Jellyfish and plastic pieces from the Pacific Ocean.

Crabs, Algae, and Flying Fish Eggs on Ocean Plastic.

Barnacles living on plastic bottles in ocean.

A research ship recently docked back home after weeks out at sea studying plastic in the ocean. You can read about the fascinating trip and see amazing photos on their blog. Or check out the official website.

Their destination was a location in the Pacific Ocean, far off the coast of California, where sea currents converge and cause a mass gathering of plastic. The plastic gathering isn’t a floating raft; but small pieces suspended at varying depths.

These plastic pieces probably leech chemicals into the water but they also act like magnets attracting hydrophobic industrial and agricultural chemicals – which are suspected to be consumed by small fish and work up the food chain to top-level-consumers like us.

Interestingly, larger pieces of ocean plastics become homes to pelagic creatures like crabs, algae, flying fish eggs. They anticipate needing six months (or more) to analyze all the data – should be some interesting results!

Ponyo Movie Poster

There is a new delightful Hayao Miyazaki movie out called Ponyo. In the film, the world is returning to the Devonian Period, AKA the Age of Fishes.

The movie is worth watching alone for the beautiful animation of trilobites, armored placoderms, and other pre-historic creatures. I tried to fish-out some clips of the sea creatures but the official trailer doesn’t feature any devonian animal scenes. If you’re a historical geology lover this is a must-see movie!

Link to more info about the Devonian Period.

Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide

I finally got a chance to take an indepth look at MinnAqua’s Leader’s Guide.

I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.

First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.

Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.

The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.

You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.

More information from the blog Deep Sea News: Scientists Solve The Mystery Of Why This Fish Is So Freakin’ Crazy, and from the blog Pharyngula: Weird-eyed fish