Spongebob and Patrick sighting!

There's a certain sponge and his friend, a seastar, in a television cartoon. If you've ever caught a few minutes of the cartoon show with SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick, you'll recognise those characters in some real sea creatures filmed by a remotely operated undersea vehicle. Click here for a link to a short article on an Ocean Explorers website, with a 1 minute video. Take a minute to enjoy a live square sponge and a live pink starfish, filmed by a little submarine steered remotely by scientists.

This little video was filmed in 2021 during the North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition, which you can read about at this link. The goals and objectives of this expedition are summed up on another page, which you can read about at this link, with discussions of mapping and animal observations, and the search for ferromanganese rocks. This expedition by scientists and several young interns was one of many interesting ocean exploration expeditions, which you can find at this link if you're looking for more on ocean science!

 

Salty Slug Love

Slippery, slimy, oozy slugs; what’s not to love? Slugs can be small and slugs can be as long as your arm! Slugs can be sausage shaped and brown, or they can have leaves, legs, and lots of rainbow colours! They can live anywhere wet, and lots live under the sea. 

Salty Samples 

Sea slugs are a family of boneless animals that contain a particularly fancy looking molluscs called nudibranchs. Usually they’re small enough to fit on your hand, but they can be as long as a sheet of binder paper. Their shapes and colours result in names like “dragon” and “orange peel,” or “sea bunny,” “dancer” and “clown.” Start an image search and you could browse pictures of fanciful nudibranchs all day. There are more than 3000 kinds! 

Pantry Paint Packs 

Like flamingoes get their pink colour from their food, nudibranchs get their colour from their diet too. Check out this little creature that looks like a sheep that rolled in cut grass! It’s the leafy sheeps’ algae diet that makes them green. They store the chloroplasts from their food and that means photosynthesis happens inside their bodies like it does in plants. 

Nudibranch Brunch 

Nudibranchs are carnivorous! They eat algae, sponges, and even other sea slugs. Some also eat coral and even stinging jellyfish, and that makes them a bit toxic. Like the leafy sheep keeps some chloroplasts from its food, the jellyfish eating “blue dragon” keeps some of the stinging cells from its food. Like a lot of colourful things in nature, the bright hues warn us that they can hurt. Touching them can sting. 

Making Nudibranchs 

Any two nudibranchs can make babies together, because they all have both sex organs. They’re hermaphrodites, just like earthworms and most snails are. About 5 of every 100 animal species are hermaphroditic.

A gooey ribbon of fertilized eggs will hatch into nudibranchs that look just like their parents but smaller. Depending on the type, there can be 2 eggs or 25 million! Once they leave the nest, they’ll live just a few weeks to a year. 

Notice Nudibranchs 

To see a nudibranch in person, you’ll have to go out into the ocean because they don’t survive captivity for long. But you’ll find some of these saltwater slugs along every ocean coast — except in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. They love coral reefs. You will find nudibranchs in shallow water and way down in the deep. Look on the bottom, and remember they’re usually very small. Most photos of these creatures are taken with a close-up macro lens.

Moby, we hardly knew ya!

By Claire Eamer

I recently wrote an article for Hakai Magazine, an online magazine about coastal life and science, on the accuracy (or lack of it) in the way whales are portrayed in children's books. Researching that article led me to a great irony: whole species and populations of cetaceans -- both whales and dolphins -- are at risk of extinction because of humans, while, at the same time, we humans are just realizing how amazing and possibly how like us cetaceans are. We could lose whales -- or, at least, a great many of them -- before we really get to know them.

A blue whale surfaces in the open ocean. Pixabay photo

The Bad News First

 Instead of teeth, blue whales and
right whales have baleen, plates
made of keratin, that sieve food
out of the water.
Claire Eamer photo

The bad-news side of that equation is how much damage we have already done to the world's whales. Take, for example, the blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived on Earth. Before the days of commercial whaling, the world population was probably about 250,000. Today, 50 years after an international ban on hunting blue whales went into effect, the world population has recovered to somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 individuals, scattered across all the world's oceans except the Arctic Ocean. That's a tenth or less of what the world once supported.

