Coast to Coast (and everything in-between)

Fearing the worst, organizers of a migratory project were elated recently to receive a transmitter signal from a young male whooping crane believed to be dead. The crane was part of an eighteen-member whooping crane migratory project housed in Citrus County, Florida, at the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge. When violent storms hit the area in February, the entire flock was thought to have perished. The young male whooping crane escaped the fatal effects of the storm and was sighted in the company of two sandhill cranes several days after the storm. Although the loss of the experimental migratory flock was devastating, organizers will continue to monitor the male survivor as well as the 64 non-migratory whooping cranes also located in Florida.

Three Northern Pacific killer whale pods, totaling 85 whales, located in western Washington state’s inland waters near Puget Sound, were recently the subject of a lawsuit when local building and farm groups challenged the decision to list Puget Sound’s orca population as an endangered species. The farmers claimed that recognizing the orca population as endangered would harm their livelihoods by resulting in unnecessary water and land use restrictions. The judge dismissed the suit stating that the plaintiffs did not present evidence to prove that they would be harmed.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources recently confirmed that viral hemorrhagic septicema (VHS) has been found in Lake Huron. VHS is a highly contagious virus that affects some of the region’s most popular commercial fish species, and its presence in Lake Huron is expected to widely impact Michigan’s aquaculture industry. VHS had previously been found only in Lakes Ontario and Erie, but officials now predict the virus will spread through the entire Great Lakes system. VHS was originally a saltwater virus, but it was first discovered in the Great Lakes in 2005. Fishery managers suspect that ballast water from ocean freighters was the culprit in introducing the virus to the Great Lakes region.

In Navy ranges off the coast of Hawaii, Southern California, and the East Coast, the Defense Department granted the Navy permission to continue using sonar for the next two years, despite the outcry of activists who fear that the sound waves may harm marine animals. The Navy has stated that it will produce environmental impact statements to provide better information on how sonar use in underwater training ranges affects the environment.

The source of the ocean’s distinct smell was recently discovered by scientists. Dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a gas produced by genetic activity recently identified by researchers in ocean-dwelling bacteria, produces the tangy sea air smell. A research team headed by Andrew Johnston of the University of East Anglia was able to use marine plant decay samples to isolate in one form of bacteria the genetic sequence responsible for converting plant decay products, dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP), into the gas DMS. Although the gene sequence found is not the only mechanism for conversion of DMSP into DMS, the discovery is an important step in understanding environmental interactions in the ocean.