Global Warming: Polar Bear Threat?
The largest terrestrial carnivore on the planet is in danger of disappearing. Polar bears are facing trouble in the near future as the ice sheets they rely heavily on for survival are disappearing each year. Perfectly at home in the harsh conditions of the Arctic, they use the ice sheets as floating islands where they hunt for food, search for mates, and rest between swims. As the ice sheets melt, valuable limited hunting grounds are reduced and swimming distances between them are increased. Their habitat is disappearing beneath their feet and scientists believe that global warming is behind this growing threat.
So are polar bears really in trouble? More than a fourth of the world’s polar bear population is in sharp decline and alarming evidence of the impact of global warming on polar bears continues to grow. Scientists have gathered evidence of polar bear drownings, cannibalism, starvation, reduced cub survival and denning dislocation.
Polar bears are one of the world’s strongest swimmers but four were found drowned in the Bering Strait and scientists believe that as many as twenty-seven may have perished.
Two female polar bears were found starved to death, malnurished and without any fat stores on their body.
Newborn cubs were crushed to death when their snowy dens collapsed from unseasonable rains.
The majority of pregnant polar bears in Alaska are now digging snow dens on land rather than on sea ice.
So what can we do to help? It’s simple, get involved and raise awareness. The threat of global warming to polar bears has led to them being added to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace have put heavy pressure on the Bush Administration to shield the polar bear under protection from the Endangered Species Act. There are plenty of ways for people to make their voice heard and keep pressure on the politicians to do the right thing for these amazing creatures. Take action now!
- Defenders of Wildlife
- Greenpeace’s Project Thin Ice
- Natural Resources Defense Council’s BioGems
- Save Our Environment
Upgraded to WordPress 2.1 Ella
Curiosity got the best of me with the release of WordPress 2.1 Ella. I couldn’t wait to see what new features they have added so I installed the upgrade tonight. It was relatively simple and took a whole 18 minutes to complete. Everything went smoothly with no problems. I don’t use many plugins and only one, WysiwygPro, doesn’t work with the new version. Hopefully they will get it fixed since I really like the extra functionality provided by the editor. As far as the Ella goes, there aren’t really any noticable differences on the surface but I like the new features added to the admin panel and they cleaned it up some. Everything said, the upgrade was worth the time and effort.
Cool Project: 2,000 Bloggers
While I was making my daily visit to 9rules I stumbled across a very interesting project a fellow blogger has undertaken. His name is Tino Buntic and he has started the global project to create a blogroll that consists of the faces of 2,000 bloggers from all walks of life. Any type of blog is acceptable and he doesn’t care what the blog is about or why the person blogs. He is including anyone that leaves a comment with their name and a link to their blog. The only requirements are that the blog must have been started before January 1st of this year and include a picture of the person somewhere in the blog. That’s pretty simple, although he has a lot of work to do making all those thumbnails for his listing. This is some pretty cool stuff!
My Own Little Piece of the Ocean
About three years ago, I got this hair-brained idea to set up a saltwater aquarium in my classroom. No big deal, I had set up plenty for laboratory studies in college so it would be a breeze. The whole idea was to be able to show the kids the real-life relationship between a clownfish and anemone. It’s a concept that’s in nearly every biology textbook I’ve ever read so I thought it would be a pretty cool to bring the pictures to life. It worked out better than I had planned. The kids loved to watch the clownfish nestle in the anemone. It reminded them of Finding Nemo which is one of their favorite movies. Who would have thought high school kids would be so fascinated with the relationship between a fish and invertebrate. The only problem was that I too had become fascinated. It wasn’t just something to study, it was calming just to simply watch.
I have always had freshwater aquariums in my home and classroom, but saltwater aquariums were always too expensive to own and maintain. With improvements in technology and a drop in prices of equipment, I decided it was time to take the plunge. The classroom experiment was such a success that I began working on a home project. It took months of planning and building and the help of family and friends to get it done. Two years after beginning the project, I can honestly say it’s been an incredible learning experience. The animals are the easy part, I spent my life studying them, but the maintenance has been tough. It takes an elaborate system of filtration and lighting to keep a reef aquarium going. For the most part, I’ve had great success and I enjoy the results every day when I walk through my front door.
It has been a lot of fun watching the fish, corals, and other invertebrates grow and interact with each other. If I can ever afford a new camera I plan on creating an album in the gallery so there will be visuals to go with the words. You can’t put a price tag on the hours of peace and enjoyment I get out of my aquarium. I have always found peace in the ocean and now I have my own little piece.
Bring Sherman to Our Beach
Running out to get the Sunday morning paper to read the comics just isn’t worth the energy anymore. The comics section of our local paper has slowly taken away all our favorites. Probably the most popular comic strip never to be printed in our paper is Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon. Picking up Toomey’s popular syndicated strip might just be a way to boost Sunday sales for our newspaper and restore laughter to people at the Beach. It would give people another reason to buy the paper besides the weekly sales ads. So what would make Sherman’s Lagoon so popular here? It’s simple, we are the hairless beach apes that Sherman loves to terrorize.
Since we don’t have Sherman’s Lagoon in our paper, I subscribe to it through DailyINK to satisfy my Sherman fix. To give you a quick idea of what the strip is about I borrowed their introduction.
“There’s a lagoon called Kapupu near the island of Kapupu in the sunny North Pacific just west of the Elabaob Islands in the Palauan archipelago of Micronesia. Sherman the Shark, his wife, Megan, and a host of other ocean occupants call it home. Occasionally, the hairless beach apes with their so-called civilized human ways try to encroach on the Lagoonies’ tropical paradise. So seven days a week, there’s bound to be high jinks in this coral-reef heaven…”
Sherman is a great white shark who’s not quite all there. No matter how hard he tries, things always seem to blow up in his face. Along with his wife Megan and son Herman, friends Hawthorne the hermit crab, Fillmore the sea turtle, Bob the bottom dweller, Thornton the polar bear, and Ernest and nemesis Captain Quigley, they will keep you laughing every day.
