Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Thailand Dive and Travel Expo 2009

We just got back from Bangkok after a weekend full of surprises and fun ! Our booth was right at the entrance, the best location in the hall !

Next to Canon and TAT, we were lucky to have our good friend Mr Sim from Lawrence Factor Asia to be our neighbor.

The show is full of activities combining adventure, golf and bouldering !

The floor where equipments take the most space in the diving section.

Myth Asia team; Poo, me, Ally of Mataking and Calvin.

Calvin posing in the booth while Poo is hard working !


Myth Asia just next to Canon Thailand.

More equipment booth !

TDEX 2009 is still a better show compare to ADEX Sin or DEM Asia in Taipei. TDEX and DEEP are 2 shows that an capture the ride of time, change according to the flow and still comes out winner !

Good show TDEX ! We are booked for next year .. 13 - 16 may 2010 ! Watch OUT for more .... Bangkok always fascinates me.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Come and meet us at Bangkok TDEX 14 - 17 May 2009

hey guys / gals,

If you happen to be in Bangkok attending the dive expo come and visit us we will be there, grab some good bargain for your next diving holiday or just come and say 'Hi' .. it will be nice to chat up with you and share some stories.

Me and Calvin will be around with our Thai colleague Khun Poo.

for more informations

Monday, May 11, 2009

Declining Shark disrupted ecosystems

Researchers warn of decline in sharks, disrupted ecosystems

THE WASHINGTON POST

July 3, 2008

The Mediterranean Sea, says Francesco Ferretti, is “a very dangerous place for a shark.”


Courtesy Enric Sala
On this vessel, sharks are stripped of their fins, which are sold to Asian markets. The demand for shark-fin soup is one factor in the decline of the shark population in the Mediterranean Sea.
So dangerous that in the past two centuries, the shark population there has plummeted by more than 97 percent, according to a study by the graduate student, two colleagues at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and an Italian researcher.

They based their conclusion on evidence scoured from an unusually wide variety of records, including documents drawn from universities and archives, from fish markets and recreational fishing clubs, and from local accounts of shark sightings.

The paper, co-authored with the late Dalhousie marine biologist Ransom A. Myers and others, is only the latest evidence that some of the oceans' most feared predators are themselves in dire danger.

Another team of scientists has shown in recent months that the peril is global, concluding that all but two of 21 species of open-ocean sharks and their cousins, the rays, are facing the risk of extinction. Another found that the decline of sharks at the top of the food chain is disrupting marine ecosystems around the globe.

“Sharks are just one part of the ocean's web of life,” said Margaret Bowman, who directs the nonprofit Lenfest Ocean Program, which helped fund all three studies. “But these studies show if you pull out that one thread, the whole web suffers.”

The shark researchers – from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and several European countries – are engaged in a huge detective project, much of it inspired by Myers, who pioneered the first global shark assessment before his death in late 2006.

Culling both unconventional and traditional sources such as fishing data, museum records and scientific studies, they are tracking not only how drastically sharks' numbers have dropped in recent decades but also how their disappearance is transforming the marine world.

Several factors help explain why the shark population has declined in the Mediterranean, Ferretti said in a telephone interview from his native Italy. Fishing vessels are targeting them to meet the Asian demand for shark-fin soup, while simultaneously trying to compensate for the fact that they have depleted other fisheries.

“Some fishers have decided to switch to sharks because they cannot make up their product with bony fish,” he said, noting that the presence of so many countries bordering the Mediterranean has contributed to the fishing pressure there.

“At these levels, these sharks can be considered functionally extinct, meaning that they cannot perform their role of top predators in the Mediterranean marine ecosystems anymore,” he said. Ferretti and his colleagues published their findings in the journal Conservation Biology.

Two other papers published this spring suggest that once these predators disappear, the species they prey on not only increase in numbers but also behave differently once they are in less danger of being eaten.

In Prince William Sound, Alaska, Pacific sleeper sharks keep harbor seals from eating too many walleye pollock, wrote Dalhousie marine biology professor Boris Worm, the lead author of a recent paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in an e-mail. Depleting the sleeper sharks in turn hurts the pollock population.

“We now understand that both on land and in the sea, large predators play important roles in regulating both the total number and the behavior of their prey,” Worm wrote. “Unchecked by their predators, some of these prey species can wreak havoc on ecosystems – this is one important reason to keep predators around in sufficient numbers.”

