DEEP DIVING CORMORANT FILMS ITS OWN HUNT

Courtesy of the Wildlife Conservation Society, this footage of an imperial cormorant fitted with a camera on its back as it dives for 40 seconds to ~150 feet (45 meters), hunts for minute on the seafloor, then catches a snakelike fish, which it carries to the surface to eat. 
  
Cool. But hopefully they take that camera off soon. Remember this study in Nature showing that the survival of king penguins wearing small bands on their flippers dropped by 16 percent, and that they produced 39 percent fewer chicks, and how this might have skewed the data on all kinds of research (notably, climate change)?
____________________________________________________________________

  


  

• Claire Saraux, Céline Le Bohec, Joël M. Durant, Vincent A. Viblanc, Michel Gauthier-Clerc, + et al. Reliability of flipper-banded penguins as indicators of climate change. Nature 469, 203-206 doi:10.1038/nature09630

Read More

THE STORY OF BLUEFIN TUNA

Infographic by the Pew Environment Group on the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna—why the decline and what's needed for the species to recover. Living proof that really good-looking informative graphics will spontaneously broadcast spawn. For a metric version, click here.

___________________________________________________________________________

Read More

A CENTURY IN THE NORTH

Fourteen extraordinary minutes detailing a hundred years in the Arctic of climate change, war, science, politics, energy, unrealistic optimism, business, and beauty.
_____________________________________________________________________



North from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Read More

PLENTY MORE FISH IN THE SEA?

Visualization from Information is Beautiful based on data from the paper Hundred Year Decline of North Atlantic Predatory Fishes comparing fish landings in tons per square kilometer in 1900 versus 2000 for popularly eaten fish—bluefin tuna, brill, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot, whiting.
_________________________________________________________________

Via Information is Beautiful.

Read More

ENDING OVERFISHING

The problem, a solution, animated.
_________________________________________________________________

Read More

A GLOBAL WARMING REFUGE AT EQUATORIAL ISLANDS

Some islands in the bulls'-eye of climate change may dodge the worst thanks to heretofore unknown dynamics between deep currents, upwelling, and rising temperatures.
⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏⸏

Gilbert Island archipelago in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. Credit: NASA/Aqua Satellite.

  
A new paper in Nature Climate Change reports on an unexpected refuge of cooler water around the equatorial Gilbert Islands—one of three archipelagos of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati (say: KEER-uh-bus).
  
This is good news at a time when when scientists predict that rising ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific will wreak havoc (coral bleaching, coral disease) on coral reef ecosystems by the end of the century. 
  
The new study shows that climate change could cause ocean currents to operate in a surprising way to mitigate warming near a handful of islands on the equator... which may then become isolated refuges for corals and fish.
    

The three archipelagos of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati straddle the Equator. Map based on: TUBS via Wikimedia Commons.

  
The dynamics of this cooler-water refuge include:
  

1. Equatorial trade winds pushing a surface current, the Equatorial Countercurrent, from east to west
2. A swift Equatorial Undercurrent flowing below the Equatorial Countercurrent in the opposite direction, west to east, at 100-200 meters (328-656 feet)

Where the Equatorial Undercurrent encounters an island, its flow is deflected upward on the island's western flank, carrying its cooler nutrient-rich water to the sunlit surface and creating localized areas of greater ocean productivity.

You can see the dynamics of this in the map and graph below showing chlorophyll levels—a marker of phytoplankton and hence marine productivity—across the equatorial Pacific. The red in the map view indicates highest chlorophyll / phytoplankton / marine productivity.

Credit: Kristopher B. Karnauskas and Anne L. Cohen. Nature Climate Change. DOI:10.1038/nclimate1499.

    
Clearly, the most productive waters occur in the eastern tropical Pacific, where the Equatorial Undercurrent drives up against the Galapagos Islands to create huge upwelling.
  
Chlorophyll quantities then dwindle rapidly as you move west... until the anomalous red signature marking the outlines of the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati seen inside the white-dotted rectangle. The islands are not shown in the map view, just their chlorophyll signatures.
  
Co-author Anne Cohen at WHOI says:
  

"Global models predict significant temperature increases in the central tropical Pacific over the next few decades, but in truth conditions can be highly variable across and around a coral reef island. To predict what the coral reef will experience in global climate change, we have to use high-resolution models, not global models."