Other whale species are further from recovery -- some maybe too far. North Atlantic right whales had a terrible year in 2017. At least 17 died in the waters off Atlantic Canada and the Atlantic coast of the United States, most as a result of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear. The most recent estimates put the population of North Atlantic right whales at about 430. About 100 are reproductive females, but after the most recent breeding season no new calves have been spotted. Some scientists have warned that the whales are just a couple of decades from extinction if nothing changes.

The waters around southern Vancouver Island, where I live, are home to a population of killer whales that is in just as much trouble as the North Atlantic right whales. Maybe even more trouble. The southern resident killer whales are fish-eaters -- and a whale can eat a lot of fish. They rely heavily on chinook salmon, which used to return to their spawning grounds along the coast of the Pacific Northwest in huge numbers. But commercial fishing, habitat destruction, and contaminants have reduced the numbers of chinook and, along with them, the numbers of fish-eating killer whales. The southern resident killer whale population is down to just 76 individuals at last count, and even those few have having trouble finding enough salmon to stay alive and healthy.

Killer whales, whether they eat fish or mammals, have impressive sets
of sharp teeth to catch and hold their prey. Claire Eamer photo

And Now the Good News

The good news is that we're learning a lot about whales, both through science and through a growing recognition of the traditional knowledge of whale-hunting cultures, such as the Inuit and other peoples of the Arctic. Perhaps if we know enough about them, we will care enough to save and protect them. As a start, here are some cool facts about whales.

Whales have cultures. They pass knowledge and forms of communication down from generation to generation. The southern resident killer whales know how and where to hunt for salmon, and they pass that information on to their calves. The Bigg's killer whales (also known as transients) know how to hunt sea mammals, such as seals and sea lions, and they pass that information along, generation after generation, possibly for millennia. A 2010 genetic study showed that Bigg's killer whales, which often hunt in the same waters as the southern resident killer whales, have been separate from other killer whale populations for 700,000 years.

Whales have language. And they sing songs. The long and complex songs of humpback whales have fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike for decades, but they're not the only singing whales. Most recently, scientists working near Svalbard in the Arctic catalogued 184 different song types sung by bowhead whales in the icy dark of an arctic winter.

Whales are like us in another important way -- they're mammals and they breathe air. However, over millions of years, their bodies have adapted to life in the water. Their nostrils moved to the tops of their heads and became blowholes that can suck in a lungful of air at the water's surface. The passage leading from their mouths to their lungs -- that's what lets us breathe through our mouths -- closed off so that they could gulp up food under water without drowning.

A Bigg's killer whale, its blowhole clearly visible, swims past
 the shore of Vancouver Island. Alan Daley photo

And they learned to sleep without breathing in water instead of air. A whale or dolphin rests only half its brain at a time. The other half stays slightly awake in order to make sure the animal opens its blowhole to take a breath of air and closes it to keep out water. After the sleeping half of the brain has had a thorough rest, it takes over breathing and swimming duties while the other half sleeps. Scientists call this method cat-napping but whale-napping seems a much better name!

That's just a taste of the amazing things we've learned about whales. If we can avoid harming them further with noise, pollution, fishing gear entanglement, ship strikes, habitat destruction, and all the other dangers we have created for them, we could learn so much more.

Explore Under the Sea, Live and Online

By Claire Eamer

From the website of the research ship, Okeanos Explorer: "From March 7 – 29, 2017, NOAA and partners will conduct a telepresence-enabled ocean exploration expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to collect critical baseline information about unknown and poorly known deepwater areas in the Howland and Baker Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument and the Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

NOTE: ROV dives are planned, weather permitting, most days from March 8 - March 27, typically from about 8 am to 5 pm WST (March 7 - March 26, from 2 pm to 11 pm EDT)."

If you go to the dive website, you can watch the whole of the dive, seeing just what the scientists are seeing, and you hear scientists discussing what they are observing in real time. Warning: it's addictive!

A seastar is wrapped around the branches of a coral, hundreds of metres beneath
the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Screen capture from Okeanos Explorer feed.

