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about 8 years ago
Manta Ray hot lunch Marianas Variety (Press Release) — The Manta Ray Band will be having a hot lunch this Saturday, Feb. 6, 2016, to raise funds for their trip to the Tumon Bay Music Festival on Guam next month. The lunches are $5 each and include fried chicken, lumpia (fried spring roll ...
about 8 years ago
gulfnews.com Whale shark sightings along UAE coast not alarming: experts gulfnews.com Dr. Elsayed Ahmad Mohammed, Regional Director, Middle East and North Africa, of International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), told Gulf News that the recent appearances of the fish make sense given the whale shark feeds close to the surface and often ... and more »
about 8 years ago
KHON2 Whale shark surprises tour group off Haleiwa KHON2 A group led by North Shore Shark Adventures was visited by a whale shark Friday morning, the intimate experience captured on video. They were about three miles off Haleiwa when the shark slowly emerged. “It swam right up to the boat, really slow ... and more »
about 8 years ago
Thanh Nien Daily Carcass of beached whale shark to be preserved by Vietnamese scientists Thanh Nien Daily The Nha Trang Oceanography Institute in central Vietnam has decided to preserve the carcass of a whale shark that died after it got caught in a fishing net last week. Fishermen and local authorities on Thursday handed over the dead fish to the institute. Giant whale shark to be embalmed for scientific researchVietNamNet Bridge all 2 news articles ...
about 8 years ago
National Geographic Manta Rays Get Crittercams for First Time Ever National Geographic We didn't think suction cups would work because manta ray skin is really rough like sand paper. We knew suction cups worked well on the smooth skin of whales. The cups were originally designed to move pieces of glass. But we gave it a try, and with a ... Scripps Grad Student Receives Prestigious Environmental FellowshipScripps Oceanography News all 4 news articles » ...
about 8 years ago
Video From a Whale Shark's Point of View National Geographic Their goal was to deploy Crittercams on whale sharks to get a glimpse of the sharks' underwater world and to better understand their behavior along the reef. Like most people, Wilhelm had never seen a whale shark. He worked on the Crittercams for about ... and more »
about 8 years ago
Zap2It Dominic Monaghan on meeting the Whale Shark: 'I had this sort of out of body experience' Zap2It “Wild Things With Dominic Monaghan” returned to Travel Channel with its third season on Wednesday (Jan. 27). The premiere, aptly titled, “Majestic Mozambique,” finds our host on the hunt for the elusive — and quite massive — Whale Shark. Early on in ... Monaghan knows where the 'Wild Things' areVirgin Islands Daily News all 9 news articles ...
about 8 years ago
CBC.ca Brian Keating swims alongside La Paz's mysterious whale sharks CBC.ca They're such huge animals," said Keating, who saw his first whale shark less than 15 minutes out of the bay. By the day's end, Keating had met at least a dozen whale sharks. He even managed to snap a few underwater photos from their tail end as proof.
about 8 years ago
FIS Fishing ban for giant manta ray FIS The Ministry of Production (Produce) has banned the capture of the giant manta ray (Manta birostris) in the Peruvian marine waters, in order to preserve this species on the coast of the country. The measure, established by a ministerial decree, is in ... and more »
about 8 years ago
The National Whale shark seen swimming in Abu Dhabi marina The National ABU DHABI // A whale shark between three and four metres long has been seen swimming in the marina at the InterContinental Abu Dhabi. Employees at the hotel first noticed the fish at 1.45pm on Friday and quickly took a video and photos to capture the ...
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Entries in behaviour (4)

Sunday
Nov142010

Sometimes *they* look at us too

Check out this cool bit of footage from our recent research visits to Mexico to study whale sharks with the Georgia Aquarium team.  We were diving under a large aggregation of whale sharks when one of them broke from the surface to come and visit, checking out first one diver, and then the other, possibly attracted by the bubbles.  Whale sharks normally cruise around at the surface, largely indifferent to human presence except for occasionally rolling their eye across you as they pass, but this one was clearly interacting with us.  Colleague Betty Galvan tells me about a small (if 4m could be considered small) female that followed her for 20 minutes in Honduras one time, so interactive she described it as being like a puppy.  I suspect, when conditions are right, whale sharks can be curious or even inquisitive critters.  Its hard to prove, but I don’t think there’s much doubt from the video.  The aquarium has been conducting a behavioural study on the collection animals for some time, but more work on their behaviour in the natural setting is desperately needed.  Hopefully the aquarium study can refine the techniques needed to get out there and understand what they do in the field.

