2008 August 3. Stinging
Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline. By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL,
The New York Times. Excerpt:
BARCELONA, Spain — Blue
patrol boats crisscross the swimming areas
of beaches here with their huge nets skimming
the water’s surface. The yellow flags
that urge caution and the red flags that prohibit
swimming because of risky currents are sometimes
topped now with blue ones warning of a new
danger: swarms of jellyfish.
In a period of hours during a day a couple
of weeks ago, 300 people on Barcelona’s
bustling beaches were treated for stings,
and 11 were taken to hospitals.
From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan
and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous
and more widespread, and they are showing
up in places where they have rarely been seen
before, scientists say....
But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance
to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for
scientists they are a source of more profound
alarm, a signal of the declining health of
the world’s oceans.
...The explosion of jellyfish populations,
scientists say, reflects a combination of
severe overfishing of natural predators, like
tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures
caused in part by global warming; and pollution
that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal
shallows....
2008 July 8. Corals,
Already in Danger, Are Facing New Threat
From Farmed Algae. By CHRISTOPHER
PALA, The New York Times. Excerpt:
BUTARITARI, Kiribati — Off the palm-fringed
white beach of this remote Pacific atoll,
the view underwater is downright scary.
Corals are being covered and smothered to
death by a bushy seaweed that is so tough
even algae-grazing fish avoid it. It settles
in the reef’s crevices that fish once
called home, driving them away.
Dead coral stops supporting the ecosystem
and, within a couple of decades, it will crumble
into rubble, allowing big ocean waves to reach
the beach during storms and destroy the flimsy
thatched huts of the Micronesians.
“We are catching less and less fish,
and the seaweeds are fouling our nets,” says
Henry Totie, a fisherman and Butaritari’s
traditional chief, in an interview in his
traditionally built house in the village near
the blue-green lagoon.
“This is one of the most damaging seaweeds
I have ever seen,” says Jennifer E.
Smith of the National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, who has studied
the Hawaiian invasion for eight years...
Moiwa Erutarem, the Butaritari representative
of the fisheries ministry, said the biggest
losses were being felt by the most vulnerable:
those who use nets in the shallow coral table
and do not have the boats required to fish
farther away. Seafood is virtually the only
source of protein in Butaritari, complemented
by breadfruit and coconut.
This equatorial island of 4,000 people is
the latest victim of a 30-year global effort
to encourage poor people in the coastal areas
of the tropics to grow seaweed that, while
not edible, produces carrageenan, an increasingly
sought-after binder and fat substitute used
in the food industry, notably in ice cream...
2008 June 10. Tallying
the Toll on an Elder of the Sea. By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York
Times. Excerpt: MILFORD, Conn. - Horseshoe
crabs may look ancient and alien and battery-operated,
they may look like Wilma Flintstone's idea
of a Roomba vacuum cleaner, yet to the sixth-grade
students from Columbus School in nearby Bridgeport,
the most outrageous thing about the bronze-helmeted
creatures crawling clumsily along the beach
was not their appearance but their size -
or rather sizes.
One boy pointed to a linked pair of horseshoe
crabs, a relatively compact specimen maybe
seven inches across clinging to the tail end
of a much larger companion. A kid crab hitching
a ride on its mother? No, explained Jennifer
H. Mattei, head of the biology department
at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, who
led the expedition. They were both full-grown,
a male and a female, and the female was the
bruiser out front.
Among horseshoe crabs, Dr. Mattei explained,
adult females are a good 25 to 30 percent
bigger than their mates, a fact that the girls
greeted with hoots of triumph, boys of indignation.
Why are the females bigger? a boy demanded.
It's supposed to be the other way around!
As it turned out, the answer to that question
was closely tied to the reason the students
from Cheryl Crevier's class had ventured out
on a flawless June morning to the shores of
Long Island Sound. With clipboards purposefully
in hand and tape measures jauntily around
neck, the 22 children were there to help catch,
measure and tag as many specimens as they
could find of the American horseshoe crab,
or Limulus polyphemus, one of the oldest and
most tenacious species on Earth. Fossils found
this year in Manitoba reveal that the animal's
architecture has hardly changed in 445 million
years.
The student project is part of a major effort
now under way from Maine to Florida...(www.projectlimulus.org).
Experts are desperate to know whether their
suspicions are correct - that as a result
of being harvested en masse for use as fishing
bait, horseshoe crab populations are beginning
to crash.
The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic,
researchers said, not only because the creatures
are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs
by 200 million years, but also because so
many contemporary life forms depend on them.
Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species
of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles,
amphibians and various other alimentary canals
eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus
eggs.
