this weekends oceanic,courtesy of sa berst haskai
by my reckoning yay
“We’re fighting over guts and feathers.”
Inbox
Hakai Magazine <info@hakaimagazine.com> Unsubscribe
03:05 (6 hours ago)
to me
View the web version ~ Below: basket star by Grant Callegari
“We’re fighting over guts and feathers.”
As I’ve said in this space before, almost every day is Oceans Day at
Hakai Magazine, but next week, on June 8, the world also takes a day to celebrate the ocean that sustains us. The theme for World Oceans Day 2021 is The Ocean: Life and Livelihoods and there are many ways to participate. The United Nations is hosting a
day-long event with an international roster of speakers and which concludes with a “concert for the ocean.” (If you are an educator, this site has
some great resources for you.) And you can
search here for events near you—or at a distance, since many will be virtual this year. Canada is taking the day and running with it by launching the second
Ocean Week Canada, again with a variety of activities including beach cleanups, concerts, chats with scientists, and the launch of a special issue of the
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education that focuses on ocean literacy. We’d love to hear how you celebrated the ocean, on Oceans Day or any day, so let us know.
Shifting gears in a very big way, I want to acknowledge the very tough week we’ve had in Canada. The remains of 215 Indigenous children were recently found on the grounds of a
residential school in British Columbia, and, again, our country has to confront the consequences of its colonial roots. I cannot begin to cover the complexity of the issue in a few sentences, but I do want to express our sorrow over this latest in a very long line of injustices that Indigenous people in this country have to face. We will continue to work with Indigenous communities and individuals, to share the stories they are willing to share, and to celebrate knowledge systems and relationships to place that have survived despite colonial attempts to extinguish them. If you haven’t already, I invite you to read
this article by Arno Kopecky. At first glance, it may seem like a story of a fight to save old-growth forests in western Canada, but it’s also a story about how colonialism has led us to this conflict. “This clock was wound up 150 years ago,” he writes. “The colonial experiment was the thing that set the stage, wrote the script, built the machine, and locked us all into preordained, perpetual motion.”
Adrienne Mason
Managing editor
This Week’s Stories
Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest
A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.
by Arno Kopecky • 6,100 words / 31 mins
The Sound Aquatic Episode 2: How Not to Get Lost in the Ocean
Marine animals that navigate through whispers, songs, grunts, or clicks.
by Elin Kelsey, Katrina Pyne, and Amorina Kingdon • 26 mins • Listen here or with your podcast app
With Little Oversight, Ships Continue to Breed Toxic Behavior
In 1989, the US Congress passed a law requiring captains to report sexual assault allegations to the coast guard. But the absence of strong enforcement has left mariners vulnerable to abuse.
by Emily Cataneo • 800 words / 4 mins
Petrifying Climate Change
Researchers want to combat climate change by chemically converting carbon dioxide into rock on a grand scale.
by Ally Hirschlag • 1,200 words / 6 mins
The Alarming Power of Melting Arctic Ice
At least 25 times over the past 120,000 years, the temperature in Greenland swung dramatically. Now, scientists have a better understanding of why.
by Theo Nicitopoulos • 650 words / 3 mins
What We’re Reading
Thirty-five fishermen in Yemen got a smelly windfall when they encountered a dead sperm
whale carcass that contained precious ambergris valued at US $1.5-million. (
Newsweek)
Plant a tree, save an ocean?
An initiative in the Chesapeake Bay aims to stop pollution entering the ocean from agricultural runoff, by encouraging farmers to plant trees alongside streams that run through their properties. (
Mongabay)
The “wandering meatloaf” looks pretty much the way you think it does. The gumboot chiton, a type of mollusk, strongly resembles a plate of cafeteria slop and eats by scraping algae off rocks.
This means it has some of the hardest teeth known, and now scientists have figured out why. The chiton’s teeth contain an iron mineral compound called santabarbaraite, the only know animal (so far) with this distinction. (
New York Times)
Quoth the Seashell “Nevermore?”
