Lots of stuff in this roundup in which we travel in time from an up-to-date science review from the gulf oil spill (handy for next month’s talks!) back to ancient cnidaria. Exciting changes in fisheries protection for the US Pacific fleet, which is to see the number of boats reduced to match the number of fish that can be legally caught. More on the formation of shoals – what is the cost of grouping together for protection? To start, however, a first glimpse into the life of one of the largest groups of marine organisms – the bacteria:
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Lots of pollution – the Deepwater Horizon was now the largest spill ever (official). Problems with policing conservation policy. How alike are flocks and shoals? Read on…
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A good couple of weeks of marine science here – from fun to fundamental stuff, and often both together! Fundamental and important is the possibility that studies of nitrogen uptake in the marine ecosystem may have have underestimated the amounts of nitrogen being fixed by marine organisms. Fundamental and fun – well, take your choice from scampering scallops to the secretive sex-life of snails!

In conservation the emerging issue is deep-sea bottom trawling; there doesn’t seem to be any way of controlling this, so I guess the industry will continue until the stocks crash, taking an entire ecosystem with them (if you care, buy fish from sustainable sources – this does not include any deep sea species!). In pollution the important stories are still with the Gulf Oil Slick, with the publication of BP’s report into the accident, and some interesting strands in the debate as to where the oil has gone…

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Fisheries and climate change – the big two marine problems go head to head this week. I couldn’t work out where some stories belonged, so if you are interested in either, scan both columns! My research for a talk in November on the Gulf Oil Spill is getting interesting, with (more) claims of independent research getting elbowed out of the way of a good legal battle! Sour grapes, or serious accusations? First though, something wholesome from the scientific journals:
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The oil spill continues to be important to the marine biology community, which is currently chewing over some of the first reports based on data obtained during the slick and in its immediate aftermath. There is still a lot else to consider – climate change is moving back up the agenda, with indications that we need to address this problem now. We will start, however, 2.5 billion years ago (the lengths I go to to find some good news…)
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Lots in the press over that last week, with the start of the publication of a new PLoS 1 collection on marine biodiversity, one of the outcomes of the Census of Marine Life (2000-2010). In the conservation field we have encouraging support for marine reserves from US studies, though there is strong indication that multi-use reserves are not as efffective as might be hoped – strongly policed no-take zones are really the only option for allowing the recovery of many areas. Otherwise, we have a number of publications on hard corals – some good basic science for a change in ‘Life at Sea’, plus a look at how well corals establish at higher temperatures in our climate change section.

Marine biodiversity and biogeography: The release of a collection of articles from around the world, each article describes the physical, geological, chemical, and biological characteristics of a region of the worlds oceans. Current papers cover the Pacific, Mediterranean, Caribbean, Antarctic, a US overview, and South Africa. These publications follow on from a decade of work by the Census of Marine Life, that attempted to bring together a corpus of knowledge about the biodiversity of our oceans.
PLoS ONE: Marine Biodiversity and Biogeography – Regional Comparisons of Global Issues

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We’ve caught a couple of pre-reports on this, but now the full paper is available for all to read at PLoS 1. The report is based on historical fish landings reported from the Firth. This sees a healthy and diverse fishery in the early 19th century. After this date the fisheries effort intensified, and commercial landings for each species targeted in turn is seen to go through a boom followed within a few decades with collapse.

The only commercial fisheries that remain today are reported to be for Nephrops and scallops (Pecten maximus, Pectinidae). The report damns the fishing industry for forcing a repeal of the trawl ban in 1984 that had been put in place since 1889. It further argues that modern intensive Nephrops fisheries are preventing the recovery of other fish stocks.

Thurstan RH, Roberts CM (2010) Ecological Meltdown in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland: Two Centuries of Change in a Coastal Marine Ecosystem. PLoS ONE 5(7): e11767. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011767

Oil spills, chemical weapons, global warming, even toxic octopuses in this week’s episode. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, a report has surfaced over the last two days that the levels of global marine primary production are in free-fall. This story links with our report last week, that phytoplankton actually start to bloom in the winter, when turbulence reduces the density of predators (Acepted theory of algal blooms wrong). This week global warming is blamed for increasing the temperature of surface waters, causing them to become more stratified, and reducing the chance of mixing with deeper cold water masses. The worrying thing is that this week’s report is based on evaluation of historic data for phytoplankton levels in seawater, so it looks like the feedback loop we predicted last week is already picking up speed… Our second article is a calibration exercise to allow us to quantify phytoplankton blooms from space more accurately, I hope that this will show up some errors in the estimates made in the first paper.
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A quick turn-around on this occasion – with hopeful news from the Gulf of Mexico, though even if the leak has been blocked successfully, it will be a long time before the effects of this disaster have been fully understood (never mind fixed). To another man-made disaster, this time off the southwest coast of Africa. Here over-fishing in the 1960’s resulted in ecosystem collapse, and only now are there a few hopeful signs of recovery, with the arrival of some tough gobies that can cope with anoxic waters and eat jellyfish…

First though, have we got the theory of algal blooms wrong? If we have, this could have serious implications for climatic modelling!
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The usual mixed bag of marine science, trawled from the Google deeps. This week we have tales of eels, shrimp, fish and octopuses (ar at least one octopus, called Paul, who has had a significant impact on the social behaviour of a certain species of terrestrial apes).
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