Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Be Good n Be Safe!

Algeria Going Orange

I was looking through a science news website and read an interesting article on the use of orange peels. Waterways in Algeria are pretty grungy looking due to the high amount of chemicals and dye dumped in the water by industries. Normally they try to clean this up with expensive chemicals (cleaning chemicals using chemicals...hmmm) so they came up with an alternative way of soaking up these chemicals and dyes naturally, ORANGE PEELS! They did a small controlled study and it seemed to work great with four major chemicals/dyes so now they just have to do a little more research to replicate these results but in a bigger scale. If all goes well, we soon might see orange peels floating around in our waterways. Hopefully they look into how this might affect the aquatic ecosystem in the long run.

Wanna read up on it, check it out at : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020093500.htm

ENJOY!

Presenting: Thalassia testudinum

Above is a photo of the seagrass I work with daily. It's also known as Turtle Grass and can be found locally ( Laguna Madre). The picture above is how the seagrass bed looks like in its natural habitat but I have several tanks filled with these species behind the science building. We've been conducting a number of experiments on this seagrass and have produced some nice results but the questions keep coming! Anyways, just wanted to my specimen its 'fifteen minutes of fame' and give whoever reads this a little background information of my work.

Kingdom: PLANTAE
Division: ANTHOPHYTA
Class: MONOCOTYLEDONEAE
Order: HELOBIAE
Family: HYDROCHARITACEAE
Genus: Thalassia
Species: testudinum

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
>Leaves are flat and linear (strap-like)
>Leaf blades are 10-12 mm long and 4. 5-10 mm wide
>Rhizomes are scaly

HABITAT
>Commonly occurs in subtidal waters from low tide to 10 m deep
>In clear water the species is found in water up to 30 m deep
>Prefers mud and/or mud substrates in relatively sheltered locations

A 'Virgin Birth'?

It's been a while since I've logged on here but I couldn't resist to share the article I recently read up on from ScienceDaily.com. Apparently there has been a second case of a 'virgin birth' by a shark. The first was discovered back in 2007 on a female hammerhead and the recent case was that of a female blacktip shark named Tidbit. In the case of Tidbit, she had only recently sexually matured but hadn't had any contact with male sharks in the eight years she was at the aquarium. Unfortunately this discovery came about when she died and was undergoing a necroscopy. There was no evidence of a genetic father in the pup and they were surprised she was even pregnant. The important discovery of this to scientists was not so much that they underwent parthenogenesis but the fact that with over fishing occurring and a decline in shark populations the females can possibly start increasing their numbers by undergoing this process. The downside though, when they undergo normal sexual reproduction they give birth to a litter of pups but when they undergo 'virgin birth' they only produce a single pup. This discovery does raise many more questions and studies are being conducted but one thing is sure, this 'virgin birth' has definitely shed a little light on the growing problem of sharks population downfall.

I wanted to do that!!

It's official, what I was seriously considering for my graduate work has been taken. I wanted to be able to predict a way to prevent HABs from occurring which is something I'm sort of working on (predicting to prevent) with my undergrad research. I'm so bummed right now! That brainstorming and research took me a good while to think up, all that for nothing! GRRRR...... read up it's interesting stuff.

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080930144214.htm>