Robert Ballard, science explorer

By Paula Johanson

It's good to have heroes. There are science heroes for us all to admire and aspire to imitate. One of the greats is Robert Ballard.

There's plenty to read about Robert Ballard in September 2015's issue of Popular Mechanics. Or on the CBC's website where he was profiled in August. I heard him on CBC Radio One's show All Points West, talking about his youth and his entry into ocean science. When he was a child, he wrote to Scripps Institute saying he wanted to be an oceanographer. They gave him a scholarship when he was old enough to study there. It took years, but he became part of that world of wonders.

The name Robert Ballard might not be recognised right away. You've heard of the black smoker vents at the bottom of the ocean? Ballard discovered them in 1977. But you might know of him as the person who found the Titanic. Remember him now?

This photo is borrowed from Popular Mechanic's Sept 2015 issue.

Now his exploration vessel Nautilus (of course. it's named the Nautilus for the amazing vessel in Jules Verne's book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea!) is run by the Ocean Exploration Trust, of which Ballard is president. Most of his corps of scientists are university students and graduate students in oceanography, geology, biology, archaeology, engineering, or film-making. And like most students, more than half of them are women. When Ballard is not on board the Nautilus, he is connected to its amazing technology by phone and the internet. So are dozens of experts all over the world, consulted at any hour of the day or night by the intrepid crew of the Nautilus during its explorations.

The scientists make use of two submersibles that are essentially robot submarines with cameras and tools that can be controlled from on board the ship. At the end of August 2015, the ship was off Vancouver Island, assisting with the NEPTUNE and VENUS programs, which you can read about at this link. Or check out the interesting photos of sea life swimming by NEPTUNE's monitors on the sea floor, thousands of metres underwater, at this article about the robot submersibles.

The educational element alone of the Ocean Exploration Trust is amazing. Over 500 educational videos are created a year by this team, sharing their day-to-day work and discoveries. If you're interested in ocean science and citizen science, these are people to know. It's easy to see Ballard as a superhero for science learning for youth. You can follow the adventures of the Nautilus and its explorers at nautilus.org or oceannetworks.ca.

Hands across the Border

Post by Helaine Becker

Last week I was privileged to attend the Tucson Book Festival as one of the presenters. I did a Zoobots-focused presentation on the main stage. I also helped kids make colour-changing octopus skin, an activity found in The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea.

But perhaps the highlight of my program was co-presenting on a panel about "Science Writing for Children" along with three of the best science writers working in the U.S. today.

If  you don't know them and their work, I'd love to share a little about each of them with you!

Sarah Albee is the bestselling author of Bugged: How 

Insects Changed History and Poop Happened. How can you not love someone who writes about malaria and cholera with such glee? Turns out she is now working on a book about poison. I can't wait til it comes out - though I won't sit next to her during ahem dinner if she is wearing a poison ring....

Loree Griffin Burns is super smart and super passionate. She brings both of these qualities to wonderful books about environmental issues like Tracking Trash: Flotsam Jetsam and the Science of Ocean Motion and  Handle with Care. She is so committed to writing quality books that she

allowed herself to be stung by bees, literally dozens of times, to get the perfect photo for the book.  You can see the photo in question in The Hive Detectives.

Elizabeth Rusch also brings a level of commitment to her work that simply boggles the mind. Yup, that's her, tramping over the still-steaming lava field after a devastating volcanic eruption, determined to get the story for Eruption. And yup, that's her, risking epic seasickness to get the goods for The Next Wave. And once she has the story? She tells it so dramatically, and with such "you-are-there" intensity that you can't stop turning the pages.

I am so pleased - and honoured - to now call these great ladies my friends. I welcome them as honorary Canadians to this Sci/Why blog, and look forward to bringing science fun to as many kids as we can on both sides of the border.

Sarah Albee, Loree Griffin Burns and Liz Rusch, with me  (in purple).

The Lane Anderson Awards for Excellence in Science Writing

Can you be just a little over the moon? No. Which is why I'm a LOT over the moon to have been named the winner of the 2012 Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing, in the Children's Books category for The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea.

The winner in the Adult category is Neil Turok for The Universe Within.

Here we are giddily clutching our plaques.  

