Before Skipper Wilson started preparing for the storm he’s sailing into, he wrote an essay about the sea animals he’s encountered. You’ve read about some of them before (albatross and flying fish, for instance), but the latest critters that have come his way are tiny: shrimp.

If the only time you’ve ever seen shrimp is on a plate at a restaurant, you might wonder what kind of animal it is. Shrimp, which are shellfish, have an exoskeleton. That means that their skeleton is outside their body instead of inside like yours. They have ten legs they use for walking, as well as ten shorter swimming appendages and six eating appendages, and can be found both in saltwater and in freshwater.

Shrimp eat tiny plants and animals found in the water. They also serve as food for larger fish, birds, seals, whales, and people.

There are 1,900 different species of shrimp. The shrimp in the picture lives in saltwater, is often found in home aquariums, and is about three inches long. It’s the same type of animal as what Skipper Wilson has been seeing, but is much bigger. (It’s kind of like the difference between a husky dog and a chihuahua. They’re both dogs, but don’t really look like each other.) The kind of shrimp Skipper Wilson has been finding are tiny. They’re about one centimeter long — the length of your pinky finger nail.

(By the way, have you ever heard of sea monkeys? They aren’t really monkeys at all, but are actually a type of brine shrimp.)

What kind of wildlife can you find in your neighborhood? Ioannis Miaoulis, president and director of Boston’s Museum of Science has some ideas about the things you might learn from them.

We, here at Science NetLinks, join everyone involved with the Vendée Globe in breathing a deep sigh of relief at the safe rescue of Skipper Jean Le Cam from his boat, which capsized late yesterday. Skipper Le Cam was below deck when the boat tipped, leaving him trapped inside the boat (but not underwater).

This afternoon Skippers Vincent Riou and Armel Le Cléac’h (as well as an oil tanker that was close by) reached the VM Matériaux, which was lying on its side in the water, as you can see from Skipper Riou’s video above. Skipper Riou called out and could hear Skipper Le Cam shout back — a relief for everyone! Skipper Le Cam worked on getting into his rescue suit (which insulates you against the cold water and helps you stay afloat) and in breaking open the escape hatch in the bottom of the boat, while Skippers Riou and Le Cléac’h came up with a plan: They would take turns circling the boat so they could rescue Skipper Le Cam when he broke through.

When at last he did, Skipper Riou, sailing the PRB, tried to throw him a rope. Three times it missed. Skipper Le Cam clung to the rudder for 15 minutes while Skipper Riou battled the seas to get closer. He succeeded and finally was able to reach his stranded friend with a rope, which he used to tow him to safety. Unfortunately, to get close enough to get the rope to Skipper Le Cam, the PRB came just a bit too close to the capsized boat and was damaged by it. Everyone is safe, though, and Skipper Riou and Skipper Le Cam are aboard the PRB and sailing toward Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the successful rescue. We’re so glad you’re all okay. To the rest of the sailors at sea (and especially to Skipper Wilson, who crossed the International Date Line to return to the Western Hemisphere yesterday), please be careful. We’re thinking of you.

Albatross are sea birds — and some of the largest fliers in the world. Most of them are really awkward on land, so they spend most of their time gliding in the air or floating on the water of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans. (Only three species of albatross live north of the equator.) Because they are always in the air and because of their large wingspan, albatross cover a lot of territory. Some have even been tracked flying up to 550 miles in a single day!

In addition to flying and floating, albatross also hunt squid and schools of fish for food. Because they spend all their time at sea, they drink salt water (which would kill many other mammals!). Albatross have a special type of beak called a “tube nose.” Inside either side of their bill, the birds have long tubes, their nostrils, which help to filter the salt out of the water. The salt then drips back out, which can make an albatross look like it’s crying. Their long nostrils also give them a very good sense of smell, which helps them with their hunting.

Once they leave their nest as young birds, some don’t return to land for up to ten years, when they land to mate and bear young. Albatross tend to mate for life and lay a single egg in a season. Young albatross can take 4-10 months to leave the nest, which is a long time in the bird world.

