WaterNotes

By drawing some deep parallels and contrasts between humans and animals Professor Robert Sapolsky makes some fascinating connections in this talk filmed at Stanford University and highlighted by TED’s Best of the Web feature earlier this week.  I particularly loved the mention of stickleback behavior (of course) but the final thoughts on culture – as [...]

A report released in Polar Biology had an interesting incident involving an overeager king penguin to relate.  Apparently a researcher happened upon a particular king that had decided he was ready to raise some offspring.   Since it was too early for king penguin breeding season, the adult went after his neighbors’ chick which belonged to a pair of skua [...]

Bottlenose dolphin have previously gone sponging in order to hunt down prey items, but no one realized they also had a recipe for success when it comes to dining on cuttlefish. Behold: Preparing the Perfect Cuttlefish Meal: Complex Prey Handling by Dolphins. Observations of a single female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) yielded the insight [...]

I’ve always loved the life history quirks of the mangrove rivulus. Unfortunately its a little too quirky for the likes of my regular students who are certainly too young or too silly to hear the scoop. And why am I intrigued by them? Well, most of the little fish – found in the IRL system [...]

Hundreds of ocean predators take advantage of a natural tendency of swarms to coalesce and to behave as a large synchronized group despite a lack of higher ordered thought or direction.  Steven Strogatz gave a beautiful presentation about this natural patterning in fireflies, swallows, and so many schools of fish, particularly as they evade predators.  [...]

Wild bottlenose dolphins, given their widespread distribution across several ocean systems, display a wide variety of peculiar behaviors including carrying objects.  The question has remained, are these objects play things or is this carrying behavior an adaptive one that helps bottlenose survive? For a subset of the bottlenose population in Shark Bay, Australia, sponge-carrying (or [...]

While the JKL pods get lots of attention off the Pacific coastline we often forget that killer whales can be found in a variety of other US waters including the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico.  A recent deep sea fishing charter had the fantastic luck to [...]