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admin
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Posted: Fri Jun 13th, 2008 08:50 pm |
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Endangered sea dragon at Ga. aquarium pregnantATLANTA - A weedy sea dragon at the Georgia Aquarium has something to celebrate this Father's Day. One of the rare creatures is pregnant for only the third time ever at a U.S. aquarium, aquarium officials said. But don't look for the expectant mom — dads carry the eggs in this family.
The aquarium's sea dragon has about 70 fertilized eggs — which look like small red grapes — attached to his tail. He is expected to give birth in early to mid-July, said Kerry Gladish, a biologist at the aquarium.
Sea dragons, sea horses and pipe fish are the only species where the male carries the eggs, Gladish said. Sea dragon pregnancies are rare because researchers don't know what gets them in the mood to mate.
"We know there's something biologically or environmentally that triggers them to want to reproduce, but in the aquarium world, we're not sure what that is," Gladish said.
The aquarium recently changed the lighting and thinned out the plants in the sea dragons' tank to give them room to court each other.
The aquarium has seven of the 18-inch sea dragons, which resemble Dr. Seuss characters with long aardvark-like snouts, colorful sea horse bodies and multiple paddle-like fins.
During mating, the female lays dozens of eggs and then transfers them to the male's tail.
In the wild, the survival rate for sea dragon babies is low, but in captivity it's about 60 percent, Gladish said. The fish is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's list of threatened species, mostly because of pollution and population growth in its native Australia.
Only about 50 aquariums worldwide have sea dragons.
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Jim
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Posted: Fri Jun 13th, 2008 11:14 pm |
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How interesting! This is the pic of the Red Dragon.
A relative of seahorses it reminded me of Captain Jack
and myself in 1972 diving the Lynhaven Pier (Big!) in
Virginia Beach (or Rudy Inlet Pier?) I think I posted it
before, but the short of it is we grabbed two seahorses
intertwined in a gill net around the pilings, took
them to Jack's house, where he had set up a salt water
aquarium. Bobby was about 10 yrs old then! To our
surprise the seahorses had babies, hundreds of them!Attachment: 080613-AP-dragon-pin_big.jpg (Downloaded 29 times)
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Jim
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Posted: Sat Jun 14th, 2008 03:41 pm |
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And to finish my "nostalgia crap" as someone so
politely put it in an email to me (and maybe to
gore the ox a little too!) here is our infamous
dive boat Sea Vamp circa 1974. That's Jack's
kids on board and Bobby is the one on the fly
bridge ladder. He was born in 63 so that would
make him about 11 or 12....and in two weeks
he'll be...45! Wow how time flies. Happy Birthday Bobby!Attachment: Sea Vamp.jpg (Downloaded 20 times)
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"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
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