Congrats to Neil and to everyone who participated in this great event! And a huge thanks to the Fitzhenry Family for endowing this award and highlighting the central role of science in our lives.

Here are the deets from the official announcement:

$10,000 Lane Anderson Award Winners

Celebrating the Best Science Writing in Canada

Toronto. 26^th September, 2013:  The Fitzhenry Family Foundation announced the winners of the 2012 Lane Anderson Award. Finalists and winners were feted at an intimate dinner in Toronto.

The annual Lane Anderson Award, now in its fourth year, honours excellence in Canadian science writing, by highlighting two jury-selected books – one addressed to adult readers, the other written for children and/or middle grade readers.  Authors of the winning books each receive $10,000. 

There were a total of 20 submissions for this year’s award.

“We established this award because we believe passionately that science writing, and science reporting is vitally important for every Canadian today.  Science writing, research, and knowledge impacts the ways in which we live now, the ways our children will live in future, and the ways in which our children’s children will live their lives. As Canadians, we do not pay enough attention to science. We take it for granted.  The Lane Anderson Award is dedicated towards removing that indifference, two books at a time. We thank all of the authors and publishers and judges who are helping us pass along this message. It needs to be heard and heeded.”

- Hollister Doll & Sharon Fitzhenry Directors, Fitzhenry Family Foundation  

The annual Lane Anderson Award honours two jury-selected books, in the categories of adult and young reader, published in the field of science, and written by a Canadian. The winner in each category receives $10,000.

The 2012 Lane Anderson Prize Winners are:

The Universe Within by Neil Turok (Anansi)

The most anticipated nonfiction book of the season, this year's Massey Lectures is a visionary look at the way the human mind can shape the future.  Neil Turok is one of the world’s top physicists and founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). He is currently the Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea by Helaine Becker (Kids Can Press)

Based on the idea that knowledge is power, The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea shows how the ocean works and why this immense ecosystem needs our protection. Experiments using everyday materials help explain the scientific concepts. Helaine Becker is a bestselling writer of children’s fiction, nonfiction and verse.

The two juries meet annually to consider all the submissions to the Lane Anderson Award and comprise editors, librarians, and previous Lane Anderson winners.

The Lane Anderson designation honours the maiden names of Robert Fitzhenry’s mother, Margaret Lane, and his wife, Hilda Anderson Fitzhenry.  The Fitzhenry Family Foundation is a privately directed Canadian foundation established in 1987 by Canadian publisher Robert I. Fitzhenry (1918-2008).  The Lane Anderson Award is administered by Christopher Alam, a partner at the law firm of Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.

www.laneanderson.ca

What happens to creatures that live in the ocean if seawater becomes more acidic? This fun activity, excerpted from The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea (Kids Can Press), is an easy to do, seeing-is-believing demonstration.

Humpty Dumpty Coral

Excess carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, is gradually making the oceans more acidic. How might more acidic waters affect coral reefs? See for yourself.

You Will Need

an egg

500 ml (2 c.) white vinegar

a large glass container (to hold the vinegar)

plastic wrap

1.     Break the egg neatly in half. Reserve the egg white and yolk for another purpose (like breakfast!).

2.     Measure the vinegar into your container. Place the two halves of the eggshell in the vinegar. Cover the container with plastic wrap.

3.     Watch what happens when you place the shells in the vinegar. Do you see bubbles forming around the shells?

4.     Leave the container in an area where it won’t be disturbed. Then check on your eggshells three days later. Where did they go?

What’s Going On?

Eggshells are made out of calcium carbonate, the same mineral that coral polyps use to make their shells. Vinegar — an acid — reacts with the calcium carbonate, removing the carbon from the shell. The carbon combines with oxygen to make the gas carbon dioxide. Those are the bubbles you saw rising from the egg.

With no carbon left in the shell, the shell literally dissolves and disappears. What you see floating in the vinegar is just the soft membrane that lines the eggshell. It is similar to the soft bodies of the corals. Like the egg membranes, the coral bodies would float off without their calyces. They’d be totally vulnerable to predators.

What’s Happening Now?

