The Mekong River is home to more giant fish than any other river on Earth. Building the Sayabouly dam will cause the extinction of wild populations of the Mekong giant catfish, which is currently listed on the IUCN Red List as 'critically endangered.' Populations of the Mekong giant catfish have plummeted 90 per cent in just two decades. © WWF

Wild populations of the iconic Mekong giant catfish will be driven to extinction if hydropower dams planned for the Mekong River go ahead, says a new report by World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The report, River of Giants: Giant Fish of the Mekong, profiles four giant fish living in the Mekong that rank within the top 10 largest freshwater fish on the planet. At half the length of a bus and weighing up to 1,322 pounds, the Mekong River’s Giant freshwater stingray is the world’s largest freshwater fish. The critically endangered Mekong giant catfish ranks third at almost 10 feet in length and 771 pounds.

The hydropower dam planned on the Mekong River at Sayabouly Province, northern Laos, is a threat to the survival of the wild population of Mekong giant catfish. The Sayabouly dam is the first lower Mekong River mainstream dam to enter a critical stage of assessment before construction is approved by the Mekong River Commission, which includes representatives from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

“A fish the size of a Mekong giant catfish cannot swim across a large barrier like the Sayabouly dam to reach its spawning grounds upstream,” said Dekila Chungyalpa, Director of WWF’s Greater Mekong Program. “Building this and other dams will lead to the collapse of the wild population of this iconic species.”

Current scientific information suggests the Mekong giant catfish migrate from the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia up the Mekong River to spawn in northern Thailand and Laos. Any dam built on the lower Mekong River mainstream will block this migration route.

The other Mekong giant fish featured in the report are the dog-eating catfish, named because it has been caught using dog meat as bait, and the giant barb, the national fish of Cambodia and largest barb in the world. At 661 pounds each, these fish tie for fifth place on the global top ten.

The impacts of lower Mekong River mainstream dams are not restricted to these Mekong giants; they would also exacerbate the impacts of climate change on the Mekong River Delta, one of the world’s most productive regions for fisheries and agriculture.

Building the Sayabouly dam would reduce sediment flowing downstream to the Mekong River Delta, increasing the vulnerability of this area to the impacts of climate change like sea level rise.

“The Lower Mekong is currently free-flowing but the clock is ticking,” Chungyalpa said. “We have a rare opportunity to conserve these freshwater giants and ensure the livelihoods of millions of people who live along the Mekong mainstream.”

WWF supports a delay in the approval of the mainstream dams, including the Sayabouly dam, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of all the positive and negative impacts of their construction and operation.

To meet immediate energy demands, WWF promotes sustainable hydropower projects on tributaries of the Mekong River, prioritizing those that already have hydropower dams developed on them.

Learn more about the giant fish of the Mekong @WWF

Source: WWF

posted on July 21, 2010, at 12:43 PM

The unretouched photo, courtesy of BP. Photo: BP

Best Opinion: Americablog, WaPo, Grist…

BP, arguably the world’s most despised corporate entity, was accused this week of doctoring a photograph of its oil-spill crisis control center. In what’s being called an “incredibly amateur” Photoshop job, the company grafted images of the underwater camera feed onto what had previously been blank computer monitors. (See the photo in question.) Scott Dean, a BP spokesperson, said there was “nothing sinister” about the changes, claiming that the photographer in question was simply trying to make the scene “more panoramic.” Here’s what the more biting bloggers and pundits had to say:

“I guess if you’re doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center.”
— Americablog’s John Aravosis, who discovered the Photoshop job.

“Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks.”
— Steven Mufson, The Washington Post

“Photoshopping to make things look better for yourself is anything but innovative…if you cut corners (literally and figuratively), you’ll probably get caught and wish you could Photoshop yourself out of an awkward PR situation.”
— Ashley Braun, Grist

“BP, which has a great track record of owning up to its mistakes, is laying the blame on the photographer… Pretty sure the photographer caused the oil spill, now that I think about it.”
— Max Read, Gawker

“Perhaps BP needs to refudiate the use of Photoshop.”
— @darrellferguson via Twitter

Top Original – Bottom Photoshoped

Source: The Week

Sea Shepherd Undercover Operative Peter Hammarstedt, also First Mate of Sea Shepherd’s vessel, the Bob Barker, had been living undercover with the ferocious islanders for a week when he heard news of a grind happening in Klaksvik over the radio. He immediately drove to the scene. Grossly outnumbered and unable to physically stop the grind, Hammarstedt documented the bloodshed upon arrival.
“Pilot whales are known to travel in pods of 200-300 members. Two hundred and thirty-six pilot whales were slaughtered last night in Klaksvik: bulls, pregnant and lactating females, juveniles, and unborn babies still attached to their mothers by the umbilical chord. An entire pod that once swam freely through the North Atlantic has been exterminated in a single blood bath,” said Hammarstedt.

