. “They’re always great portraits of science and culture.”

Credit: GigaPan/Jason Buccheim

Bait Ball
When this school of Salema fish, also called “dream fish” for their hallucinogenic toxins, swam toward photographer Jason Buccheim, he quickly snapped 10 photos to create this wrap-around panorama (in addition to one from inside the school).
Such schools of fish are often called “bait balls,” because dolphins, tuna and other fast ocean predators will simultaneously attack the fish from many directions, keeping them from escaping.
“Underwater gigapanography is one direction we’re really interested in pursuing,” Nourbaksh said. “Just imagine doing them on a coral reef over and over. It would be a dream to be able to show a detailed time-lapse of reef bleaching.”

From Wired

The ability to capture extremely detailed panoramic views made up of hundreds of perfectly stitched individual photos is tremendously useful for scientists studying everything from rock outcrops to birds to microscopic organisms.

The creators of the GigaPan robot, which can automatically create zoomable gigapixel-scale images, announced eight winners of a science photography contest Nov. 11 at the Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science.

“Having access to such high-resolution images changes scientists’ relationships to images and the information they contain,” said Carnegie Mellon University robotics scientist Illah Nourbaksh, one of GigaPan’s inventors and an organizer of conference.

Created in 2006 by Carnegie Mellon and NASA, the GigaPan robotic camera mount can shoot hundreds of perfectly aligned images using almost any digital camera. After the photographer uploads the photos to a computer, photo-stitching software seamlessly merges them into a single, highly zoomable image.

Since 2007, Nourbaksh and others have trained 120 scientists to use the system. “There are 8,000 GigaPans out there just by scientists, and that’s growing every day as more of them use it,” Nourbaksh said.
From microbes on a barnacle to a landscape coated with penguins, explore the winning scientist-photographer entries, plus a sneak preview of zoomable, gigapixel-size, time-lapse videos.

Links :

• Stephane Scotto : Bassin d'Arcachon (aerial oblique photo hosted in the GeoGarage)
• Gigapan : surgeon fish, Galapagos
  

Settling on the Coast

Taken in 2007 by Expedition 16 astronauts aboard the International Space Station,
this digital image shows Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims first set foot
(position in the Marine GeoGarage)

From NASA Earth Observation

Cape Cod is a haven for waves of migrants who have washed up on American shores.
The most famous arrived in the early 1600s, and hundreds of thousands now visit every summer. But most of the migrants washed up between 18,000 and 23,000 years ago.

In September 1620, English Separatists, also called the Pilgrims, left Europe to set up a colony near the mouth of the Hudson River.
On November 20, they sighted land and confirmed it to be Cape Cod.
This arm-shaped peninsula of Massachusetts is shown here in 2007 in a digital photograph from astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The Pilgrims initially decided to sail farther south, but quickly became wary of the shallow waters and shoals east and south of Cape Cod and Nantucket—waters full of the sandy, rocky outwash from ancient glaciers.
They sailed around the northeastern tip of the Cape and on November 21, 1620, dropped anchor just off the shores of modern-day Provincetown.
While resting in that harbor, they composed and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement to establish self-government.

In the weeks that followed, the Pilgrims explored the Cape and made their first encounter with the Wampanoag Indians, native people whose ancestors may have explored and inhabited Cape Cod as early as 11,000 years ago.
Eventually, the Pilgrims made their way to the western shores of Cape Cod Bay, landing near an abandoned Wampanoag settlement known as Patuxet.

Plymouth Rock—which is likely a creation of oral history and legend, since there is no mention of it in the writings of the original Mayflower voyagers—is a glacial erratic, a large boulder that dropped out of a glacier.

The Cape’s sandy peninsula and a fair bit of southeastern Massachusetts is, in a way, also a migrant.
The area was both built up and scoured by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which stretched down past Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket during Earth’s last major Ice Age.
In their advance and retreat, the glaciers composing the ice sheet scraped rock off of Earth’s surface, eventually depositing it on Cape Cod.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the deposits are 200 to 600 feet thick across the region.

Though this photo cannot show all the rocks left behind, it does show the dozens of kettle hole ponds.
As the ice sheet retreated, sediments washing out of the glaciers occasionally covered chunks of ice.
Those ice blocks would eventually melt and collapse the sediments, creating the space for the fresh groundwater-fed ponds we see today.

Editor’s Note: On the original Mayflower Compact, the date is listed as November 11.
When Western societies switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, 10 days were added, turning November 11 into November 21.

Links :

• Oldale, Robert (2001) Geologic History of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. U.S. Geological Survey
  
• Plimoth Plantation (n.d.) The Mayflower Compact
• LiveScience : The first Thanksgiving, a view from space
• OurAmazingPlanet : Cape Cod, carved by glaciers