Despite their tiny size, corals build structures that are so gigantic they can even be seen from space! To do so, they need just the right conditions. They need water that is the right temperature, clarity and acidity. They need to remain undisturbed. And they need the right kind of base to lay the foundation for the reef.

Today, reefs are at risk all over the world. Global warming, ocean acidification, pollution and habitat destruction are all taking their toll. So people are lending corals a helping hand. The Reef Ball Foundation, for example, is a non-profit organization dedicated to building artificial reefs.

The foundation makes ball-shaped, concrete structures. They lower them in waters where an existing reef has been damaged. Teams of scientists hand “plant” about 500 corals per day onto each structure. The scientists then monitor the growth and health of the corals until the reefs re-establish themselves. The process can take 3–5 years. Since their founding in 1993, the Reef Ball Foundation has helped rebuild coral reefs in more than 70 countries.

 

The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea has been longlisted for the Information Book Award from the Vancouver Children's Roundtable.

Diving into an Alien World

By Claire Eamer

In a couple of months, I'll be touring schools and libraries in Ontario, talking about some of the marvellous and strange animals in my book, Lizards in the Sky: Animals Where You Least Expect Them. So I've been thinking about critters and presentations and cool pictures and things like that... and, well, one thing led to another, and I found a whole raft of new, cool, and utterly weird critters in one of my favourite habitats, the deep ocean.

The ROV Hercules operates deep in the Atlantic Ocean.
Photo credit: Mountains in the Sea Research Team;
the IFE Crew; and NOAA/OAR/OER

We're talking deep, here--really deep. So deep and so strange that exploring the deep ocean is like exploring an alien planet. In fact, you need the equivalent of a space ship to go to the deep ocean, something that can see in the absolute dark and survive pressures that would crush the toughest submarine.

But, oh, the wonders when you get there!

How about this? Five full kilometres below the sunny surface of the Caribbean Sea is the Cayman Trough. It's utterly dark and very cold down there, but not everywhere. Just last month, scientists released video taken by a remotely operated undersea vehicle. It shows mineral chimneys at tall as four-storey buildings, belching smoky black water as hot as 400 degrees Celsius, four times the boiling point of water.

Even more astounding were the creatures lurking around those vents: fireworms that look like woolly caterpillars and delicate, almost-colourless shrimp with special organs for detecting hot water.

Super-heated water and rocks billow up from an undersea
volcano in the Pacific Ocean near New Zealand.
Photo credit: Submarine ROF 2006, NOAA Vents Program.

Over in the Pacific Ocean, there's an even deeper spot--Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, on the west side of the Pacific. At about 12.5 kilometres, it's the deepest spot in all Earth's oceans. And even there, where the pressure is 1000 times the pressure we experience at Earth's surface--even there, you'll find life. A lot of it! Tiny life, to be sure--bacteria. But they swarm there far more densely than in the shallower water at the edge of the Trench.

You don't even have to go super-deep to find the super-weird. Over the last couple of years, scientists have been finding some spectacularly strange creatures in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. National Geographic compiled a list of the five weirdest Antarctic species, including a transparent fish and sea spiders that breathe through holes in their bodies.

This feather-pen-like coral lives almost 2.5 kilometres 

below the ocean surface at Davidson Seamount, California.

Photo credit: NOAA/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Not to be outdone, the biologist who writes one of my favourite science blogs, The Echinoblog, compiled a list of the ten weirdest Antarctic invertebrates. His list includes a 30-centimetre worm with serious teeth!

Me, I'm waiting eagerly for the next list--maybe longer and even weirder.

In the meantime, I guess I had better get back to what started all this, preparing some presentations about my own favourite weird beasties. Seeya!

Over, Under, and On the Arctic Sea Ice

By Claire Eamer

The shrinking sea ice of the Arctic Ocean has been in the news a lot lately, along with photos of polar bears stranded on ice pans or wandering hungrily along bare shores. But what does the disappearing ice affect, apart from polar bears and some shipping companies that see a shorter sea route opening up?

Claire Eamer photo

Arctic sea ice supports a huge and complex ecosystem that ranges from polar bears, birds, and humans down to organisms too small to see without a microscope. Here are a few sites about that world - and a lot of gorgeous photographs!

