Blackmoor Vituperative

Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there,” said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London’s The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

( The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”, from TreeHugger)

The Burmese python is challenging the native alligator for the top of the Everglades’ food chain. In a particularly freaky skirmish of this war, two of these apex predators killed each other in a fight to the death just a few days ago.

I learned an interesting thing at the Virginia Aquarium the other day. A swamp is not a bog, nor are either of these marshes. A swamp has trees, water, and mud. A bog has trees, water, and decaying vegetation which is decaying more slowly than it builds up. A marsh has grass, water, and mud, and is either a salt marsh or a freshwater marsh, depending on how close it is to the ocean and how much brackish water the tide brings in. The Virginia Aquarium is located right on top of a salt marsh, and the exhibits on the marsh ecosystem are really interesting.