Bubbles in the Bathtub

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There has been a lot of talk about cicadas lately, and they have finally started to come out. These are periodical cicadas that emerge on a 17 year cycle. The cicadas that are emerging this year are from brood X and last appeared in 1987. Since then they have been sitting underground, tapped into the roots of trees, slowly maturing. During the last few days the mature nymphs have started to emerge in this area. They climb a vertical surface: tree, lamp post, blade of grass, you name it, then molt, and you have a winged adult. The adults move up into the tree tops and begin wooing, which pretty much sounds like one of alien space ships from any of the old 1950's sci-fi movies.

For some reason there aren't any in my yard, but I took my kids to a park about a mile away yesterday and they were all over the place. The song is pretty cool and amazingly loud. Even though there aren't any in our yard I can hear them calling pretty clearly from the woods that surround our subdivision.

In any case, they come to mind here because it strikes me that they have taken the whole arribada thing to an extreme. Turtles that nest en masse probably do so as a mechanism to ensure that as many hatchlings survive as possible when they emerge, also en masse. Ideally predators become sated picking off the hatchlings that emerge early allowing more of the late ermergents to survive. And the cicadas do this on a 17-year cycle!

It makes me wonder how many other taxa, or what proportion, have adapted similar strategies to increase the survival of their young? Coral come to mind which spawn syncronously, as do many fish species, like grouper that have spawning aggregations.

Click on the image (couresy of J. Stein Carter from his website) or follow this link to learn more about cicadas.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, carrying on from my last message...

As I was saying, seaturtle.org is a labor of love. It's not something I get paid to do. Most of the work I do in my spare time. It's not that I haven't thought about getting paid to do it. Since I am director I would essentially be paying myself, which seems a bit odd. Either way the funds just are not there for something of that magnitude and as long as I can get work done while maintaining another job the money that does come in is better spent on other things (like ISP fees, maintaining server hardware, software, etc). But I do like to imagine what I could get done if I was able to devote my full time to seaturtle.org :) Kinda scary...

What this basically boils down to is that obviously I need to maintain a "real job". It is not likely that seaturtle.org will become self-sustaining or be able to support me with a salary anytime in the near future. So, the current job I have held with NOAA, and now my move to Duke, are a must.

You could consider this the motivation, the deepest, darkest driving force behind this turtler's need to migrate. Not unlike whatever base instincts, genetic instructions, or whatever it might be that drives sea turtles to migrate.

tbc

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A big migration is set to begin. Not the migration of a turtle, but a turtler. I thought I would use this space to document the process and everything that is involved in moving a turtler from here to there...

For those of you that haven't heard yet, I am moving to Duke University. A step even farther back might be necessary for those of you that don't know me. SEATURTLE.ORG is not my job, more a labor of love. I have a real job working for NOAA's Biogeography Program. I came to this office as a seagrant fellow more years ago than I'd like to admit, with no intention of staying as long as I have. But it turned out to be a great experience working with great colleagues, one thing led to another and I ended up with a full-time job working for the US government.

In any case, I wasn't really looking for anything, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I have always kept my ears open for other opportunities. I like what I do, but working for the government has become burdensome. It seems like lately I spend most of my time fighting the hierarchy just to get the tools I need to do my job. I should rephrase that as "keep" the tools I need to do my job. We have always had them, but with the internet being the contrary beast it is, the "government" has found it necessary to lock everything down, making it difficult to continue business as usual. For security reasons they are centralizing all network activities, taking away many of the resources we have taken for granted, despite the fact that we have nothing on any of our computers even remotely resembling information that needs to remain secure.

Oops, I have digressed and gone off into a half rant, and now I must go. So, more later...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Name all of the turtlers in this picture...

I just returned from the 2nd Annual OBIS-SEAMAP Data Providers Meeting. This is a good initiative that aims to create a digital database of sea turtle, marine mammal and sea bird distribution and abundance. OBIS-SEAMAP is a node of the larger OBIS [Ocean Biogeographic Information System] project. Here's the Duke press release about the project.

In any case, a handful of researchers representing each of the taxa were present, including the geek taxa. It's still not entirely clear which taxa I represent.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I won't even go into how I found this, but stumbled on a website that indexes blogs and I was interested in how many blogs out there refer to seaturtle.org or blogs on seaturtle.org. There were a few...

Turtle Soup
This one references the turtle tracking on seaturtle.org...
http://blogg.zeit.de/randow/eintrag.php?id=407

Tools for serious scholars
This one links to Manjula's Rite-in-the-Rain post...
http://www.pinkmachine.com/alfrehn/nastyscholar/archives/000143.html

King's BLOG
Not sure what's up with this one, but it has a link to Manjula's blog in it's list of blog links...
http://domain546229.sites.fasthosts.com/

Turtle Diary
This one is from the blog of a sea turtle volunteer in Greece. He mentions getting a picture from the Image Library to add to his website. Woo-hoo!
http://turtlediary.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_turtlediary_archive.html#106241377175572599

The Ravings of a Mad Prophet
I can't find the original page for this one, but the link reference talks about seeing turtles hatching and links to seaturtle.org...
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pallidbat

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

SEATURTLE.ORG's satellite tracking section was recently featured in Science Magazine. A nice little blurb letting folks know about the resource. You can read the bit here, but unfortunately you need to be a subscriber.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)