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Environmental Blog Midway Atoll Sea Turtle Conservation Wayne Stentman, a former club speaker passed along word of a conservation program.
More info at the Oceanic Society website
We're killing the oceans! In November, the Boston Pheonix featured an article about unsustainable fishing practices and an interview with New England native and National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry. It's an interesting read: We're Killing the Oceans."You take a net, and you scrape it along the bottom to catch shrimp. In the process, everything else — all the little stuff that lives on the bottom, the sponges and the coral and all the habitat for baby animals — you wipe all that out. To catch one pound of shrimp, we might kill 12 pounds of other animals that get thrown back into the sea [dead] as by-catch. "If we did that on land — to catch a single deer you go through the forest and kill all the raccoons and squirrels and skunks and everything that lives there — people would be outraged. Yet you can do it in the ocean and nobody cares."http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/93157-Were-killing-the-oceans/ Ocean Acidification There was a recent article in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Oceanus Newsletter about Ocean Acidification, which shows that the process may actually help certain organizms grow bigger shells (but only up to a certain acidity) Ocean Acidification: A Risky Shell Game More about ocean acidification:
PADI International Cleanup Day 9/19/09 PADI's International Cleanup Day: Project AWARE has scheduled it for September 19, and is asking divers in 100 countries to volunteer to clean up trash, especially plastic bags, in coastal dive sites. All data collected by volunteers will be used in the Ocean Conservancy's Global Marine Debris Index (it reported 1.4 million plastic bags were collected on Cleanup Day last year). You can also organize your own local cleanup project; Project AWARE gives you the tools to get started and record data. Details are at: https://www.projectaware.org/english/take_action/international_cleanup_day.aspx COASTSWEEP 2009The Massachusetts Annual Statewide Beach Cleanup Volunteers throughout Massachusetts turn out in large numbers each year for COASTSWEEP, the state-wide beach cleanup sponsored by the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) and coordinated by the Urban Harbors Institute (UHI) of the University of Massachusetts Boston. COASTSWEEP will kickoff its 22nd year on September 19, 2009. COASTSWEEP is part of the International Coastal Cleanup organized by The Ocean Conservancy in Washington, DC. Participants all over the world collect marine debris and record the types of trash they collect. This information is then used to help reduce future marine debris problems. Each year, thousands of COASTSWEEP volunteers take to the beaches, river banks, and seafloor to help remove debris that would otherwise pollute our oceans. The cleanups are organized at each location by a dedicated local coordinator or beach captain. To volunteer for the 2009 event, organize your own cleanup, or to learn more about COASTSWEEP, see the following links:
If anyone is interested in doing a cleanup, contact Shawn at environmental@neadc.org Beach Cleanup Beach clean up May 30th. Cookout to follow at Camp Harbor View. RSVP to Shawn Cormier at environmental@neadc.org Deadline to respond is May 25 When: Saturday, May 30th, 2009 10:00am—3:00pm Where: Camp Harbor View, Long Island, Boston Harbor, One Mood Island Road, Boston, MA 02171 Why: Camp Harbor View needs a good spring cleaning to get ready for another great summer season What: Activities will include landscaping, gardening, beach clean-up, as well as a multitude of indoor clean-up projects, such as painting and window washing. *Lunch will be served The Bay vs the Bag Very well done video about plastics in the San Francisco Bay Coastsweep 2009 Join us for this annual state-wide cleanup effort! More info as it comes! Stellwagen Bank Report Card NOAA's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary has released the sanctuary's first-ever *Condition Report*, a "report card" on the status of sanctuary resources, the impending release of the draft management plan which we anticipate will be available for public comment in the early summer. The documents can be accessed at http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/science/condition/. The sanctuary appears to be working toward their goals, - the only declining conditions are the invasive [MORE INFO]species and the the negative impacts of fishing gear on maritime archaeological resources. Do Marine Protected Areas Really Work? Here's an interesting aticle from Wood's Hole's Oceanus Magazine about whether closing parts of the ocean to fishing really works to preserve fish stocks. It specifically focuses on George's Bank "These closures have given us a unique opportunity to examine a marine protected area in a temperate system under a “macroscope”—to examine how marine ecosystems are structured and how they function and recover. The long history of research on Georges Bank adds a foundation of scientific knowledge that makes the Georges Bank MPA an ideal system to test the effects of year-round fishery closures." Cleanup photo gallery Photos from the various dive club cleanups are in the scrapbook |
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