Another team of researchers, headed by Nicholas Dulvy, a biology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, found that in the open ocean, sharks that used to be an inadvertent bycatch for vessels seeking tuna and swordfish are increasingly being targeted for their meat and fins.

The group, which belongs to the World Conservation Union's Shark Specialist Group, surveyed 21 pelagic shark and ray species, and determined that only pelagic stingrays and salmon sharks do not face a risk of extinction. Others, such as thresher, ocean whitetip and shortfin mako sharks, are all vulnerable, they wrote.

Sonja Fordham, a co-author of their paper in the journal Aquatic Conservation Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, said pelagic sharks, which regularly cross vast oceans, face heightened pressures because there are no international catch limits.

“Even though these are wide-ranging and fast-moving sharks, they are at risk,” Fordham said in a phone interview from Brussels, Belgium, where she advocates for tighter European shark-fishing regulations as the shark conservation program director for the advocacy group Ocean Conservancy.

Bowman said she and other advocates hope fishery managers will “figure out how to control fishing to prevent further declines” of sharks, and policymakers are responding. On June 19, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced it would ban the removal of shark fins at sea in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico by late July and cut the permitted catch of sandbar and porbeagle sharks.

A week earlier, the House Natural Resources Committee advanced legislation that would institute the “fins attached” requirement nationwide. International fishery managers will debate this fall the idea of imposing worldwide shark catch limits.

Enric Cortes, a scientist at NOAA's Fisheries Service who conducts shark-population assessments along the East Coast, emphasized that scientists are still learning about the role sharks play in ecosystems. They may dominate more isolated regions, but they don't necessarily shape every marine environment they inhabit: “The jury is still out on that.”

Read the details from link

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080703/news_1c03sharks.html

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Cigarette Butt .. think twice !

Every year billions of cigarette butts end up on our beaches and in the ocean

Story Highlights

  • Cigarette butts an environmental danger
  • Are cigarette butts hazardous waste?
  • About the Cigarette Butt Advisory Group
Every year billions of cigarette butts end up on our beaches and in the ocean


Everyone knows smoking cigarettes is hazardous to their health, but a new study shows that cigarette butts can be just as dangerous for the environment. SDSU public health researcher Richard Gersberg evaluated the effects left-over cigarette butts have on marine life and found that the chemicals from just one filtered cigarette butt had the ability to kill fish living in a one-liter bucket of water.

Gersberg's study used three types of cigarette butts:
  • Smoked filtered cigarettes without tobacco
  • Smoked filtered cigarettes with tobacco
  • Clean un-smoked filtered cigarettes

In all cases, about half of the fish were killed with a very low concentration of cigarette butts.

"The most important finding in this research is that it seems to be the filter, or rather what's in the left-over filter that is most dangerous to our water," Gersberg said.

Cigarette filters are made of cellulose-acetate, which is not readily biodegradable.

str-050109-nosmoke.jpg
An estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts wind up
as litter worldwide each year.
Cigarette Butts Are Hazardous Waste

In response to these new findings, the national Cigarette Butt Advisory Group (CBAG) has made the recommendation that cigarette butts be placed on the list of hazardous waste.

"Each year, billions of cigarette butts end up on our beaches, and in our oceans, lakes and rivers," said Tom Novotny, chair of CBAG and professor of public health at SDSU. "Based on this new research, we believe that cigarettes should be considered toxic waste and new requirements need to be established for how they are disposed."

According to Novotny's recent article in theInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, an estimated 1.69 billion pounds (845,000 tons) of butts wind up as litter worldwide per year. In addition, the annual Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup reports that "cigarette butts have been the single most recovered item since collections began."

About Cigarette Butt Advisory Group (CBAG)

The Cigarette Butt Advisory Group consists of more than a dozen members including representatives from environmental groups, government advocacy groups and legal advisors. The Cigarette Butt Eradication Project seeks to unify public health efforts against smoking with environmental efforts against waste.

Together, these efforts will add to health and healthy environments.

This research was sponsored by the University of California, Office of the President, Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

NOTE : THE ABOVE IS AN ARTICLE PICK FROM

http://www.sdsuniverse.info/sdsu_newscenter/news.aspx?s=71209

Dive The World! (M'sia Time)