Hello new marine life! hello PADI Gator Specialty.

This is from TheLivingSea.com. (check it out cool site)

As I cruised along the sand, from the hazy distance I could see a dark shadow,” Ruda writes. “Not being able to discern its shape too well, I thought to myself, ‘Holy cow! That’s a huge stingray.’”

Ruda said when he got closer, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“This creature was so out of place that I thought it was nothing more than a well-planned out hoax by my good friends,” he said.

So let’s re-cap… this guy goes ALONE inside a boat full of Japanese whalers… to do a citizen arrest…?

What is this guy thinking? Peter Bethune vs 100 Japanese whales?

Hi mister Japanese Captain.. this is a citizen’s arrest.. please step down of the vessel…. and jump in my jet ski!

So obviously now… the Japan’s coast guard has an arrest warrant for him on suspicion of trespass and his wife Sharyn, who hasn’t heard from him for almost a month, fears Japanese authorities may make an example out of him.

Well Peter… enjoy Tokio.. enjoy the sushi!

If convicted, Bethune could face imprisonment of up to three years.

Recently, just last August, Shark Rescue joined the mounting chorus, a new kid on the block that launched their activities by “drawing a line in the sand from the heart of the shark-fin trade to the [Hong Kong] Government House.” That line in the sand was when Shark Rescue’s founder, Ran Elfassy, submitted his first call to action.

“What people don’t realize,” said Ran as he stepped through the crowds in his shark costume, “is the sheer magnitude of the shark trade. It’s big business with highly-invested interests clinging to keep the business alive and well. But,” continued Ran, “this industry is big money with a side that’s simply impoverishing things for everyone.”

Standing in his silver costume, arms bound to his side as an echo of the millions of shark carcasses discarded by an insatiable trade, Ran eyes the shops behind him, chock-a-block on Des Voeux Road. Each store is packed with burlap bags of fins, each shop a warehouse of expensive and profitable shark cartilage.

“This is it,” he continued, heading towards an establishment called Shark Fin City, “this district is the heart of this unsustainable action.” Hong Kong is undoubtedly the major player in the shark-fin trade, as a 2007 report found that over 55% of the shark fin trade passed through the Chinese metropolis.

Not only is the city a huge consumer of shark fin and other shark products, but the Asian powerhouse is the greatest engine driving the shark trade. “Which is why Shark Rescue was founded,” explained Ran. “I looked at where I was, asking myself what activity would have the greatest strategic impact in marine conservation.

By using sharks as a proxy for marine conservation in such a strategically important place, our mission of bringing real conservation to the world’s seas and oceans has the greatest chance of success.”

Walking from storefront to storefront, pausing in many to raise his silent protest, Ran faced retailers who lacked the values of conservation that would make such a trade impossible. “Although this street is arguably ‘ground zero’ of the shark trade,” mused Ran as he left the district to head for the Government House, “Shark Rescue is not limited to the activities in Hong Kong. Part of our mandate is also to raise awareness that the West is also guilty of decimating sharks.” Ran noted that if shark fin was arguably a cultural practice that Asian cuisine had to drop, so too did the fish-”n-chip shops in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. Too often, the “fish” at the fish-”n-chip shop is flake or so-called reef-cod – AKA shark meat. Then there’s the substantial shark oil and other derivatives for supplements, shark teeth for fashion and more.

As Ran conducted his one-man protest from Des Voeux Road to the government house, he came face to face with Hong Kong office workers, each in their own world and sometimes faced with a man painted and grey, silently reminding anyone who would see him of a grim reality often carried out at sea in the name of a banquet, a festive meal, a celebration.

Walking through down town, Shark Rescue’s spokesman finally alighted at the steps of the Government House, where he submitted the first of Shark Rescue’s many calls to action. At the heart of Shark Rescue’s “fashion with teeth” campaigns is the simple message to the city’s leader: Please do the right thing and lead Hong Kong towards protecting sharks and the health of our oceans.

By Delian Gaskellhttp://www.sharkrescue.com/

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The encounter was captured in calm waters just off St. Heliers beach in Auckland, New Zealand, yesterday.

Five or six orcas gathered in the morning sun to feast on the stingrays resting near the shore, while another 30 orcas hung around at the back of the harbour.

A huge crowd gathered to watch the spectacle.

While stingrays seem most content to spend their days lying at the bottom of the sea-bed, occasionally sticking their stingers into unassuming human feet, this one proved they can be moved to flights of fancy when needed.

Taveuni – one of the best dive locations in Fiji because of the world-class Rainbow Reef. Accessed from Taveuni and some parts of Vanua Levu, the reef sits in the Somosomo Strait that divides the two islands. Fed by nutrient-rich ocean currents passing through the strait has ensured a rich coral wonderland, coral fishes and pelagics. Don’t miss the Great White Wall, one of the reef’s world-famous dive sites.

Although Taveuni is called the “Garden Island” because of the richness of its topside flora, the name
could equally apply to the remarkable, colourful scenes beneath its waters. The Somosomo Strait is the stretch of water between the island and Vanua Levu. The Strait almost single-handedly earns Fiji its title as “The Soft Coral Capital of the World”. Nearby, the world famous Rainbow Reef and Great White Wall have been noted in the ‘Top 10 Dive Locations in the World’ by U.S. Divers magazine, and Rainbow Reef has been consider one of the top 7 dive sites in the world by the Jacques Costeau Exploration team.

