Sea Turtle Recovering After Washing Up On Oregon Beach

An endangered sea turtle that washed ashore on the Oregon coast during a thunderstorm last week is recovering. The Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport is caring for the turtle.

The Olive Ridley turtle warmed to 68 degrees as of Wednesday — up 11 degrees from when she arrived at the aquarium’s rehabilitation unit. Aquarium spokeswoman Erin Miller says the turtle’s temperature must reach 75 degrees before she can leave triage. Miller says the turtle, nicknamed “Lightning” showed improvement when she was moved to a deeper pool.

Miller: “They put her in there and she immediately started exploring her new environment. She has an air bubble trapped under her shell, which is a common ailment for stranded sea turtles, so she floats at the top of the water but she had the strength to swim down and dive underneath the water’s surface.”
Lightning has opened her right eye, but it’s badly damaged. She has yet to open her other eye.
Timothy Ebarb of Pacific City found Lightning last Thursday. He stayed with the turtle for more than two hours while awaiting help.
 

Sea Turtle Recovering After Washing Up On Oregon Beach

Rare turtle washed up on Cumbrian beach dies

Published at 16:07, Friday, 23 January 2015

A rare turtle found washed up on a Cumbrian beach and being cared for at a county aquarium has died.

Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle

The Kemp’s ridley sea turtle died this morning shortly before it was due to be moved from Maryport aquarium to the Lakes Aquarium, Windermere, where it was to be tube fed in a last resort to save its life.

Marine biologist and BDMLR Cumbria co-ordinator Sarah Neill, who was due to transfer the turtle, said: “We are all obviously absolutely gutted but I’m so grateful to Maryport Aquarium and Millcroft Vets for all their help and support throughout the rescue.

“We have all learned a great deal and will be prepared for next time, if there is a next time.”

The male turtle’s body will be sent to the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme for a post mortem examination.

Sealife experts have been caring for the Kemp’s ridley – the world’s rarest sea turtle – which was discovered on Walney, since December 20.

The species is usually spotted in the Gulf of Mexico but may have been “cold-stunned” by a drop in temperatures before being carried 5,000 miles across the Atlantic by the Gulf Stream.

Experts believe there could be as few as 1,000 breeding female Kemp’s ridley’s left.

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk

Rare turtle washed up on Cumbrian beach dies

Va. Beach pet store closing after 39 years

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) – The king of the jungle is hanging up his vines.

Bob Hames says 39 years of owning and running the massive and unusual pet store Animal Jungle is enough. In the next four to six weeks, he said, he’s closing his doors at Holland Road and South Plaza Trail.

“A, I’m tired,” Hames said. Then there’s the way the market has changed, with competition from big-box pet stores and Internet sites. Hames said his two children aren’t interested in taking over the store, and he doesn’t want to sell it.

“This is a lot to take care of,” he said. “I grew into a store this size over 39 years.”

Hames started Animal Jungle at Pembroke Mall in 1976 when he was 20 years old. He had been an aquarium hobbyist since he was 10.

From the start, the store’s primary focus was aquatics. Hames said he traveled to Florida more than a dozen times a year to buy fish directly from commercial farms. It got him good pricing and a selection few other stores could boast, he said.

Today, the store on Holland Road has 40 to 45 employees, 26,000 square feet of floor space, 35,000 gallons of aquarium water and big selections of reptiles, small animals and birds.

It also has a few “display” animals, including Flapjack the stingray, Cookie the hyacinth macaw and Mikeeto the serval, an African cat that was born and raised by a private breeder in North Carolina.

He plans to find places for all of them. A staff member is planning to take Flapjack, and a few longtime customers are interested in Cookie. The Virginia Zoo in Norfolk is interested in taking Mikeeto and, if that doesn’t work out, Hames said he might take her to a cat rescue in Florida. She can’t legally be sold in Virginia to anyone who doesn’t have a special permit.

“I’m not taking any animal to the SPCA,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to find homes for all of our animals.”

