Shark spy camera

Filmmaker Jeff Kurr On Shark Week's New Noninvasive Device

From HuffingtonPost

Shark Week 2012 has been full of great footage, including shots of leaping great whites and amazing underwater scenes.

But one particularly impressive piece of equipment, featured in "Air Jaws Apocalypse," may be the future of shark observation.

The Shark Spy camera fulfills a simple objective: get eyes in the water without actually getting in the water.

As Shark Week filmmaker Jeff Kurr explained to The Huffington Post, this benefits sharks and shark observers alike.

"Boats, divers, bait and chum can alter a sharks' natural behavior," Kurr wrote in an email to HuffPost.

"To truly understand and learn about these animals we certainly want to see what they're doing naturally, without those outside influences... there's a lot more to sharks than just feeding time."

In addition to protecting sharks from the stress of invasive research projects, the Shark Spy's remote viewing capability also removes divers from the dangers -- and limitations -- of working in shark-infested waters.

"Shark Spy lets us go deeper into the world of the great white shark without risk of bodily harm to us," Kurr wrote.

"It also allows us to spend a great deal of time with these animals without the restriction of limited [diving time] you have to deal with on SCUBA. "

The new technology has already helped unravel a mystery.

On "Air Jaws Apocalypse," Shark Spy allowed the crew to see why the great whites were visiting an inshore reef that was too dangerous for diving.

Through use of the camera, the team discovered that the great whites were preying on other sharks.

"In the past, to learn about a great whites' diet, you had to cut the shark open and kill it to see what it'd been eating.

Obviously, we don't want to have to kill these animals to learn about them. Especially considering their highly vulnerable status," Kurr said.

Environmentalists are currently working to add great white sharks off the California coast to the endangered species list, Reuters reports.

Studies suggest there are fewer than 350 of the sharks in the area.

Groups say the sharks are "threatened by chemical contaminants" and sometimes get caught in "fishing nets," according to KTVU.

Wreck of Captain Scott's ship discovered off Greenland

The Terra Nova carried Captain Scott and his party on their ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic

 From BBC

The wreck of the ship that carried Captain Robert Scott on his doomed expedition to the Antarctic a century ago has been discovered off Greenland.
The SS Terra Nova was found by a team from Schmidt Ocean Institute, a US research company.

 Sonar mapping revealed an unidentified feature on the seafloor

Scott and his party set off from Cardiff aboard the Terra Nova in 1910 with the aim of becoming the first expedition to reach the South Pole.
The ship had a life after the polar trek, sinking off Greenland's south coast in 1943.
It had been on a journey to deliver supplies to base stations in the Arctic when it was damaged by ice. The Terra Nova's crew was saved by the US Coast Guard cutter Southwind.

On arriving at the geographical South Pole in January 1912, Scott and his party discovered they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen.
The polar team led by Scott died on their return journey from the pole; their bodies were found by a search party eight months later.

A crew from the Schmidt Ocean Institute discovered the Terra Nova whilst testing echo-sounding equipment aboard its flagship vessel - the R/V Falkor.
One of the scientists noticed an unidentified feature during sonar mapping of the sea bed.

Team members then noted that the 57m length of the feature

matched the reported length of the Terra Nova.

Technicians dropped a camera package called Shrimp to just above the presumed wreck to film it.
Camera tows across the top of the target showed the remains of a wooden wreck laying on the seabed.
Footage from an underwater camera also identified a funnel lying next to the ship.

 A camera package called Shrimp was sent down to film the wreck

Taken together, the features of the wreck closely matched historical photos of the Terra Nova, leading to the identification.

 S.S. Terra Nova funnel as seen in the underwater video frame filmed from R/V Falkor using SHRIMP (Simple High Resolution IMaging Package).

Brian Kelly, an education officer from the Discovery Point museum in Dundee, where the ship was built, told the Daily Record newspaper: "The Terra Nova has such a story."
She went through a lot in her lengthy history and really was the pinnacle of Scottish wooden shipbuilding.
"It is incredible that one of the most famous ships in history has been found 100 years after the race for the pole and in the year commemorating the event.

Links :

•  TheTelegraph : Wreck of Captain Scott's ship discovered off Greenland

Premiers essais embarqués de l'appli iPad Carte Marine France

Hier à l'occasion de la troisième édition de la biennale d'art contemporain Estuaire, l'équipe GeoGarage a pu tester pendant une durée de 3 heures l'application Carte Marine France proposant un accés aux cartes du SHOM sur iPad durant une balade le long de la Loire entre Nantes et Saint Nazaire

Accès aux cartes SHOM sur les serveurs GeoGarage via 3G-Edge

Le parcours de Nantes à Saint Nazaire

 Petit détour près de Paimboeuf pour mieux voir le Jardin Etoilé de Kinya Maryyama

'La maison dans la Loire' de Jean-Luc Courcoult

vu du fleuve, qui a pris définitivement ses quartiers à Couëron.
A découvrir depuis l'estacade du quai Pont-Gibeau (A 200 mètres de la Tour à Plomb).

