Latest Posts by simplyphytoplankton - Page 4

March is Dolphin Awareness Month, and here at Sanctuaries, we love our dolphins! 

Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar Alexandra Avila photographed these Hawaiian spinner dolphins in Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. Spinner dolphins are incredibly gregarious, sometimes gathering in groups of several hundred or more! These dolphins feed at night and return to coastal waters to rest and socialize. Because they rest during the day, it’s important to give them lots of space – would you like someone trying to hang out with you when you’re trying to get some shut-eye? 

(Photo: Alexandra Avila)

What if we told you that a group of gelatinous animals helps control the planet’s climate? Your disbelief would be salp-able! 

Salps are filter-feeding gelata related to pyrosomes that pack up plankton produce into poo pellets that precipitate into the deep, capturing carbon from the atmosphere and tucking it away in the depths of the hydrosphere.

Thanks to local photographers Michelle Manson and Joe Platko for the salp selfies! Joe’s photo on top shows a solitary Pegea confoederata ready to birth the same kind of long chain that Michelle found in her lower photo! 

(The pink orbs are the salps’ guts, and these tubular animals are essentially a passing pasta strainer for plankton!)

Baby loggerhead turtle at home in the sargassum in the Gulf Stream current, where it will spend roughly 5 years, finally being large enough that many animals won’t be able to eat! Sea Turtles have a very difficult life, most of which never make it to maturity and reproduce! Our own existence here on earth as a species is responsible for the death of many beautiful creatures including the sea Turtles, due to mistakes of the past! We have the knowledge, technology and some the drive to fix this, but will we make necessary changes to put our beautiful planet into a sustainable direction? I MOST DEFINITELY WILL! Please join me as our planets future and all creatures are dependent on it! Be the change the world needs! @jim_abernethy #beautiful #babyturtle #gorgeous #cute #precious #underwater #saveturtles #saveoceans (at Jim Abernethy’s Scuba Adventures & Marine Life Art Gallery)

#4—Fun Facts for World Whale Day

Whales are the biggest creatures to ever live on the earth. The largest whale, the blue whale, can be over 90 feet long. The sperm whale, on the other hand, may not be the biggest whale, but it has the biggest brain to have ever existed on Earth.

Learn more about how whales grew to such massive sizes here.

Photo: Smithsonian Institution

Evo-Devo (Despacito Biology Parody) -  A Capella Science

This is how we go from single cells to people.

It’s National Hippo Day, and this is all we got.

Annual Arctic sea ice minimum, 1979-2016

What’s a whale fall?

Whale falls can be found throughout the ocean. This one was spotted in Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, off the coast of Southern California!

GIF transcript beneath the cut.

Keep reading

Prionace glauca by migueldesigns It’s no exaggeration to say the blue shark is one of the most beautiful sharks swimming in the earth’s waters today. It stands out with its slim, elongated, torpedo-shaped body and beautiful swimming style. Sadly, this shark species is among the most highly fished sharks around. Humans catch it for its fins, meat, oil, and as a display animal because of its beauty. About 10 million blue sharks are killed by humans every year! As a result, this shark is listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN. Blue sharks have a deep blue back with white underbelly, large eyes, and long pectoral fins. It has a particularly strong and unique sense of smell.

Darwin is most famous for his theory of evolution. But did you know that much of his life’s work was influenced by his time at sea? 

In the spirit of Darwin Day, here is one of his observations of bioluminescent plankton while aboard the HMS Beagle on October 24, 1832:

“The night was pitch dark, with a fresh breeze. — The sea from its extreme luminousness presented a wonderful & most beautiful appearance; every part of the water, which by day is seen as foam, glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, & in her wake was a milky train. — As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright; & from the reflected light, the sky just above the horizon was not so utterly dark as the rest of the Heavens.” Charles Darwin

Learn more about Darwin’s connection to the ocean from this article at the Ocean Portal.

Photo Credit: unknown, Turin Museum of Human Anatomy

This may look like a beautiful flower blooming beneath the waves, but it’s actually an animal! 

This stalked crinoid was spotted in the deep waters of National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa. The feathery “petals” you see are arms, which this invertebrate uses to grasp small particles of food out of the current. Crinoids can also use these arms to crawl along the seafloor if they need to relocate! 

(Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2017 American Samoa)

Turtle by TomMeyer

Stunning Footage of Sperm Whales Attempting to Communicate With Freedivers Using Clicking Noises

It may be winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but down in Antarctica, it’s currently summertime. This humpback whale migrated south to feast on the plentiful krill along the West Antarctic Peninsula.

Credit:  © Ari Friedlaender

Meet Bruce McCandless. He was a bit of a bad-ass. In 1984, Bruce was aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle and became the first human to walk in space without a safety line. By utilising a nitrogen propelled Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), he stepped free from Challenger into the blackness of space for a 90-minute space walk and wandered as far as 97 meters from the ship. The result is this amazing image which captures ingenuity, innovation and most certainly bravery.

Bruce McCandless died yesterday at the age of 80.

-Jean Image Credit: NASA

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Recently, NASA Goddard released a visualization of aerosols in the Atlantic region. The simulation uses real data from satellite imagery taken between August and October 2017 to seed a simulation of atmospheric physics. The color scales in the visualization show concentrations of three major aerosol particles: smoke (gray), sea salt (blue), and dust (brown). One of the interesting outcomes of the simulation is a visualization of the fall Atlantic hurricane season. The high winds from hurricanes help pick up sea salt from the ocean surface and throw it high in the atmosphere, making the hurricanes visible here. Fires in the western United States provide most of the smoke aerosols, whereas dust comes mostly from the Sahara. Tiny aerosol particles serve as a major nucleation source for water droplets, affecting both cloud formation and rainfall. With simulations like these, scientists hope to better understand how aerosols move in the atmosphere and how they affect our weather. (Image credit: NASA Goddard Research Center, source; submitted by Paul vdB)

From walking around Lake Louise, Alberta.

That was rather impressive

Mid Air Mid octopus

Hatfield Marine Science Center:

Sashay the Pacific Giant Octopus Gets Released Sashay, our stunning and extremely friendly Visitor Center octopus was released back into the wild on November 26th. After being gently introduced into the Yaquina Bay, she temporarily crawled onto land. This gave her human fans a final opportunity to say goodbye.

This type of behavior has not been seen at any of our previous releases and was an unforgettable moment for all who witnessed it. While it was difficult to bid this beautiful animal adieu, we want our octopuses to have the opportunity to reproduce and finish their lives in the wild. We hope you enjoy these photos!

Photos by Volunteer James Upton

When This Sea Slug Eats, It Prefers the Turducken of the Sea

A species of nudibranch was found to engage in what researchers call kleptopredation — “steal your meal and eat you, too.”

Nudibranchs are dainty, colorful, voracious ocean predators. And this species figured out how to get two meals for the price of one!

Dinoflagellates The dinoflagellates are a large group of flagellate protists. Most are marine plankton, but they are common in fresh water habitats as well. They are characterized by two flagella, one girdling the cell and the other trailing the cell. Some dinoflagellates exist in coral, in a symbiotic relationship. These dinoflagellates are termed the zooxanthellae. Other dinoflagellates occur in such high numbers that the water is colored red, a phenomenon known as a red tide.

Some pictures of the diversity and beauty of dinoflagellates, coccolithophorids, and diatoms. :]