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If you're in Brussels next week, come talk about MPAs

2008-05-07T01:04:16Z

If you happen to be in Europe next week, why not stop by Brussels on May 16th and participate in a conversation between folks in the EU and the US working on marine protected areas, aka MPAs. It's not that odd a time to be in Brussels, the weather is warm and there's a meeting of the Council of the Parties for the Convention on Biodiversity that weekend, so it's possible you were already planning to go. I, for one, am excited to be part of the conference as many of the questions about MPAs are the same whichever side of the pond you're on. Who gets to draw the lines? How do you monitor and enforce them? What makes a public process work, and what's a one-way trip to brawling, catastrophic failure?

Oddly enough, California and the EU are on the same timeline. Governor Schwarzenegger announced he wants the state's MLPA process done by 2010-11, and the Convention on Biological Diversity has a 2010 deadline for a European network of MPAs. It would be great if we ended up with real investment zones, protecting special places like nurseries and sensitive habitats. It would be depressing if the EU ended up with only paper parks, where they have protection only in the name and not in the water.

Salmon flunk

2008-05-02T23:48:22Z

The Secretary of Commerce has now officially declared the west coast salmon fishery a "disaster" and a "failure." These dire words have a legal meaning; their utterance opens the door for disaster relief money. Ever since fishery managers made the difficult but correct choice to close the Chinook fishery, we've been waiting for the federal declaration to come through and then the funds that can help allay some of the economic costs and, hopefully, fund research that will help us bring the populations back. Salmon are wild fish, even with our hatchery supplements, and wild things have cycles and fluctuations at the best of times. For years the Sacramento fish were the reliable run, with fish that sustained the boats when the Klamath, Columbia, and Fraser came up empty. It's a bitter year when your reliable source runs dry.

The last one standing

2008-04-24T02:43:02Z

It started raining in San Rafael around 5:30 pm last night, right around rush hour, and the 250 people who'd shown up to talk about marine protected areas were getting antsy. They'd been there since 9 am, wearing shirts and hats and stickers, supporting one proposal or another, waiting for their two minutes to have their say and now there were kids to pick up, dinners to get ready, long drives home on the winding, dark, wet roads of Sonoma and Marin. It's not as amazing to me anymore that two hundred plus people showed up at a public meeting on marine protected areas -- we've had at least that many at the final decision meetings for the Channel Islands and the Central Coast -- no, I was amazed by how many were left when public comment finally opened. At 10 pm.

Fifty people were there to talk about their kayak fishing, their time fishing with kids, the marine mammals they see wounded and sick on the beach, the abalone and kelp they see underwater. For the last year, we've had a group of 45 volunteers from all different background and interests, going over the coast with a magnifying glass, looking at the best habitats, the best fishing holes, the most photogenic dive sites. That group came up with three proposals, placing between 9% and 14% of the 760 square mile region in fully protected marine reserves. Since those proposals were announced letters, emails and petitions have poured in to the state and last night was the chance to have your say in person.

Today, the Governor's Blue Ribbon Task Force looked at the menu before them and faced the very hard job of pulling it all together. They picked ideas from each of the proposals to make their recommendation, including places like the Farallons and Point Reyes, where all three groups had virtually identicial suggestions. It's a real compromise, and I expect that for some once the bleariness of the last two days wears off, they'll wake up wondering what happened to my favorite site? What is going on at Duxbury reef? But from my view, it's a hopeful sign. Maybe we can all get along.

Here's a shot by one of the stalwarts from last night, John Albers-Mead of the Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. A Hermissenda nudibranch making slow and steady progress, like the MLPA.

Fishing makes fish populations unstable

2008-04-21T20:22:32Z

I'm always excited to see new papers from George Sugihara's lab, because his group of researchers is applying new math to old problems. Since you can't count all the fish in the sea, regulators rely on estimates produced by stock assessments, which use models to extrapolate an idea of the total population size from a sample of caught fish. The underlying approach to these models has changed little over the decades, even though we've learned much more about how fish and fisheries actually behave. Sugihara brings his background in finance to bear on fish population dynamics, with interesting results.

The latest papers appear this month in Nature and the Canadian Journal of Fisheries & Aquatic Sciences and they look more in depth at the question of what is it about fishing that's driving the instability. In CANJFAS, Hsieh looks at the spatial distribution of 29 species in Southern California and finds that exploited fish populations are more likely to shift their location along the coast in response to changes in ocean conditions. In Nature, they drill down more deeply to the root causes.

