In case you didn't notice, aside from being an avid reef aquarist, I'm also a female.  And as a female, I enjoy feminine wiles like shopping, nice jewelry, and the perfect beauty products.  So while decidedly being a girly girl this weekend, I began perusing my favorite beauty sites looking for new deals. 

Who knew that my two great loves--marine biology and cosmetics--would come together in a big way.

Beauty Anonymous recently posted that the incredible skincare company La Mer has begun another partnership with international ocean conservation organization Oceana for the second year in a row to raise awareness.  That means they're in full force for World Oceans Day and have created a limited-edition 250ml "World Oceans Day" Creme sold exclusively at Saks Fifth Avenue and the official website of La Mer from May to June.  

As part of Vancouver Aquarium’s celebration for World Oceans Day - June 8th, 2009, Vancouver Aquarium is hosting Oceans Week Trivia online to test your knowledge of our Aquarium animals.  It is your chance to win a family membership to the Vancouver Aquarium and an amazing Sea Turtle encounter.  Visit Vancouver Aquarium site to watch the Oceans Week Trivia videos and answer the questions. Then enter to win the Oceans Week Trivia grand prize.

Image Credit: Vancouver Aquarium/ Matt Simpson

Play Vancouver Aquarium’s Oceans Week Trivia today at the Vancouver Aquarium official website.

The Ocean Project, working in partnership with the World Ocean Network, is working to build greater awareness of the crucial role of the ocean in our lives and the important ways people can help. World Ocean Day began on June 8, 1992 and has finally been recognized by the UN, which passed a resolution in December 2008 that June 8th would be designated World Oceans Day every year starting in 2009.

What a reason to celebrate our salty seas! 

In honor of the big day, The Reef Tank will be bringing you lots of coverage in the next week from a plethora of personalities.

Here's what's ahead: 

Mark Hall is not your average marine life aficionado. Nor is he your average school teacher.   The marine biology educator tells us he was so obsessed with marine life since he was young that becoming a part of a marine life business in high school supplying marine specimens to schools and colleges nationwide, was not even a question. And it worked--Mark made enough money to pay for college.

Now the owner of the Biomes Marine Biology Center, Mark is still going strong, teaching kids about the marine world through visuals rather then typical schoolwork assignments.  What started as a mere trip to a classroom for a marine life show at 23, cemented Mark's future and he knew he wanted to impact kids for the rest of his life. Now in his 40s, he still doesn't call it a real job.

Among other things, Mark is also the creator of the Biomes Blog,which surprisingly enough no longer has a lot to do with the Center of the same name.  But while he calls his blog creation more of a "link blog", it's the Daily Kos's Marine Life Series where he gets the chance to write what he knows on marine life.

TRT had the chance to ask Mark a few questions about his marine biology experience. Here are the great things he had to say.

Upon coming across a page filled with brief descriptions of the reviewed published works of esteemed climatologist Roger A. Pielke, Sr. I  came across this quite interesting marine-oriented piece accepted for publication back in 1980 while R.A. Pielke was part of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia.  

The report was eventually published in the Ocean Management journal.

The paper, as described by Pielke, is an overview of how the world understands the physical interactions between sea-and-land breeze and coastal waters.

This paper overviews the modes of interaction between coastal waters and the sea-and-land-breeze circulations.  It is concluded that, for most situations, the major influence of this mesoscale atmospheric circulation on coastal waters is the wind stress exerted on the water affecting currents and vertical turbulent mixing, whereas the dominant effect of the coastal waters on the sea-and-land breezes is the establishment of a horizontal temperature gradient which generates local atmospheric wind circulations.

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Or, more exactly, where are they all going to go during the next two or three months?

I'm sitting here between a large frozen lake and a small "pond" (connected to the lake with a channel) that has patches of open water on it. (The melting on the pond is probably because the bioactivity at the bottom of the pond increases water temperature.) There is a pair of mallards on the pond, and I expect that in a few weeks there will be two or three mallards and three or for mergansers, all females, and each with between six and 12 or so ducklings. These 60 ducklings will initially hang out only with their mothers, but as time goes by the mothers will overlap their feeding territories and night time roosts, and the ducklings will start to form a creche. It is even possible for a multispecies creche to form.

The New Zealand sea lion (Phocarctos hookerii) is a remarkable animal. A highly localised species operating at the extremes of their physiological limits, NZ sea lions are recognised as the world’s deepest diving pinniped (eared seal), reaching depths of up to 600m. Unfortunately they are also one of the world’s most rare pinnipeds.

Once ranging throughout New Zealand waters, their population was massively depleted in the 1800s due to hunting for their once prized blubber. Such large scale depletion brought the species to the brink of extinction leaving only small, scattered populations in the cold southern extremes of New Zealand.