A rarely seen deep sea fish is found in California, and scientists want to know why
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
SAN DIEGO — A rarely seen deep sea fish resembling a serpent was found floating dead on the ocean surface off the San Diego coast and was brought ashore for study, marine experts said.
The silvery, 12-foot-long (3.6-meter) oarfish was found last weekend by a group of snorkelers and kayakers in La Jolla Cove, north of downtown San Diego, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in a statement.
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
1 of 5
This image provided by The Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows a team of researchers and science-minded snorkelers working together to recover a dead oarfish from La Jolla Cove, Calif., Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. (Michael Wang/The Scripps Institution of Oceanography via AP)
It’s only the 20th time an oarfish is known to have washed up in California since 1901, according to institution fish expert Ben Frable.
Scripps noted that oarfish have a mythical reputation as predictors of natural disasters or earthquakes, although no correlation has been proven.
Oarfish can grow longer than 20 feet (6 meters) and normally live in a deep part of the ocean called the mesopelagic zone, where light cannot reach, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Swimmers brought the La Jolla Cove oarfish to shore atop a paddleboard. It was then transferred to the bed of a pickup truck.
Scientists from NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Scripps planned a necropsy on Friday to try to determine the cause of death.
In 1974, science fiction author Larry Niven wrote a murder mystery with an interesting premise: could you kill a man with a tiny black hole? I won’t spoil the story, though I’m willing to bet most people would argue the answer is clearly yes. Intense gravity, tidal forces, and the event horizon would surely lead to a messy end. But it turns out the scientific answer is a bit more interesting. On the one hand, it’s clear that a large enough black hole could kill you. On the other hand, a black hole with the mass of a single hydrogen atom is clearly too small to be noticed. The real question is the critical mass. At what minimum size would a black hole become deadly? That’s the focus of a new paper on the arXiv . The study begins with primordial black holes. These are theoretical bodies that may have formed in the earliest moments of the Universe and would be much smaller than stellar-mass black holes. Anywhere from atom-massed to a mass several times that of Earth. Although astronome...
Even as the avian flu continues to affect birds and the local egg supply, health experts say eggs remain safe to eat . Commercially available eggs pass through testing, grading and inspection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture , the agencies that share responsibility for the safety of eggs before they hit your plate. Federal inspections of egg farms with multiple millions of birds occur four times a year. California’s agriculture department further regulates the safety of eggs produced, shipped or sold here — ensuring they go through an industrial washing and sanitization process. All eggs sold in California from farms with 3,000 chickens or more, whether originating within or being imported from outside of this “egg-deficit” state, go through additional measures and labeling rigors implemented a decade ago to combat bacterial contamination by Salmonella enteritidis. Related Articles Science | With avian flu flying around, is it ...
On October 14th, 2024 , NASA’s Europa Clipper mission launched atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will spend the next few years traveling 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion mi) to reach Jupiter’s moon Europa , arriving in April 2030. Once it arrives in the system, the probe will establish orbit and conduct 49 close flybys of this “ Ocean World ” and search for chemical elements that could indicate the presence of life (biosignatures) in the moon’s interior. By July 2031, it will be joined by the ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), which will conduct a similar search around Callisto and Ganymede. As is customary, the mission team has been checking and calibrating the Clipper’s instruments since launch to ensure everything is in working order. The latest test involved the probe’s stellar reference units (or star trackers), which captured and transmitted the Europa Clipper’s first images of space. These two imaging cameras look...
Comments
Post a Comment