One of our favorite marine conservation bloggers, Jennifer Jacquet of Guilty Planet at Scienceblogs, recently took a Panama vacation, which wasn't quite so Panama-riffic (ok, bad play on words, but you get the idea.) Still, it was well worth.  Read on to find out just how much.

I am traveling in Panama (have been for the last couple weeks, hence the sparse blogposts) as a post-dissertation vacation.

I started at Bocas del Toro, which several friends of mine recommended. Despite being somewhat hard to get to, Bocas is overrun with tourism and is thus overrun with overbearing hoteliers and is overpriced (in addition, both bank machines in town went the way of Zimbabwe and were short on cash.) The Caribbean's glory days seem over to me: the coral reefs were part beautiful, part wrecked. There were no big fish to be seen. It might not be a bad idea to pour sugar on Bocas and allow the ants to have their way.

Don't be fooled. Coral Cay Conservation IS the name, but only saving corals is not the game.  Contrary to popular belief, the organization doesn't focus specifically on corals. Instead, the focus is to support local communities living near to a coral reef ecosystem (and also a tropical rainforest atmosphere) and teach them to preserve these amazing locations and tools for the future.  

Peter Faulkner is the Chairman of this wonderful conservation organization, but he doesn't stop there.  While actively promoting the preservation of tropical rainforests and corals, he makes time to run a small business in Mission Beach of North Queensland with his wife.  They provide dive training with a reef environmental spin, but also use their business and finance background for consulting purposes.  

Are you tired just thinking about it? We are! But somehow, Peter manages to hold up both and we applaud him for his efforts to educate the globe on the marine world. 

Here's what Peter has to say about his lifestyle:

Though a humble and modest man, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg stands tall in the world of climate change and marine science.  Though currently the Foundation Professor and Director of the Centre for Marine Studies at The University of Queensland, he's held other academic positions at UCLA, Stanford University,The University of Sydney, and The University of Queensland.  He's a member of the Australian Climate, Royal Society (London) Marine Advisory Network, and the Board of Editing Reviewers at Science Magazine.  He heads up a large research lab with over 27 researchers and students that focus on how global warming and ocean acidification are affecting coral reefs.  

He's written dozens of publications, had his work read by the Al Gore team, visited Antarctica, lived underwater for 10 days, and is creator of Climate Shifts, a blog that brings climate change issues and science discussions to a larger audience, without being restricted to scientists only.

Yes, he's done quite a bit and lives to tell about it. Now, TRT gets to hear about it.  We're excited to hear from this climate change king.

Aquafornia, the California Water News Blog by the Water Education Foundation is dedicated to providing comprehensive news and information about California water issues and issues that affect the Southwest by posting links from the news, press releases, trade magazines, and blogs. 

Unfortunately, it's not so difficult to find water issues that affect us everyday.  The blog posts are updated 7 days a week with breaking news whenever it occurs.  

The blog and the Water Education Foundation is dedicated to educating all of us about the water issues affecting California, and therefore, all of us all around the world.  They want to create a better understanding of general water issues and help resolve water resource problems through educational means and awareness.   They provide educational resources, recommended reading, data on the current California water crisis, research and more.

The health of marine ecosystems is declining.  So says James Douglass, a marine ecologist working at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Florida. Unfortunately, there are many factors behind these declines, both man-made and natural, and it can be challenging to figure out which are the most significant and how we should address them."

These are just some of the questions James asks himself almost everyday as he continues to research this and other matters of marine ecosystems, his goal being to describe and protect the biological diversity and beneficial functions of coastal marine habits.  As the oceans are threatened by both its natural ups and downs and issues like decreasing water quality and too much of an overharvest of important marine species, James continues to research what might truly be the cause. 

He writes about his experiences on his site: James' Blog, where he also gets to boast about his windsurfing expeditions.

Coral paleoclimatology, the study of corals and how they relate to climate and climate change, can be quite a complex concept.  Lucky for us, Bruce Bauer, the Data Manager for the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology and a member of the Paleoclimatology Branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, makes it quite simple with these short, but concrete responses to some of our questions on a topic we'd love to learn much more about. 

What does Bruce and NOAA's general Paleoclimatology program do exactly? According to it's official site, it provides the paleoclimate data and information needed to understand and model inter-annual to centennial-scale environmental variability.   It's also operates the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, and an Applied Research Center for Paleoclimatology.

It doesn't just look at climate relating to corals, of course.  We're happy to know they do research and collect data on lakes and oceans, too!

Bruce's answers may be short and sweet, but the NOAA's Paleoclimatology program, particularly in the Coral department, is making some big changes!

Okutsu works on salmonids, a group of fish that includes salmon and trout. Many members of this tasty clan have suffered greatly from over-fishing in the last few decades, and their populations are dwindling their way to extinction.

If stocks fall below a critical level, they may need a jump-start. One strategy is to freeze some eggs to be fertilised artificially, in the way that many human eggs are in fertility clinics. But it's much harder for fish eggs - they are large and have lots of fat, which makes them difficult to freeze effectively.