Storms Kills Fishes, Saves the Rays

Storm is blamed for fish kill in Potomac River

A summer storm that spawned a waterspout in the Potomac River last week is likely to blame for killing about 4,300 fish that washed ashore July 19 in Piney Point, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

The July 15 storm brought water near the river bottom that was low in oxygen into the area, and the fish, mostly menhaden and striped bass, essentially suffocated, Jay Apperson, a spokesperson for MDE, said this week.

Stratification in the river naturally occurs when lower-density fresh water overlays higher-salinity waters, which prevents the better-oxygenated upper layers from mixing with oxygen-poor bottom waters.

As winds abruptly changed during the storm, the surface water was pushed out and essentially backfilled by low-oxygen bottom waters, according to MDE, a phenomena called a seiche event. The event can happen so quickly that fish are unable to escape to better water and are unable to breathe. They likely died that day, sank to the bottom and then floated to the surface after a few days, when the tide pushed thousands of the fish on shore along Lighthouse Road.

Stormy weather hurting sales of Chesapeake rays

The summer's stormy weather is hurting the state's efforts to boost sales of the Chesapeake ray. The severe weather is keeping watermen ashore and the heat is sending the rays into deeper water, explains Mike Hutt of the Virginia Marine Products Board.

The cownose ray, the so-called "Veal of the Sea" is caught in the Chesapeake Bay from May to September.

The tornado that ripped through Hampton recently damaged Armory Seafood, the only processing plant in Virginia. Meade Amory says the tornado damage shut down processing for about a month. He hopes with the facility repaired and better weather, the catch and processing will pick up soon.

Actually, I wasn't aware that there was any kind of commercial fishing on the Cownose Ray in Chesapeake Bay.  I've often speculated that one could be made.  The rays are edible (I've had it) but I didn't consider them that good.  But they are abundant.

As for the veal thing, I don't like veal either.  I do see a superficial similarity.  Ray flesh is unlike any fish flesh I've seen before, a light pinkish color, shot through with red specks of some sort.  It is rather firm, and a bit pork like, and not awfully fishy (at least if fresh).

It is thought that Cownose Ray populations have risen since their major predators, sharks off the Atlantic coast, have been decimated (or worse, decimate means to take one in ten, this is more like nine in 10).  However, the reproductive potential of rays is low, as females have a single pup yearly, born live, like mammals, and most sharks.  A serious fishery would need to be well regulated to not do serious damage to their population.

To The Tower

As mentioned yesterday we took a trip to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels and also the Olympic rings hanging from nearby Tower Bridge. For once (this summer) the sun shone and the sky was blue. It was as if someone "up there" had decided with the games starting soon, it was high time the UK had some good weather.

Here's a small selection of images from today.




The Tower.

LL and the Bridge.

Traitor's Gate.

















Even the weather vanes are a bit posh.

Pomme De Terre

Dug these up today. Can't wait to get cooking some of them.

I also had to spend considerable time sweeping up a mass of fallen leaves. It's just like Autumn come very early. What is wrong with this weather?


Tomorrow (Sunday) I'm up early-ish and taking LL up to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels. I'm under strict instructions not to go trying on any of the crowns LOL.

Long Hot Summer Good for the Bay

Drought and heat good for the Chesapeake Bay

The weirdly mild winter, the dry and toasty spring, and the hottest summer heat wave on record apparently had at least one upside: a cleaner Chesapeake Bay.

Last year around this time, the bay was smothered by one of its largest dead zones — low-oxygen water caused by pollution where fish and plants cannot survive. This year, with so little rain to move pollution from farms and city streets into waterways, the zone “absolutely is much smaller,” said Bruce Michael, director of the resource assessment service for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

But state monitoring that started last month amid record-breaking heat and abnormally dry conditions showed a dramatic improvement from this time last year — very few low-oxygen areas in the bay’s main stem so far, “better than average,” Michael said. About 12 percent of water volume in Maryland’s portion of the bay was low in oxygen in June, compared with more than 30 percent last year.

“We were kind of predicting this, because we had relatively low flows in winter and spring . . . not much runoff at all,” Michael said.

But, as witnessed even on my own beach this weekend, there is still a mass of low oxygen water sitting in the deep areas of the bay, waiting for the right meteorological conditions to bring up into the shallow waters and produce a crab jubilee, or even a fish kill. Incidentally, I also heard from a fellow fisherman of a similar crab jubilee on the western shore near Point Lookout.