Coral reef of the equatorial Pacific. Credit: USFWS.

The models predict:
  

• That as air temperatures rise and equatorial trade winds weaken, the Pacific surface current will also weaken by 15 percent by the end of the century.
• But the then-weaker surface current will also impose less friction and drag on the EUC, so this deeper current will actually strengthen by 14 percent.

 
The high-resolution models developed by  Kristopher Karnauskas, also at WHOI, and Cohen, suggest the amount of upwelling will actually increase by about 50 percent around the Gilbert Islands, to reduce the rate of warming waters there by about 0.7°C (1.25°F) per century.
  
From the paper:

In the central Pacific, home to one of the largest marine protected areas and fishery regions in the global tropics, sea surface temperatures are projected to increase by 2.8 °C by the end of this century. Of critical concern is that marine protected areas may not provide refuge from the anticipated rate of large-scale warming, which could exceed the evolutionary capacity of coral and their symbionts to adapt. Combining high-resolution satellite measurements, an ensemble of global climate models and an eddy-resolving regional ocean circulation model, we show that warming and productivity decline around select Pacific islands will be mitigated by enhanced upwelling associated with a strengthening of the equatorial undercurrent. Enhanced topographic upwelling will act as a negative feedback, locally mitigating the surface warming. At the Gilbert Islands, the rate of warming will be reduced by 0.7±0.3 °C or 25 ± 9% per century, or an overall cooling effect comparable to the local anomaly for a typical El Niño, by the end of this century. As the equatorial undercurrent is dynamically constrained to the Equator, only a handful of coral reefs stand to benefit from this equatorial island effect. Nevertheless, those that do face a lower rate of warming, conferring a significant advantage over neighbouring reef systems. If realized, these predictions help to identify potential refuges for coral reef communities from anticipated climate changes of the twenty-first century.

  

A bathymetric view of the Phoenix Islands group of the Pacific islands nation of Kiribati. Credit: Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

    
As an interesting aside, in 2006 Kiribati created the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) to the east of the Gilbert Islands. In 2008 they doubled its size to make it the world's largest marine protected area. (Since then the Chagos Marine Reserve in the Indian Ocean has surpassed PIPA in size.)

At 410,500 square kilometers (158,453 square miles), about the size of California, PIPA preserves one of the Earth's last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems, complete with eight coral atolls, two submerged reef systems, underwater sea mounts, and abundant marine and bird life.
 
This is a truly phenomenal accomplishment. 
  
But if the Gilbert Islands are destined to become one of the few places where coral reef biodiversity is able to hang on in the coming century, then maybe we should begin thinking about giving those waters stronger protections too.

 

An atoll of Kiribati. Via Flickr.

The paper:
   

• Kristopher B. Karnauskas & Anne L. Cohen. Equatorial refuge amid tropical warming. Nature Climate Change (2012) DOI:10.1038/nclimate1499

  

Read More

MARINE SANCTUARY REALLY HELPS RARE DOLPHINS

Hector's dolphin. Credit: James Shook via Wikimedia Commons.

  
A new study provides the first empirical evidence that a marine protected area (MPA) has robustly improved the survival of a marine mammal. In this case, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals, the Hector's dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori) of New Zealand.
  
The IUCN Red List describes the problems facing this diminutive cetacean:
  

This species is considered to be Endangered due to an ongoing and projected decline of greater than 50% over 3 generations (approx. 39 years)... Hector’s dolphin has the most limited range of any marine cetacean other than the vaquita (Phocoena sinus)... The main cause of population decline is ongoing bycatch in [gillnet and trawl] fisheries.

  
Concerned for the future of this rare species (population: 7,270 individuals), New Zealand in 1988 established the Banks Peninsula Marine Mammal Sanctuary in 1,170-square-kilometers (451-square-miles) of waters off the South Island. 

Banks Peninsula, South Island, New Zealand. Credit: NASA Astronaut Photo ISS013-E-67242.

The research, ongoing since 1986, involved identifying 462 individual Hector's dolphins through photographs and then analyzing the photographic re-sightings using a Bayesian mark-recapture technique. The team applied a population model to assess the impact of the MPA on the dolphins.

