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Migaloo is an albino humpback whale,  usually sighted along the Australian coast,  and occasionally in New Zealand waters.  Migaloo was named by the Hervey Bay local aboriginal collective,  and it means “white fella”.  While several Humpback Whales have been spotted with almost 90% white pigment coverage,  Migaloo is the only documented albino.

(source)

That was rather impressive

Preparing to return home

Mixed Feelings  

Looking forward

Experiences

I can’t believe that in less than two days, my semester abroad will be over and I’ll be headed back to the United States. At this point, there are things that I miss about the U.S. and I am looking forward to go back, but on the other hand, there are also things that I do not miss. Likewise, there are lots of things that I will miss about Costa Rica (food, host family, etc..) but there are also other things that I am ready to leave behind.  

I’m in the middle of my finals week and past the worst part. I’ve been ready to be done with classes for a while, especially after seeing friends from home finishing the semester a month ago. I am also ready to start my REU (like an internship for science students) that I have been figuring out the logistics of since mid-March. However, this means that I will be home for less than 24 hours before I leave (I live in South Central Pennsylvania and my REU is in Rhode Island), which means that I have barely any time to spend with my family and pets.  

I’ve had so many experiences abroad that I don’t even know where to begin to articulate them to family and friends. And you can only understand some of them if you were here to experience them for yourself. Throughout, I’ve gotten more comfortable with public transportation, which barely exists at home, and is one thing that I will miss but will be difficult to convey to my family since if we want to go somewhere at home, we just drive there ourselves. While it’s more convenient, it is also so nice to know that if you do a bit a research, you can get to just about anywhere in Costa Rica by bus. I’m also much more comfortable with Spanish after spending a little more than four months here.

In sum, I will miss Costa Rica and hope that I can come back in the not so distant future. I will miss my host family and friends.

“I make sure that when I am boating that nothing goes into the water, I try to recycle everything I can, and I don’t eat seafood unless it is invasive lionfish. I also participate in as many coastal cleanups to help to remove all of the garbage along our shorelines and I try to encourage others to do the same. We have a long ways to go in ocean conservation, but national marine sanctuaries, along with national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges, afford us the best opportunity to help leverage limited resources to address coastal and marine conservation." 

– Mark Chiappone, research associate at Nova Southeastern University and assistant professor at Miami Dade College 

What inspires you about the ocean? 

(Photo: Scrawled filefish in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Credit: Daryl Duda)

Trump’s War on Science continues

Ars Technica

Editorial: Censoring the scientific enterprise, one grant at a time

Recent grant terminations are a symptom of a widespread attack on science.

Phytoplankton: An overview of the small, plant-like organisms that make the world go round. 

http://becausephytoplankton.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-are-phytoplankton.html?spref=tw

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Aqua/MODIS via Flickr

Baby loggerhead turtle at home in the sargassum in the Gulf Stream current, where it will spend roughly 5 years, finally being large enough that many animals won’t be able to eat! Sea Turtles have a very difficult life, most of which never make it to maturity and reproduce! Our own existence here on earth as a species is responsible for the death of many beautiful creatures including the sea Turtles, due to mistakes of the past! We have the knowledge, technology and some the drive to fix this, but will we make necessary changes to put our beautiful planet into a sustainable direction? I MOST DEFINITELY WILL! Please join me as our planets future and all creatures are dependent on it! Be the change the world needs! @jim_abernethy #beautiful #babyturtle #gorgeous #cute #precious #underwater #saveturtles #saveoceans (at Jim Abernethy’s Scuba Adventures & Marine Life Art Gallery)

The Ghost, Craig Parry’s photo of the famed white whale Migaloo won first place in the underwater world category at the 2017 Golden Turtle International Photography Competition in Moscow this week.

None Like It Hot

By Joylette Portlock

July. Long known across the U.S. for fireworks, barbecues, and a desire to stay cool any way we can. Whether it’s air conditioning, swimming pools, beaches or popsicles, the dog days of summer are often reminders that as humans, our comfort depends on an experienced ambient temperature roughly somewhere between 59 and 77 degrees (Fahrenheit).

But what if, instead of 77, it’s a full 40 degrees more: 117 degrees, like it was in California on July 6? Or 105, like it was in Japan last week? Then, it’s more than an issue of comfort; our lives depend on finding a way to stay cool, and in fact more than a hundred people have perished in heat-related deaths globally already this year.

Life in this new age, the Anthropocene, is marked by many things, including a human-caused increase in global heat, commonly referred to as global warming, or climate change. Risk from heat (or wildfires, or floods) is no longer something we have to rely on the overwhelmingly strong scientific consensus about global warming to tell us; every year, climate change impacts are becoming more and more obvious to everyone, whether you have a degree in climate science or not.

Weather and climate are different. Weather is what happens on a day-to-day basis. Climate is the range of weather that we expect and consider normal (i.e., summer is hot) – but normal is changing.

Photo: Graph showing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and human population from We Are Nature, on display until September 2018.

We’re now up to over 400 consecutive warmer-than-average months and counting. Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s collections, which span more than 140 years, can help show these shifts in many ways. One of the most important things we can do is to make connections and show the relevance between the basic scientific principles underlying natural phenomena and the evidence all around us; between what’s happening globally and what’s happening locally.

Photo: The growth of plants collected today versus 100 years ago in the same locations, shown in We Are Nature, corroborates the observation of increasingly earlier springtime by documenting earlier maturation of these species.

The globe’s increasing heat is a result of fossil fuel use, food production, and our land use practices. We need energy and food, of course; but it’s critical that we recognize that the systems we impact also impact us. It’s not just our actions, but our interactions with the world around us that are the story. To understand what’s happening and improve our interactions with nature, we have to look at the big picture, and work to meet our needs in ways that minimize disruption to the overall system.

As summer heat waves get longer, more numerous, and more intense (and it seems the whole world is on fire, with deadly fires everywhere from California to Greece to inside the Arctic Circle) one connection is obvious: our need to be cool.

Joylette Portlock, Ph.D., is associate director of science and research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. She is also executive director of Communitopia, a nonprofit focused on climate change communication, and holds many other roles in the community.