..."A single female horseshoe crab can put
down 80,000 eggs a year, four million in her
lifetime," said John T. Tanacredi, a
professor of earth and marine sciences at
Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y....
In the last few years, the Asian market for
North American eel and conch meat has soared,
and it seems that gravid female horseshoe
crabs make the best bait. Even the stalwart
Limulus can't last if all its eggs end up
in one basket - shaped like a fisherman's
boat.
2008 Apr 12. Even
the Whales Have Their Predators: Ships. By SHAILA DEWAN, NY Times. The
federal fisheries service is attempting to
put a speed limit on some ships to keep them
from killing endangered right whales.
2008 Mar 4. Want
to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet
Needles. By PATRICIA COHEN,
The New York Times. The exotically shaped
creatures that began to sprout silently all
over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling
onto empty chairs and into women's laps and
shopping bags. When fully grown, these curiously
animate forms will find a home as part of
a mammoth version of the Great Barrier Reef.
But at the moment they were emerging at a
remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking
crochet hooks wielded by members of the audience.
...This environmental version of the AIDS
quilt is meant to draw attention to how rising
temperatures and pollution are destroying
the reef, the world's largest natural wonder,
said Margaret Wertheim, an organizer of the
project, who was in Manhattan last weekend
to lecture, offer crocheting workshops and
gather recruits. The reef is scheduled to
arrive in New York City next month.
As she explained to the 40 people, nearly
all women, who had gathered at New York University
on Saturday, "This has grown from something
that was a little object on our coffee table" to
an exhibition that, so far, spreads over 3,000
square feet. And that was before the addition
of that day's catch.
...the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic
Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the
Humanities at New York University is co-sponsoring
the exhibit, which will appear in the university's
Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at
the World Financial Center April 5 through
May 18.
In the university's auditorium Ms. Wertheim
opened a large bag and began throwing out
long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms,
fat textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses
created out of yarn, thread, plastic bags,
ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel
and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues,
pinks, oranges, greens, tans, purples and
yellows.
Later the group members traipsed upstairs
to a large jewelry studio where they settled
at one of six thick wooden worktables and
began crocheting. The woven organisms developed
so quickly it seemed as though time-lapse
photography was at work....
2008 Feb 14. Map
shows toll on world's oceans.
By Helen Briggs, Science reporter, BBC News,
Boston Excerpt: Only about 4% of the world's
oceans remain undamaged by human activity,
according to the first detailed global map
of human impacts on the seas. A study in Science
journal says climate change, fishing, pollution
and other human factors have exacted a heavy
toll on almost half of the marine waters.
Only remote icy areas near the poles are relatively
pristine, but they face threats as ice sheets
melt, it warns.
The authors say the data is a "wake-up
call" to policymakers. ...Lead scientist,
Dr Benjamin Halpern, of the National Center
for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa
Barbara, US, said humans were having a major
impact on the oceans and the marine ecosystems
within them. "In the past, many studies
have shown the impact of individual activities," he
said. "But here for the first time we
have produced a global map of all of these
different activities layered on top of each
other so that we can get this big picture
of the overall impact that humans are having
rather than just single impacts."
...The researchers divided the world's oceans
into 1km-square sections and examined all
real data available on how humankind is influencing
the marine environment. They then calculated "human
impact scores" for each location, presenting
this as a global map of the toll people have
exacted on the seas. The scientists say they
were shocked by the findings. "I think
the big surprise from all of this was seeing
what the complete coverage of human impacts
was," said Dr Spalding, senior marine
scientist for international conservation group
The Nature Conservancy. "There's nowhere
really that escaped. It's quite a shocking
map to see." He said the two biggest
drivers in destroying marine habitats were
climate change and over-fishing....
5 February 2008. MARIN
SALMON POPULATIONS PLUMMET. Excerpt:
Worst Spawning Numbers in 12 Years Raise
Fears for Recovery
The spawning season for endangered coho salmon
of Marin is the worst
recorded in 12 years, causing high levels
of concern by biologists
who have been working to monitor and restore
the endangered
populations following a decade of stable or
slightly increasing
spawning numbers. Marin's Lagunitas Watershed,
located just 25 miles
from downtown San Francisco, and one of the
Bay Area's most beloved
salmon runs, boasts the largest remaining
population of coho salmon
left in Central California and upwards of
20% of the State's total.
Coho have already gone extinct in 90 percent
of California streams
that once supported this species....
