Arctic Seas: Currents of Change, An International Symposium

The International Year of the Ocean (IYO), declared for 1998 by UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), was a call to the world to examine the state of the planet's oceans, evaluate our collective impact on these critical environments, and take steps to protect them to ensure the quality of life for future generations. While the initiative was successful in rallying the attention of a large segment of the population, interest in the Arctic seas was disproportionately low compared with that in areas with large human coastal populations. To redress this imbalance, a symposium was held on 21-24 October 1998 in Mystic, Connecticut, USA, convened by the Sea Research Foundation and Mystic Aquarium, to bring attention to the issues, both scientific and sociopolitical, that bear on the status and future of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent waters. The IOC endorsed the symposium as an event in support of the IYO initiative. The papers comprising this special issue of Arctic represent some of the scientific program presented over those three days. ... The program consisted of five thematic sessions: Climate, Ice, and Ocean; Productivity; Ecology of Marine Mammals; Contaminants; and Human Resources and Development. The thematic undercurrent linking these topics was the examination of changing conditions in the Arctic seas. Change in itself is not necessarily alarming. It shapes the diversity of life on this planet and gives us insight into the balance of natural processes. But what can we predict about the consequences of the changes we are observing: Are the changes due to human presence and activity, local or more distant? And are their consequences something that we must attempt to redress? ..

Rescue, rehabilitation, and release of marine mammals: An analysis of current views and practices.

Stranded marine mammals have long attracted public attention. Those that wash up dead are, for all their value to science, seldom seen by the public as more than curiosities. Animals that are sick, injured, orphaned or abandoned ignite a different response. Generally, public sentiment supports any effort to rescue, treat and return them to sea. Institutions displaying marine mammals showed an early interest in live-stranded animals as a source of specimens -- in 1948, Marine Studios in St. Augustine, Florida, rescued a young short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), the first ever in captivity (Kritzler 1952). Eventually, the public as well as government agencies looked to these institutions for their recognized expertise in marine mammal care and medicine. More recently, facilities have been established for the sole purpose of rehabilitating marine mammals and preparing them for return to the wild. Four such institutions are the Marine Mammal Center (Sausalito, CA), the Research Institute for Nature Management (Pieterburen, The Netherlands), the RSPCA, Norfolk Wildlife Hospital (Norfolk, United Kingdom) and the Institute for Wildlife Biology of Christian-Albrects University (Kiel, Germany).(PDF contains 68 pages.

Belugas and Narwhals: Application of New Technology to Whale Science in the Arctic

... In the course of the research reported in this issue, there have been few observations of tagged whales after release, and this may be unavoidable, given the remoteness, harshness, and darkness of Arctic field conditions. However, on those occasions when there has been follow-up, the results have been informative and useful. For example, observations of scarred tissue on the backs of previously tagged white whales appeared to confirm the supposition that tagging has no lingering effect on animal health or behaviour .... Changes in blood constituents of animals recaptured within a few weeks after tagging ... are about what one would expect, given that some tissue damage and stress are inevitably associated with capture and tagging procedures. ... The ten studies published in this special issue are pieces of a much larger puzzle. Stock- and even site-specific studies have been typical for beluga research, largely because of management concerns. Findings, therefore, are often reported in what seems like a fragmentary manner, and this is reflected in the somewhat miscellaneous nature of the present compilation as well. Eventually, we expect a unified picture to emerge for both the beluga and the narwhal. Until it does, this collection of papers should be seen as one more in a series of benchmarks, each of which helps to elucidate what is known about the whales, the tools available for studying them, and questions that remain to be addressed. ..

Search for the production of dark matter in association with top-quark pairs in the single-lepton final state in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV

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Search for disappearing tracks in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV

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Searches for supersymmetry using the M-T2 variable in hadronic events produced in pp collisions at 8 TeV

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Search for physics beyond the standard model in dilepton mass spectra in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV

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Observation of the diphoton decay of the Higgs boson and measurement of its properties

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Angular analysis of the decay B-0 -> K*(0)mu(+)mu(-) from pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

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