Currents are variable in Taveuni but you should at least be prepared for some as it is seldom entirely still here. Normally the currents are little more than a gentle helping hand along the way, guiding you past some of the most wonderful proliferations of soft corals on the planet. When the current is present to any reasonable extent the grateful corals expand to their finest and most enchanting, whereas without the current they would retract into barely visible balls – and who wants that?
It is not all sessile stuff when diving in Taveuni however as the nutrient rich waters also result in the presence of plenty of pelagic fish species and you can expect to see barracudas, reef sharks and manta rays, particularly at a site aptly named The Zoo.

There are also some really rewarding sites off the little islands to the north east which you will surely visit if staying for several days. Here there is less current but still plenty to see and these sites can make an interesting change from the Somosomo Strait where diving can, in every sense, be truly breath-taking.

So if you are looking to one of the best Soft Coral Dive sites in the world: Rainbow Reef in Taveuni can be a great choice.

Biology professor Bradley Wetherbee has been studying the effects of sites where tourists feed wild stingrays in the Grand Cayman Islands since 2002.

In 2002, 2003 and 2008, Wetherbee traveled to Stingray City, one of the world’s most popular dive sites, where he began his research.

“We were interested in how feeding the stingrays was influencing their behavior,” Wetherbee said.

In the wild, stingrays are known to be nocturnal and maintain a diet consisting of organisms that dwell on the sea floor.

“From an evolutionary point of view, for millions of years these stingrays have been nocturnal,” Wetherbee said. “Tourists start feeding them during the day and they reverse their behavior. They became very active during the day, or diurnal, which they never were before, and now they sleep all night.”

Wetherbee explained that in the wild, stingrays are bottom-feeders, and do not typically eat non-natural prey items, such as squid, which many tourists have been feeding them.

“They eat a lot of invertebrates, worms and shellfish,” he said. “Their mouths are on the bottom, so they swim along and dig up stuff in the substrate mostly. They do catch little fish sometimes but it’s mostly invertebrates.”

Allison Seifter, a sophomore at URI who will be majoring in marine biology, helped organize the data from Wetherbee’s research and presented it at the 2009 Northeast Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Seifter said the largest ray Wetherbee found was a female measuring 120 centimeters in diameter for its disk width.

“I was surprised that the females are a lot bigger than the males, almost twice as big,” said Seifter. “With people feeding these rays, they’re getting to really big sizes that they wouldn’t usually grown to in the wild.”

“We found the body of a Western woman but we couldn’t identify her immediately,” Marine Police Lieutenant Colonel Wanlop Phuangbaka said.

The marine police continued a sea surface search for the missing passengers from the Choke Somboon, the company’s 29-metre scuba-diving-boat-cum-floating-hotel, that sank late Sunday night in the Andaman Sea after being hit by a sudden tornado, according to crew and survivors.

“If we don’t find the other missing soon we will send frogmen down to the boat to see if they were trapped inside,” Wanlop told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in a telephone interview.

The missing foreigners include three Austrians, two Swiss, a Japanese and a Thai man, said Beno Branden, a manager at the Dive Asia Company which runs scuba diving tours to the Similan Islands.

Thai authorities are using a helicopter to search the area where the boat sank.

“The whole affair took one to two minutes at the most,” Branden said. “The captain said it was a twister. It was 2-3km away and then at the boat within a minute.”

About 23 passengers, including 15 foreigners and 8 Thai staff, made it to life rafts and were rescued by a Thai fishing boat on Monday morning.

Most of the passengers were in the boat’s saloon deck when the twister hit at about 23:00 on Sunday (16:00 GMT), about 30km offshore of Phuket Island, a popular Thai beach resort situated about 600km south of Bangkok.

It was unclear whether the missing passengers were inside the boat when it sank.

“We have relatively certain information that at least two of the missing people made it out of the boat because some survivors saw them and described them as going in the opposite direction,” Branden said.

But the likelihood of them surviving at sea was deemed slim.

“Everything happened so quickly I don’t think the people had time to take life jackets,” Branden said.

Those picked up from the sea were reported to be well, with only sunburn and scratches.

The boat itself is advertised on the company’s website as it’s “luxurious flagship”, with air-conditioning, a saloon, a bar, a multi-media centre and a large sun deck.

A typical tour takes scuba divers to the Similan Islands from Phuket, allowing them to dive all day and then sleep on the boat as it drives back to Phuket overnight, which takes 10 to 12 hours.

The Similan Islands, a national marine park, is one of Thailand’s best-preserved scuba and snorkeling destinations. Hotels and guest houses are prohibited on the islands to conserve the environment.

* We want to thank Joakim Jarheden Clown Manager of Moskito Diving for threatening to sue us for adding the wrong photo. Thanks Joakim for your rude email ! We will keep you in mind any time we need to advise people where to dive in Thailand.

The adult male pygmy sperm whale initially stranded on Mahia beach near the golf club.

Moko led a group of stranded whales back out to sea late last year, but Department of Conservation Wairoa field centre supervisor Malcolm Smith said Moko was “pretty involved” with its legion of human fans and suggested the whale had “snuck in the back”.

A group of volunteers, including Gisborne police officers Greg Lexmond and Russell Holmes, managed to refloat the five-metre-long, 800kg whale, but it stranded again outside the Mahia campground.

“It had been thrashing around in the shallows for some time … you could see it was exhausted,” Mr Holmes told the Gisborne Herald.

The whale was dead when Mr Smith arrived.

He said the stranding was unusual, as mainly female whales strand along that area.

“What we think happens is that Hawke’s Bay is a breeding and calving area for pygmy sperm whales.

“The calves feed in the bay where it’s quite shallow and there’s a good food supply for mother and calf.”

The dead whale was buried on site.