WaterNotes Version 2.0

I wanted to take a quick moment to thank all of the regular readers of WaterNotes for making this site part of your daily Interweb roaming. As you may have noticed, there are some changes afoot! After reviewing the latest traffic I noticed there were some serious revisions needed on the WaterNotes framework to support features I thought were important.

For instance, if you are not a native English speaker, you can now translate WaterNotes into your Native Tongue!  (This is powered by Google Translate so if it becomes something outrageous or offensive please blame them and not me!)

There is also a beautiful ability to go back through the Archives of WaterNotes by the month if you Time Warp! 

AND, even more incredibly, you can Search WaterNotes!  You havent been able to Search through this weblog for years!  (Ever since the great CSS xHTML coding disaster of January 2007 when I errantly erased part of the necessary inner workings and never thought twice about it.  Why not?  Well, I never thought this ‘blog would get so big!)

You will see major updates to the “About & Archives” page in the coming days because of these two new features.  Since you can Search there’s not much need for me to list each and every last post and now that you can view the Archives by chronological date it should make finding what you were looking for far far easier.  (And easier on me!) 

To be honest the “About & Archives” page was getting entirely unwieldy because WaterNotes has grown so much in the last year.  It’s easier for me to tag new notes with relevant older posts so that if there IS related content from within this website you can find it easily as comment or a tag on the post you’re actually reading!  Hooray!

Something else I’m excited about: Commenting!  You could always leave Comments before on the old version of the website but it should be a lot easier now. 

Now comes the ground truthing bit.  If you’re a regular WaterNotes reader and you notice: broken links, obscured text, missing images, or otherwise cannot easily read through this weblog please get in touch.  And for those of you who suffered through bizarre looking webpages in the last few days.. thanks for the patience.  I hope you enjoy this new incarnation of WaterNotes.

King Penguin Commits Chicknapping

A report released in Polar Biology had an interesting incident involving an overeager king penguin to relate.  Apparently a researcher happened upon a particular king that had decided he was ready to raise some offspring.   Since it was too early for king penguin breeding season, the adult went after his neighbors’ chick which belonged to a pair of skua gulls.  Skuas are a natural predator of king penguin chicks and infrequently prey upon the adults as well. 

After a few hours of attempting to brood the baby on his feet the penguin was greeted by the chick’s real parents that proceeded to fight for their hatchling.  Researchers from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, who were on Marion Island, decided to intervene to ensure that the chick was returned to his natural parents.  Besides a potential “I’m not getting any younger I should raise some chicks” notion, the observers think the king penguin’s natural parenting instincts might have been instigated by the skua chick’s visual resemblance to a very young king chick.  Both species sport a fuzzy brown coats as juveniles.  In fact king penguins were once called the “wooly penguin” for this shaggy ensemble.