 

You can follow my YouTube channel here, or the aquarium’s channel here. Footage Copyright 2010 Bruce Carlson/Georgia Aquarium and used with permission

Friday
Oct012010

Look who's talkin'

Interesting news in a study thats in pre-publication in Ethology about mixed species schools of dolphins and the communication patterns that take place within them.  The author, Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico, hypothesised that when bottlenosed dolphins and Guyana dolphins school together, differences between their respective songs ought to be exaggerated in order to avoid confusion and enhance communication within species.  [Whales have been shown to alter their song to meet surrounding conditions, most recently in papers that describe long-term increases in song volume to offset the increasing background of human-made noise in the oceans.]  What she found was the exact opposite: calls became more homogeneous (with less variation between species), with the signal stucture (the waveform of the whistle as seen, for example, on an oscilloscope) converging on a form intermediate between the bottlenosed and Guyana whistles. Her first conclusion is that this represents a change on the part of the smaller Guyana dolphin to reduce social stress (placation, if you will) but its also possible that the dolphins might be using a common language.  If so, that would be one of the first examples of interspecies communication and it would be quite different from how humans do it, wherein one participant nearly always tries to change to the other participants language, not that boh participants find an intermediate language (I guess this is because human languages are too complex to easily invent intermediate forms).  Dr. May-Collado was unable to determine which explanation was the correct one because her equipment couldn’t distinguish which individuals were making the sounds, but its certainly a tantalizing view into the chatter that goes on between species in the ocean.

Guyana dolphin in front, bottlenosed behind. Click pic for original story

 

Thursday
Mar252010

Your calamari wants a flat screen

ResearchBlogging.orgOctopuses and their relatives are just incredible animals.  Not only do they manage to coordinate hundreds of suckers on 8 arms simultaneously without tripping over themselves (I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast) and have the most advanced eyes in the invertebrate world, but they can do other cool stuff like eat sharks,  fit through holes much smaller than themselves, use tools and learn from each other.  Now a new study has shown that they can tell the difference between regular TV and HD.  How did they determine this?  Simply, as it turns out.  The octopus show no reaction to footage of other octopus or crabs shown to them on regular TV screens.  When shown real crabs or crab footage in hi-def, however, the octopus lunged as if to attack the hapless decapod (video link).  In other words, octopus can tell the difference between real and imagery, if the image is not of high enough quality.
The explanation appears to lie not in the resolution of the screen (how small the pixels are) so much as how fast the picture can be draw and redrawn on the screen.  The picture on a TV screen is constantly being created line-by-line from the top of the screen in a process called rastering.  We don't perceive this rastering because it happens faster than we can see; faster than our "critical flicker frequency".  Well, not everyone has the same critical flicker frequency, and nor do all televisions have the same rastering rate.  Most hi-def TV's have a higher frequency (120 or even 240Hz, or times-per-second).  It may be that low-def TV is below the octopus critical flicker, but hi-def is above it.  In this way, they would see a sort of strobing effect in normal footage, but the hi-def stuff would look like, well, a crab.
The authors also noticed that the octopus showed "episodic personality", which is to say they were interested in the crab (or footage of another octopus) some times but not others.  I'm not sure I would class that as evidence of personality, just a less-than-100%-predictable response to a stimulus.  Having said that, ocotpus do have obvious personalities, which is one reason people are so drawn to them.  That, and sweet chilli sauce...

Pronk, R., Wilson, D., & Harcourt, R. (2010). Video playback demonstrates episodic personality in the gloomy octopus Journal of Experimental Biology, 213 (7), 1035-1041 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.040675

Tuesday
Dec152009

Octopus using tools

I couldn't let this go by.  My wife is something of a behavioural expert and a very good animal trainer, and we have often discussed how intelligent octopus are.  In that respect this isn't news, but the tool use is pretty cool and very exciting for behavioural scientists, what with them being invertebrates and all (the octopus that is, not the scientists...).