'La maison dans la Loire' installée à Couëron en mai 2012

pas encore sur la carte du SHOM 7396, ni sur l'imagerie aérienne de Google (voir)

Ocean health index unveiled

Ocean Health Index provides valuable data.
The earth's oceans are at risk.
Now we can assess the future for our water, our fish and ourselves, if we continue as we are.

From Nature

www.oceanhealthindex.org

Taking a page from the financial sector’s use of the Dow Jones industrial average to track economic 'health', marine researchers have created an index that assesses overall ocean vitality.

Global map of marine health index scores. 

All waters within 171 Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) were assessed.

The index, described this week in Nature, comprises ten disparate measures that are aggregated into a single score of how well the seas are doing.

The ten measures — which assess features such as food provision, carbon storage, tourism value and biodiversity — were chosen to reflect both the needs of humans and ecosystem sustainability.

Posting a global score of 60 out of 100, the index offers a seemingly gloomy outlook.

Almost one-third of the world's countries scored below 50.

But the study authors say that the range of scores for individual countries — from 36 to 86, with 5% of nations scoring higher than 70 — implies that there are successes amid the areas of concern.

  The new Ocean Health Index is designed to assess the importance of the seas to people as well as other species. Here, a man paddles over a coral reef in Bird's Head, Raja Ampat, Indonesia.

“This should not be considered a failing grade for the oceans,” says Karen McLeod, a study co-author and the director of science at COMPASS, a non-profit science-communication organization based across the west coast of the US.

“The real value of the index will be the ability to track progress related to management policies over time,” she adds.

Many marine researchers who were not involved in designing the index agree that useful indicators of ocean health are woefully lacking.

Hundreds of specific indicators already exist, but none does a comprehensive job of integrating different sources of information.

Jane Lubchenco, head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) in Washington DC, says the index is “a great leap forward in society’s attempts to understand what the trade-offs are for management decisions”, noting that President Barack Obama's National Ocean Policy calls for a more holistic look at oceans.

 Commercial fishermen and other mariners join together to send an urgent message to save the oceans from ocean acidification caused by fossil fuel emissions in Homer, Alaska, on September 6, 2009.

Over a hundred boats and hundreds of members of the fishing community participated in the event.

UPI/ Lou Dematteis/Spectral Q

Inner workings

Some have raised concerns about how the index assesses fisheries, which were given a global health score of just 25, lower than any other measures except for tourism and recreation (which are grouped as one measure) and mariculture (the farming of fish and other sea creatures).

The fisheries score is calculated as the difference between a region’s total landings and an estimate of maximum sustainable yield.

For fisheries containing many species, 75% of the maximum sustainable yield was used.

“I’m concerned [that] managers will wrongly interpret a score of 25 to mean that we could quadruple catches — which is far from being sustainable,” says Trevor Branch, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist also at the University of Washington, suggests that not enough is known about maximum sustainable yield in many countries for this metric to be used with any confidence.

A new Ocean Health Index developed at Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions evaluates several factors of ecosystem health.

Gaining traction

Whether policy-makers will adopt the ocean health index is the big question. “Getting a metric or index to gain traction among decision-makers is sort of a dark art,” says Damon Stanwell-Smith, coordinator of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, at the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, UK.

“People can be quite contrary and will look to undermine anything set up as the ‘best way’ of doing something; the ocean health index is most likely to succeed globally if it’s a slow burner."

The 10 components of the Ocean Health Index and the global score each received

The index will soon get exposure.

In October, it will probably be among the metrics considered by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad, India.

It may also prove useful in the UN General Assembly’s first global integrated marine assessment this autumn.

For her part, Lubchenco thinks that the index will be most readily adopted by institutions that manage places rather than particular sectors, such as the NOAA's National Marine Sanctuaries or the state of Rhode Island, which has one of the most comprehensive marine management plans of any US state.

Links :

• NationalGeographic : New Ocean Health Index Measures the Global State of the Seas 
• ESA : Sea sick? Setting targets to assess ocean health and ecosystem services

The blue : face to face with dolphins

The Blue

While fishing tuna 20 miles off the coast of Santa Cruz, California, Mark Peters dropped his GoPro Hero 2 inside a custom-made torpedo case in the water to see what he could catch.
The camera captured amazing footage a pod of Pacific White-Sided dolphins swimming along with their boat.