WaterNotes

Oh those beautiful armored catfish. When they aren’t invading Florida’s ecosystems and causing me headaches as a naturalist (don’t release your Plecostomus!), they are rather lovely and highly varied creatures swimming natively within the Amazon floodbasin. And the Amazon, as we fish-nerds well know, is one of nature’s hot zones for fish evolution.

As a high school student I was obsessed with one particular genus of Cichlidae, the Apistogramma and their seemingly endless forms. It didn’t hurt that this group is also beautiful, small enough for aquaria, and have mesmerizing courtship and fry-rearing rituals they happily display in an artificial world. The armored catfish are very like them: beautiful, most of them suitable for aquaria, and full of surprises in behavior and adaptation.

Turns out they’re even more surprising then we ever suspected and their adaptations can reach to the extreme. A new species was recently described that actually eats wood. Wood! Its spoon-shaped dentition probably allows for this rather amazing capability. You can read a great interview-styled writeup on the newcomer with the Nature Conservancy’s Dr Paulo Petry here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you want to have animals named after you and discover a new species.. abandon the mammals! Go fish!

Remember the other day when I waxed philosophic about the chances of late-season turtle nests producing any viable hatchlings? Well, if the nests were laid in Palm Beach County, we could’ve added poaching to the list of potential harms. A man in Juno Beach lifted 120 eggs from a single nest for the purpose of selling them in the illegal trade. Eggs sell upwards of $30 a dozen, which seems an insultingly small amount of money to pay to gut the next generation of these incredibly important animals.

Thankfully nearly all the eggs were returned to a nest cavity and the man faces several charges, not the least of which include federal poaching charges.

There is one line in this report that causes me great unease: other nests, monitored by the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, had been tampered with in the past week. Biologists routinely mark out nests with stakes, wildlife-proof fencing, and tags to flag them for tourists and locals alike to avoid damaging the nests. It would appear that sometimes, if poachers cannot follow actively nesting females to their quarry, they simply use the markers as a target for buried treasure.

One more point of issue for turtles, and especially our Florida loogerheads – NMFS has their ESA status on the docket and may upgrade them to “endangered” in the near future. You can encourage this move to better protect the turtles by submitting comments via Oceana. They’re due by September 13th, so get cracking!

After chatting with a good friend last night about the Story of Cosmetics, she pointed out that I’ve never posted EWG’s excellent 10 Americans presentation from their President Ken Cook. And so, here it is, chopped into bite sized easily-downloadable pieces. Informative, more than a bit shocking, and even has its points of laughter. In short: good stuff.

Few things are as adorable as loggerhead hatchlings.  This little one’s hotfoot-scurry to the sea was captured by Lisa Morse, working in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area (via Marine Photobank).

Loggerhead nests abound on the east coast of Florida. During a long beach walk today I was thrilled to count dozens – leading to hundreds – of nests out on the Refuge.  The rather interesting thing: some of these nests are fresh from the past week!

For those of you who are in-the-know about turtle biology, you’ll remember that incubation takes an average of sixty-ish days before the little eggs will be ready to rock and roll.  Sixty days from now is roughly Halloween!  Do turtles hatch that late into the year?   My gut says no, and the reports online seem to suggest that later nests don’t usually make it for reasons varying from coastal flooding and washout from passing tropical systems and hurricanes, to predation and improper temperatures.

Still, I’m curious: why bother going to the trouble, as a Mama Turtle, to haul oneself up that long stretch of sand and dole out huge energy investments in the form of fifty to two-hundred leathery eggs this late in the season?  Did they just not get the message earlier?

Turns out many females will actually build several nests throughout the season and won’t rely on a single clutch.  It does make you wonder though, if the later nests fail so often to yield any young, wouldn’t this behavior tend to weed itself out over time?

Perhaps the turtles are so bent on remembering the coordinates of their natal beaches that they don’t imprint on the timing of their clutches throughout the summer months.  Then again I suppose this is like asking a sea turtle if they know what month of the summer it is.  (Can you picture me crouching with a long pole, microphone attached, yards away from a loggerhead to ask her, “Miss Turtle, do you know the date?  Is it July or August?”?)  If the water’s warm and the seas are fair and the moon is right, maybe they simply continue on with nesting.  Hmm.

Another day another mystery my friends.

The original Story of Stuff has appeared on WaterNotes previously, and now the same folks have taken aim at the cosmetics and personal care industry. I’ve been following EWG and their Cosmetics Safety campaign for nearly four years.   Included in that span of time are many hours spent obsessively logging into the Skin Deep database and checking up on products before (and sometimes after) purchasing them to see their toxicity scores.  (Buyer’s remorse is a strong theme for me if I check it after, this much I will confess.  Thank goodness for the very understanding return policies of such places as Walgreens.)

The problem for me is that organic and low-scoring products just don’t feel the same as the lovely high-lathering super-scented and dreamy concoctions that are loaded with all the tomfoolery.  I invariably go through phases of being extra super good and being incredibly toxically bad.  One week of, “I am never wearing mascara again!” is followed later by: “I am so smoking hot in this brand new mascara!  I should get a ‘script for Latisse and grow a fringe of lashes worthy of a giraffe!”

I’m sure if I were a mother or a wife I’d stick more towards the good end of this scale but as a single girl, I still enjoy experimenting with miracle products that increase my.. erm.. allure. Ok, perceived allure. It’s all very silly, I realize fully; and yet I cannot seem to say no.

At least I’ve been able to eschew the high-scoring likes of my old shampoos, face washes, sunscreens, moisturizers, and especially.. antiperspirants, by replacing them with lower-scoring-if-still-toxic choices.  My goal is to one day only use products that score a 2 or less, but on my budget, such a dream remains quite fully in the pipe.  (That’s the other side problem with the organic and natural and effective products, they’re relative luxuries.)

It’s a good thing my motivation for getting rid of these limitless chemicals (like triclosan which seems to be in absolutely everything) is linked to my love of the water. Contamination with these compounds isn’t unknown in waterways and wells and can, at times, be found in the drinking water supply. Speaking of the water supply, interested to know what sorts of weebeasties are showing up in yours? The EWG has a database for that too.

It’s no secret here at WaterNotes that I have very mixed and rather strong feelings regarding animals – and particularly cetaceans – living in zoos and aquariums. (If you missed it, here’s my take.) The documentary The Cove never sat evenly with me. As an insider in the community of zoological parks, and one with many friends in similar posts at other facilities throughout the US, I knew much of the information hurled about in The Cove to be fractured and somewhat veiled. It was the truth.. but it wasnt the whole truth.

The two videos I’ve posted today do a rather good job of highlighting some of the real numbers associated with the drive fisheries in Japan and also picks apart the alleged links between US facilities and these drives. It’s a good outside viewpoint to consider, and I hope that it becomes just as popular on YouTube as the clips from the main documentary.

Don’t get me wrong – I have not lost sight at all of the real issue at the core of The Cove – but I am pleased to see that someone, however anonymous, has taken up the side of the zoological community to present another angle to this very complex topic.

One of the most interesting partnerships I’ve ever seen captured on film… a labrador retriever and a bottlenose dolphin, frolicking in a bay.