New Intern Says Hello!

Hello everyone, I just wanted to introduce myself as the newest addition to Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper. My name is Chris Murawski and I will be serving an internship with the organization for the Spring 2007 semester. I am currently working on an undergrad degree in Biology at Buffalo State College and plan on graduating this May. My duties as an intern include working with Robbyn on the Riverwatch program, assisting with the Spring Cleanup, and various other tasks.
I have spent a great deal of my childhood, teenage and adult years fishing, boating, swimming, and hiking in and around our great rivers that our region is so lucky to possess. Because of this I am glad to do anything I can to help out a great organization like Riverkeeper. I am truly amazed what this organization has accomplished in the last few years and I hope I can be a part of the many more achievements that are to come in the future.

Reflections on Water from a Renaissance Man and a Transcendentalist Poet Philosopher

Leonardo da Vinci , the Renaissance artist/inventor and Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist naturalist/poet/philosopher, both wrote articulately and artistically about water.

In a time when scientists believed the world consisted of only four elements--water, air, fire, and earth--Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up sophisticated inventions and experiments. In his notebooks, he wrote extensively about his observations of eddies and currents and described 12 different kinds of waves. In explaining why the surface of flowing rivers presents "protuberances and hollows," da Vinci said that "just as a pair of stockings which cover the legs reveal what is hidden beneath them, so the part of the water which lies on the surface reveals the nature of its base." He obviously knew the Mediterranean region very well! Oh, and try to stump somebody with this riddle of water some day--"In its rapid course it often serves as a support to things heavier than itself. . .It submerges with itself in headlong course things lighter than itself."

Read da Vinci's comparison of bodies of water to the bodies of humans:

". . . as man has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, so the world has the rocks which are the supports of the earth; as man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world; as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spread their branches through the human body, in just the same manner the ocean fills the body of the earth with an inifite number of veins of water."

Henry David Thoreau spent idyllic months observing and recording the passing of seasons around Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Read what he has to say about a halcyon inland lake:

. . . it is the earth's liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveler to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon, where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and tidiness; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each morning, and a fresh surface is constantly welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have accumulated herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In summer a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and veering on their tiny voyages."

Secret Fish Conversations

Talking Fish: Wide Variety Of Sounds Discovered
(excerpts from an article by Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience)

Scientists are discovering unusual mechanisms by which fish make and hear secret whispers, grunts and thumps to attract mates and ward off the enemy. In one bizarre instance, seahorses create clicks by tossing their heads. They snap the rear edge of their skulls against their star-shaped bony crests.

There are more than 25,000 species of fish living today, more kinds than any other animal form with a backbone in the history of the planet. A lot of them appeared to have done well in school.

"We know so far that at least 1,000 fish species make sounds, with a huge diversity of means by which they generate and listen to sounds," fish behaviorist Timothy Tricas at the University of Hawaii at Manoa said.

Tricas and his colleagues studied butterflyfishes, a family that includes 126 species with bright colors and striking patterns found on just about every coral reef in the world. Using underwater cameras and sound recorders known as hydrophones on Hawaiian coral reefs, Tricas and his colleagues discovered butterflyfish emitted several types of sounds using tail slaps, fin flicks, fin spine extensions, grunts and jumps.

"We know butterflyfish swim very close together," Tricas said. "What we think might be happening is they are essentially whispering, and have to swim close together to listen."

A fish that other scientists have recently investigated is the pearlfish. Curiously, these dwell inside living sea stars or tubular creatures known as sea cucumbers. While a number of fish, such as the toadfish, communicate with their swim bladders by rapidly twitching it back and forth with muscles, the pearlfish instead use a much slower muscle that generates strong, low frequency sounds which pearlfish may use to speak with others, advertising their presence even from inside their homes.

"Think of the pearlfish swim bladder as a bongo drum. If you could grab its skin and let it go like a rubber band to go thunk, that's what the pearlfish is doing, some four to 20 times per second," Tricas said. "It's a highly novel system that I've never heard of anything like before."

Studying fish sounds could help shed light on the evolution of communication and hearing, as well as related behaviors, such as finding of mates or defending of territory, Tricas said. For instance, the fact that butterflyfish can effectively only whisper "may help explain the evolution of their pairing behavior, why the fish appear so social, and why almost all butterflyfish affiliate with one another so often."

Currently the purposes of some fish sounds remain complete mysteries. "There were early claims that seahorse clicking increased in intensity during courtship, but no evidence has been found to support that. It's a tantalizing question for scientists to work on," said marine conservationist Amanda Vincent, director of Project Seahorse in Vancouver.