The Census of Marine Life's Arctic Ocean Diversity website has great information and amazing images. Click on Species to see some of the creatures that make use of the Arctic Ocean and its ice, from top to the ocean bottom.

The US National Earth Science Teachers Association’s page on Arctic Marine Life gives a quick overview of Arctic Ocean biology, from algae to polar bears.

A young Russian scientist and photographer, Alexander Semenov, has been photographing Arctic sea life and sharing his photos with the world. There’s an article about him (with lots of lovely photos) and here's his own website and gallery.

How about the people who live with the ice all their lives? What can they tell us about it? The Inuit of northeastern Canada have been collecting traditional information about sea ice and sharing it at Inuit siku (sea ice) Atlas.

What does it really look like up there, around the Arctic Ocean, both above and below the ice? The photo galleries of Canada’s ArcticNet research program can give you a good idea.

And if you’re a student or a teacher and you want to see the Arctic for yourself, it just might be possible. Check out ArcticNet’s Schools on Board program.

What Makes an Octopus Blush - and How Exactly Do They Do It?

Posted by Helaine Becker

We've all heard about octopi that can change color to mimic their environment. But how do they do it? I discovered the answer when writing The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea for Kids Can Press.

The book is designed to present information to kids ages 8-12, but also to engage them with cool hands-on (or do we call that "experiential" now?) activities. Most people learn best by doing, and doing stuff that involves splashing water is pretty well a can't-fail learning opportunity.

The problem with octopi, though, was that I couldn't find a good activity anywhere out there to explain color-changing skin. I had to invent one.

Coming up with ideas is pretty easy for me. But coming up with ideas that any klutz, I mean kid, can do (And I am the klutz in question; if I can't do it successfully, it won't go in the book) wasn't a piece of cake. Luckily, cake was not required. Waxed paper and food coloring, however, were.

For all you lucky readers, here, in it's entirety, is the activity I invented. You'll find it, and many other fun and kooky things to try and do in The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea. Check it out, please!



 Seeing Spots?

Make your own octopus skin in less time than it takes an octopus to blush.

Image courtesy Pamsclipart.com

You Will Need

a large sheet of newspaper 

2 sheets of waxed paper about 30 cm (12 in.) square

yellow food coloring

1.     Lay the newspaper on your work surface to protect it.

2.     Lay down one sheet of waxed paper. Can you see the grayish newspaper through it? That’s the color of your octopus skin.

3.     Staying away from the edges of the waxed paper, carefully place 10–20 drops of food coloring on the waxed paper about 1 cm (½ in.) apart. Can you still see the gray newspaper between the colored dots?

4.     Hold the second sheet of waxed paper above the first sheet. Gently place it on top of the first sheet. See how the spots seem to spread out? Gently press on them with your thumb to spread them out even more. Can you still see the gray newspaper? Or does your octopus skin look yellow?

5.     Lift the top sheet of waxed paper off the bottom sheet. Do the dots return to their original size?

What’s Going On?

An octopus can change color to hide from prey or predators by blending into its surroundings. Many scientists think octopus also use color to communicate and express emotions, such as fear or dominance.

But how do our wriggly friends achieve this tint-o-riffic trick? Octopus skin contains microscopic pigment-filled structures called chromatophores, represented here by the dots of food coloring. Real chromatophores are so small, you can’t usually see them.

When an octopus wants to change its hue, it changes the size and shape of its chromatophores. Your thumb, forcing the dots to expand, acts like the small muscles in the octopus’s skin. They pull on the chromatophores to widen them. Now the skin they’re in is filled with color!

When the octopus relaxes, the chromatophores shrink back to their normal size. The octopus’s skin returns to its original color.*

*Excerpted from The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea, Copyright 2011 by Helaine Becker, Kids Can Press, Publisher. All rights reserved.

Arctic Fever Update

By Claire Eamer

On August 17, I posted an article about the rapid melting of arctic sea ice this summer and the likelihood that we were heading for a record low in sea ice extent. It happened just over a week later. On August 26, the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean hit a historic low. And it's still melting.

