Video: Longest known flying fish flight

A Japanese TV crew has filmed what is believed to be the longest flight of a flying fish ever recorded.

The NHK television network said one of its camera crews captured the 45-second flight on video on Monday, from a ferry near Kuchino-erabu island in southwestern Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture. The crew was reportedly on its way to shoot footage for a nature documentary.

The fish can be seen occasionally beating its tail against the surface of the water to keep itself aloft. The ferry was traveling at a speed of about 20 mph (30 kilometers per hour) during the encounter, NHK said.

More than 50 species of flying fish, in the marine family known as Exocoetidae, are found in warmer ocean waters worldwide. They can rise out of the water to avoid predators underneath, and stretch out its long pectoral fins to glide through the air.

Usually the fish remain airborne for just a few seconds before landing back in the water — but as Monday’s video demonstrated, they can give themselves another boost with their tail fins. The previous record for a fish’s compound flight was 42 seconds, reported from Florida by a sea captain with a stopwatch in 1928.

Other experts have cited flights lasting 28 seconds.

A 45-second flight may well be close to the physical limit for a flying fish, since the creature must suspend brachial respiration in the air, NHK reported.

Watch video: here

Cage diving doesn’t encourage aggression in sharks

Dropping chum and bait to attract sharks has not made sharks more aggressive or any more likely to approach humans or boats was the decision by top marine biologists attending a workshop held by Save our Seas Foundation. It was revealed that sharks, monitored by scientists, stopped responding to the vessels throwing chum overboard after a short time and actually stopped approaching the vessels. One factor may be that shark boat operators in the area were very good at not rewarding the sharks for approaching the boats…

The Save Our Seas Foundation (SoSF) Shark Centre in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, officially opened it’s doors on 15th May with a workshop attended by some of the world’s leading experts on sharks and rays. The centres manager, Leslie Rochat, told the delegates that in order to change people’s attitudes, science would have to excite and reach the general public and politicians. The centre will become a “dedicated facility for shark research” said Leonard Compagno, (director of ziko Museum’s Shark Research Centre and the chief scientist at the SoSF Shark Centre).

Marine biologist Alison Kock, made a presentation on white sharks in the False Bay area. She reported that shark poaching seems to be on the increase. She said that Cape Town currently had a “relatively healthy population” of white sharks. However, there were unconfirmed reports that there are significant declines in the shark population as dead sharks were being found with “targeted fishing gear” in their mouths, indicating that they were being singled out by fishers.

From DiveNews: Read more

Olympic swimmers learn from Sharks

When winning an Olympic gold medal in swimming is the goal, it helps to take inspiration from some of the best swimmers in the world — sharks and dolphins — and that is exactly what U.S. Olympic team swimmers have been doing as they train.

From suits to strokes, coaches, researchers and other advisers are making sure that their athletes benefit from fish and marine mammals’ natural swimming abilities.

“Some of our athletes are now wearing what are called ’shark skin suits,’” Russell Mark, biomechanics coordinator for U.S.A. Swimming, told Discovery News.

“These aren’t made of actual shark skin, of course, but they are slippery in feel, like sharks, and they make the wearer move faster than normal in the water by reducing friction and drag,” he explained.

Mark also indicated that excelling at the dolphin kick can make or break a swimmer’s race.

From Discovery News: Read more

BioWave: harness Ocean power by mimicking nature

Oceans have tremendous untapped potential for power generation which technology firms have been trying to harness for quite some now. Despite all these efforts, harnessing the Ocean’s huge power hasn’t been very successful till date.

Now an Australian called BioPower plans to harness the ocean’s energy by taking inspiration from mother nature herself. This method called Biomimicry involves the creation of designs which are based on natural systems. BioPower have designed their BioWave ocean energy generation system by replicating the motion of underwater plants due to ocean currents.

For this, they have designed a structure that looks like three pods on a stalk. Due to ocean currents, these pods sway and in turn generate electricity. Upon the advent of very strong currents that may even destroy this system, the Biowave will assume a horizontal position till the mighty ocean calms down. Currently this technology is being tested on a pilot mode, which if successful will power vast areas of Australia. If that happens, we can soon eliminate conventional sources of power and embrace the almost boundless electricity that can be generated in the ocean. Lets hope that the Biowave project is very successful.

From Inhabitat

Arctic ‘Monster’, the Greenland Shark

Canadian fish scientists are opening a window into the mysterious world of the Greenland shark — the top predator in the Canadian Arctic about which almost nothing is known. Except this, says Steve Campana of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography: “These are very, very strange sharks.”

Its meat is poison. Its mouth is far under its body. It has almost no spine. It’s so lethargic that it doesn’t even snap at the scientists who hook it and attach a radio to it.

And it may live 200 years.

“The sharks are incredibly abundant”, says Mr. Campana, “and yet we don’t have a clue how fast they grow, how old they get, where they give birth, how many they give birth to…” The researchers are hoping that samples of bone may hint at the age, using the 1960’s testing of nuclear weapons and searching for radioactive elements.

Growing to a length of eight metres, it cruises along the bottom of the ocean floor taking it’s meals of fish and seals. It’s not known if the seals are already dead when they consume them or if curious young ones have ventured too close to the slow moving shark, no one really knows. The Canadian researchers have tagged the sharks and will record data and then will ‘pop off’ the sharks in a few months and be radio their findings via satellite.

Only one other big shark in the world is almost unknown — the extremely rare deep-ocean “megamouth.”

From DiveNews: Read more

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