11 August 2023

As if they are wearing white tie and tails, black-necked stilts look formal in black and white. Their beauty is enhanced by reflections in their watery habitat.

The mothers look more casual when protecting their chicks. As you can tell by the sound track on this video, the chicks are adorable.

Black-necked stilts (Himantopus mexicanus) are native only to the Americas, mostly South America. Check the map for their breeding zones to see their tiny chicks.

(photos and map from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)

4 August 2023

Except for a few scientific probes, we humans know almost nothing about the deep sea, yet remote as it is it contains human evidence. Even in the deepest sea a plastic bag floats by.

It was far too easy to find clips of plastic bags in our #deepsea video footage ?#PlasticFreeJuly pic.twitter.com/8sV9H1GsDT

— Deep Sea Research Centre (@deepseauwa) July 3, 2023

Meanwhile, because the sea floor has no owner, mining companies are chomping at the bit to extract minerals from the deep sea in the absence of any rules to protect it. The companies claim the minerals to be used in electronics would mitigate climate change (really?) but what will the mining damage?

Last month the International Seabed Authority (ISA) met in Jamaica to discuss potential rules to allow deep sea mining. In the end they deferred the decision until next year. This video explains why the topic is so ‘hot’ right now and the potential dangers.

For a lengthy explanation see this 2021 video from the Economist: Mining the deep sea: the true cost to the planet.

(*) The deep sea floor has no “owner” because in international waters it is owned by all of us.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, tweet and video embedded)

7 July 2023

This weekend I’m at Cape Cod where some of the beaches are cordoned off to protect piping plover nests and chicks.

Piping plovers are also protected in Queens by the NYC Plover Project, @NycPlover that tweeted 10 amazing facts about these cute endangered birds.

This endangered piping plover chick is 14 days old.

HERE ARE 10 PIPING PLOVER FACTS:

1. Piping plover chicks must feed themselves from birth.

? pic.twitter.com/8OnqzSOyiH

— NYC Plover Project (@NycPlover) July 3, 2023

I have unspooled the thread below for those of you who don’t have Twitter access.

NYC Plover Project @NycPlover

Gateway Natl Rec Area and 9 others
5:06 PM · Jul 3, 2023 from Queens, NY

HERE ARE 10 PIPING PLOVER FACTS:

1. Piping plover chicks must feed themselves from birth.

2. Once they hatch, chicks don’t have a home base or nest.

3. Both parents fiercely protect them but they must have undeterred access to the water’s edge to feed.

4. If they don’t, they will die.

5. Few plover chicks live long enough to fly.

6. Once they are able to fly – at about 1 month – they are over a significant hurdle but still face many threats.

7. Piping plovers are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. They are also protected under New York State law as a NYS endangered species.

8. There are fewer piping plovers than polar bears on earth.

9. Multiple states including NY, NJ, MA, ME, IL, temporarily close beaches where plover chicks are present. This saves their young fragile lives.

10. As few as 6,000 piping plovers are left on the planet. A little inconvenience for us – for our day at the beach – can save their young lives. This is not a hard predicament. Let’s do it.

#protecttheplovers

— Quoted from 3 July 2023 Tweet from NYC Plover Project @NycPlover

If you come upon a protected beach, please honor the barriers and keep your dogs away. These tiny birds depend on us.

UPDATE on 7 JULY 2023: Today I saw baby piping plovers in the protected zone at Sea Gull Beach in Yarmouth, MA. So cute!!

(click on the links to see the originals)

28 June 2023

It’s time for summer vacation when we climb over grassy dunes to get to the beach.

Beach grass planted on our sandy coasts stabilizes dunes and protects against storms. As the grass expands it holds down larger areas and provides more protection, but a new study published this month in Science Advances found that dune grass fails in major storms.

The same scientists that taught us the value of dune grass realized they’d never tested it for major storms. Rusty Feagin, a coastal ecologist at Texas A&M University, decided to simulate the effects of Hurricane Sandy (October 2012) so he teamed up with Oregon State University where they house the largest wave tank complex in the U.S. It’s longer than a football field (104 m).