However, the high temperatures can also bring oxygen stress:

Usually, putting crabs or fish in hot water leads to one thing: dinner.

But water temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay hit record highs in some spots this week because of the heat wave and that's causing problems.  "[It] causes what we call the temperature-dissolved oxygen squeeze," says Bruce Michael, with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources.

He says the squeeze happens between hot surface water and the oxygen-deprived deeper water. Surface water temperatures climbed to record highs in many spots this week, hitting the low- to mid-80s and stressing many fish.  "It's probably not going to cause a fish-kill, but it will stress the fish," Michael says.

The fish become more vulnerable to disease when there's less oxygen. Dissolved oxygen is the single most important measure of habitat quality in Chesapeake Bay. Higher water temperatures can be even worse for underwater grasses since the grasses are stationary. The grasses are where crabs hide from predators.

The Bay managers are much like farmers; no matter what the weather, it's never quite right.  Either there's too much rain or too little rain, too hot or too cold.

Squirrels Declare War on Advanced Civilization

Squirrels are the leading cause of data center crashes

Squirrels may be the data center's enemy number one. Level 3 Communications say that they accounted for an astounding 17 percent of all of their cable damage last year.

The thing is, squirrels are little chewing machines, and they love to chew right through whatever is in their way, even if it's a critical fiber-optic cable or (bad news for the squirrel) a live power line.

That's what happened to Yahoo a couple of years back, according to Mike Christian, a director of engineering at Yahoo. " A frying squirrel did take out half of our Santa Clara data center two years back," he said, speaking at the Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California last month.

Even worse, they're willing to die for the cause.

As Data Center Knowledge pointed out recently, squirrels account for an astoundingly large percentage of power outages.

Steven Hebert, a wildlife specialist with Swat Pest Control in San Jose, Calif. says that most of the time the culprit is the eastern grey tree squirrel. These guys don’t hibernate or burrow like their ground squirrel cousins.

How do you tell a ground squirrel from a tree squirrel? It's easy, Hebert says: "Clap your hands. If it runs up a tree, it's a tree squirrel."

We just had a power failure here, in fact, a series of short failures.  It seems to be back and stable now, but we're in the middle of a bunch of pop up thunderstorms so I'm glad I renewed the battery on my data saver so that it will hold my computer up long enough for a controlled shut down.

Even though it's probably the storms, I'll blame the crafty little squirrels for weakening the trees, or shorting the lines.

Whew, What a Relief!

As usually happens here, the heat wave broke with the onset of a thunderstorm.  Georgia and I were at a restaurant, celebrating on of those "Hallmark" events when it arrived.  Lightening, thunder, raining buckets.  By the time we reached home, 7 miles away, it had slacked off, and it was apparent that Prince Frederick had much more rain than St. Leonard.

We needed the rain, but best of all, the temperature cooled 10 F in a few minutes with the passing of the front.

We got more thunderstorms last night, and by this morning have a total of over a half inch of rain, and a morning temperature of 74 F compared to yesterdays 84.  More rain is in the forecast, too.

Bring it on!

WTF?

Is this?  Some kind of beetle I guess. 

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

J.B.S Haldane - What is Life? The Layman's View of Nature, 1949

The quote is also sometime rendered "The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Have I told you it's hot outside yet today?

The "Ring of Fire" Derecho

A lot of us just went through the effects of a Meteorological phenomenon called a derecho, defined as:

a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo. Derechos blow in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to a gust front, except that the wind is sustained and generally increases in strength behind the "gust" front.

Over at Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts, a weatherman by profession, has a post up explaining derechos, with a couple of neat graphics.  First, a radar composite showing the June 29 derecho from its origin near Chicago, to its arrival at the Chesapeake Bay.

The traditional definition of a derecho is a thunderstorm complex that produces a damaging wind swath of at least 240 miles (about 400 km), featuring a concentrated area of convectively-induced wind gusts exceeding 50 kts (58 mi/h, or about 93 km/hr). Some studies add further criteria, such as a requirement that no more than 2-3 hours separate any two successive wind reports. Derechos typically possess a high or rapidly increasing forward speed. In addition, they have a distinctive appearance on radar (known as a bow echo) with several unique features, such as the rear inflow notch and bookend vortices, and usually manifest two or more downbursts.

