Month: September 2015

So it pained me to watch this video of these people who nursed this bird back to health, release it to return to it nature only to watch it fly smack into a building and die.

to get Your GMG Cap or Hoodie- http://www.storenvy.com/stores/11582-all-things-gloucester

10:35am 09/18/2015

The September GAAC meeting will be this week, on the 18th, not the second Friday as is usual. In October we will be returning to our regular meeting schedule.

In the sort of colorful and engrossing presentation we’ve come to expect from Gary Meehan, at our September 18 GAAC meeting Gary will discuss his ongoing efforts to image the solar system. He will explain the equipment he uses in some detail, and will run through some of the issues that need to be considered in order to obtain the best results. 

Gary’s presentation is, of course, loaded with images, especially his new pictures of the Sun, Moon, and Jupiter. And those of you who want to give it a try are in luck: in addition to leading us on a tour through his recent astrophotos, Gary will also demonstrate the series of procedures that he uses to convert video data into a final image product. 

And there’s more! At this meeting we’ll be celebrating what looks to be the upcoming decision to replace Gloucester’s streetlights with lower color temperature 3000k astronomy-friendly LED’s, and we’ll be thanking the principles involved in advocating for this decision. There will be cake.

The Gloucester Area Astronomy Club meets on the second Friday of the month (usually), at the Lanesville Community Center, 8 Vulcan Street in Lanesville. Everything is always free. For more info, see http://gaac.us, and see our Facebook page at http://facebook.com/gaacpage. You can follow GAAC on twitter, @gaacster.

Is there anything the Kimberley’s can’t do? Multiple drone rescues 125 feet in the air,  Indian delights for dinner,  how hum,  just another day in the life of two beautiful people.  Love you guys.  Thanks for feeding us 🙂

While I’ve been there many, many times, the beauty of the Rose Garden at Lynch Park in Beverly always takes my breath away just a little bit.  There’s something about how gorgeous it is…and how it sits boldly, so close to the oceanfront, that always surprises me.  A great place to head for a picnic lunch if you’re looking to squeeze every last drop out of summer.

A photo of an ancestor, a vintage sled, boxes of photos, gizmos and gadgets, and memories, memories, memories.

These Salps or Salpae were at Good Harbor Beach, where there were multitudes of strands of them riding on the incoming tide in the river.  They are very cool gelatinous little creatures, which I had never heard of or seen before.  The first photo is a couple of strands floating in a plastic cup.  The other two are out of the water (although I put them right back after photographing them) on land.  When you remove them from water, the strand immediately breaks up into individual animals, but when you return them to the water, they find each other and rejoin again.  Very fascinating creatures.

A salp (plural salps) or salpa (plural salpae or salpas^[1]) is a barrel-shaped, planktonic tunicate. It moves by contracting, thus pumping water through its gelatinous body. Salp jet propulsion is one of the most efficient in the animal kingdom.^[2] The salp strains the pumped water through its internal feeding filters, feeding on phytoplankton.

Salps are common in equatorial, temperate, and cold seas, where they can be seen at the surface, singly or in long, stringy colonies. The most abundant concentrations of salps are in the Southern Ocean^[3] (near Antarctica), where they sometimes form enormous swarms, often in deep water, and are sometimes even more abundant than krill.^[4] Since 1910, while krill populations in the Southern Ocean have declined, salp populations appear to be increasing. Salps have been seen in increasing numbers along the coast of Washington.^[5]

Salps have a complex lifecycle, with an obligatory alternation of generations. Both portions of the lifecycle exist together in the seas—they look quite different, but both are mostly transparent, tubular, gelatinous animals that are typically between 1 and 10 cm (0.39 and 3.94 in) tall. The solitary life history phase, also known as an oozoid, is a single, barrel-shaped animal that reproduces asexually by producing a chain of tens to hundreds of individuals, which are released from the parent at a small size. The chain of salps is the ‘aggregate’ portion of the lifecycle. The aggregate individuals are also known as blastozooids; they remain attached together while swimming and feeding, and each individual grows in size. Each blastozooid in the chain reproduces sexually (the blastozooids are sequential hermaphrodites, first maturing as females, and are fertilized by male gametes produced by older chains), with a growing embryo oozoid attached to the body wall of the parent. The growing oozoids are eventually released from the parent blastozooids, and then continue to feed and grow as the solitary asexual phase, thus closing the lifecycle of salps.

The alternation of generations allows for a fast generation time, with both solitary individuals and aggregate chains living and feeding together in the sea. When phytoplankton is abundant, this rapid reproduction leads to fairly short-lived blooms of salps, which eventually filter out most of the phytoplankton. The bloom ends when enough food is no longer available to sustain the enormous population of salps. Occasionally, mushroom corals and those of the genera Heteropsammia are known to feed on salps during blooms^[6]

The incursion of a large number of salps (Salpa fusiformis) into the North Sea in 1920 led to a failure of the herring fishing.^[7]

One reason for the success of salps is how they respond to phytoplankton blooms. When food is plentiful, salps can quickly bud off clones, which graze the phytoplankton and can grow at a rate which is probably faster than that of any other multicellular animal, quickly stripping the phytoplankton from the sea. But if the phytoplankton is too dense, the salps can clog and sink to the bottom. During these blooms, beaches can become slimy with mats of salp bodies, and other planktonic species can experience fluctuations in their numbers due to competition with the salps.

Sinking fecal pellets and bodies of salps carry carbon to the sea floor, and salps are abundant enough to have an effect on the ocean’s biological pump. Consequently, large changes in their abundance or distribution may alter the ocean’s carbon cycle, and potentially play a role in climate change.

Salps are related to the pelagic tunicate groups Doliolida and Pyrosoma, as well as to other bottom-living (benthic) tunicates.

Although salps appear similar to jellyfish because of their simple body form and planktonic behavior, they are chordates: animals with dorsal nerve cords. Such evolutionary development leads in turn to vertebrates, animals with backbones.

Salps appear to have a form preliminary to vertebrates, and are used as a starting point in models of how vertebrates evolved. Scientists speculate that the tiny groups of nerves in salps are one of the first instances of a primitive nervous system, which eventually evolved into the more complex central nervous systems of vertebrates.^[8]

^{From Wikipedia}

I woke up singing this song this morning.  Since none of us can say with certainty that we won’t, I felt compelled to ask the question, and ask you to seriously contemplate the answer for yourself.  If you died tonight, where would you be?  Listen to this song by Big Daddy Weave and think about it.  Do you know where you would be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhn-UoWWibI