Their results show that since the designation of the sanctuary, the Hector's dolphins' survival rate has increased by 5.4 percent: 

• From a decline of ~6 percent per year
• Now slowed to a rate of decline of ~1 percent per year

As good as that sounds, the researchers were surprised survival rates hadn't increased further, since they expected the establishment of the MPA to solve the problem entirely.
    

Hector's dolphin. Credit: David Searle via Flickr.

Instead they discovered the dolphins don't spend the whole year in the sanctuary. Co-author Liz Slooten tells me:

Their distribution with respect to depth and distance offshore changes. In winter they are almost evenly distributed with respect to depth and distance offshore. In summer they are strongly concentrated close to shore. This means that in summer about 80% of the population is inside the sanctuary and protected. In winter this drops to only about 40%. Too many dolphins are still being caught in fishing nets to allow the population to stabilise, let alone recover from the massive decline they've suffered over the last three decades.

"The MPA hasn't quite yet 'saved' the dolphins," says Slooten, "but it's been a major step in the right direction. The take home message is that size matters. Marine Protected Areas work, but they have to be large enough in order to be effective."

The paper in early view at the Journal of Applied Ecology:

• Andrew M Gormley, Elisabeth Slooten, Steve Dawson, Richard J Barker, Will Rayment, Sam du Fresne and Stefan Brager (2012). First evidence that Marine Protected Areas can work for marine mammals. Jour. App. Ecol. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02121.x

Read More

ONLY GIRL SHEARWATERS FLY TO FRANCE

Puffinus shearwater. Credit: Jofre Ferrer via Flickr. 

  
The Balearic shearwaters (Puffinus mauretanicus) who breed on the Spanish Balearic Islands don't go far when they migrate... out the Strait of Gibraltar then north to summering grounds off the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and France.
  
Yet, curiously, only the females go to France. 
  
Perhaps because of these longer migrations, they also spend longer away from their breeding grounds than the males: 

• Median duration of time away for females: 91 days
• Median duration of time away for males: 83 days

Credit: Tim Guilford et al. PLoS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0033753.

These are the findings of a team of researchers who tagged 26 shearwaters with miniature geolocation trackers and followed their annual movements from the Balearic Islands. The results are published in a new paper in PLoS ONE.
  
You can see in the maps above the routes of the individual birds, each with its own color track:
  

• Inset map shows where all the birds occurred statistically half the time throughout the year.
• Larger maps shows where all the birds occurred statistically half the time on migration to and from their breeding islands.
• The colored circles mark where four birds made trips back into eh Atlantic after their migrations.
• The red symbol is the position of the breeding colony at Sa Cella cave on Mallorca.

  

Longline hooks. Credit: Isaac Wedin via Flickr.

The gender-specific migrations are more than a curiosity. They're vitally important knowledge since Balearic shearwaters are Europe's only critically endangered seabird. From the IUCN Red List:
  

This species has a tiny breeding range and a small population [known breeding population: ~3,200 pairs] which is undergoing an extremely rapid population decline owing to a number of threats, in particular predation at breeding colonies by introduced mammals [cats, genets, rats, rabbits] and at-sea mortality as a result of interactions with commercial fisheries [hooked and drowned on longlines]. Population models predict an extremely rapid decline over three generations (54 years), qualifying the species as Critically Endangered.

  

Balearic shearwater. Credit: Roger Montserrat via Flickr.

Obviously if you have a large proportion of the females flocking and feeding in one location then the entire species becomes susceptible to mass mortality fishing events like the one that killed ~50 birds off Spain in 1999-2000. As the authors note:
  

[F]or approximately ¼ of the year, a large percentage of the world's population of breeding birds will be vulnerable to [fisheries] by-catch in these two core areas within the territorial waters of Portugal and France.    

      
The paper:

• Guilford T , Wynn R , McMinn M , Rodríguez A , Fayet A , et al. (2012) Geolocators Reveal Migration and Pre-Breeding Behaviour of the Critically Endangered Balearic Shearwater Puffinus mauretanicus. PLoS ONE 7(3): e33753. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033753

Read More

TEN GIFTS FOR THE OCEAN

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response.

 
What to give that favorite ocean on your list? Here are 10 little presents that say "thanks" in a big way to the  big-wet-deep-dark-mysterious lifegiver to us all.

Credit: DanCentury via Flickr.

  
1) On your next visit to the ocean—or any of its feeder rivers, lakes, streams, or ponds—pick up trash. Every piece of (mostly) plastic you carry away will spare the ocean pollution lethal to life.

