Manta rays are good

There are Manta rays in this new advert from Cadburys.

I also made this drawing of manta rays:

Manta rays can jump

I found this newspaper clipping which supports some of my earlier research about manta rays jumping out of the water sometimes although it is still really unknown why they do this.
Some people think it is part of a mating ritual and others think it is used just to get the parasitic fish off their bodies.

The sea specifically

I did this brainstorm to try and narrow down my research about the sea. I am considering focussing specifically on manta rays as they have been a big part of my sea research so far.

The only problem with that is that Monkeys are another of my topics and having 2 animals is quite similar and will probably have a lot of overlapping research about conservation and endagerment and stuff so I may have to change the Monkeys topic to a different one.

Fishies

An article about some unfortunate fish.

Sea Stones

Here are some stones that I collected from the sea in Cyprus.
There were billions of other stones but these are the ones that caught my eye. 

And here are some different styles of observational drawing of the rocks.

The sea is good but it still broke my camera.

Although some might argue that it was partly my fault for swimming with it in my pocket.

Frilled Shark

This thing has apparently been around for a long long long time and its predicted to be the basis for stories and legends huge mythical sea serpents and stuff.
Interestingly it is found in a lot of places around the world including the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.
Weird things live in the sea.

Manta Rays

I decided to look into Manta Rays a bit more and see what kinds of problems affect them.
I already know a fair bit about the way they work (or as much as I can find as the Manta Ray is a very mysterious species and a lot is still unknown about it).

Manta's are quite outgoing and curious as sea creatures come and they are very inquisitive and forward when it comes to humans. Mantas will often follow humans around in waters and there is evidence of them recognising individuals and building real relationships with humans.
Despite their size (which can be up to 25foot wide), the Manta Ray is completely harmless in every way. They are basically big gentle giants.
They have some tiny tiny teeth but they have never seen being used and there are some theories about them being to do with mating rituals.
They live for probably about 30 years based on their size and information about their closely related species and feed on algae and stuff in the water.
The move relatively slowly through the waters because they are constantly feeding and moving and need to save their energy which they can store and use tiny aounts of without having to replenish it for ages although they can move quite fast if they have to and can jump clean out of the water; Sometimes these massive rays can jump on passing boats and cause a lot of damage, often causing them themselves to die because their weight creates a massive impact.

Because they are slow and have no defenses at all (Unlike some of their close relatives they don't have a stinger) they are very vulnerable to attack from predators.
Their only real predators are Orcas, Sharks and as with everything Humans.

We kill Mantas quite regularly, I think most especially around the Gulf of Mexico as this is a good environment for them to live in.
As I understand it there has been some recent law changing which has made it a pretty serious criminal offence to kill Manta rays. This is good news although I have read a few criticisms saying effectively saying that the laws are not being properly enforced as a result of funding or staffing or something.
Either way, Manta Rays are still dying and people are getting away with it.

The most common occurrance for death seems to be accidental catching in nets. This may either kill them from some kind of strangling or pressure or damage their bodies which can be really prone to infection or they will often be raised out of the water when caught, harpooned or speared and then thrown back into the water to dispose of the body.
This is a pretty merciless killing and totally unnecessary.

Manta rays can be killed needlessly for sport or trophy.
They can also be killed by big ships and boats as technology keeps making them larger and faster.
I can imagine that the BP oil spill is probably not doing wonders for the Manta Ray welfare.

Mantas can also be specifically hunted as a kind of novelty food. Manta Ray meat can be served from restaurants to fast food and is well known for being used at Taco stands as a result of dwindling shark populations.
Humans undeniably have the most ways to kill Manta Rays and in fact are their biggest predators.

Just to make it clear, it is entirely illegal to kill a Manta in any of these ways.

Oceans

As some primary research for my summer project I went to the London Aquarium.
I mentioned that I wanted to look at the kinds of creatures that live in the sea so this was a good starting opportunity.

These were the tickets:

I like rays and I think that they are good. They also have little smiley faces like this one I made:

I watched a really good documentry on Manta Rays and they have since become my favorite type of ray because they are massive and cool.

I swam with a huge wild sea turtle in the caribbean sea off St Barths which accidently found us when I was snorkeling with my family in 2006. It was awesome.

I like turtles.





Here are some photograohs from the aquarium

The Sea - Composition

The seas and the oceans in the world are all a variety of sizes and densities and depths and concentrations but they all share a common factor in being comprised of a saline body of water.
Saline basically means slat water, though the type of sodium vaires from place to place and the water usually has a mixture of different salts.

The average salinity (saltiness) of world ocean water is 35 parts per thousand.
Parts per thousand is just a way of measuring concentration, it is more of a ratio that an actual mesaurement. The idea is that it is always proportional no matter what the measurement scale is, e.g. if you have a kilogram of saline water with 1 part per thousand salt then you would have one gram of dissolved salt in the water.

