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Bizarre blue blobs have washed up en masse on beaches across South California—but they aren't jellyfish or Portuguese Man O' War as one might expect. Photographs of the strange gathering were uploaded to social media by Point Reyes National Seashore, which stated that these creatures are actually Velella velella, also known as By-the-Wind Sailors. This was also backed up by Rita F. T. Pires, a research assistant at the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere. "The species usually forms large agglomerations when beached, as pictured, so it seems it could be the case," she told Newsweek. Velella velella are hydroid...

A recently retired friend is thinking of selling his home (which is paid for) and buying a boat for himself and his wife to live aboard without ever having lived aboard a boat before. Are there any FReepers who have done something similar, or who have experience living this kind of lifestyle, or have advice I could maybe pass on to them?

New research from Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire indicates that collecting and bleeding horseshoe crabs for biomedical purposes causes short-term changes in their behavior and physiology that could exacerbate the crabs' population decline in parts of the east coast. Each year, the U.S. biomedical industry harvests the blue blood from almost half a million living horseshoe crabs for use in pharmaceuticals—most notably, a product called Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), used to ensure vaccines and medical equipment are free of bacterial contamination. This lifesaving product can only be made from horseshoe crab blood, says researcher Win Watson,...

After a ban on non-biodegradable utensils went into effect over the weekend in Seattle, local officials are advising food service businesses to “[s]top using plastic straws and plastic utensils.”An ordinance pending before the New York City Council would make that city’s food service businesses the next front line in liberal politicians’ war on plastic straws.For the last two months, the New York City Council has deliberated over a bill that would make it a civil offense for any food service provider in the city to offer customers straws or stirrers “made of plastic or any other non-biodegradable material.” If passed,...

The strange squid was captured on April 17 by the crew of NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer during a scientific voyage studying an ocean area never explored before. The mission has been conducting both scientific research and capturing images of deep-sea habitats in the western Gulf of Mexico that likely found nowhere else. “Dive 04 targeted an unnamed mound in East Breaks (EB) 1009, an area of the Gulf of Mexico that had never before been explored using deep-sea submersibles. The closest historical dive to the site was a single 2009 survey that autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry conducted over 12 kilometers...

The creatures hail from a rarely before explored region of the ocean's water column.Shallow waters can be easily explored by divers and the deep sea is now starting to be scanned by robotic submersibles. But there’s an in between part of the ocean where its too dark for divers to see and too shallow for bots to bother with. The area 150 to 500 feet deep is called the Twilight Zone, at the California Academy of Sciences. And recent expedition to those mysterious waters just off the coast of the Philippines revealed more than 100 new species, reports Grace Singer...

The one common element in recent weather has been oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and hungry seals are washing up on California beaches. A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what’s wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two University of Washington papers to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. “In the fall of 2013 and...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive "dumbos" that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits. A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life. "Parts of the deep sea that we assumed were homogenous are actually quite complex," said Robert S. Carney, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University and a lead researcher...

On Earth Day, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis wanted to make Obama's energy policy perfectly clear: "If we are going to create clean energy industry jobs in this country," they write in a widely syndicated op-ed, "break the stranglehold that foreign oil has on our economy and punish the polluters who are devastating our natural resources, then we've got to be honest about the difficult tasks and tough choices ahead. It's going to mean telling the special interests that their days of dictating energy policy in this country are over." Indeed, and we can...

Read these stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. Wall Street Journal: “Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions” 2. ScienceNOW: “Our Ancestors Were No Swingers” 3. National Geographic News: “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” 4. LiveScience: “Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified” 5. BBC News: “Stem Cells ‘Can Treat Diabetes’” (adult stem cells, that is...) 6. New Scientist: “Praying to God Is Like Talking to a Friend” And much much more at...

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge has ordered the Navy to adopt stringent new safeguards intended to improve protection of whales and dolphins during its sonar training exercises off Southern California. The ruling, issued Thursday by Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, orders the Navy to limit its use of medium-range sonar to an area beyond 12 nautical miles from shore. Closer to the shore, marine mammals have exhibited frenzied and disoriented behavior during the emissions of sonar blasts as part of the Navy’s practice missions. Judge Cooper’s order also outlined...