There are 20 species of albatross, and 19 of them are threatened. While years ago they were prized for their feathers, today it is more the problems of pollution and commercial fishing that harm the birds. When not threatened by manmade problems, albatross can live a long time — some more than 50 years.

Sailors in the olden days considered albatross good luck when they followed a boat, because their presence meant that there was a good wind. So, it’s timely that they have arrived to help Skipper Wilson say farewell to 2008 and to welcome the new year.

You can read Skipper Wilson’s most recent log here.

Sunday marked the the first official day of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, where Skipper Wilson and his fellow sailors are making their way east. Solstices occur twice each year — once in June and once in December. In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice was celebrated with snow falling across the United States and Canada. For those of us north of the equator, we’re now officially in winter. For those people, like Skipper Wilson, who are south of the equator, they’ve moved into the summer months.

Two things cause seasons. The first is that the Earth revolves around the sun. The second is that the Earth is tilted on its axis. (Imagine a ball with a stick pushed through its middle. If the Earth is the ball and the stick represents the North and South Poles, then the stick isn’t straight up and down, but leans over at an angle.)

The solstice marks the extremes of light that the Earth receives. On December 21, the Northern Hemisphere was tilted the furthest from the sun that it gets all year. That means that you didn’t get a lot of daylight and instead had a very long night. The Southern Hemisphere, however, was tilted closest to the sun so it had many hours of daylight.

When you’re sailing, it’s good to have lots of hours of daylight because it’s easier to be able to see what’s going on around you. You can read here what Skipper Wilson has been up to since the longest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere.

The closest land mass to most of the fleet of sailboats is currently Australia, the sixth largest country — and the smallest continent — in the world. Australia is what the United Nations calls a megadiverse country. Home to many unique creatures, megadiverse countries are the 17 nations that contain the majority of the world’s species. Australia, for instance, is one of the only places where kangaroos and koalas (both of which are marsupials — mammals that have a pouch to protect their young after birth), emus, and platypus are found in the wild.

Australia is also known for its Great Barrier Reef, which is the largest coral reef system in the world. Coral is a tiny, shell-like creature that grows on the skeletons of previous corals. Over the years, these creatures create what is known as a reef, which is a mostly stationary feature not too far under the surface of the water. Reefs provide food and shelter for many different types of plants and animals, making them very important to take care of.

The Great Barrier Reef, because of its size, offers a home to thousands of species. Unfortunately, it’s very fragile and can be easily damaged by global warming, pollution, and too much interaction with humans. Some of the animals and plants the reef protect are also endangered. The Great Barrier Reef is beautiful but delicate, and it would be easy for humans, even without trying, to interrupt the food chain and the flow of life that depends on it.

We at Science NetLinks would like to join all the sailors and Vendée Globe watchers in wishing a speedy recovery to Skipper Yann Eliès. Skipper Eliès fell on his boat last week and broke his leg. A ship from Australia was sent out to meet his boat, the Générali, and evacuate him back to land. He’s now at the hospital where he’ll have surgery to fix his leg.

You can read Skipper Wilson’s latest log here.

If you’ve been checking in with Skipper Wilson over on sitesALIVE!, you know that the storms predicted for last week brought very strong winds with them. How much wind are we talking about, though?

Wind speed is measured on what’s called a Beaufort Scale. This is what you might experience if you were in a place with different speeds of wind:

You can see some of the storm footage in this video from Skipper Wilson. Unless you speak French, you probably won’t understand much of what he’s saying, but it does give you a sense of the huge waves and strong winds he’s been encountering this week.

Skipper Wilson is still heading east, but the winds ended the race for a number of his fellow sailors. Two of them had their masts snap off, a couple boats had rudders break, and a few had other mechanical problems. Luckily, all the skippers are fine and are headed back to land. Nineteen of the original thirty boats that began the race last month are still competing.

You can read Skipper Wilson’s latest log here.