This means that if you have a kilogram of average saline ocean water then it would have 35 grams of salt in it. Equally if you have a metric ton of water then it has 35 kilograms of disolved salt in it.

Anyway, 35 ppt (parts per thousand) is the average salinity, but almost all sea/ocean water is in the small scale between 30 and 38ppt salinity.

The most common majority of sodium in the waters composition is sodium chloride but other salts appear as well. The full elemental composition of a 35 ppt saline solution is this:

Element	%
Oxygen	85.84
Hydrogen	10.82
Chloride	1.94
Sodium	1.08
Magnesium	0.1292
Sulphur	0.091
Calcium	0.04
Potassium	0.04
Bromine	0.0067
Carbon	0.0028

You can see that the two main elements in the the table are oxgyen (making up over 4/5 of the solution) and hydrogen which are the two elements commonly used to express water as an equation.
Together they make up 96.66% of the water, leaving only 3.34% to be made up of the other elements.
This shows how little salt there really is in the saline water and what a difference it can make to compeletely change the environment from fresh to salt water and change everything about the waters use and what can live in it.

I have made a couple of pie charts to show how these figures looks visually:

The Chloride and Sodium go together to create the salt Sodium Chloride and make up 3.02% which is the majority of what is left.

The other elements are tiny molecules of metals, non-metals and halogens and are insignificant in comparison to the other elements as there is so little of each. Together these remaining elements make up only 0.32% of the 35ppt saline solution.

Just because there is so little of each of these elements doesnt actually mean that they are useless, as they are some of the most important elements in creating life, especially calcium and carbon which I know all lifeforms are based around. 
I wouldn't know exactly as it is quite complicated and probably a bit beyond my understanding but I would say that it isn't a coincidence that life is so abundant in the seas and oceans with these remaining elements present and completely surrounding everything that lives in them
(e.g. we obviously have these elements on land as well but we are not constantly swimming through them or breathing them in)


DENSITY

Interestingly saline water has a higher density than fresh water because the sodium chloride increases its mass. This doesn't afect water much physicaly although it means that salt water is heavier than fresh water and creates more pressure at greater depths.
It also means that energy has different effects on the water.

There is such a thing as heat energy but there is no such thing as cold energy because it is not physical but is a side effect of a lack of heat.
Heat also cannot pass from a colder body to a hotter, it always goes the other way.
The salt in saline water acts as a metaphorical insulation and changes how heat energy affects the substance.
The boiling point of water is 100 degrees C and the freezing point is 0, but salt increases the boiling point and decreases the freezing point depending on how much salt there is. For approximately every 30grams of salt added and dissolved into water, the boiling point will rise about half a degree C.
The salt in the water effectively stops the heat and lack of heat from affecting the water molecules at the regular temperatures.
In fact the freezing point of water can go down dramatically, as I found that the lowest recorded freezing point of water was around the antarctic and was about -2.8 degrees C (bearing in mind that this is still flowing water and not ice).

Although this might not seem that interesting to most people, it does to me.

The Sea

The sea can otherwise be known as the ocean or a series of smaller sections each as its own single ocean.

Depending on perspective, there can be between 1 and 5 oceans but it is more commonly accepted that there are 5 main oceans.

In my opinion I think there are actually more like 3 main oceans; The Pacific, The Atlantic and the Indian.

The other 2 oceans are the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean and are closely spread across the north and south pole (around Antarctica and the Arctic) and are basically smaller parts of the other 3.

Actually looking closer I’d say that the Artic Ocean is vast enough to be considered its own but the southern ocean is very small in comparison. 

This brilliantly fantastic piece of graphic design that I created is a rough layout of the oceans on a world map.

Seas and oceans are actually different things although the word ‘Sea’ is often used synonymously with ocean. In fact this topic that I am researching shouldn’t be called ‘The sea’ it should be called ‘The ocean’ or ‘The Oceans’.

A sea is defined as a large body of saline water just like an ocean, although a sea is much smaller or rather an ocean is comprised of seas.

Sea < Ocean

A sea is usually connected to an ocean in some way.

I remembered the term ‘Seven Seas’ to do with sailing and pirates and stuff and looked into what that actually means.

It turns out that there are a lot of different theories behind where the term comes from and the ways it was used and understood in different parts of the world.

Medieval European culture stated that the seven seas were the Mediterranean, Adriatic, the Black Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. 

Opposing this view is Arabic culture claiming that the seven seas are a route to china with evidence backing up as early as 9^th century AD. The seas are The Persian Gulf, The Gulf of Khambhat, The Bay of Bengal, The Straight of Malacca, The Singapore Straight and the South China Sea.

Opposing both of these is the Venetian claim that to ‘Sail the Seven Seas’ was a kind of title given to those who were particularly nautically skilled.

In total there are between 100 and 120 seas in the world depending on your definition of a sea, as some are more commonly considered lakes.