The store announced the closing Dec. 18 on Facebook and said all inventory is 35 percent off. Nearly 300 people had commented on the post by the next day, lamenting the store’s close and sharing memories.

Chuck Doud was one of them. He said he started bringing his children to Animal Jungle years ago when they were 1 and 2, back when he had little money for entertainment. They’d feed the koi fish and maybe hold a cockatiel, and eventually got their first hermit crabs and betta fish there.

“I’m just heartbroken,” Doud said over the phone. “It’s such a shame, too, that an independent store like that doesn’t seem to be able to survive anymore.”

Bob Claffy said that when he was 14 and the store was at Pembroke Mall, Hames let him clean hamster cages in exchange for fish and fish food. Today Claffy has 30 to 40 aquariums.

“That shop is not like a normal pet shop,” he said. “It’s iconic on the East Coast…. For the hobbyists in Hampton Roads, that store and those people will be sorely missed.”

Story Continues →

Va. Beach pet store closing after 39 years

Photographer focuses on beasts' beauty in Va. Beach

By Elisabeth Hulette
The Virginian-Pilot
© December 8, 2014

VIRGINIA BEACH

Aire the red-tailed hawk wasn’t cooperating.

She kept turning sideways Sunday morning, showing the camera where her right wing was amputated after a collision with a cellphone tower. Why wouldn’t she show her good side?

“I don’t speak red-tailed hawk well, so who knows?” said photographer Joel Sartore. After some coaxing, he got the shot.

He always does.

Sartore, 52, a National Geographic photographer from Nebraska, has spent the past nine years photographing captive species around the world for a project he calls the Photo Ark. The collection is part preservation, part inspiration: If people see beautiful, up-close photographs of animals, Sartore reasons, they might fall in love. And if they do, they might try to keep them from extinction.

On Sunday, he was at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, where he spoke to the public. While there, he asked if he could add a few of the aquarium’s animals to the ark, said Rachel Metz, director of live exhibits. On Sunday, he photographed mostly birds; today, he’ll tackle the fish.

“It’s exciting. He’s been all over the world photographing animals, and now here he is,” Metz said, “photographing ours.”

Handlers buzzed Sunday morning as Sartore set up a “light tent,” a cloth box that contains the creatures. He said bees are tough and wasps aren’t any fun, but birds are a close runner-up on his list of the toughest critters to photograph.

Gulliver the herring gull put up a fight. He became a local celebrity after dangling – and being rescued – from power lines near the Lesner Bridge. On Sunday, he scratched and stomped around the light tent.

“Ow, that’s my fingers,” his handler said as he took Gulliver away after the shoot. “That’s my wrist.”

A pretty red-headed moorhen behaved better, but Sonic the North African hedgehog ran in circles. A sand boa from Kenya just sat still, and a tiny yellow warbler, native to Virginia and missing one eye, preened for the camera.

“It’s easy when they just stand there, with their good eye toward you,” Sartore said.

His pictures show animals in startling detail against plain black or white backgrounds. That way, he says, an elephant appears the same size and has as much value as a sparrow.

Sartore said he has photographed about 4,250 species in more than 200 zoos and aquariums around the world. That puts him about a third of the way toward his goal of photographing all 12,000 species in captivity.

It’s a small percentage of the world’s total biodiversity – there are 6,000 species of frogs alone, he said – but there are advantages to sticking with captive animals. For one thing, they don’t have to be chased down in the wild. For another, Sartore can send a message that zoos and aquariums are doing important work – often they’re the only places some people will interact with animals.

“You can’t care about something if you’ve never met it,” he said.

In his presentation, Sartore urged people to think about what they buy and throw away.

Want to save a walrus? Put on a sweater, he said.

“Don’t burn carbon to keep your house warm,” he said. “You don’t have to be a biologist to save species.”

Elisabeth Hulette, 757-222-5097, elisabeth.hulette@pilotonline.com

Photographer focuses on beasts" beauty in Va. Beach

El Nino show at Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach may be only place to see weather ...

At the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, a new show debuts Saturday devoted to the global weather phenomenon known as El Niño.

