Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth today, and I’ll be celebrating this weekend by going to Epping Forest to hopefully see signs that the beechwood is beginning to shrug winter off. It’s a good time of year to go outdoors and look for signs of winter’s end – many birds are claiming their nesting territories already and very early wildflowers will be struggling through snow, ice and flood. I could have chosen a million ways to celebrate – there are organised events taking place all over the world over the next couple of days, many of which can be found here. I have to confess though that (shhhhh… whisper it) a lot of the celebrations on that list seem to be just that – formal - you know, a little bit worthy.  I’ll be getting along to a Darwin exhibition or two I’m sure, but to me there can be no better way of celebrating with a walk in a wintry forest and letting my curiosity run riot. Darwin’s greatest strength was his ability to look,  a facility for noticing the small things and reading their implications, a lesson I’ve taken to heart from the moment I could understand it. What could be more appropriate than wandering  in pursuit of my own discoveries, however modest, in honour of the man who’s inquiring mind led to one of the most important discoveries of modern times.

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Britain prepares for rubber duck invasion

Britain is about to be invaded – by a flotilla of rubber ducks!

For the past 15 years Seattle based Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys, known as Friendly Floatees, that were released into the Pacific Ocean when containers filled with the toys were washed off a cargo ship. The plastic ducks and other creatures have been voyaging en masse around the worlds’ seas and oceans ever since. This charming and surreal incident has proved invaluable to science.

Some of the bath toys, including red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and the more famous yellow ducks, are expected to reach Britain after a journey of nearly 17,000 miles, having crossed the Arctic Ocean frozen into pack ice, bobbed the length of Greenland and been carried down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Mr Ebbesmeyer has been tracking them using an ocean surface current model called the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation, created by himself and fellow oceanographer James Ingraham. The mass release of 29,000 objects into the ocean at one time offered significant advantages over the standard method of releasing 500–1000 drift bottles and was a glorious opportunity not to be missed.

Many were stranded as ocean currents took them through the Bering Strait, which divides Alaska from Russia. Mr Ebbesmeyer predicted that they would spend years trapped in the Arctic ice, moving at the rate of one mile a day towards the Atlantic. In 2000, eight years after their journey began, the ducks were reported in the North Atlantic. By now the ducks had been frozen in ice and defrosted, and their yellow colour bleached white by the elements. Sightings in the past two years have been scant, but oceanographers believe that their next port of call is southwest England, southern Ireland and western Scotland.

Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said that the ducks offered a great opportunity for climate change research. “They are a nice tracer for what the currents are doing as they travel around the world, and currents are what determines our climate, and cycles of carbon.

“I would ask holidaymakers to keep an eye out, as they might be very few and far between by now. It’s a real adventure story and the plastic should last 100 years, so we hope it will continue.”

Any beachcomber lucky enough to find one of the toys will be able to claim a $100 (£50) reward from the toys’ American distributor, First Years Inc; the ducks have also become collector’s items, changing hands for £500. I think the real value of these miniature plastic adventurers can’t be estimated – to science and as springboards to the imagination, at any rate. More uncomfortably, they also highlight the persistance of plastic in our environment – these harmless toys will be around in the world for as long as the children they were intended for.

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