He explains how, although you likely have not heard the term before, they are not an uncommon weather event, along with a history of some of the more damaging derechos in US history. I for one, am happy that me region is in the region expecting 1 derecho per 4 years as opposed to, say 4 in 3 years.

Major derechos get names, much like Hurricanes, and this one has been named the "Ring of Fire."

There is also an an excellent animated video of progressive radar images as it traveled across the country:

That's Helpful

After Dinner

Readers of this blog may recall one of my favourite films is Ridley Scott's Alien. Absolutely love it and despite pretty much knowing it inside out, I still find it exciting and somewhat scary.

You can imagine my delight at the thought of a trip to the cinema this week to see Prometheus, Scott's (possibly maybe) prequel. Definitely set in the same universe and playing by the same rules or as I think Scott put it, it shares the same DNA. A good film- certainly superior to Alien 3- with big spectacle set pieces to please. Not as scary as perhaps I would have liked but there you go.

Regardless of whether Prometheus fits into the Alien canon, there was I noted quite a big plot hole that got over looked. Just taking the film as a stand alone, a pretty big plot device had been used and then contradicted later on. I won't spoil things here, see if you can work it out.

Oh and while I think of it, I had real difficulties with the main character being named after a well known After Dinner Mint brand. Would have thought fellow Brit Scott would have known LOL...

Has anyone noticed today is meant to be the longest day (at least in the northern hemisphere)? It's more or less rained all day (see previous post re- summer weather) with temperatures likely to have struggled to get to the low 20's grrr. Of course now all we can look forward to is the nights gradually drawing in as we head towards Christmas. Cheerful soul aren't I?

By the way has anyone else been enjoying the excellent sitcom 2 Broke Girl$? See what they did there with the title LOL? Nothing ground breaking and a bit obvious at times but quite fun.  

Flood Helps Polar Bear Escape in Duluth Zoo

Where's Berlin?   "I know nussing"

People evacuate homes, animals flee zoo pens as heavy rains bring floods to Minnesota city

Jeb, the black and brown dwarfed goat at Lake Superior Zoo, sought out Brad Jago every day for a little love, attention and a gentle scratch on the forehead where his horns once stood. On Wednesday it was Jago seeking Jeb, as the groundskeeper and the rest of the zoo staff scrambled to find and recapture animals that escaped during torrential overnight flooding that forced the evacuation of some homes in a low-lying neighborhood in the port city of Duluth.

Floods fed by a steady torrential downpour have forced residents to evacuate their homes and animals to flee their pens at a zoo in a northeast Minnesota city.

Zoo workers safely recovered two seals and a polar bear that had managed to escape their enclosures but Jeb and a dozen or so other animals from the zoo’s barnyard exhibit — including other goats, sheep and a miniature donkey — drowned. “That was a tough loss,” said Jago, one of several employees who spent Wednesday afternoon grieving and regrouping after the exhausting search that began before dawn.

Hmm; I wonder if that storm is headed our way?

In the Summertime

June 20, the Summer solstice, and the first official day of summer, in fact, right now at 7:09 EDT.  It was about 95 F here today, with the humidity starting to climb into the miserable range.

Ferenginar

You know, looking at the weather this past week or so I can't help but wonder if the UK has somehow been swapped with the Ferengi home world from the Star Trek franchise LOL. Sooner or later summer must start, surely?

Best brush up on the Rules of Acquisition I guess*.



*Getting in touch with my inner Trekkie LOL.

Atlanterhavseieven

One of the world's more scenic roads on one of it's more scenic days.

The Atlantic Ocean Road or the Atlantic Road (Norwegian: Atlanterhavsveien) is a 8.3-kilometer (5.2 mi) long section of County Road 64 which runs through an archipelago in Eide and Averøy in Møre og Romsdal, Norway.

Rains a Mixed Blessing for Chesapeake Bay Waterfowl

Scientists find that rain may not always be a welcome thing to waterbirds

The scientists compared waterbird communities in estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay during 2002, a year of severe drought, to 2003, a year of high rainfall. During the drier year, the species of waterbirds present included both those that fed generally on many species of invertebrates and those that only fed on specific ones. However, the waterbird community was made up of most generalists the following year after heavy rain. The high rainfall increased nutrient runoff into the estuaries which reduced the estuaries' populations of small invertebrates. Because the dynamics of the invertebrate populations were affected, so in turn were the dynamics of the waterbird communities that fed on them.