"So what?" you might ask. Doesn't that just mean more ships, more tourists, more economic development, and other good stuff? And maybe a few uncomfortable polar bears?

Over the next few weeks, as the ice melts, the Vancouver Aquarium's Aquablog is running a series of articles about what declining sea ice means for the Arctic and for the planet. Here's the first of them: Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Record Low.

And keep an eye on the blog for updates on this record-setting summer.

Paddling the Ice Kap

No, I didn't get up North or to Antarctica, to paddle my kayak at either of the actual ice caps. Instead I got to try out a kayak model called the Ice Kap, from Sterling Kayaks. It was a great day to learn more about kayaking science. Yes, there's science in kayaking! There are all the measurements, when designing and constructing boats. There's also research. Which boat shape is good for racing, or for surfing in waves? And then there are the experiments. No lab coats and clipboards for me -- I just try the different boats and have fun, while my friends Louise and John keep a notebook of their own experiments with kayaks.

At the MEC Paddlefest on Willows Beach, we found an assortment of several models from Sterling Kayaks. Each is a custom job, with the foot pedals set to accommodate the paddler's own leg length, for example. I got to sit in an Illusion, but even with the footpedals adjusted as far as possible, my feet still couldn't reach. That would be no problem if I owned one of their kayaks, explained the designer, Sterling Donaldson. He would put the footpedals closer to the seat for someone as short as me. He's calculated the centre of gravity and balance points for all his kayak designs.

Donaldson gets fibreglass under his fingernails and epoxy all over his hands, he complained at one point. But there's no substitute for the hands-on approach when customizing a kayak for someone with special needs.

The foam seats are a terrific support... lifting the knees a little and fitting around the butt. I'm guessing that my partner Bernie would find THIS seat doesn't hurt his back. The seat back is good support, but low so that a paddler can lean back when rolling the kayak. On each side of the seat is a support for foam padding, to customize the fit to the paddler's thighs.

I got into the Ice Kap which is designed for small people. The coaming, the edge around the cockpit opening, is low. As in half-way up my thighs when I'm seated in the kayak. No more rubbing my elbows on the coaming with each stroke! That happens in most kayaks for me. The designer Donaldson pointed out, most shorter people are not only short in the leg, but have short backs as well. It's hard to roll a kayak that is too big.

My friend John Herbert  took a photo of me on the water in the Ice Kap. It's pretty clear in the photo that this boat has a lot of rocker, a curve which brings the keel up in the bow and stern. That makes for a lot of fun riding waves. I expressed some concern about the front deck being so high out of the water, and the stern so high. Wouldn't they catch wind and turn like a weather vane? "None of our boats weathercocks," Donaldson insisted.
The Illusion has a similar hull to the Ice Kap, but the coaming rises a little higher at the paddler's thighs and sides. John could tell that he wouldn't fit either model. At 6'4", he went for their Grand Illusion that fits the 6'3" designer. But the model on the beach had been padded to fit a thinner paddler. Not for John today!
Louise tried the Ice Kap as well, just to add another model to her research for which style of boat she would buy this summer. We compared notes. Afterwards, John and Louise changed out of their paddling clothes while I just wandered around evaporating. One of the most important things I learned about kayaking science is to wear clothes that evaporate dry quickly.
Our verdict: if you're a thin, short man or woman who is wanting an exciting kayak, try the Ice Kap for an experiment of your own. If you're not thin, try the Illusion as the coaming is just a little higher instead of pressing on the sides of your thighs.
And if you're a differently-able paddler (like every member of our paddling group, and plenty members of SISKA and VCKC and the entire crew of the Breaststokers Dragon Boat team), talk to a kayak designer about kayak science. How can a kayak meet your needs?
This particular designer understands. Sterling Donaldson not only talks the talk, he walks the walk with one leg and crutches on the beach among his kayaks. He grew up designing experimental aircraft with his father, and now he applies the scientific methods he learned to building kayaks.

No Ocean Necessary: Hands-on Science Activities for Beach Lovers

I grew up on the Eastern seaboard, so for me, summer means sand, surf, and soggy french fries from a red-striped paper box. It also means a long walk along the shore, picking up this and that, discovering something new every time. Last week, on New York's fabulous Jones Beach (an my old stomping grounds), we came across some sea lice on the beach - something I'd never seen in countless visits there.