For more information, please contact:
Todd Steiner, Executive Director and biologist
415.663.8590 ext. 103,
tsteiner{AT}tirn.net
Paola Bouley, Watershed Biologist 415.663.8590
ext. 102, paola{AT}tirn.net
24 January 2008. Tuna
Troubles. Excerpt:
Here is a simple rule
for life: the food you eat is only as safe
as the
environment it comes from. This is narrowly
true,
in that food from a dirty kitchen is likely
to be
unsafe. But it’s also true in the
broadest sense.
A good example is the tuna in sushi. Many
New
Yorkers have come to love the convenience,
taste
and aesthetic appeal of sushi. But as The
Times
reported Wednesday after testing tuna from
20
Manhattan stores and restaurants, sushi
made from
bluefin tuna may contain unacceptable levels
of
mercury, which acts as a neurotoxin. Every
piece
of that tuna, glistening on its bed of rice,
is a
report on the worrisome state of the oceans....
2008 January 11. Greenhouse
ocean may downsize fish. [EurekAlert
(11.1.08)] By
2100, warmer oceans with more carbon dioxide
may no longer sustain 1 of the world's most
productive fisheries, says USC marine ecologist.
The last fish you ate probably came from
the Bering Sea. But during this century,
the sea's rich food web stretching from
Alaska to Russia-could fray as algae adapt
to greenhouse conditions. "All the
fish that ends up in McDonald's, fish sandwiches-that's
all Bering Sea fish," said
USC marine ecologist Dave Hutchins, whose
former student at the University of Delaware,
Clinton Hare, led research published Dec.
20 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, a
leading journal in the field. At present,
the Bering Sea provides roughly half the
fish caught in U.S. waters each year and
nearly a third caught worldwide. "The
experiments we did up there definitely suggest
that the changing ecosystem may support
less of what we're harvesting things like
pollock and hake," Hutchins said.
2008 January 5. EMPTY
SEAS Europe's Appetite for Seafood Propels
Illegal
Trade. By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. Europe's
dinner tables are increasingly supplied by
global fishing fleets, which are depleting
the world's oceans.
2008 January 3. Federal
Judge Orders Navy To Adopt Significant Mitigation
Measures For Sonar Use. District Court
Establishes Protections For
Marine Mammals During Exercises. Excerpt:
LOS ANGELES - The U.S. District Court for
the Central District of California issued
today a preliminary injunction requiring a
series of mitigation measures that will govern
the use of mid-frequency (MFA) sonar by the
U.S. Navy during training exercises in the
rich biological waters off Southern California.
In its order, the Court considered both the
environmental benefits of mitigation and the
feasibility of specific measures.
Calling key elements of the Navy's mitigation
scheme "grossly inadequate to protect
marine mammals from debilitating levels of
sonar exposure," the court imposed
... additional limitations to protect marine
mammals....
...."We have said from the beginning
of this litigation
that the Navy can meet its training objectives
while substantially increasing protections
against unnecessary harm to whales and other
marine mammals," said Joel Reynolds,
director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project
at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC),
which filed the lawsuit. "We
are very pleased that the Court has agreed
with us and has enjoined the Navy from conducting
these
exercises unless it takes the necessary
precautions."
...The high-intensity MFA sonar system can
blast vast areas of the oceans with dangerous
levels of underwater noise and has killed
marine mammals in numerous incidents around
the world. The waters off Southern California
have some of the richest marine habitat in
the country, and include five endangered species
of whales, a globally important population
of blue whales, the largest animal ever to
live on earth, and as many as seven individual
species of beaked whales, which are known
to be particularly vulnerable to underwater
sound....
15 December 2007. In
China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters. By DAVID
BARBOZA, The New York Times. Excerpt:
FUQING, China - Here in southern China, beneath
the looming mountains of Fujian Province,
lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky
brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp
and tilapia, much of it destined for markets
in Japan and the West....Fuqing is No. 1 on
a list for refused seafood shipments from
China....the two most glaring environmental
weaknesses in China: acute water shortages
and water supplies contaminated by sewage,
industrial waste and agricultural runoff that
includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn,
are discharging wastewater that further pollutes
the water supply.
"Our waters here are filthy," said
Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer who has
20 giant ponds in western Fuqing. "There
are simply too many aquaculture farms in this
area. They're all discharging water here,
fouling up other farms." Farmers have
coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal
veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish
feed, which helps keep their stocks alive
yet leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues
in seafood, posing health threats to consumers.
...No one is more vulnerable to these health
risks than the Chinese, because most of the
seafood in China stays at home. But foreign
importers are also worried.
