The Hook that Caught the Fish that Saves the Corals that Inspired the Artist
By Daniel de la Calle Here are a few Ocean and Ocean Acidification news bits found while surfing the web over the past week. I hope some are news to you: •How long has man been catching fish from the open ocean? 42,000 years at the very least. Archeologists from the Australian National […]
Interview with Sven
By Daniel de la Calle On this rainy morning I had the chance to meet with Sven for a cup of tea and a half hour chat in his kitchen. We had not done an official interview for the blog since May of last year, so an update on A Sea Change and the […]
Reconsider Your Shrimp
By Daniel de la Calle » Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass. is hosting an Oceans Symposium and next Monday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m., Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker, will lead a discussion following a showing of A Sea Change, Imagine a World Without Fish. » Beautiful new documentary on the oceans […]
Research News and Job Opportunities
By Daniel de la Calle I bring you some research news and job opportunities to start the week: •The University of Alaska Fairbanks placed its first Ocean Acidification buoy in Alaskan waters last April. “This is the first dedicated ocean acidification mooring to be deployed in a high-latitude coastal sea,” said Jeremy Mathis, principal […]
Taganga
By Daniel de la Calle While in Santa Marta, on Colombia’s eastern Caribbean coast, a old beggar in front of a supermarket told me he was a fisherman in a small neighboring village called Taganga. He explained that fishing was worse these days. The last few days he caught enough to eat, but was there […]
The Tough Choice
By Daniel de la Calle Let me ask you this question: in the fight to save ecosystems and biodiversity around the globe, do you think we should begin targeting those areas and species with more chances of survival? Or should most funding resources still go to those areas that seem more fragile, more threatened by […]
Saint Nicholas Post
By Daniel de la Calle As advanced celebration of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker tomorrow, here are a few links, photos, videos and news for you all, stuffed inside the shoes you are putting out tonight: •A team of scientists at Santa Cruz’s University of California have spent the past three years studying the submarine […]
Knitted Corals, A Jellyfish Light And A Song
By Daniel de la Calle Looking for news about Ocean Acidification tends to be devastating, feels like swimming in a sea of storms in the quest of a single ray of light. Each hand stroke leaves you caught between the huge waves of poisoned destruction and that those fruitless political name calling all matters environmental […]
To Save Corals
By Daniel de la Calle Right where you read these words now many others have stood, layer upon layer, in a frustrated attempt to write about corals and my dives at the Tayrona National Park back in June. They were not the problem, the source of trouble was the confusing mixture of sensations and […]
Ocean Acidification News on the Web
By Daniel de la Calle Some Ocean Acidification news for this beginning of May: ¤Symposium on Ocean Acidification to be held in Canberra, Australia from the 15th to the 17th of June 2011. The event is titled Ocean Acidification and Implications for Living Marine Resources in the Southern Hemisphere and aims to: “enhance the […]
Sanctuary
By Daniel de la Calle Islands make for miniature universes, like snow globes: they transform a few miles distance into the crossing of a continent, produce insular dwarfism (where even the animals try to scale down and look only into the restricted cosmos) and remarkable adaptation from its species. I know what it […]
Ocean Acidification News, Again
By Daniel de la Calle I know it has been a while since we last posted news about Ocean Acidification and other related environmental problems on the blog. In an effort to catch up with the latest information out there, here we offer a first list: •Scientists launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature […]
That Elusive Golden Past
By Daniel de la Calle The screening at Maloka and the countless interviews in Bogotá couldn’t have gone any better. Some sort of miracle, some magic must have turned my pumpkin backpack into the Ocean Acidification ambassador’s golden chariot (caught up in the worst traffic jams ever, though!) and I was welcomed like royalty, asked […]
Videos Of Present & Future Inventions
By Daniel de la Calle This weekend I wanted to take a look at inventions, some that look like science fiction but are in fact here with us now, other technologies that still need years or decades in development to be functional but that look promising, ingenious, and cheap simple ideas that are changing the […]
Autumn News
By Daniel de la Calle •Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientists have launched a sophisticated, unique tool to study the effects of Ocean Acidification on deep-sea animals in their native habitat, using free-flowing water. The idea behind Free-Ocean Carbon Enrichment (FOCE) is to create a test area on the seafloor where seawater pH […]
Environmental Capitalism
By Daniel de la Calle Richard Conniff wrote a brilliant piece last year titled “What are species worth? Putting a price on biodiversity” : Had you ever heard about Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacteria responsible for 20% of the oxygen we breathe? It might have only been discovered 25 years ago, but was playing this vital role […]
Little Red Dots
By Daniel de la Calle• Don’t be afraid to scratch if they itch: •Anyone who has been to the Pacific Northeast in general and to Puget Sound in particular can bear witness to its beauty and uniqueness. An invisible contributor to this distinctiveness lies in the origin of its waters: strong currents bring […]
Weekend Material
By Daniel de la Calle ¤Marine Spacial Planning presents a rational approach to ocean management. The system tries to “allocate space in the ocean allowing compatible uses to coexist, separating incompatible ones, all while protecting the environment”. This video presentation with Philippe Cousteau explains things in more detail: “The ocean economy in the USA […]
Pizza Vs. Sushi
By Daniel de la Calle Researchers believe we should prepare ourselves for a world with more anchovies and less tuna: Various recent studies indicate a constant decrease in the number of marine predators; from sharks to tuna, our “lions and tigers of the seas” are becoming less and less abundant. If certain key elements […]
Books, Projects and PhDs
By Daniel de la Calle “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer ¤The European Union is launching this April a new three-year project called Mediterranean Sea Acidification in a changing climate (MedSeA). Its goal is to […]
I Am Costly
By Daniel de la Calle I confess I get irritated by the carbon footprint/credit scheme. Some months ago I did some research to try to understand just how carbon credits work, where you can buy them, how individual and national emissions are measured and I found the system to be complicated, bias, Kafkaesque. Here we […]
Please welcome: the amazing octopus
By Daniel de la Calle During my first year of college I studied Law. I did not know what to do and my father was convinced it suited me, so between nothing and Law, Law it was. For two semesters the only lectures that caught my attention were about Roman Law. Not only was the […]
Some News, Some Information
By Daniel de la Calle Our poor blog has remained silent for over two weeks. I do not know how to make excuses sound like explanations, so my excuses are that I was busy showing Barbara Ettinger (our director) and Sven Huseby (our protagonist) my side of the world and after their departure I suffered […]
The Highest High, The Lowest Low
By Daniel de la Calle Today is World Water Day. All kinds of events must be taking place around the planet with the spotlight on water, on its current state and its importance to us living creatures. Some of them will surely point out our dependency on good water and the paradoxical way we treat […]
Brazil, Lessons in Coexistence and Incongruence
By Daniel de la Calle What you see below is Brazil: While going through some of the pictures I took here I was struck by the realization that exactly what makes this country so fascinating is what turns it so easy to hate, impossible not to love, so tricky to fully grasp. Everything happens together, […]