The Faroese government claims that the deaths of these whales are quick and painless, but the newly released grisly footage shows otherwise.

“One whale had five to six brutal chops to her head,” reported Hammarstedt. “The islanders basically used her as a chopping board. Her death would have been slow and extremely painful. Some whales are hacked repeatedly for up to four minutes before they finally die.”
It was equally apparent that the grind is indiscriminate and ruthless.

“Babies had been cut out of their mother’s dead bodies and left to rot on the docks,” said Hammarstedt, who photographed a number of dead infants and fetuses. “Pilot whale groups are strongly matriarchal; I can’t imagine the fear and panic that these mothers must have felt as their families were wiped out in front of them.”

The Faroese pilot whale grind is similar to the annual Taiji dolphin slaughter in Japan, documented in the award-winning film, The Cove. The main difference is that there are at least eighteen different coves in the Faeroes where a grind could potentially take place, as opposed to one cove in Taiji, making it all the more difficult to anticipate where the killings will occur or to get there in time to intervene and prevent the murders.

Baby Pilot whales cut out of their mothers’ bodies and left to rot

Pilot whales are classified as “strictly protected” under the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. By allowing the slaughter to continue in the Faeroes, Denmark fails to abide by its obligations as a signatory of the Convention.

In order to gain access to the grind, Hammarstedt had been posing as a Swedish film student. Even though considerable steps had been taken to conceal his identity, he was ultimately recognized by several hunters due to his role in the Animal Planet TV series Whale Wars. Apparently, even the Faroese have heard of Sea Shepherd’s interventions against illegal whaling in the Antarctic.

When the whale killers began to follow Hammarstedt by foot at a distance, he quickly escaped to his car where he fled the scene and uploaded images and footage to get them safely out of the country. With his identity compromised, he began receiving threatening messages within the hour and was instructed by Sea Shepherd HQ to exit the country immediately.

Despite heightened scrutiny and police interrogation at the airport, Hammarstedt has confirmed that he has departed the Faeroe Islands.

Sea Shepherd has been actively opposing and confronting the Faroese grind since 1985 and remains one of the foremost advocates for the whales.

Source: Sea Shepherd

Ocean Dead Zones ~ A Special Request - Aquaman ~ Ocean Defender's MySpace Blog | Aquaman's Aqua~Blog

Dead zones can result when the number of basic chemical nutrients in the water increases to the level that eutrophication occurs, in  which enormous blooms of single-celled and plant-like organisms such as algae occurs, using up available oxygen. (Algae do produce oxygen through photosynthesis to an extent during the day, but consume more through respiration at night, and through decomposition after they die.) The result is that oxygen in the area is drawn out of the water, leaving less available for other marine life. If oxygen levels fall far enough, then marine life is unable to survive on what remains. The process would be exactly analogous to what surface life, including humans, would suffer if oxygen were somehow drawn out of the atmosphere.

Although algae blooms are a well-understood natural cause of oxygen depletion, it is believed that an increase in dead zones in recent times is also the consequence of human alteration and pollution of the environment. In particular, chemicals released into the water via fertilizer, sewage, and city waste can cause dead zones or eutrophication (the process described above).

There is, of course, a considerable range of increasingly severe effects resulting from lowering oxygen levels, rather than a simple “termination” point. As oxygen levels fall, the evidence suggests that fish reproductive rates decline. Fish and fast-moving animals probably move toward oxygen-rich areas where possible, but small bottom-dwellers, like clams and lobsters, as well as animals naturally found in large and more-or-less immobile colonies, would not be able to relocate in the same way and, if oxygen levels fall far enough, must perish.

Several hundred dead zones have been identified in oceans around the world. These include dead zones in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the Black Sea, the latter of which is a natural phenomenon resulting from stagnant water. Those which attracted the most early concern were in the Chesapeake Bay, U.S., the Kattegat strait in Scandinavia, and elsewhere. Where the Mississippi deposits the detritus of Midwest agriculture into the northern Gulf of Mexico, a gargantuan dead zone has developed which spans over 8500 square miles. The Gulf of Mexico will likely develop another massive dead zone as a result of the BP oil spill at Deepwater Horizon, oil plumes from which will have a devastating effect on marine life.

