Cranking the heat on the planet turns up the disease dial of fishes. So pointed out Jim Winton, a fish biologist at the United States Geological Survey, at a conference earlier this week. Marine fish have enough to deal with as is–we’ve plucked them like eyebrows from the face of the Earth, shaken quiet seafloors into snowglobes of sediment, herded schools into new territories as we’ve warmed their waters, and may be spinning their sense of smell silly as we drop acid in their home reefs.

Now, Winton is warning that warming lakes and streams makes it easier for diseases to spread. Evolution has whittled fish to fit a thin temperature range. Their cold-blooded bodies rely on the ambient waters to keep them going; too much heat or chill can overwhelm and make them vulnerable to disease like we are to a cold after a week of rainy days.

Not only are fish more susceptible, but our mobile ways have added more ailments to the mix. One example is whirling disease. The trouble comes from a parasite that burrows into young trout, snuggles into the developing skeleton and nerves, and twists the inchoate cartilage and bone. An afflicted fish spins like a spastic hippie at the dawn DJ set. They can’t stop shaking long enough to eat properly, and they’re easily picked off by predators. Most die young.

The parasite comes from Europe, where it has found balance in the lake systems. But the wild rainbow trout in the Rocky Mountains have little resistance to it, and as warmer waters stress their slimy systems they can succumb all the easier.

Similar stories involving other fish and parasites or viruses play out in other water bodies across North America, but the difficulty of noticing and counting sickly fish has kept it off the radar. In this case, the parasite’s knack for playing puppetmaster has been its own undoing–the obvious change in behaviour makes infected trout easy to spot.

I have seen polar bears annually for the past seven years, and in two of those years had to terminate the field season early because of the frequency and nature of bear encounters. Not only are bears now a regular and predictable part of being here on Cooper Island in late July and August, individual bears are spending more time on the island both looking for food and sleeping after or before having to swim in the ice-free Arctic Ocean. Last summer polar bears regularly visited the cabin during my last week on the island.

Here’s a 10-second video of a polar bear checking out their shack research structure:

You can read regular updates from him at his Earth Live: Cooper Island blog, including tales of a polar bear smashing eggs and killing nestlings of an Arctic bird without bothering to eat them

I’m stoked to hear a case where corporate muscle is flexing for good, not evil. Now, who will follow suit?

via Compass Group bans 69 endangered fish species from its restaurants | Business | guardian.co.uk.

They’ve learned a few things already.

1. It was a lady whale–since they conceal their bits in genital slits for streamlining purposes, it’s hard to tell the sex from the outside–and an older one at that.

2. The blubber layer was thinner than usual; that can happen after birthing a calf, which they do every 2 or 3 years. It’s not known whether baleen whales reproduce throughout their lives or go through menopause; so far, it seems only some toothed whales do, like orcas and short-finned pilot whales. So it’s unclear whether her slenderness was related to reproduction.

3. Her stomach was empty.

Okay, so she was a starving West coast middle-aged female. This just prompts a bunch more questions.

Did she die before or after the ship rammed it? Since fin whales can swim at 20 knots and can hear well and cruise ships are noisy, you’d think she was already dead–though whales may not be so attentive when they’re feeding (which she wasn’t) or nursing (which she likely wasn’t) or resting. If she did die first, that’s the second fin whale to die around here this year–one washed up about a month ago near Ucluelet , off the West coast of Vancouver Island.  So, how many naturally wash up each year? And does the baseline number actually represent a healthy or recovering population, or is it cause for concern when the number of fins is a small fraction of what they were before whaling?

If she was still alive, how can we avoid such collisions in the future? Whale avoidance tends to mean slowing down and maybe changing course. Is that the best we can do? Efforts to track whales through underwater listening stations and relay their locations to ships are a ways off still.

Does an empty stomach mean she hadn’t eaten in hours, or days, or months? Since they can eat a couple of tonnes a day, food must a pretty quick residence time in the stomach. Evidence of her starving prompts another question about fisheries managment: fin whales eat schooling fish like herring and sardines. While sardine levels have recovered along the West coast, does that really give us license to fish them again? Or should we just cool it for a while, and maybe let fin whales and other animals have a fighting chance?

The rest of the necropsy results are expected in the next couple of weeks. I’ll see what more I can find about fin whale health before then.

Parasites have been found sticking out of more flounder eyeballs than usual. Credit: A. Morton

You think you’ve got problems. Arrowtooth flounder, a flatfish found along the West Coast, have been turning up with more parasites lately.

And not just any parasites. The copepod Phrixocephalus cincinnatus burrows into the eyeball of the flounder and anchors itself inside,tapping into the bloodstream to feed its string of eggs now streaming from the fish’s eye. Fish, of course, have a tough time seeing with them. When the eggs hatch, the eye loses sight completely. Flounder with copepods in both eyes are pretty much screwed.

Shrimp trawlers fishing in British Columbia for years have recently noticed more of the creepy critters on flounder near salmon farms, and Dane Stabel, a parasitology graduate student at the University of Victoria, wants to find out why.

Little is known about the copepod’s biology—no one has ever seen an adult male or any juveniles, and no one knows why the parasite chooses the sanddab over the arrowtooth in California, even though both fish live in both places. With so much still to discover, Stabel offers loads of possibilities for the recent spike: more fish gathering near farms makes it easier for the parasite to spread, for example, and the extra nutrients and waste in the water could compromise the fishes’ immune systems. Half the picture is still missing: the identity of the animal that hosts the copepod for the rest of its lifecycle is a mystery. Stabel suggests it could be a polychaete worm that thrives in sites too polluted for other animals.

Over the summer, Stabel hopes to quantify how many flounder are afflicted to see whether the shrimpers’ reports hold water. Ultimately, he plans to uncover details of the copepod’s ecology—if he can keep quelling his gag reflex.