Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 3-4, 2010

Interesting:  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today reopened to commercial and recreational fishing 5,130 square miles of Gulf waters stretching from the far eastern coast of Louisiana, through Mississippi, Alabama, and the western Florida panhandle. The Mariner Energy oil platform just had an explosion is about 250 miles from today’s reopening. The fire on a Mariner Energy Inc. oil and natural-gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico has been extinguished in an event that may prolong the U.S. drilling moratorium imposed after BP’s record crude spill.

At its closest point, the area to be reopened is about 54 miles north of the Deepwater/BP wellhead. The entire area is heavily fished by fishermen targeting snapper, mackerel, and shrimp. In addition, the area off the Florida panhandle currently open only to fin fish fishing will be opened to all fishing. King mackerel are found Gulf wide in open near shore and coastal waters.

While these fish as adults are seldom found inshore, they are found as near to shore as clear water can be found. While they are generally considered an open-water fish, in the northern Gulf of Mexico they are very commonly encountered near the perimeters of offshore oil and gas platforms. The total area is about four percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and 21 percent of the current closed area, as last modified on August 27. The closed area now covers 43,000 square miles, or about 18 percent of the federal waters in the Gulf.

The boundary of the fishery closure has changed 26 times after it was first instituted on May 2, at which time it covered about 3 percent (6,817 square miles) of Gulf waters around the wellhead. As oil continued to spill from the wellhead, the area grew in size, peaking at 37 percent (88,522 square miles) of Gulf waters on June 2.

The Mariner fire occurred September 2 and there were no injuries or deaths. However, a mile long, 100-foot-wide sheen of oil was sighted near the burning Vermilion 380 platform, which stands in less than 400 feet of water, the Coast Guard said, citing a report from Houston based Mariner. Mariner operates seven wells in the Vermilion 380 field.

Proved reserves were estimated at 33.2 billion cubic feet of gas equivalent at the end of 2009 and were about 47 percent oil and 53 percent gas and gas liquids. Production last year was equivalent to 1.1 billion cubic feet of gas, Mariner said in a public filing. At this time the Mariner incident is not having any effect on the BP incident. What this foretells for the overall oil drill rig industry is to be determined.

Interesting2: A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution’s existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life’s preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths. Some scientists have suggested the former. Rates of species diversification — the speed at which groups adapt and fill open ecological niches — seemed to predict what’s flourished in the aftermath of past planetary cataclysms. But according to the calculations of Macquarie University paleobiologist John Alroy, that’s just not the case.

"Mass extinction fundamentally changes the dynamics. It changes the composition of the biosphere forever. You can’t simply predict the winners and losers from what groups have done before," he said. Alroy was once a student of paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, who in the 1980s formalized the notion that Earth has experienced five mass extinctions in the 550 million years since life became durable enough to leave a fossil record.

Graphs of taxonomic abundance depict lines rising steadily as life diversifies, plunging precipitously during each extinction, and rising again as life proliferates anew. As the fossil record is patchy and long-term evolutionary principles still debated, paleobiologists have historically disagreed about what these extinctions mean.

Some held that, in the absence of extinctions, species would diversify endlessly. The Tree of Life could sprout new branches forever. Others argued that each taxonomic group had limits; once it reached a certain size, each branch would stop growing.

Interesting3: Ants are not out of their weight class when defending trees from the appetite of nature’s heavyweight, the African elephant, a new University of Florida study finds. Columns of angered ants will crawl up into elephant trunks to repel the ravenous beasts from devouring tree cover throughout drought-plagued East African savannas, playing a potentially important role in regulating carbon sequestration in these ecosystems, said Todd Palmer, a UF biology professor and co-author of a paper being published in the journal Current Biology.

"It really is a David and Goliath story, where these little ants are up against these huge herbivores, protecting trees and having a major impact on the ecosystems in which they live," Palmer said. "Swarming groups of ants that weigh about 5 milligrams each can and do protect trees from animals that are about a billion times more massive." The mixture of trees and grasses that make up savanna ecosystems are traditionally thought to be regulated by rainfall, soil nutrients, plant-eating herbivores and fire, he said.

"Our results suggest that plant defense should be added to the list," he said. "These ants play a central role in preventing animals that want to eat trees from doing extensive damage to those trees." While conducting research in the central highlands of Kenya, where hungry elephants have destroyed much of the tree cover, Palmer said he and his colleague and former UF post-doctoral student, Jacob Goheen, now a University of Wyoming zoology, physiology and botany professor, noticed that elephants rarely ate a widespread tree species known as Acacia drepanolobium where guardian ants aggressively swarm anything that touches the trees.

But they would feed on other trees that did not harbor these ants. The researchers decided to test whether these tiny ants were repelling the world’s largest land mammal by serving as bodyguards for the tree in exchange for shelter and the food it supplied in the form of a sugary nectar solution. So they offered elephants at a wildlife orphanage a choice between these "ant plant" trees, with and without ants on the branches, and their favorite species of tree, the Acacia mellifera, to which the researchers added ants to some of its otherwise ant less branches.

"We found the elephants like to eat the "ant plant" trees just as much as they like to eat their favorite tree species, and that when either tree species had ants on them, the elephants avoided those trees like a kid avoids broccoli," he Palmer said. Also, the researchers removed ants from "ant trees" out in the field to see if elephants would attack them undefended, and a year later found much more damage than on trees with ants.

Satellite images between 2003 and 2008 confirmed the ants were having a widespread, long-term effect throughout the savanna, he said. The ants did not seem to annoy tree-feeding giraffes, who used their long tongues to swipe away them away from their short snouts, in marked contrast to the long nose or trunk on an elephant, Palmer said. The inside of an elephant’s trunk is tender and highly sensitive to thousands of biting ants swarming up into it, he said.

"An elephant’s trunk is a truly remarkable organ, but also appears to be their Achille’s heel when it comes to squaring off with an angry ant colony," he said. Because it appears that smell alerts elephants to avoid trees that are occupied by ants, it raises the question of whether ant odors might be applied to crops to deter elephants from feeding on them, just as DEET helps repel mosquitoes from people, he said. "A big issue in east Africa is elephants damaging crops, which is one reason elephants have been harassed and sometimes killed," he said.

"There’s been a lot of interest in the conservation world about how to minimize the conflict elephants have with humans and particularly how to keep elephants from raiding agricultural fields." One predicted outcome of global warming is more frequent and intense droughts, which will force desperate elephants to eat everything they can to survive, Palmer said "With more droughts, the extent to which elephants destroy and remove trees may increase and potentially shift the ecosystems back to grasslands," he said.