Where dead zones are a product of human pollution, in theory they can be mitigated or even eliminated through conservation efforts. The Black Sea itself became largely a dead zone as a result of fertilizer pollution during the Soviet era, but has recovered to a considerable extent since the Soviet collapse took with it much of the agricultural activity which affected the sea. European and North American pollution control efforts have also had some success reducing dead zones resulting from pollutants running out to sea via major rivers.

source: Aquaman Aqua-Blog

Diploastrea heliopara corals can reach a diameter of seven metres

A species of coral in the Red Sea could stop growing by 2070 if current warming trends continue, say scientists.

A team of US researchers, using 3D technology, said that the rate of growth of Diploastrea heliopara had declined by 30% since 1998.

Rising sea surface temperature was already “driving dramatic changes” in the growth rate in the important reef-building organism, they observed.

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

The coral's growth bands cannot be seen with the naked eye

Co-author Anne Cohen, a research specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US, explained that the team were able to measure the decline in growth by examining core samples from coral skeletons.

“The coral is an animal, and the colony made up of millions of tiny, little animals – and they together build this huge thing that is seven metres in diameter,” she told BBC News.

“As they are growing, they are building this calcium carbonate skeleton that the animal is basically leaving behind. If you cut through a colony, only the very top layer is actually living – the rest of it is all dead.

“What is really cool is that everything that the colony has experienced in its life, which can be very long – these colonies can live four or five hundred years – is recorded in the skeleton,” Dr Cohen explained.

“It is recorded in annual growth bands, so we know exactly the year in which certain things happened.”

The team collected “biopsies” from six colonies, which were then examined in a computerised tomography (CT) scanner.

“The scan reveals variations in density in calcium carbonate because the growth rings are caused by changes in density; what the CT scanner is effectively doing is revealing the annual growth bands for us, which you cannot see with the naked eye,” Dr Cohen said.

WHOI used the technique because many of the corals had very complicated skeleton growth patterns, which we too complex to examine using 2D images.

Feeling the heat

By building up a profile of the growth bands, the researchers were able to see how much the coral had grown in any given year.

“We can also work out the density of the band, which tells us how much calcium carbonate the coral has put down,” Dr Cohen added.

“We say in our paper that the upper growth rate has decreased by 30%, and the amount of calcium carbonate produced has decreased by 20% since 1998.”

Using the precise chronology provided by the CT scans, the team were able to compare coral growth with the sea surface temperature (SST) record.

There was a critical temperature, 30.5C, above which the growth rate “basically plummetted”.

“So we have identified a threshold temperature for growth,” said Dr Cohen.

Using future climate change scenarios, the team calculated that the coral would “cease calcifying altogether by 2070″, when summer SSTs were projected to exceed current summer values by 1.85C.

However, the team said this timescale was likely to be conservative.

“One reason why we say this is because we think the corals will bleach long before this,” Dr Cohen explained.

“They are going to lose their symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) long before they stop calcifying, and many of these corals will die at that point.”

However, she was at pains to point out that the paper only considered the impact of rising SST on one species from the 250 or so in the Red Sea.

“It is a very important species – a dominant reef-building species – but it is only one species,” she said.

“I expect that there are corals that are doing much worse than this species, but there might be others that are doing better in terms of thermal tolerance.

“Before we can talk about what the coral reefs are doing to do in the future, we really need more information about more species,” she observed.

The team plans to carry out similar studies on other species. Dr Cohen said they had collected samples from another dominant reef-building species, which they were planning to examine in the coming months.

Source:   BBC News

“Climate change is not some abstract phenomenon that will affect us sometime in the distant future.  It is happening now and its impacts are being felt across the country in the form of record-shattering heat waves, flooding rains, persistent droughts and other extreme weather events,” said Lou Leonard, Director of US Climate Policy for WWF.  “The changes we are already experiencing are not just causing uncomfortable living conditions for Americans.  They are threatening human health, destroying our natural heritage, jeopardizing our agriculture industry and putting our economy and national security at risk.

