Category Archives: Marine Conservation

Day 2 6/27/13 Trash

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According to Sausolito’s Marine Mammal Center,  ocean trash kills more than a million seabirds,10,000 marine mammals and turtles each year. 80% of the trash in the ocean comes from the land. 90% of the trash in the ocean is plastic.

On a two-hour walk through Griffith Park, I picked up a lot of trash including those maddening, elusive plastic shopping bags that (thank God) will soon be banned in Los Angeles, those “creepy, flimsy” bags  and that often drift and dance just beyond one’s grasp.

I’ve always been a fan of lists in literature and I found making the list of the trash I picked up to be strangely addictive:

1 Starbucks clear drink lid

1 Milky Way wrapper

1 weathered Scientology ad

1 bright new ad for electronic cigarettes

1 running shoe tongue

1 empty cellophane bag

2 empty clean-up-after-your-dog bags

7 thin plastic shopping bags

1 foam plate

1 glass bottle

1 plastic fork

2 plastic drinking cups

2 plastic caps

7 crushed paper towels

1 ad for the Hollywood Bowl Summer 2013

1 crumpled but still cheerful yard sale sign

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Day 1 6/26/13 Love Makes a Family: Adopt a Shark

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Shark Stewards offers symbolic adoptions of the sharks it tags and releases in the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

Today I became the proud surrogate parent of a hammerhead.

Here are some fun facts about this odd fish:

  • Hammerheads swim in large schools that sometimes exceed 100 sharks during the day, but at night are solitary hunters.
  • The oddly shaped hammerhead (known as a cephalofoil) is used for navigation and to detect and trap prey such as stingrays
  • Like humans, hammerheads have stereo vision, (each eye gets a slightly different view of an object), fantastic depth perception and better vision than other sharks.
  • In 2001, a captive female bonnethead (a type of hammerhead) gave birth to a shark without having had previous contact with a male. While “virgin birth” or parthenogenesis had been seen in birds, snakes and reptiles, until 2001, it had never been documented in sharks.