Anti-whaling activists and Japanese whalers have exchanged hostile water cannon fire in the Antarctic Ocean as two activists’ boats tailed the Japanese whaling fleet in an attempt to foil the killing of any whales.

Wales Online report that the Sea Shepherd conservation group said its ships – the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker – had surprised the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru early yesterday.

Each year, the US-based activist group sends vessels to confront the Japanese whaling fleet and two collisions have already occurred this year alone.

Japan’s hunt for whales is allowed under world whaling regulations as a scientific expedition even though commercial whaling is banned.

Despite man’s ability to put a man on the moon and send satellites into the far reaches of space, the deepest parts of earth’s own ocean are still shrouded in mystery; indeed it’s probably true that scientists’ maps of Mar’s surface is more detailed that any map they possess of the ocean floor.

Scientists attribute this to the inherent difficulty of communicating with robots and submarines beneath the sea, due to the intense pressure, currents and even marine life that form part of the ocean’s deeper reaches.

However, in order to address this problem, scientists developed the new NEPTUNE network, which went online Wednesday 8^th December.  The deep-sea network will stream data collated from hundreds of undersea instruments, sensors and probes and stream them direct to the internet direct from the ocean floor.

The network consists of a 497-mile ring of fibre-optic cable, situated off the Canadian coast and features five nodes which act as routers to transmit data to the internet.  Each node is encased in a 6.5 ton cage to protect it from fishing trawlers, sea vessels and giant squids.

The network is expected to produce around 50 terabytes of data each year, all of which will inform scientists about everything from earthquake dynamics to the effects of climate change on the water column, and from deep-sea ecosystems to salmon migration.  It will also study gas hydrate deposits which are found along the continental margin and the effects deep-sea fishing can have on benthic communities and marine life as fishermen cast their nets wider and deeper.

Embley Wood

A new website has been launched to help find the most scenic area in the UK.

ScenicOrNot seems to use the same system as other successful voting sites like HotOrNot and RateMyPoo where users are shown a random image and asked to rate it out of ten.

This new project is powered by mySociety, the company who are behind projects such as TheyWorkForYou (that puts constituents in touch with their MPs), FixMyStreet (lets people complain about potholes in their roads) and PledgeBank (gets people to work together towards a common goal).

Images are currently being taken from Geograph – a project that sets out to collect photographs covering every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, but has no ranking system of its own. MySociety director Tom Steinberg realises there are external factors involved in the voting and said: “We encourage people quite strongly to discount any aspect of photographic skill.”

The FAQs on the site also mention that the data gathered will eventually be used for a secret project but Tom also said it would be made open “so that anyone can re-use it and play with it later on”.

The early leaders so far are Hampshire’s Embley Wood and Loch Ossian in the Highlands.

British beekeepers have expressed fears over the future of the honey bee as numbers have dwindled this year.

As well as a shortage of honey (English stocks are likely to have run out by Christmas), a lack of bees would have a knock-on effect on some of Britain’s other crops – such as apples, pears and raspberries – because the bees are responsible for 90% of the pollination.

The number of bees has dropped elsewhere – America, France and Greece have all announced heavy losses – and researchers are at a loss as to how to best combat the problem. Hundreds of British beekeepers signed a petition that was delivered to parliament earlier this month demanding more funding for research in a effort to come up with a solution. There is currently £200,000 ($309,000) set aside for bee health research, but the beekeepers are pressing for a figure closer to £1.6million.

A wet summer has contributed to the dwindling numbers, making it hard for bees to store food for the winter months, but more important has been the changes in agriculture.

Wheat prices have increased which has led to a 13% rise in British plantings and this is a problem for bees as wheat produces no nectar. The concurrent drop in oilseed rape (by around 12% according to figures released by Britain’s farm ministry) has further hindered the honey bee as this is one of their favourite feeding places.

One proposal put forward by the EU is for farmers to start planting bee-friendly flowers near wheat crops to help feed the honey bee in the hope that the bees will have a bigger presence in years to come.

Picture from Insect Identification