“The Senate is now at the proverbial fork in the road.  One path leads to a clean energy future marked by economic growth, new jobs and a stable climate.  The other leads to further strains on our economy as climate impacts worsen, our oil dependence deepens and America cedes millions of new clean energy jobs to China and Europe. This should be a no brainer for Senators.

“To effectively put America on a path toward a safer, healthier future, the Senate must pass a bill that includes a clear target to reduce the amount of oil America consumes and a quick timeline for limiting all fossil fuel pollution. Only by breaking our addiction to dirty, dangerous fossil fuels can we maximize job creation and minimize future climate-related impacts,” said Leonard.

Below is a list of recent announcements showing the dramatic warming of the planet:

• Globally, June 2010 was the warmest June on record (announced by NOAA today): http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/index.php?report=global.
• Globally, January through June 2010 was the warmest January through June period in recorded history (announced by NOAA today and NASA last week).
• In the Eastern US, April through June 2010 was the hottest April through June period on record (announced by NOAA last week).
• Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures, from which hurricanes derive their strength, have been at record high levels for the past five consecutive months, leading to the most severe hurricane season forecast in history.

Source: WWF

Content

Functions

Global Help is available on iTunes store. The developers told RED SEA RESEARCH that they are glad for any feedback on missing numbers. They won’t bite you – big promise

The British energy giant has suffered numerous setbacks in its struggle to control the 85-day-old gusher that stands as the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. And BP cautioned that tests of its latest containment system were not sure to succeed.

But BP shares, battered for weeks as damage to the U.S. Gulf Coast economy and cleanup costs mounted, surged nearly 8 percent in New York on Monday by promising developments at sea and by news that U.S. energy company Apache Corp and other bidders were in talks to buy up to $10 billion worth of BP assets.

The potential breakthrough in efforts to fully contain BP’s ruptured wellhead also came as the Obama administration issued a revised moratorium on deep-water oil drilling that critics called a mere repackaging of an earlier ban struck down by the courts.

The prospect of legal battles over the administration’s bid to suspend deep-sea energy exploration in the Gulf already has had a chilling effect on drilling, putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk, industry officials and analysts said.

Photo shows a section of the new containment cap is pictured during capping stack operations at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in this frame grab captured from a BP live video feed July 12, 2010. BP said it had installed a cap meant to halt the flow of oil from its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well on Monday.

Source: Read the full article at reuters.com

Specifically, the episode Whale Wars–The Stuff of Nightmares, in which a whale is harpooned and is shown taking 23 agonizing minutes to drown, is competing against LIFE and The National Parks for the titles of Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming and Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming.

The Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on Sunday, August 29th, at 8 PM ET.

Source: Sea Shepherd

Hello,

My name is Richard Hum.I want to know if there is any availability for 5 guests to come to your place for an open water dive course. They are coming for vacation holidays and it’s part of the plan.We would love the guest to have intensive diving experience and training(all of them)and your services too.If there is availability, kindly
let me know about the dates and the quotes.

They are looking forward to Arrival on 24th of August 2010. The ONLY Mode Of Payment :Visa Card, Master Card, Amex Card.

They have 11 days to stay for the diving experience.Write me immediately with an update on the list of services you offer.Call me anytime.

Mr Richard Hum.
Cell: +447045768990

and you reply you will get something like the following:

Hello,

Thanks for the response.We would now be making deposit of $2,700.00 USD for the open water Dive services and other expenses.I am happy to inform you that we have concluded with the guests.I will make payment to you in advance.I made an arrangement with a Logistic agent who will provide the guests with Flight tickets,visas and tour guide arrangement.

We have decided that you will handle the credit card information.So once you get the Credit card information, you are required to charge the total of $10,300.00 USD and then take $2,700.00 USD as deposit and transfer $7,600.00 USD to our Logistic Agent whose information will be forward to you once this is confirmed.Confirm the above message and provide me with the information needed below for office record and payment.Please let them feel your best services.God bless you.

(1) YOUR FULL NAME……
(2) FULL ADDRESS……….
(3) PHONE AND MOBILE NUMBERS……..
(4) CREDIT CARD TYPES WHICH YOU ACCEPT FOR PAYMENT……..

Regards.

Mr Richard Hum.
Mobile : +447045768990

Our advice for this: don’t even bother to answer – it’s nothing but a phishing attempt. Digging a bit around it came out that they tried the same scam with restaurants before. Thy bad guys also using the names Mr Tim Mccarron or Dr Allan Brad.