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Tag Archives: diving
Sewage Treatment, Coral Disease, and Koch’s Postulates
Coral reefs are in a tight spot these days. Increasing CO2 levels and rising ocean temperatures aren’t doing them much good, but their biggest problems are more direct. Overfishing is wiping out important predators, the aquarium trade picks off whatever … Continue reading
Posted in Research Blogging
Tagged coral, diving, marine biology, microbiology, zoonosis
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Lionfish Derbies vs. Groupers
I love both diving and fishing, so the continuing saga of Pacific lionfish invading the Caribbean has definitely caught my attention. The backstory is that Pterois volitans and its cousin Pterois miles probably escaped from home aquarists’ tanks in Florida … Continue reading
Attention Horror Movie Writers
Here’s your next script idea: The remains of a prehistoric child were removed from an underwater cave in Mexico four years after divers stumbled upon the well-preserved corpse … The skeletal remains of the boy, dubbed the Young Hol Chan, … Continue reading
What Are These?
A report from Hawaii describes “mysterious pink organisms” washing up on beaches. They look like immature arthropods of some kind to me. Do any Dovdox readers want to hazard a guess?
Unanticipated Consequences of Beach Replenishment
I was amused to see the story in the New York Times about the surprising souvenirs now available on some New Jersey beaches:
The explosives problem arose on March 5 when a resident using a metal detector came upon a rusted military fuze, an ignition device incorporating mechanical or electric elements, buried in the sand. Believed to have been dumped off the sides of ships sometime during World War I, the discarded military munitions lay on the ocean floor for 90 years or more, according to Mr. Follett. Last fall, the Army Corps dredged up 500,000 cubic yards of sand from the bottom of the Atlantic as part of a $9 million beach replenishment program for Surf City and part of Ship Bottom.
Why do I find this amusing? Well, a few years ago some of my scuba diving friends and I had a somewhat closer call with a piece of ammunition in New Jersey waters (I wrote about it on the old version of this blog). This stuff is definitely down there, and it doesn’t get safer over time. In fact, according to a Navy source one of my diving buddies talked to, it actually gets more dangerous, as the explosives become less stable. Yet another reason to question the wisdom of beach-replenishment projects. Continue reading