Using the fifty year CalCOFI dataset (which is a very long time in ocean science) they looked at three hypotheses:

Fishing pressure varies and that variability is amplified by natural processes, making populations themselves more variable
Fishing pressure drives fish to be smaller and younger, which makes them more sensitive to environmental changes and that causes instability
By changing the age and size structure of the populations, fishing changes the inherent demographics of the population, making it less stable.

#3 won out, which should start pointing our management in a new direction because it says there's a fundamental problem with catching bigger, older fish. It's not just that it exacerbates other problems (hypothesis #2), like changing ocean temperatures or the availability of prey, but it inherently destabilizes the population. Perhaps we should be giving Rainer Froese's ideas a second look and tracking not only the number of fish caught, but the demographics of the population left behind.

SunChips, now with Real Sun

2008-04-19T02:21:15Z

I was intrigued by this piece in the NYT this week where pollsters use their knowledge of "microtrends" to associate certain products with the three Presidential candidates. Clinton = butter & fig newtons, Obama = olive oil & soft chocolate chip cookies, McCain = bourbon & Sun Chips.

The lists are heavily weighted towards identifiable brands rather than ingredients, so I don't know who gets the votes of, say, people who like their apples peeled and cut up vs. those who will just eat them whole. But perhaps the Sun Chips fans of any political persuasion will be encouraged that PepsiCo/Frito-Lay is now making them with real sun at their Modesto plant. Kudos to the company for working to get off the grid and reduce energy. No word if Funyuns will now contain actual fun.

Can you hear me now?

2008-04-09T22:51:53Z

We at NRDC have a long history of worrying about the sound in the sea. When your life's aquatic, your ability to detect vibrations can mean life or death or lunch. You might even want to make some joyful noise of your own, if you're a toadfish on the make or a cusk eel, and what a shame if that call is drowned out by the roar of a ship engine.

Luckily, more and more scientists are listening to the sea beyond a handful of acoustic oceanographers. Researchers at the Wegener Insititute for Polar Sciences dropped hydrophones under the Antarctic ice as a way to get a baseline of a quiet sea. Only it's not exactly silent. After only half an hour of listening I caught the crash of an iceberg calving, and possibly some animal sounds, though those were hard to make out above the sirens wailing past my office window. Good thing I wasn't using those sounds to navigate.

Alexis Madrigal at Wired points to a few other sites where you can hear underwater sounds, and perhaps the researchers at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary will make their recordings available to the public when their buoys pop up to the surface. SBNMS hopes not only to calculate a "noise budget" in their busy area just off Boston, but also make progress in counting fish with sound. Which is much easier on the fish than catching them.

Jump, tuna, jump!

2008-03-27T06:50:42Z

Casual games are all the rage these days, what with Freerice racking up billions of grains. They even have some that make you happy and more confident. But what if you just want to pretend to be a tuna? Now there’s a game for that, too. But Kate, you say, you’re really the target demographic for tuna-centric games. How can I know if I would enjoy this game? Well, that’s why I turned to some trusty game-testing friends. The kind of people who can play Trogdor on Guitar Hero the first time. Here are their reviews:

The whole jumping and swimming interface could use some work. Arrow keys work for some and not others, clicking seems to cause more trouble than its worth, but just moving the mouse around was enough to get my fish leaping over boats. YMMV.
Much debate about catch versimilitude. Game tuna can bounce off the boats – not so for real tuna. Game tuna also get snagged on the edges of nets, which my testers thought was cheating but if it’s a gillnet that’s how they work, snagging the gills of fish that swim past.

Finally, JH says “The music is good. It is clear you will eventually get caught and that every escape is temporary” Ah, the life of a tuna.

On their bellies, sea pigs crawling

2008-03-24T20:13:31Z

I usually count on the boys at Zooillogix to post the best news of new creatures first, but I'm disappointed they left out the sea pigs and eelpout in their post on the Tangaroa voyage. Giant starfish and jellyfish? Cool, but let's focus on this horned sea pig, a sea cucumber relative that looks like Satan's finger. Caught almost 10,000 feet below the sea, scouring the seabed for tasty morsels.

Or what about this lyrical discussion of the eelpouts of the Ross Sea? It must be international eelpout week, because AFS just notified me of a new book on a fish I thought was a misprint: The Burbot. Also an eelpout, the burbot lives or once lived in the cold waters of North America. Many burbot populations appear to have been "extirpated", which is usually a fancy way of saying "we ate them and messed up their habitats." I do like that eelpouts look like a bit like pouting eels, and that, according to Wikipedia, they are also called "the lawyer".