Edgar Allan Poe’s bestselling book during his lifetime was a small textbook on conchology, or the identification of seashells. (
Atlas Obscura)
Doctors use a handheld mass spectrometer, a tool that scans molecules in a few seconds, to ID cancer
. Turns out, food inspectors can also use it to quickly ID mislabeled seafood. Some 30 to 50 percent of fish is likely mislabeled globally. Check out
Hakai Magazine’s past coverage of seafood fraud
here,
here, and
here. (
Anthropocene, Hakai Magazine)
Former US president Barack Obama’s speech has a distinctive characteristic: he pauses dramatically right before an important clause. This strategy emphasizes the important words or clauses, sort of like a more polite form of shouting. And a particular species of fish does this, too. Yes, fish.
The Brienomyrus brachyistius apparently communicates with electrical pulses similar to Morse code. They use these pulses to fight, make friends, find mates, and conduct other fishy business, and they seem to pause right before very intense or critical pulse bursts, possibly to emphasize them. (
The Atlantic)
Can you smell a tsunami in advance? A radioactive gas called radon can emerge in soil days before seismic events like volcanoes and earthquakes, but detection of such signals underwater is much more challenging.
Though early in development, underwater drones might soon be able to detect this uptick in radiation and help warn of tsunami-triggering subsea quakes. (
Vice)
Kate McKeown and Lena Dietz Chiasson were taking a snack break among the old-growth conifers of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, when this adorable American pine marten popped out from a cluster of fallen trees and started climbing. Kate captured the moment that the solitary, arboreal creature realized it had spectators.
This photo is one of thousands captured by a crew of field technicians who are using iNaturalist—a global community science database—to document species throughout British Columbia’s provincial parks and protected areas. The
BC Parks iNaturalist Project, now in its third year, is a collaboration between the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, BC Parks, and the BC Parks Foundation. Inspired by this project, our friends at the Hakai Institute are now finding ways to incorporate iNaturalist into their work, including crowd-sourcing sea star sightings, while also contributing years of their own field observations to the database.
Everyone—from scientists to naturalist neophytes—can participate in iNaturalist. Use it to learn more about the plants and animals you encounter and contribute to biodiversity science by signing up at
inaturalist.org.
Photo by Kate McKeown
On May 23, the marine conservation community lost Jack Orr—aka Captain Jack—a highly respected marine biologist who led much of the marine mammal research in the Canadian Arctic and Nunavut. Captain Jack developed the tracking system researchers use today to follow the daily and seasonal lives of belugas and narwhals. Writer Isabelle Groc wrote about
Captain Jack and his work for
Hakai Magazine in 2016.
Behind the Story
Arno Kopecky, the author of “Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest,” explains the deep roots of his story.
I’ve been wanting to write about British Columbia’s coastal old-growth rainforest, and the fact that we’re still logging it, ever since I was a student at the University of Victoria. That was in the 1990s, just after the biggest environmental protests in Canadian history saw over 800 people get arrested in Clayoquot Sound. There have been numerous heroic feats of activism since then, along with famous books, reams of powerful journalism, landmark court decisions, and earnest government reports, all aimed at preserving the fragments of ancient rainforest left on this coast—and all the while, logging has continued unabated.
It’s one of those issues, not unlike climate change, that everyone knows about and nobody can change, which made it something of a literary riddle. How do you approach a subject that’s been exhausted, yet is more urgent than ever? The historic protests at Fairy Creek offered a fresh way in. They also gave me a chance to go beyond the most obvious question—how can we still be logging these magnificent beings?!—and explore something far more unsettling: how can it have taken this long for the broader Canadian society to notice the First Nations people who live here? This is their territory, and they’ve been subjected to the same forces of destruction as these forests. There is no understanding one story without the other.
Reply to this email to send us questions, comments, or tips.
If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can
subscribe here.