...China produces about 70 percent of the
farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands
of giant factory-style farms that extend along
the entire eastern seaboard of the country...."There
are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants
in fish samples we've tested," said Ming
Hung Wong, a professor of biology at Hong
Kong Baptist University. "We've
got to stop the pollutants entering the food
system."
...More than half of the rivers in China are
too polluted to serve as a source of drinking
water....
11 December 2007. Experts
Study Lake Champlain Eel Decline. (AP)
Excerpt: Scientists
are trying to determine what caused Lake
Champlain's populations of American eels
to decline to almost nothing
over the last two decades. ..Until the early
1980s ...commercial
anglers would harvest tons of them every year. "We
have a fairly large vertebrate that has gone
from abundant to
virtually absent in 20 years," said Tom
Berry, Lake Champlain program
director for the Nature Conservancy. ...By
the early 1990s Quebec
banned the commercial fishing of eels.
American eels start life in the Sargasso Sea,
an area in the Atlantic
Ocean between the West Indies and the Azores.
After hatching, eel
larvae float on ocean currents to East Coast
rivers, including the
St. Lawrence. Historically, immature female
eels swam up the St.
Lawrence and Richelieu rivers and lived 10
to 20 years in Lake
Champlain before returning to the Sargasso
Sea. "It is just remarkable they travel
3,000 miles when they are only an
inch long. It boggles the mind," said
UVM fisheries biologist Ellen
Marsden.
Biologists do not fully understand the reason
for the decline.
Theories include climate change, pollution,
and overfishing of young
eels.
But the decline could also be due to the reconstruction
in the 1960s
of two hydroelectric dams on the Richelieu
River in Quebec. The dams
could have prevented the eels from reaching
Lake Champlain.
A decade ago, Hydro-Quebec installed an eel
ladder at one of the
dams. "Within 10 days we measured eels
going up the ladder," said
Quebec fisheries biologist Pierre Dumont....
1 May 2007. Coral
Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn? By CORNELIA
DEAN, NY Times. TAVERNIER, Fla. - ...
Meaghan Johnson ..., a program coordinator
for the Nature Conservancy, ...Ken Nedimyer,
...and Philip Kramer, who directs the conservancy's
Caribbean Marine Program, ...had come to
see... an array of concrete disks set in the
sand. Each one held a tiny piece of coral.
Mr. Nedimyer had led them to a nursery, one
of a number he has established since 2000,
.... He is working with assistance from the
conservancy, which in turn cooperates with
the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
which has its own coral efforts in places
like Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, the Environmental
Protection Agency is looking at water quality
standards for corals in Florida, Hawaii, the
Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Puerto
Rico, .... The Coral Reef Task Force, created
in the Clinton administration, regularly assesses
coral health. ... Many would say corals
globally are already so damaged, and so threatened
by further environmental degradation, that
there is little chance restoration efforts
can turn things around. Staghorn and elkhorn
corals, Mr. Nedimyer's principal interests,
were once abundant in South Florida, the
Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean. But
since the 1990s they have significantly declined,
to the point that last year they were placed
on the threatened list, under the Endangered
Species Act...."We
have lost 25 percent of the world's corals
in the last 25 years," David E.
Vaughan, director of the Center for Coral
Reef Research at Mote, said in an interview,
adding that 25 percent more are expected to
die in the next decade or two. "Sometimes
we sound like doomsday sayers," Dr. Vaughan
said, "but those are the facts." ...Corals
in South Florida have another big problem,
a die-off of sea urchins, which began succumbing
wholesale to a mysterious ailment about
20 years ago. Urchins graze on unwanted
algae, and without them, corals in many
areas have been smothered in overgrowth,
making it difficult or impossible for them
to grow or propagate.
17 April 2007. No-Fishing
Zones in Tropics Yield Fast Payoffs for
Reefs. By CHRISTOPHER
PALA. NY Times. Excerpt:
NGIWAL, Palau - ...on Palau's main island
of Babeldaob, Islias Yano, 57, ..."We
fished certain fish in certain seasons," he
recalled. "Each reef
could only be fished by people from a certain
village." Village elders would rotate
fishing on reefs, he recounted, to husband
their slow-growing main source of food. Starting
in the 1980s, population growth, new seafood
markets in Asia and modern ways of thinking
washed away the elders' authority and rules. "Outsiders
started coming into our reefs, they used scuba
gear and dynamite, and the fish got smaller
and fewer," Mr. Yano said, shaking his
head. ... In Ngiwal, the reaction was not
long in coming. Once again, the elders ruled.
In 1994, they banned fishing in a small area
of reef that was partly accessible on foot.
The village women, who traditionally gather
shellfish at low tide, noticed how the fish
became more plentiful there in a few years.
