Episode 4 : British Columbia
What happens when you cross a wolf with an eel? You get a wolf-eel. (Don't
even go there, ok?)
Now, you might think that you'd have to go to the Caribbean, Fiji, or some other
exotic locale to study Marine Environmental Science, right? Uh, no. Casey finds out
in our third episode that Canada, our home and native land, is actually
home to some extremely diverse ocean life.
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Highlights:
Petting a wolf-eel on the head like it's a puppy or something, observing elephant and ivory seals
and their puppies in their natural habitat, and not getting grounded for having your room look
like it was hit by the Perfect Storm!.
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Salt of the Earth
Seventy-one percent of the earth's surface is covered by water, which represents about 362,000,000 square
kilometres. That's 1,300,000,000 cubic kilometres of, primarily, salt water. How much is
that in litres? Today's computers can't even handle the number it's so astronomical!
Want to talk about salt?
Scientists estimate that the oceans contain as much as 50 million billion tons of dissolved solids.
If the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface, it would
form a layer more than 166 metres thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.
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Other facts:
- The ocean's principal dissolved solids are sodium salts (sodium chloride or common salt), calcium salts (calcium carbonate or lime, and calcium sulfate), potassium salts (potassium sulfate), and magnesium salts (magnesium chloride, magnesium sulfate, and magnesium bromide).
- Atlantic seawater is heavier than Pacific seawater due to its higher salt content.
- The freezing point of seawater depends on its salt content. Typical ocean water has about 35 grams of salt per litre and freezes at -19 degrees C.
Here wolfie wolfie... here boy...
Wolf-eels, or anarrhichthys ocellatus, aren't actually real eels. They're classified in the same family as
other 'wolffishes', Anarhichadidae. The longest recorded length of a wolf-eel is 2.4 metres, or about 8 feet!
The wolf-eel lives in the Pacific Northwest and makes its home on rocky reefs or stony bottom
shelves at shallow and moderate depths. They will usually stake out a territory in a crevice
and make a den or lair in the rocks. Their long, slender, tapering bodies allow them to squeeze into their
rocky homes.
Wolf-eels have extremely strong jaws with thick spike-like front teeth and massive flat molars
in the back, which makes it great for crushing their food, mostly hard-shelled animals such as snails,
clams, crabs, and sea urchins.
Wolf-eels may look dangerous, but they are really quite friendly. Some scuba divers can
lure wolf-eels out of their lair with sea urchins, and they'll actually eat right out of the
diver's hand.
Did you know... in any given year:
...over a 100 million sharks are killed, many solely for their fins; one million seabirds and
100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles suffer cruel deaths from exposure to plastic; about 600 miles of
commercial fishing nets break loose and float freely, killing everything that they come in
contact with.
...the amount of garbage dumped into the oceans is three times the weight of all the fish caught.
...2,200,000 tons of oil, or one tenth of one percent of all the world's shipped oil, is spilt
into the ocean. To put this in perspective, one litre of motor oil can contaminate 8 million
litres of drinking water.
...a female cod lays 4.1 million eggs.
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