green | rising

There’s That Shrimp!

December 11th, 2006 by Vihar Sheth | Posted in Environment, Water

So I dropped this hitchhiking shrimp off at a gas station a few years (50 million) ago and he hasn’t been heard from since. Damn cops hassled me something awful too. Well, they found him. A six-year census of the ocean conducted by the Sloan Foundation was culminated with a report released on December 10, 2006. According to this article, here are some of the juicy tidbits from the study.

• “Shrimp, clams and mussels living near the super-hot thermal vent in the Atlantic, where they face pulses of water that is near-boiling despite shooting into the frigid sea. 
• In the sea surrounding the Antarctic, a community of marine life shrouded in darkness beneath more than 1,600 feet of ice. Sampling of this remote ocean yielded more new species than familiar ones. 
• Off the coast of New Jersey, 20 million fish swarming in a school the size of Manhattan. 
• Finding alive and well, in the Coral Sea, the type of shrimp called Neoglyphea neocaledonica, thought to have disappeared millions of years ago. Researchers nicknamed it the Jurassic shrimp. 
• Satellite tracking of tagged sooty shearwaters, small birds, that mapped the birds’ 43,500-mile search for food in a giant figure eight over the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand via Polynesia to foraging grounds in Japan, Alaska and California and then back. The birds averaged a surprising 217 miles daily. In some cases, a breeding pair made the entire journey together. 
• A new find: a 4-pound rock lobster discovered off Madagascar. 
• A single-cell creature big enough to see, in the Nazare Canyon off Portugal. The fragile new species was found 14,000 feet deep. It is enclosed within a plate-like shell, four-tenths of an inch in diameter, composed of mineral grains. 
• A new type of crab with a furry appearance, near Easter Island. It was so unusual it warranted a whole new family designation, Kiwaidae, named for Kiwa, the Polynesian goddess of shellfish. Its furry appearance justified its species name, hirsuta, meaning hairy.”

Good stuff. Let’s keep polluting!