Credit: Buzz Hoffman via Flickr. 

 
2) Report garbage on the beach via this smartphone app to the Marine Debris Tracker project.

Via Project Aware.

  
3) If you're a diver, join an underwater clean-up group, like Project Aware, and feed their Dive Against Debris dataset.

Credit: reuvenim via Flickr.

  
4) Reconsider synthetic fleece. As new research shows, its microfibers wend their way from your washing machine through wastewater treatment plants to become yet more plastic pollution in the ocean.

Credit: Justin Gaurav Murgai via Flickr.

  
5) If you eat ocean animals or plants, consult the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list for what's sustainably fished and what's not. Use its recommendations to double-check the recommendations of the Marine Stewardship Council... the group that "vets" seafood sold at Whole Foods and many other markets and restaurants, but that's been making dubious judgement calls of late.

Credit: colros via Flickr.

  
6) Avoid ocean-based remedies and natural medicines like shark cartilage, fish oil (use flaxseed), coral calcium (leafy green veggies are better), plus ingredients (like dried seahorses) in some "herbal" medicines—or any other stuff taken from the sea that may or may not make you healthier but will sicken the ocean.

Credit: irmiller via Flickr. 

  
7) Use ocean-friendly sunscreen at the ocean, river, lake, stream, or pond where you swim. Up to 600 tons of the stuff gets washed off, or washed downstream, into the ocean ever year, carrying all kind of nasties with it. Plus sunscreen may not be so good for you as you think. Here are tips for some better choices.

Credit: Ryan E. Poplin via Wikimedia Commons. 

  
8) If you keep a saltwater aquarium, buy only fish certified by the Marine Aquarium Council.

Credit: Lee R Berger via Wikimedia Commons.

  
9) Forgo the purchase of ocean souvenirs—objects or jewelry made of coral, sea shells, nautilus shell, seahorses—anything that had to be killed and removed from the ocean in order for you to take it home.

Credit: NOAA's National Ocean Service via Flickr.

  
10) Learn more about the ocean. Our well-stocked brains and hearts are good for the ocean and all living things.

Credit: JIGGS IMAGES via Flickr.

  
Happy Holidays!

Read More

OZ MARINE PARK: BIGGEST, BEST, OR BUST?

Part of the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast of Australia. Credit: NASA.

 

The Australian government announced last week a proposal to create the world's largest marine protected area in the phenomenally biodiverse richness of the Coral Sea.

Too bad no one's happy with it.

Of course, it's in the nature of protected areas to make people unhappy for a good long while before there's any hope of making them happy.

Bison, Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Daniel Mayer via Wikimedia Commons. 

Yellowstone, the world's first national park, might have triggered part 2 of the Civil War if there had been more people living in the West at the time. Here's what Senator Cornelius Cole of California had to say about it during legislative debate:

I have grave doubts about the propriety of passing this bill. The natural curiosities there cannot be interfered with by anything that man can do.... I cannot see how [they] can be interfered with if settlers are allowed to appropriate them....  I do not see the reason or propriety of setting apart a large tract of land of that kind in the Territories of the United States for a public park. There is abundance of public park ground in the Rocky Mountains that will never be occupied. It is all one great park, and never can be anything else.... There are some places, perhaps this is one, where persons can and would go and settle and improve and cultivate the grounds, if there be ground fit for cultivation.

Australia's Coral Sea draft marine reserve covers 989,842 square kilometers (382,180 square miles). Courtesy Commonwealth of Australia.

In Australia, some fishers are mad as hell about the proposed new park. For brevity in reporting, nothing beats this article, in its entirety, from the Queensland ABC:

Commercial fishers in the Coral Sea claim they are being made scapegoats despite a long history of sustainable fishing. Rob Louden is a licence and quota holder in the Coral Sea and East Coast sea cucumber fishery. He says the proposed Commonwealth marine park will put valuable and productive fishing grounds off limits for no apparent ecological or biological reason.

Man, sea cucumber. Credit: Fritz Geller-Grimm via Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists and conservationists are equally unhappy with the Coral Sea proposal. From Nature News:

Hugh Possingham, director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland, points out that little more than half... of the Coral Sea reserve is proposed as a 'no take' area, in which all fishing would be banned. The world’s largest existing marine reserve, established last year by the British government around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, spans 544,000 [square kilometers] and is a no-take zone throughout. An alliance of campaigning conservation groups, including the WWF and the Pew Environment Group, argues that more of the Coral Sea should receive this level of protection.