CHICAGO, April 20 — A virus that has already killed tens of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes is spreading, scientists said, and now threatens almost two dozen aquatic species over a wide swath of the lakes and nearby waterways. The virus, a mutated pathogen not native to North America that causes hemorrhaging and organ failure, is not harmful to humans, even if they eat contaminated fish. But it is devastating to the ecosystem and so unfamiliar, experts said, that its full biological impact might not be clear for years. It is also having a significant impact on...

Pristine seascapeA previously unexplored section of Antarctic sea floor lured marine scientists and their vessel Polarstern to the frozen continent for a voyage of exploration over Christmas and New Year.The trip yielded, said researchers, a wealth of useful information and some undiscovered species.(Image: G Chapelle, IPF/ Alfred Wegener Institute) Unexpected giantAmong the new species was this giant amphipod, a type of crustacean, which researchers caught in baited traps. About 10cm (four inches) long, it is one of the biggest amphipods found in the region.(Image: C d'Udekem, Royal Belgium Institute for Natural Sciences) Key creatureAlready well known to science is...

KEY LARGO, Fla. — Marine scientists hope "test-tube coral babies" will take root to help restore a tract of reef ravaged by a 1984 ship grounding in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. A team of University of Miami marine science researchers is collecting coral eggs and sperm all this week during an annual reproductive ritual, dubbed coral spawning. Looking like an upside-down, underwater snowstorm, most corals in the Keys, Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean release eggs and sperm into the water a few days after the full moon in August. In the wild, eggs and sperm randomly mix...

The Arctic may be devoid of industry and agriculture, but it is slowly turning into a pollutant dump just the same. The phenomenon is known as the grasshopper effect, because the contaminants - including persistent organic compounds like PCB's and DDT - tend to evaporate in the more temperate zones where they are produced, migrate on air currents and condense in the colder polar region. "What we've been seeing over the past 15 years is that the Arctic is essentially acting as a depository for many industrial chemicals," said Jules M. Blais, a biology professor at the University of Ottawa....

Scientists working off the west coast of Africa have identified sardines as an unexpected factor in global warming. The fish are not acting like cattle or termites, whose gassy emissions (to put it politely) add heat-trapping methane to the atmosphere. Sardines improve the situation, the researchers say. Or they might, if they were not being fished out. The scientists say that when sardines are plentiful they gobble up ocean phytoplankton, tiny plants that appear in vast numbers when ocean currents produce upwellings of deep water. But when sardines are scarce, the phytoplankton survive uneaten, only to sink to the bottom,...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 - The Bush administration on Tuesday ruled out the possibility of removing federal dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers to protect 11 endangered species of salmon and steelhead, even as a last resort. In an opinion issued by the fisheries division of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government declared that the eight large dams on the lower stretch of the two rivers are an immutable part of the salmon's environment. Endangered fish, the opinion said, can be protected by a variety of measures, including carrying fish around dams and building weirs - a new...

NOAA Fisheries and scientists from various academic institutions believe they have found a new subspecies of Bryde’s whale in North Carolina. On March 13, 2003, a beach comber found a dead baleen whale on the shore of Carolina Beach near Wilmington, N.C. During studies of tissue samples collected, scientists determined that the animal most likely died from starvation as a result of line entanglement. Scientists also determined that the whale is a member of the baleen whale family and has a unique genetic sequence only seen in one other whale. (Click image for larger view of stranded whale that died...

Toxic Algae Blamed for Marine Species Deaths (Anchor link was wrong: scroll down if you want to read the article on the site. The text is just the same as below.) SACRAMENTO, California, May 7, 2002 (ENS) - Toxic algae may be contaminating shellfish and killing marine mammals and seabirds along the Southern and Central California coast. Domoic acid, a naturally occurring toxic algae [that should be algal toxin], is the suspected culprit, say the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) and Department of Fish and Game (DFG). The agencies say dozens of marine mammals, including dolphins and sea...