The team set up two dunes, one planted in dune grass whose roots spent six months taking hold, the other a bare dune. “VD” = vegetated dune, “BD” = bare dune

Then they pounded the dunes with a Hurricane Sandy simulation — 19 hours of punishing waves — stopping every half-hour to laser-scan the dunes.

On the bare dune the waves rolled straight up slope (“BD runup”) and removed sand but left the slope basically the same. On the vegetated dune the waves undercut the grass and caused a cliff, making the dune more vulnerable in future storms. (“VD runup” and yellow circle)

Here’s what the vegetated dune looked like near the end of the storm (from above and the cliff face).

Here’s a real life example of major storm damage to a grassy dune.

Feagin says we should still use dune grass, but change our expectations. Science Magazine explains:

Even if the plants cause dunes to erode in severe conditions, Feagin says, it’s still worth having them for protection from milder storms. “When that medium-small storm hits, [the dune] is going to do its job, but the giant [storm] every 10 years is gonna take it out.” And vegetated dunes have advantages over concrete walls for storm protection, because native plants can grow and spread. That means the plants can help dunes increase in size as they trap sand, and perhaps keep up with rising sea levels.

The take-home point of paper is “more about managing expectations” of vegetated dunes, Feagin says. They are not a panacea for coastal protection, he suggests — and land managers shouldn’t expect them to deliver permanent stability.

Read more about the dune grass experiment in Science Magazine: In a twist, beach grass could make dunes more vulnerable to storms. See the study itself in Science Advances.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons and Science Advances: Does vegetation accelerate coastal dune erosion during extreme events?, Creative Commons license)

23 June 2023

While the media focused this week on the search for a missing tourist submersible that imploded on its way to the wreck of the Titanic, we saw underwater search footage illuminated by headlights. Beginning at the ocean’s twilight zone, 200-1000 meters below the surface, headlights are required because sunlight cannot reach that deep. In underwater darkness deep sea creatures use bioluminescence.

In 2005, for the first time, Japanese scientists filmed a Dana octopus squid (Taningia danae) and saw its “headlamps” or photophores on the tips of two tentacles, some of the largest such organs known to science and comparable in size to fists or lemons. It is so dark in this squid’s natural habitat, 240 to 940 meters below the surface, that scientists believe the lights are used to stun its prey.

In September 2015 NOAA’s ship Okeanos Explorer was roving the undersea world near Hawaii with a robotic submersible when two Taningia danae approached the robot and acted aggressively.

Were the squid annoyed by the man-made headlights?

Maybe they thought the headlights were the signal of a competitor.

(photo and video credits are in the captions; click on the captions to see the originals)

6 May 2023

This was the week the north wind blew and it rained until Friday. This week an American bittern and sora spent more than 7 days at pond-sized Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park. They were still there yesterday in sunshine.

After I saw the bittern in pouring rain last Friday the sora eluded me. On Sunday evening I drove to Schenley Park just before dusk and aaarrg! I left my binoculars at home! Too late to go get them I went down to the pond and hoped for a ‘naked eye’ sighting.

Soras (Porzana carolina) are in the rail family but aren’t nearly as “thin as a rail.” Instead they look plump but surprisingly small. They weigh as much as an American robin but have very short tails. Knowing what size to look for is key to finding one.

Standing silently at The Spot To See The Sora (birders’ pindrop) I watched the bird come out to feed at dusk among the reeds. Without binoculars he looked like this.

Charity Kheshgi had better looks than I did.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Charity Kheshgi (@charitykheshgi)

Before I left I heard the sora vocalizing after he’d walked back into the reeds. The Merlin app refused to identify him. (“That bird can’t be here so I’m not telling you it is.”) My Merlin recording is too muddy to post but this is what the sora sounded like:

(photos by Charity Kheshgi)