fred wobus . com

So just when you though you had the food chain all sussed out, some clever people and their deep-diving robotic toy find little shrimp happily feeding on something at some hideously dark depth, where the sun don’t shine:

Deep Antarctic waters are teeming with krill – small shrimp-like creatures near the bottom of the food chain – in a discovery which has amazed scientists.

Read the full story here:

New Scientist: ‘Amazing’ discovery finds krill in Antarctic abyss

The abstract of the paper is available online:

Current Biology : Adult Antarctic Krill Feeding at Abyssal Depths

Usually krill eat phytoplankton (minute marine plants that drift in the sunlit surface layers), but at that depth there is no light. And where there’s no light, there can be no plants.

There is life at any depth of the ocean, but it gets very sparse with the fading light at depth and increasing distance from land.

So the big question is: What do these tiny shrimp eat at a depth of 3000m?

The abstract only says that the little critters were “actively feeding” but not on what. The New Scientist article has some more clues
and reports the researcher speculating that they feed on plankton remains (“lumps of gunge“) raining down from the sunlit surface waters.

The fascinating phenomenon was described by Rachel Carson in “The Sea Around Us” as the “The Long Snowfall“. And while the marine snow of particles certainly feeds some of the sparse deep-sea life, it seems amazing that it sustains “significant numbers” of Antarctic krill.

So, we’ll have to wait for them to send down their remotely operated vehicle (ROV) a couple more times to find out.

So, I wonder… Does the ROV take passengers?

From the facebook cause "Save the sharks" comes this message:

Sharkwater, the Rob Stewart documentary on sharks, is being released in the UK this Friday, the 22nd.

The film strives to dispel the myths about sharks and expose the current threat they face from over fishing and finning.

You can find details of the film on the following web site:

http://www.sharkwater.com

screenings are listed here:

http://www.sharkwater.com/screenings.htm

The more shark awareness is promoted the more chance we have of slowing down the current rate of decline of the shark populations – sadly the message all too often only reaches as far as the ears of the people that are already listening. Sharkwater provides us with a chance to change this, Rob Stewart has done all the hard work in putting it together, all we need to do is spread the word and encourage people to go along to watch.

As a foot note, IUCN have just announced that they will be adding a further nine species of sharks to their official list of animals at threat of global extinction, including the Scallop Hammerhead, which will be listed as endangered.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/18/eashark118.xml

In a strange reversal of fortunes …

Hayibo – Whales resume annual hunt of Japanese

Only yesterday I posted an interesting story about a robotic deep-sea glider that can run forever. It still needs batteries to establish radio contact with its mother ship, but its propulsion system runs on the heat energy of the ocean (where there’s lots of it).

And I made a jovial comment about the 18th century fascination with perpetual motion machines. The understandable obsession with limitless energy waned only when science academies and patent bureaus around the world stopped accepting inventions of such devices.

Guess what? Some has just done it again. Thane Heins of Ottawa has presented the very machine we were taught was impossible.

We don’t know yet if his design holds up to scientific scrutiny. To avoid being branded a lunatic, the inventor steers clear of claiming his engine actually IS a perpetual motion machine. But then again he dubbed his design "Perepiteia", and with a name like that people are going to make the connection.

If it works he can can call it anything he likes, because he might just have invented a very efficient electric motor.

Read the story at

TheStar.com | sciencetech | Turning physics on its ear

 … and don’t miss some of the hilarious comments on the story on the nerdiest website of them all ( hint: it sounds like /. )

PS.: Hold your horses before you start selling all your shares in Shell, BP, Statoil, E.ON and those more ‘traditional’ energy corporations. I have a feeling that if his thingy works, we’ll hear more of this guy!

Boffins at Woods Hole have cooked up a self-propelled deep-sea robot that can run virtually forever. It crisscrossed a 4000m deep ocean basin off some island paradise more than twenty times and could have kept going.

A machine that runs forever? Perpetual motion machines were very much in fashion in the 18th century until someone came along and spoilt the show and presented the laws of thermodynamics.

So how can this thing keep running? It does use energy, not from batteries, but from a source that has lots of it – the heat of the ocean, or better the differences in water temperature between warm surface water and cold bottom water.

Other than that it can navigate on its own and every so often it pokes its yellow nose out of the water and uploads its data to a satellite. Very clever stuff indeed!

Read the story:

Green robot self-propels through sea | Science | Reuters