I stand corrected: the International Eelpout Festival was in February. Eelpout week is over. Perhaps next year the Antarctic eelpout scientists will make it to Minnesota to show off their 26 species.

Fewer eggs, fewer baskets

2008-03-24T17:36:58Z

The idea of a diverse portfolio is a common theme in financial discussions. If you happen to have any money these days, the experts would tell you to spread it around to maximize your returns and reduce your risk. Putting all your money in a savings account is safe, but earns you less interest than putting some of that money in savings and the rest in the stock market. Sinking all your cash into a house in California may have seemed like a wise investment, but now, perhaps not so much. Let’s hope there are some Canadian loonies hiding under the couch cushions.

Animals have evolved similar strategies to cope with the changing environment that affects their most valuable asset – their offspring. Older female Pacific rockfish give their tiny planktonic young more food in the form of a large oil globule, letting the larvae survive longer until they find a suitable rock to call home. Since rockfish are also known to be cannibals, the juveniles don’t always live near the adults. These diversifications have helped many species survive the many milder fluctuations on ocean temperature and productivity. With global warming pushing sea surface temperatures beyond the range marine wildlife has grown accustomed to, animals are reaching their limits. Including the king penguins.

This piece by Le Bohec et al in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences gave me a grave sense of unease. 2/3 of the world’s king penguins live on the Crozet Archipelago where they breed year-round. Penguins need high calorie prey available year-round, preferably close to their rookery. Warmer water temperatures may reduce the extent of the ice shelf, but they also negatively effect the penguin’s prey, making them less numerous and pushing them further offshore. Warmer ocean temperatures are hitting penguins in both the winter and the summer, making it harder to feed their young and harder just to make it through the winter. Previous El Nino events caused lower recruitment and lower adult survival, but as those events were relatively short, colonies could recover.

Here’s a quote from the discussion:

“..according to life history theory in long-lived species, king penguin populations would not be sustained with a 9% drop in their adult survival such as that we show for an increase of only 0.26C in SST.”

They then cite an IPCC that global surface temperature is predicted to increase by 0.2 per decade for the next two decades. There’s not a one to one ratio between surface temperature and SST, but this is not good news for the penguins. They’ve already tried spreading their foraging out over time and space, but those distances are getting longer and the seasons are less productive. There’s only so diverse your survival portfolio can be at the bottom of the world.

Can it, Sony

2008-03-12T16:34:36Z

Dear Sony credit card services,

Thanks so much for sending me this great can with your latest unsolicited credit card offer! It's true, I was ignoring those blah envelopes you usually send but how could I just toss this in the bin? For one thing, I can't because it's not recyclable. It's not a real aluminum can, but one of those Pringles-style foil-fused-to-cardboard deals where the only metal is on the ends.

The top warns me to "use caution when opening" as those metal edges are sharp. Perhaps a subtle reminder of the danger of too much debt? Clever, Sony. Inside is a small glossy flier for the new card, so delicate that it could never survive the journey to my mailbox in an envelope. But now it's safe -- safely tucked into my mixed paper bin. Sadly, there were no potato chips.

You know, Sony, we don't consider getting new credit cards often in this household. Lucky for us, you've helped us make a more informed decision by showing us where our interest charges would go if we took you up on your offer. Fake can ads. I'm off to buy my mailman a cup of coffee and some ibuprofren.

--Kate

You can touch this

2008-03-04T18:49:19Z

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing "Deep Sea 3D" in its full 3-D IMAX glory. The opening shot is a glowing school of moon jellies floating towards you, and we all reached up our hands to touch the softly, pulsing domes as they drifted by. The divers in the room who'd swum through moon jellies in real life (moons don't pack the same paralyzing punch as other jellies) and were as transfixed as anyone by the virtual school. For millions of non-divers a movie like this may be the closest they ever get to the otherworldy part of our world, below the waves. It's an immersion unlike an aquarium or a Wii game.

But then today brings news of another way to hold the sea in your hands -- with a crochet hook. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef held a 'knitshop' in New York over the weekend, where scientists and members of the Harlem Knitting Club came together to make sponges, urchins, and corals out of yarn. The reef just finished an exhibition in Chicago and moves to New York in April, by which time it will certainly be larger than its current 3,000 square feet (about 2% the size of the Great Barrier Reef). I'm pretty dreadful with a set of needles but I'm inspired to try a coral, or maybe some irish moss. Or perhaps venture into one of their side projects, like the Toxic Reef, which incorporates trash and plastic into the knitted creatures just as many live sea creatures do by eating the real plastic floating in the sea. Bad for the turtles who mistakenly fill up on plastic bags while seeking jellyfish. Though it appears toxic runoff may have some upsides for sexy males starlings (thanks, BoingBoing). I think I'd rather keep my reefs real and my art an homage to the living sea, not a historic diorama.

