Visions of Spring

The oil spill of the Gulf of Mexico seems to be the hottest topic, flooding Huff Post with new blogs, articles, and updates every few hours. Today, the spill has managed to find its way to Florida’s shores. Blobs of oil goop were found on the beaches early this morning. BP, who is responsible for the leak, is in charge of fixing this spill. The head of the company wants “his life back.” Well, Mr. BP president, we’d like our clear waters, wildlife, and jobs back.

Since the spill, thousands of animals, including endangered species, have been exposed to the toxic oil. Folks who fish off the coast, own restaurants nearby, resorts, and equity on the houses near polluted beaches are at risk. Humans who swim in the ocean are in danger of ingesting blobs of oil. The ecosystem is being destroyed by a man-used resource that, since seeping into the ocean, now pollutes water, air, and land. Quite the triple threat indeed. However, where are the revolutionaries? Where are the green technology graduates and businesses? Where are the engineers who could fix this plan? WHERE IS THE LEFT?

Hasn’t BP already done enough polluting for a few hundred years? This will take so much effort to restore the ecosystem, if possible, the jobs, the loss in equity, the ocean! Yet, they seem to be the ones fixing the problem. Perhaps Obama should open the floor to other companies, especially those with women as managers and in high roles. Perhaps we should be investing our money, time, and effort into green energy alternatives. According to one blog on the Huff Post, of the 19 green energy companies (there are over 50 different ones) that are in the NY stock exchange, only 5 have women in any high-ranking position. 5. Out of 19. And some only have ONE woman. Uno. Un. 1. Why not open the floor to a more diverse platform of opinions and ideas? Why invest in companies that continue to remain patriarchal?

Regardless, the two most upsetting items to me personally about the spill is that 1) They are not being charged (yet at least) for contaminating public oceans, damaging the ecosystem, and failing to figure out a solution 43 days after this whole mess began and 2) Many people are continuing to/will continue to use OIL instead of trying to organize efforts for healthy, cleaner alternatives. Groups should issue statements on the spill. People should boycott the company. Activists and the masses should be building up efforts for large protests, sit-ins, demonstrations, and rallies. We as members of the left should turn this accident into a solution to the countries dirty oil usage by fighting for less oil and more green energy. We cannot allow  this tragedy to go unaccounted for like so many other opportunities in the past. Let’s fight for a cleaner, better world!

If I were to ever become a marine biologist, studying octopuses would be at the top of my list! Here’s an article from the AP, with the first evidence of tool use by an invertebrate. It should interest folks interested in the continuum of animal intelligences and adaptation. Enjoy!

AP– SYDNEY — Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter – unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.

Julian Finn and Mark Norman of Museum Victoria in Melbourne observed the odd activity in four of the creatures during a series of dive trips to North Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia between 1998 and 2008. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

“I was gobsmacked,” said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I’ve never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.”

Octopuses often use foreign objects as shelter. But the scientists found the veined octopus going a step further by preparing the shells, carrying them long distances and reassembling them as shelter elsewhere.

That’s an example of tool use, which has never been recorded in invertebrates before, Finn said.

“What makes it different from a hermit crab is this octopus collects shells for later use, so when it’s transporting it, it’s not getting any protection from it,” Finn said. “It’s that collecting it to use it later that is unusual.”

The researchers think the creatures probably once used shells in the same way. But once humans began cutting coconuts in half and discarding the shells into the ocean, the octopuses discovered an even better kind of shelter, Finn said.

The findings are significant, in that they reveal just how capable the creatures are of complex behavior, said Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville.

“Octopuses have always stood out as appearing to be particularly intelligent invertebrates,” Robson said. “They have a fairly well-developed sense of vision and they have a fairly intelligent brain. So I think it shows the behavioral capabilities that these organisms have.”

There is always debate in the scientific community about how to define tool use in the animal kingdom, Robson said. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use. But other scientists could define it differently, which means it’s difficult to say for certain whether this is the first evidence of such behavior in invertebrates, Robson said.

Still, the findings are interesting, he said.

“It’s another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world,” Robson said. “We are just a continuum of the entire planet.”