The Coriolis Effect

Hahahahahaha. How true.

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Seafoam.

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theanimalblog:

Ten-year-old giant panda Xin Yue chills out at Taihu Lake National Wetland Park in Suzhou, China.  Picture: China Foto Press / Barcroft Media

Everytime there’s a panda on tumblr, its always looking into the sky.

Sea turtle - School’s started and I’m back to being busy again. I realise though, that I didn’t complete uploading all the wonderful pictures of my diving trip.

So here, I would like to share with you the gems of my trip, getting really up close and personal with a green sea turtle in the wild. They’re such beauties underwater.

Rise - I was pretty disappointed to find out that the sun sets behind the island. Meaning to say that there was no way I was going to be able to take a picture of the sunset on Dayang unless I took a boat and made my way around the island.

However, I never took notice of how the sun rises on the island. And to my delight, I saw this view while we were on the boat just as we were just about to leave for our first dive for the second day. 

Knowing that the sunrise wasn’t gonna last long, I took as many panoramic shots at different exposures as well as I could and hoped that they’ll turn out perfect for this HDR Panorama.

So much epicness in this shot.

via Marine Recreation Workshop Toolkit — National Geographic)

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Underwater Cities - Coral formations look squishy, but they are really hard as rock. A clumsy diver will be bound to bump and break beautiful coral like those pictured here, but once he or she attains “peak performance buoyancy” i.e. the ability to control his or her buoyancy, avoiding colliding head on into coral with a breeze. This is achieved by controlling how we breathe in and out, and also inflating/deflating a vest which is connected to our source of air.

Fishes have an in-built buoyancy control device, which is called a swim bladder. You don’t see fishes crashing into coral do you? However, fishes with a defected swim bladder face the same problem as us humans - the inability to control buoyancy properly.

Recalling my first few dives in Tioman and Dayang, I was like a bull in a china shop, constantly bumping into corals, I even got cut a few times because of my clumsiness.

Christmas Tree Worms - As you can see here, are aptly named because of their “gills” that spiral in such a way that it resembles the tree. They come in so many colours too! 

Actress Maggie Q swims with a whale shark off Cancun, Mexico to publicize the plight of sharks threatened by demand for shark fin soup.  Picture: Paul Hilton/ WildAid / AFP/GettyImages

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Farewell, George.

science:

Lonesome George is dead. Since being discovered more than forty years ago, he has been the last of his kind, the Pinta Island tortoise. With him, his species dies. Someone on reddit made this comparison of the Wikipedia page for the Pinta Island tortoise. How did we screw George’s species over? First 19th century whalers killed off a bunch for food on their journeys, then in 1959, fishermen introduced goats to the island. The goat population exploded to over 40,000 in just a few years, and the vegetation on the island was seriously harmed. The goats have since been exterminated and a project is underway to restore the Pinta island ecosystem and reintroduce tortoises to the island, but it didn’t come soon enough to save George’s species. 

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