Skipper Wilson is expecting to sail into a storm sometime in the next day or so. He has been on a boat during storms before, so he knows that although the strong winds and big waves can be scary, he should come through it all okay. (When someone talks about “weathering a storm,” this is exactly where the phrase came from.)

The boat’s long keel (that you saw in this post) is designed for rough weather and helps to keep the boat upright. And Skipper Wilson’s computers give him an advantage that sailors didn’t have a hundred years ago: He’s able to find out almost immediately when the storm shifts. Meteorologists (weather men and women) examine information from satellites and from buoys and from the sailors themselves and can give pretty good estimates of what the storm is going to do next. In the olden days sailors relied on traditional records of where storms moved in the oceans and on the weather that they could see from the ship to guess what was happening around them. Today’s computers give a much more accurate view, offering Skipper Wilson more options.

Listen to Skipper Wilson talk about the coming storm here. You can also read his most recent thoughts on the storm here.

Skipper Wilson is a month into his trip. Before he left, he had to figure out what he was going to eat for the next four months. After all, because he can’t stop, he had to take everything with him. His mom helped him come up with some menus and he worked with professionals to come up with foods that had lots of vitamins and minerals to keep his body healthy. (In the olden days, for instance, lots of sailors died of scurvy, an illness that comes from a lack of Vitamin C found in food like oranges, carrots, and broccoli. People now know to make sure they eat fresh fruit and vegetables or to take a multivitamin if they can’t to avoid the problem.) Skipper Wilson also worked hard to stock food that would give him lots of energy without taking up a lot of space.

Food has energy stored in it in the form of calories. When you eat, the energy is transfered to your body. Your body has two ways to deal with the energy. One is to use it up. You might use energy playing during gym class or running during recess. Skipper Wilson uses it up hoisting sails and working on the Great American III. Your body even uses a certain amount of energy just breathing and thinking.

The other thing the body can do with energy is to store it. The human body has evolved to protect it from starvation. On days when the body doesn’t use the energy it takes in, it stores it in fat cells. When humans used to have to go out and find food in the wild, there would have been less to eat in the winter. The body could then convert some of the energy it had stored in the fat cells to keep the body alive and in working order.

One of the reasons people gain weight is because they take in a lot more calories than they use up. Because food can be easily found today, it’s rare that the body needs to store energy for harder times. But if a person doesn’t do enough activity to use up the energy in the food he or she has eaten, the body has no choice but to store the excess in its fat cells.

Skipper Wilson works very hard on the boat and he is awake a lot of the time, which means he needs a lot of energy. You can read about what he and his team figured he would use up in this Question and Answer session here.

You also can see photos of some of Skipper Wilson’s food supplies here and how he rations it out to last for the whole journey.

Skipper Rich Wilson sets sail on his boat, Great American III, in the Vendée Globe Race on Sunday. He will be at sea, sailing around the world by himself, for many months. It’s one of the hardest sailing races in the world because sailors not only have to keep going every day in very difficult conditions all by themselves, but also because they have to sail as fast as they can to beat the other boats. There’s not a lot of time to sit back and relax.

This video is from the Transat B2B race earlier this year when Skipper Wilson sailed the Great American III alone from Brazil to France to qualify for the Vendée Globe. You can hear the wind whipping past the microphone and see that the sea is relatively calm on the day of the recording:

Skipper Wilson will be happy to see days like this come along during the Vendée Globe. Too often there will be dangerous seas and icebergs and other hazardous conditions that he will have to battle through. Skipper Wilson will report on them from his site, sitesALIVE!, where he will update from the Great American III. Here on this site, we’ll offer more information about what he’ll be experiencing—from what causes the wind he uses to power his sails to the creatures he encounters swimming past his boat.

We hope that you will come back here as the race gets started next week. In the meantime, click on the tabs at the top of the page to learn more about Skipper Wilson, the Great American III, and the Vendée Globe. We look forward to sharing this sailing adventure with you.