The reef became locally famous, and other
villages started to do the same. Today, Palau,
a tiny island state 600 miles east of the
Philippines that is internationally known
as a site for recreational diving, is at the
forefront of a worldwide movement to ban fishing
in key reefs to allow the return of prized
species. It now protects a patchwork of reefs
and lagoon waters amounting to 460 square
miles. ...That Palau has taken the lead in
ocean conservation is no accident. Even among
Pacific peoples, Palauans have been known
for prizing fish and seafood over meat and
farmed vegetables, and its fishermen have
stood out for their keen understanding of
the reefs. ...
4 April 2007. Quake
lifts Solomons island out of the sea.
By Neil Sands. Excerpt: RANONGGA, Solomon
Islands (AFP) - The seismic jolt that unleashed
the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted
an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying
some of the world's most pristine coral reefs.
In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's
tectonic plates in the
8.0magnitude earthquake Monday forced the
island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).
Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba
divers from around the globe lie exposed and
dying after the quake raised the mountainous
landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles)
long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide. ...The
stench of rotting fish and other marine life
stranded on the reefs when the seas receded
is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral
is dry and crunches underfoot. Dazed villagers
stand on the shoreline, still coming to terms
with the cataclysmic shift that changed the
geography of their island forever, pushing
the shoreline out to sea by up to 70 metres.
...fisherman Hendrik Kegala had just finished
exploring the new underwater landscape of
the island with a snorkel when contacted by
the AFP team. He said a huge submerged chasm
had opened up, running at least 500 metres
(550 yards) parallel to the coast. On the
beach at Niu Barae, the earthquake has revealed
a sunken vessel that locals believe is a Japanese
patrol boat, a remnant of the fierce fighting
between Allied forces and the Japanese in
WWII. ...Jackie Thomas, acting manager for
Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the Solomons,
said the loss of the reefs was a huge blow
for the fishing communities that are dotted
along Ranongga's coast. "The fish from
the reefs are the major source of protein
for the villagers," she told AFP from
Gizo."....
27 February 2007. EU
Wants to Speed Up Tuna Protection. By
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Excerpt:
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union's
top fisheries official on Tuesday pressed
for stronger protections for the overfished
bluefin tuna, an increasingly rare delicacy
in high-end restaurants around the world.
EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said he
wants to extend the fishing offseason, reduce
tuna sold on the black market, and impose
new worldwide cuts in catch quotas as quickly
as possible. The EU's 27 member states were
expected to approve the measure within weeks,
officials said. The proposal would reduce
catch quotas this year for bluefin tuna caught
in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean
to 29,500 tons from 32,000 officials said....Globally
two years ago, Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks
have dropped by 80 percent over the past
30 years. The global tuna export market
in 2002 was $5 billion, according to the
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
13 February 2007. GOLFO
DE SANTA CLARA JOURNAL: Vaquita Porpoise,
and a Way of Life, Face Extinction.
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times.
Excerpt: Fishermen
in Golfo de Santa Clara say their catches
of shrimp and fish have steadily declined
over the years. GOLFO DE SANTA CLARA, Mexico
- ...The Mexican government set up a reserve
in 1993 to protect the vaquita porpoises,
which become entangled in fishing nets and
drown. But the area is too small, with fishing
banned in only about 637 square miles. Environmentalists
from the United States and Mexico had begged
the fishermen to stop using the gill nets
that are killing off La Vaquita, or the
little cow, a porpoise that now has the
dubious distinction of being one of the
most endangered marine mammals in the world.
Only about 400 of them survive in the waters
at the tip of the Gulf of California where
the Colorado River once poured into the sea,
environmentalists say, and the only way to
save them is to ban commercial fishing with
nets in about 1,545 square miles.... Environmentalists
have put forward proposals to pay the fishermen
not to fish and to develop tourism as an alternative
source of income. But the men with rope-hardened
hands and weathered faces are skeptical. ..."They
want us to stop fishing," said Andrˇs
Gonz‡lez, a 43-year-old fisherman. "They
want to take care of the animals here, but
they are not taking care of the people." ...biologists
say studies of the carcasses of the vaquita
porpoises show no signs of malnourishment,
but plenty of scars from fishing nets. The
advocates of buying out the fishermen note
that the human population at the gulf's tip
is quite small, about 50,000 people in three
towns, including maybe 10,000 fishermen. The
solution, they say, is to ban fishing with
nets in the upper gulf and establish a $50
million trust fund and use the earnings to
pay fishermen a total of about $4 million
a year, not to fish but to pursue other trades.
The program would last at least seven years,
until the porpoise population could recover....
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