Q&A with a Perth Redmapper: never saw that as a kid!
Hugh Richardson is an avid diver, travelling up and down the coast in search of WA's best dive spots. He's also a Redmap member and has logged some unusual sightings online.
Game fish follow warm route south
There was a summer spike in strange marine sightings in the South West/Capes region [of WA], as fish typically found in the State’s north made their way down via the warming Leeuwin Current. Spanish mackerel, marlin and redthroat emporer were just a handful of fish species recently spotted along the South West coast, all of which generally favour the warmer northern waters, writes the Busselton Dunsborough Times.
This summer’s sea temperatures were the hottest on record for Australia: here’s why
The summer of 2015-2016 was one of the hottest on record in Australia. But it has also been hot in the waters surrounding the nation: the hottest summer on record, in fact. Read the full article in the Conversation AU.
Talking Point: Scientific reticence could mark much worse climate scenarios
ARE melting polar ice sheets as stable as we think or have we missed something? Could we face rapid sea-level rise in a few decades? Scientific debate about this has picked up in the wake of the March publication of two major research papers by scientists from the US, France, Germany and China. Read the full story by Peter Boyer in The Mercury.
Snakes in a tank at Seafest marine festival
Redmap and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) will be chatting to fishers, boaters and the community at Seafest this Saturday, 2 April. Come along to the marine festival in Triabunna for your chance to win an aquarium full of lolly snakes or a marine book - and chat to the Redmap and IMAS staff about fishing and any weird and wonderful fish you've caught lately.
Tracking 'marine heatwaves' since 1950
Unusually warm oceans can have widespread effects on marine ecosystems. Warm patches off the Pacific Northwest from 2013 to 2015, and a couple of years earlier in the Atlantic Ocean, affected everything from sea lions to fish migration routes to coastal weather.
A University of Washington oceanographer is lead author of a study looking at the history of such features across the Northern Hemisphere. The study was published in March …
How regular people can help shape science
Not a scientist? As David Lang shows, you can still play a meaningful role in solving science’s hardest problems. Read more in IDEAS.TED.COM
Diving a hobby into a career
How do you turn a hobby like SCUBA diving into a job? Ask 17-year-old Tasmanian Jakob Lister. The high school student grabs his dive gear and heads underwater every chance he gets. Now he’s grabbed the chance to steer his love of the ocean towards a career. He’s won a Redmap scholarship to join a Marine Biology course, run by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, on Maria Island …
Old tourist photos show seabird's rise over the last century
In 1880, the picturesque Swedish island of Stora Karlsö became a nature preserve and hunting park. To help fund the venture, owners of the island began organizing tours in the 1920s. Stora Karlsö remains a popular tourist destination, attracting about 10,000 visitors each year. And that means that the colony of seabirds living on the island has had its picture taken over and over again, for almost 100 years. Now …
It’s not ‘doom and gloom’ to point out what’s really happening to coral reefs
If you read The Australian or Britain’s The Times this week, you might have concluded that concerns about ocean warming and acidification are all a big beat-up. Based on a study of the expert literature, the newspapers ran with a line that the marine science expert community has a penchant for “doom and gloom stories which has skewed academic reporting” because we only report the bad bits and rarely the …
