Fish have swim bladders to help them maintain neutral buoyancy in the water, otherwise they’d have to up and down in the water column. Gas is added or removed from the bladder as the fish changes depth.
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Aug
30
Aug
9
As best it can be figured it began happening quietly and slowly around 15 years ago. An insect called the emerald ash borer arrived from its native China in wood used to make crates. This borer is a beetle loves our ash trees. It flies from ash tree to ash tree laying its eggs in the bark. The eggs hatch and the larvae bore into the tree and block the flow of water and nutrients. The US experience with this pest is that every infected tree dies and once a tree is infected it dies within three years.
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Jul
6
In an era of terrorist attacks and global warming it sounds a bit ridiculous to fight over fish but it’s a war that has been going on for centuries all over the globe and it has only intensified over the last 100 years.
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Jun
17
When we look at the animals in the world around us, its hard see that the ways animals use to survive has any bearing on the humans. We think of how we adapt to a changing world as an intellectual process. If something changes we reason out a method of dealing with it – if it gets cold we find a way to generate heat, if there’s a hurricane or drought we move somewhere else.
Jun
10
A global sampling project of the oceans of the world began on September 11, 2003. It’s scheduled to last for ten years and cost over one billion dollars. The majority of the funding for this project is coming from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and several coastal countries. These countries include the United States, Japan, Russia and England.
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Jun
3
Animals always seem to be more in touch with their environment than humans. As an example dogs and horses always seem to know a few minutes or days before we do that an earthquake is about to occur. With the increase in the global temperature and associated climate altering implications, it only follows that animals would be the first be aware and start to acclimate to this new paradigm of their existence. It turns out that they have been responding to these changes for years and we were just not paying attention.
May
20
Risk is defined as ‘The possibility of meeting danger or suffering harm or loss’. When we look at animals we always seem to view them as if, like us, they had a choice in what they do. When fish school to spawn or caribou migrate it’s because they evolved that way. It’s not a conscious choice. When their environmental or physiological cues are altered or removed they have a difficult time and are at risk. There is usually massive mortality associated with these events. Some individuals survive due to the diversity in the species’ gene pool. These individuals are ‘fit’ for the altered environment. They establish a balance with it and over time repopulate.
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May
14
In our modern society tends to put us under stressful conditions. The origin of that stress can come from many different sources – from one source at a time or several. It can be our jobs, family, the environment or any number of things. These conditions can affect just one individual at a time or an entire population.
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