Sea louse

Seeing this critter made me think about how you believe you know something, and then, much much later on, discover that what you thought you knew, about a person, a place, a fact, is incomplete or just plain wrong. Up until last week, my mental picture of Jones Beach did not include sea lice.  I now have had to modify that inner vision to include this new piece of data.

This is of course not the first time in my life I've had to revise my thinking on a subject. This past winter, while researching The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea,  I discovered that everything I thought I knew about pearls was wrong. No, they are not made by oysters when a bit of grit gets into their shell and irritates the lining.

What?????

You, like me, probably learned this fact aeons ago. How could it - we -  be wrong?

Even worse, the true cause of pearl formation has been known since 1856. People have been repeating incorrect information and spreading it for well over a hundred years. Jeesh.

So what does cause a pearl to form, if not a bit of grit? "The most beautiful pearl is only the brilliant sarcophagus of a worm," said Raphael Dubois in 1901. And in fact, the pearl is a method for entombing a parasite that has invaded the mollusk's shell. Slap it with a liquidy goo that soon hardens, and voila, the pest is neutralized.

One of the fun hands-on activities in The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea is making a real pearl of your own. Since finding and working with parasites is kind of yucky, I suggest you start the pearl the way I did - with a fake parasite/piece of grit. I used a tiny balled-up wad of paper. Over a period of several weeks, I coated the wad with layers of pearly white nail polish, letting the pearl dry between coats. Turn it over and repeat until you have a pearl like this one - pretty enough to wear, and not at all yukky.

The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea

 Posted by Helaine Becker

We know the ocean is at risk. Rising global temperatures, deoxygenation, and increasing acidity are all serious threats to marine ecosystems. Knowing these facts, it’s easy to fall victim to despair.

But there is reason to hope – lots of it. And that’s one of the inspirations for why I wrote The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea, my new book from Kids Can Press.

It’s an experiment-based science book that teaches kids through first-hand exploration how different aspects of the marine system work – why ice floats, how currents form, how fish swim. It also gives kids a chance to explore environmental issues, like the enormous garbage island in the middle of the Pacific, or how an oil boom works.

But The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea is more than an experiment book. It’s also a primer on the threats facing the ocean. And most importantly, it’s a serious discussion of what people today, all over the world, are doing to protect the sea and minimize the impacts of human activity.

We all know that the media focuses on negative stories. They are immediate adrenalin-boosters, and feed into the human need to constantly scan the horizon for danger. But that focus on risk means we don’t really hear the other half of the story – we don't hear about the car that didn’t crash or the lost wallet that was retrieved.

This is true when discussing environmental issues too. We hear about the coral dying, the sharks being finned, and the Dead Zones expanding. But few ordinary people realize that Dead Zones have also disappeared. That corals can be regrown. And that new laws across North America are in place that will help protect our seas well into the future.

The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea presents it all: the facts, the risks, and the heartening stories of recovery.

Some of the facts may surprise you –like learning pearls are NOT caused by bits of grit that get caught in the oyster’s shell!). Some may delight you – like discovering how the beluga whales of the St. Lawrence River are no longer in danger of extinction, thanks to a concerted effort by Quebec’s citizens and business community. Some may even astound you. But in the end, you (and your students) will discover the ocean is larger, more complex, and more diverse than anything you could have ever imagined.

The truth is the ocean is under serious threat. We can’t be Pollyannas, pretending there are no problems. But we also can’t be Eeyores, seeing nothing but doom in our future. The reality is more nuanced. There are many reasons for optimism.

Optimism, I think, is a requirement for children’s non-fiction. To tell young people, “all is lost” is counter-productive. It negates them, and their future. It  also, plainly, is false; it's unsubstantiated opinion.

The facts point in the other direction. Where there is life, there is hope. And there’s lots of life in the ocean: More, in fact, than anywhere else on the planet.  Resilient, adaptaive, wildly creative life.

Shouldn’t that fact alone give us reason to hope?