Welcome to another fun Friday Smorgasbord post with some of the fun items we’ve stumbled across on the web the last week. First off we’ve seen quite a few Facebook postings of a LEGO whale shark and a little digging has discovered that the LEGO Pavilion at the Nasu Highland Park amusment park in Nasu, Tochigi, Japan, not only has this great LEGO shark on display but also a variety of wonderful reef fish. Make sure you check out these and more in crawl_ray’s Flickr stream.

The Panama Canal is one of the busiest global shipping lanes connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean and unfortunately, the wide path of ship traffic has injured and even killed whales in the nearby waters. But Panamanian officials and scientists have developed a plan that would corral vessels into narrow lanes. Since Humpback whales breed around the Las Perlas archipelago, 40 miles from the canal’s southern entrance, the breeding is not only being disturbed but many whales are killed each year. The team has studied ship traffic and whale traffic to help determine these proposed lanes. They plan to present it for discussion and maybe adoption by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) next year.

[via BBC News]

Not that we want to stop helping preserve coral reefs but one study is showing that coral reefs may be able to recover from disaster. Rising global temperatures, ocean acidification, and pollution are taking their tolls on reefs and while we still need to do our diligence to protect these jewels, the report focused on reefs off the Pacific coast of Panama where they discovered a time in the history where the reef did not exist. Professor Richard Aronson at the Florida Institute of Technology and his colleagues discovered that by taking a core sample of the reef, that in the 6,000-year history of the reef there was a 2,500 year span where the reef did not exist. While this is great news for the long-term view of longevity, I still would rather not let it get that bad.

[via NPR]

I love some DIY ingenuity and using everyday products for practical reefing issues. When we came across this DIY protein skimmer, we didn’t think too much about it until we saw that orange body and translated the description and see that it appears to be an orange traffic cone! Having DIY’d a recirculating skimmer myself, I know the feeling of walking down the aisle at a store — Home Depot, Wal Mart, a dollar store — and seeing things in a different light telling myself, “That would make a great skimmer cone!” Bravo and we hope this skimmer keeps kicking out the foam!