Unfortunately, that’s likely to be the only place to experience El Niño’s warm seas and heavy rains in Southern California this winter.

Even though predictions of a coming El Niño reached 80 percent this summer as warm tropical coastal waters flooded the area, NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists announced this week that a much-hoped-for El Niño probably won’t materialize. That means Southern California can expect another dry season burdened by ongoing extreme drought.

“Everybody got pretty excited because it was definitely a preview of a coming El Niño,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But it just sorta fizzled out.”

Climatologists now say there is a 53 percent chance of a weak El Niño arriving from the western Pacific, where shifting trade winds that normally blow from east to west stall or reverse in an El Niño year. That atmospheric shift affects the ocean by causing tropical surface waters to pile up along the equator and move eastward. The entire process is depicted in the Long Beach aquarium’s show, which will be played daily in the Ocean Science Center.

The show is projected on the aquarium’s 6-foot-diameter Science on a Sphere globe that hangs from the middle of the science center flanked by TV monitors that can display secondary footage of earthquakes, tsunamis and other images to help explain complex, large-scale weather phenomena in a compelling way.

Scientists still don’t know what initiates an El Niño event, though it appears to be the planet’s way of keeping temperatures from getting too hot or too cold.

National Weather Service Science and Operations Officer John Dumas said Thursday that, though the estimated chance of an El Niño still exceeds 50 percent, it would be very mild if it does arrive in Southern California this winter.

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“What is the El Niño forecast this year?” Dumas asked at a news conference Thursday announcing the latest expectations at Aquarium of the Pacific. “The water’s there. The temperatures are there (in Southern California). But the big portion of it is still in the western Pacific.

“The Climate Prediction Center is calling it a 53 percent change of an El Niño, and a weak one at that if there is one,” Dumas said. “Some people have said: ‘Will El Niño get us out of the drought? Unfortunately, we’ve had three years of drought conditions and one (near) El Niño event.”

Since summer, tropical ocean currents have flooded Southern California waters, delighting anglers with species rarely seen here like wahoo, opah and mahi-mahi. Scientists closely monitored the warm waters from the western Pacific to see if they brought with them wind patterns consistent with a full-fledged El Niño, but they now say it may have more to do with an active tropical storm season.

“I love El Niño,” Patzert said. “Why do I love El Niño? We live in the American Southwest, which is normally dry. But when we get an El Niño — which is not that often — we can get double our normal rainfall. Wouldn’t that be sweet, because we’ve been in a long-term, large-scale drought.”

While scientists have lost hope of a large-scale El Niño this year, they said an active tropical storm season has at least brought some rain.

“Just to give you a little hope: There are other weather systems that can deliver rain,” Patzert said. “And any El Niño — even a wimpy one — would help. But it will take several years to get us out of this drought.”

El Nino show at Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach may be only place to see weather ...

Volunteers wanted for Blue Reef beach clean-up effort

Blue Reef Aquarium wants local people to support a big beach clean up on Thursday, October 9 meeting at the aquarium at 11am.

Volunteers will be given bin bags, gloves and a form to record their finds as they clean up the stretch of beach beside the aquarium.

“Hastings Borough Council has kindly agreed to provide us with a selection of litter picking tools and volunteers from Clean Seas Please will also be lending a hand,” said Blue Reef’s Leanna Lawson.

“The plan is to meet up at the aquarium at 11am on the day so everyone can be registered and issued with cleaning items, datasheets and beach clean booklets.

“All the rubbish that we collect on the day will be brought back to the aquarium where it will be separated out and individually itemised. After that we will recycle as much of it as we possibly can while the rest will be disposed of safely in an extra refuse container” she added.

The event has been arranged as part of the Marine Conservation Society’s ‘Great British Beach Clean’ initiative. If you are under 17 and want to take part you will need to be accompanied by an adult. Please wear sensible footwear and clothing.

To take part please contact the aquarium on 01424 718776 before the event.

Volunteers wanted for Blue Reef beach clean-up effort