I strenuously object to any study making hard and fast conclusions based on a comparison of two single years in the Chesapeake Bay (or anywhere else for that matter).  There are too many factors that can control the abundance of different waterfowl to be accounted by a single difference in two years in the Bay.  What about conditions in the north, where the birds go in summer to breed?  Could that have been the difference?

And as for the alleged reason for the effect, increased rainfall increases the probability of anoxia in the deep waters of the Bay.  These waters are approximately 5% of the Bay, and are out of reach of waterfowl in any event.  A change in the area of the anoxia would affect less than 5% of the area of the Bay.  Not likely to leave a mark on the waterfowl populations in a single year.

"We're seeing more extreme rainstorms in this region, so our results give a snapshot of what bird communities in urban estuaries might look like in the future," said Colin Studds, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute at the time of the research. "As urban development continues, we need new solutions for managing water quality or we stand to lose the Bay's iconic natural treasures."

There is actually no evidence for "more" extreme weather as a result of global warming.  This is simply a way to invoke global warming without actually having to explain that the difference in temprature between years is generally small and inconsistent.  But if you say it will cause "more extreme weather, you can try to scare people regardless.  Hurricanes and tornadoes really are scary

Floods – no increase in frequency, less intense
Extreme weather events – no trend
Global precipitation – no trends
Weird weather – no trends
Forest fires – decreasing frequency

Short Landing and Takeoff

Looks like Alaska to me.

Long To Rain* Over Us

Wouldn't you know it- public holiday in the UK and it's chilly and raining! What happened to all the glorious weather we were enjoying last weekend? I'm seriously thinking about having to put the central heating back on for a bit.

Loving all the repackaged items currently in the shops, just in time for the Jubilee and Olympics.












* "God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save the Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
God save the Queen"

I guess you might conclude I'm a bit of a Royalist at heart...

Annual Hurricane Predictions - Take Your Pick

Two of three major hurricane season predictions just came out (NOAAs was already out):

One said it was going to be above average,

One said it was going to be below average,

And the other one said it was going to just about average.

At least somebody will be right this year.

Oh My, What a Morning at the Beach

Oh my, what a morning!  Sunny, warm, but not too warm, not too humid and just the right amount of breeze.  Weather doesn't get any better than this.

Skye decided that these sun bathers needed checking out.













The water has warmed up to comfortable wading temperatures.  We waded around looking for shark's teeth, but it wasn't really good day for us.











However, Joel brought the big one he found last week for our viewing pleasure.  This is a once a year grade tooth, a fine specimen of what we call the extinct Mako, but which is likely a precursor to the modern Great White Shark.




A good day for a ride on a jet ski.

Or to paddle around in the shallows while silly dad looks for sharks teeth

 Or to paddle around in a kayak.













The flower of the day.  I still haven't figured out what this is.  It's a shrub with leaves like a Black Locust, but a very different flower.

I also took a picture with a flash, and it looked very different, because the flash brought out the purple in the flower, and somehow diminished the orange.

Back to the Beach

The conditions here this morning were pretty much the same as in Anchorage two mornings ago, cloudy and rainy, except for that temperature thing.  It was more like 70 F here instead of 40 F.  Shorts and T-shirt weather instead of jeans and flannel shirts.

An interesting version of the beach's colors, courtesy of Paintshop Pro's temperature correction.  It looks a little too pink to me.

Skye was pretty happy to see us, and clung pretty close last night.  But she was raring to get back down to the beach.  We met Joel and Red on our way back, and filled Joel with some misinformation about the cruise, or at least Georgia did.

The flower du jour was the Japanese Honeysuckle, a common invasive species in the US.  I remember sipping nectar from these as a kid back in Los Angeles.  It's probably illegal to do that now.

This helicopter made a pretty low pass just off shore.  I assume from the lack of markings that it's military, probably from Patuxent River Naval Air Station, just down the bay, but I don't know for sure.  That's pretty much a stock response when something odd flies by here.

Georgia won the prize for the best fossils of the day with these, a large Snaggletooth shark tooth (on the right), and a crocodile tooth (on the left).  Joel had found a huge Mako tooth over the week and still had it to show us, a once a year type tooth, but foolishly, I didn't ask to take a picture of it.