Carnival of the Blue turns 10!

2008-03-03T17:00:01Z

Let’s face it – those of us who work on, around, and in the sea are lucky people. We find the minute extraordinary and marvel at the fantastic every day. We have 2/3 of the planet as our playground. It’s great work if you can get it, and if you get it, you ought to share your dive mask view with the world. I’m pleased as punch to host Carnival of the Blue 10, highlighting the best my ocean blogging colleagues have to share from the last month. Get yourself comfy and settle in for a good read of the weird and wonderful.

The Natural Patriot reminds us that the father of all biologists, Charles Darwin, was a detailed systematist at heart, spending his post-Origin of Species years looking at barnacles. As with all NP posts, it’s beautifully illustrated. Charlie at 10,000 Birds tells you how to identify gulls, and will patiently guide you through the revelation that (1) there’s not just one grey and white bird called “the seagull” and (2) they look different at different ages. Go to the beach (or the park, or the parking lot) with new eyes.

Surf.Bird.Scribble wins best blog post title with “Molten Iron Chicken Kimchee in Space.” Those of you seeking more info about ocean iron fertilization schemes should follow this through to the recent issue of Oceanus on that very topic. Also a good post for those of you wondering how chickens got from Asia to South American (not by swimming).

I will take a tour of Mark H’s aquarium any day. He’s just acquired a very rare albino rock crab to go along with his blue lobster. Check out Rebecca Bray’s photos, accompanied by Mark’s nice understatement about the tank’s living quarters: “The divider keeps them from killing each other.” Peace in the crustacean realm is a tenuous thing.

Frank Schatzing’s “The Swarm,” is like sweet, sweet candy for marine biologists because it combines all the weirdness and devastation and change we study into one amped-up luge ride to hell with latin names. Read it now before they release the movie. The general plot is an ocean deeply irritated at humans that decides to fight back. As preposterous as parts of the book are, the author’s use of real-world organisms and problems had me doing a double take at some of the news. Shrimp with stun gun claws? Real. Tiny parastic crustaceans with invisible adults? Real. Giant methane hydrate eating worms? Fictional (or so we think). And if there is a sentient ocean, engineering cyborg sharks does seem like a sure way to get it angry. Can LL Cool J save us from the DARPA sharks, too?

Finally, let’s turn to the deliciously murky world where the waters of science and human desire mix together. Would it be better for us if we could swim with whale sharks in captivity? Would it be better for the whale sharks if we didn’t? In the heat of a debate about tourism, technology, and tradition, will someone accidentally catch the last Napoleon wrasse ? And why isn’t The Pope working to stop overfishing? Props to Zooillogix, The Saipan Blog, and Jennifer at Shifting Baselines for pondering the hard questions. Blogfish tackles the issue head on, asking what’s the better tool for conservation: carrot or stick, praise or punishment, guilt or desire? And Sheril at The Intersection goes right to the source (of funds) to ask “what do we have to do to get a bigger investment in ocean research?”

The ocean is a big place. We’ll keep doing our best to cover the water. You keep diving in.

Celebrity Trash

2008-02-23T01:24:08Z

There's something about Jon Stewart that reminds me of Kermit the Frog. The dark eyes, the pensive, self-deprecating humor. Or maybe just the greenness, which in Jon's case is coming less from a cozy felt skin than from the Oscars. Oscars can be recycled, you know. Apparently the Academy does get some back, to be re-polished and sent on their way to delight another celebrity. These are the things I learn from our professional event greener, Darby Hoover.

Darby was headed out to her secret underground bunker where she'll be fielding calls and emails up until the last minute about greening the Oscars. It's her second time working with Oscar to put some green behind the glitz, so I asked her for her favorite item this year. She said, "Garbage."

Yep, this year there will be compost bins available throughout the Kodak theater, including at the Governor's Ball. What silverware Wolfgang Puck and his crew can't provide as real flatware will be biodegradeable. This celebrity compost will not be directly for sale, so those of you hoping to fertilize your azaleas with Keira Knightley's crudite are out of luck. And the power LADWP's providing for the telecast? 100% renewable. Paparazzi, you'ld best be recycling those flash batteries.