Blue starfish (Linckia laevigata) resting on Acropora coral, Lighthouse, Ribbon Reefs, Australia. Credit: Richard Ling via Wikimedia Commons.

The fight is fierce—and important. Australia is struggling to create meaningful protection for much of its waters. 

But its weak draft proposal last May for a southwestern Australian marine park prompted 173 scientists to write an open letter to the government in protest. One of the co-signers, CJA Bradshaw, wrote at his blog Conservation Bites:

Basically, the proposed parks are merely a settlement between government and industry where nothing of importance is really being protected. The parks are just the leftovers industry doesn’t want. No way to ensure the long-term viability of our seas.

Barry Wrasse is a stakeholder too. Here's what he has to say.

Read More

HAPPIEST FEET: OILED PENGUINS GO FREE

Little blue penguin. Credit: Noodle snacks via Wikimedia Commons.

Forty-nine of 343 little blue penguins rescued from the oil spill off the New Zealand coast were released back into the ocean yesterday—with more to come in the next few weeks, says Maritime New Zealand.

At least 2,008 birds died.

When Rena grounded on 5 October 2011 it contained 1,712 tons of oil. About 360 tons spilled into the ocean. The last of the 1,319 tons remaining were removed by salvors working under really tough conditions by 13 November. Kudos to them.

The freed penguins were released back into the Bay of Plenty with hopes they'll make their way to their breeding rookery on Rabbit Island.

Bonne chance, little dudes.

Read More

KILLER WHALES V. SALMON

Credit: Robert Pittman, NOAA.

What happens when we 'manage' two species in the wild with different—and conflicting—objectives? 

And what happens when one eats the other—and so do we?

That's the question raised in an interesting new paper in PLoS ONE. The authors investigated how many endangered chinook salmon are needed by endangered killer whales to recover their numbers in the northeastern Pacific.

Salish Sea, comprising the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound, surrounding Vancouver Island and Washington state. Credit: SeaWiFS Project,NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.

The question gets even more intriguing when you have two countries—Canada and the US—managing the fate of the two species that blithely cross international boundaries as if, you know, they weren't there.

The killer whales in the middle of the conflicted question are known as the southern resident killer whales (SRKW), who summer in the Salish Sea. They eat only fish, and are so dependent on chinook salmon that when they can't get them more adult whales die and fewer calves are born. 

• Current population of southern resident killer whales: 87 individuals
• Current chinook salmon stock: 36% of historical run in Canada, 8% in US

Chinook salmon. Credit: Josh Larios via Wikimedia Commons.

The stated objective of US management is to grow the dwindling killer whale population by 2.3% per year over 28 years. 

The authors assessed what the minimum basic caloric requirements were likely to be to make that come true—based on food requirements of captive killer whales, and body lengths of wild whales.

Estimated prey requirements of wild killer whales, based on two plausible values for calorie content of a typical, 4-year-old Chinook salmon. Credit: Rob Williems, et al. PLoS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0026738.

What they found suggests that the chinook salmon can't support both a growing killer whale population and human fisheries at current levels.

What's a fish-eating primate to do? The authors' suggest:

When one protected species relies almost exclusively on another protected species, it can be difficult to develop management frameworks that meet the needs of both species. This can lead to a perception that the needs of the more charismatic species will unfairly trump those of the prey species. In our experience, genuine conservation conflicts often result in management inaction in the absence of a framework in which to assess likely impacts... It is faster to reduce takes of salmon than to increase salmon production, and it is faster to increase salmon production than promote population growth in killer whales. The efficacy of salmon habitat restoration actions can often be measured within a decade, whereas similar measurements will take decades in studies of long-lived species like killer whales.

In other words, maybe we should let the whales get the fish for a while.

There's a lot more interesting stuff going on in this forward-looking paper and luckily it's open access. So you can freely read deeper.

The paper:

• Williams R, Krkošek M, Ashe E, Branch TA, Clark S, et al. 2011Competing Conservation Objectives for Predators and Prey: Estimating Killer Whale Prey Requirements for Chinook Salmon.PLoS ONE 6(11):e26738. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0026738

Read More