The Oscars are a bit modest about this greening. Apparently you will not be seeing the tiny compost bins on the red carpet. After the year of Inconvenient Truth, where green politics were front and center, it's nice to see the Oscars continuing their commitment to being green even out of the spotlight. Much like we'd hope for all kinds of environmental policies, that they become part of our daily lives, efficiently working behind the scenes. Like Darby is right now.

Oh, and American Idol? Darby's waiting for your call.

Invading armies, travelling on your belly

2008-02-22T20:12:37Z

Mr. Wetzler threw me a bone (or a tentacle as it were) in his post on the recent NYT OpEd by Taras Grescoe. Jennifer's also blogging it at Shifting Baselines -- with some good comments to boot -- so I should really climb out of my work routine and respond.

I've dug out my well-worn copy of "Harmful non-indigenous species in the U.S." from my thesis work. Ah, the old Office of Technology Assessment. Sure would be handy to have a non-partisan agency using science to look at technologies these days, but I digress.

Grescoe's OpEd focuses on critters from unintentional invasions, which tend to be smaller organisms or larvae like you would find in ballast water. It's true we do have a big job tackling the global systems that make it easy for hitchhikers to find and settle in new homes. It's not just the ballast but the containers themselves which give easy access to insects, seeds, slugs and snails. In the mid-1980's containers of tires brought Asian mosquitoes to the U.S. and wooden packing material has brought us bark beetles.

We could all go out in the yard and slurp up some mosquito larvae but it's going to take bigger policies and technologies to stop the accidental invasions that are tied to our voracious appetite for trade. As Grescoe's book (which I have not yet read) is titled "Bottom feeder" I suspect he chose the plankton invaders for the worthy goal of encouraging us to eat lower on the food chain. All perfectly well and good, but don't forget that many of our most difficult invasives arrived here intentionally.

When you make something tasty or valuable, people will want it and it will spread like pet rocks or Air Jordans or Facebook. I grew up fishing for striped bass, or rockfish, in the Chesapeake and was surprised to find them in San Francisco Bay, where fishermen had introduced them decades earlier. They wanted the taste and sport of a familiar fish. California has spent millions of dollars eradicating the northern pike infestation in Lake Davis, where pike decimated the native trout. Fishing derbies weren't enough to wipe out the fast-growing fish, and starting a commercial fishery would mean pike transported throughout the state, increasing the odds of another invasion. Or a would-be entrepreneur would start his own pike farm in a nearby lake.

So, I'm all for foraging, but marketing invasives is a risky business. If these invasives are really coming soon to a restaurant near you, they may be coming to stay. Be careful who you invite to dinner.

Return of the Dead (Zones)

2008-02-15T18:04:40Z

The West Coast is continuing its George Romero tribute festival with four straight years of Dead Zones. The Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is perhaps the most famous of the Dead Zones. In the Gulf, nutrients flowing down the Mississippi mix in the warm, shallow waters to create a fertile brew for algae, which flourish and die taking oxygen out of the sea as they decompose. Scientists are also familiar with the "oxygen minimum zone" -- deep, dark waters of the sea below 600 meters where oxygen is scarce and marine life has adapted to live slowly and breathe less.

This region has been considered one of the worlds most productive, with the California current driving the temperature and nutrient supply that feeds our crabs and rockfish. We thought we were immune to dead zones until 2002, and unfortunately, it looks like they're here to stay. Dr. Francis Chan and his Oregon colleagues found persistent hypoxia over 80% pf the water column in shallow depths, up to 60 meters. Submersible surveys in 2006 found rock reefs devoid of their usual rockfish and an increase in sulfur-oxidizing bacterial mats. Tasty.

This is all-too consistent with the recent work by Dr. Bill Gilly on the rise Humboldt squid (aka jumbo squid) in California waters. Kevin Drum wonders what the benefits are of "massive oxygen starved zones" and if you're a jumbo squid, that benefit is free suffocated food at the edge of that anoxic zone. Like a jubilee for cephalopods.

Ken Weiss's excellent piece in the LA Times has this quote from Newport fishermen Dennis Krulich, who found tiny baby octopuses climbing up their crab lines from the dead zone:

"I'd tell my crewmen, be careful with these cute little things," said Dennis Krulich, a longtime fishermen in Newport. "Peel them off the rope, and we'll put them back." Only later did he realize that these babies were coming up from oxygen-depleted waters that hover near the seafloor, climbing to save their lives.

Bad signs that the winds of change are blowing and they're already affecting the deep patterns that govern the sea. I'm not ruling out zombie fish.