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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Themes this week include climate change, and in particular how phytoplankton, some of the smallest plants on the planet, have a vital role in managing the Earth’s carbon dioxide budget. Otherwise, scientists are starting to evaluate how climate change will effect key organisms in the marine ecosystem, and results from these studies are beginning to come in. Fisheries are an important component of many maritime economies, and there are a few interesting papers in this area this week. Historic studies of fisheries are important for understanding how and why they develop, and what economic pressures can lead to collapse. Otherwise, husbandry is becomming important in the marine field, as demonstrated by the breeding of new ‘super prawns’ for the Australian market.

If climate control and resources are two positive things, it is less easy to find good things to say about pollution and the continuing oil spill. The importance of monitoring marine systems for organic mercury compounds is emphasised – while the marine ecosystem dilutes these compounds, the marine food chain concentrates them right back up again, and guess who is at the top of that food chain…

On the oil spill there is a very interesting blog post on how likely the spill was to occur – was it an event so unlikely that (as the US regulators agreed when they licensed the Deepwater Horizon) there was no likelihood of environmental damage? Beyond that, we look at some of the less visible casualties of the spill, and start to quantify just how much of the Gulf marine ecosystem has been wiped out.
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This roundup has a focus on oceanography, physical and chemical processes in the worlds oceans. The chemistry and biology of natural seawaters are very tightly linked, with most reactions being biologically mediated. The physical side, however, dominates what chemical species marine biology has to work with, an interaction that scientists are now claiming to be able to model. Many marine systems are rather less than ‘natural’, with a range of human influences. In the oceanography section we look at the underlying science of these man-made changes, whilst in our pollution section we look at the dirty stuff…

We finish on a few general papers that don’t fit into the two main themes for the week – living underwater, mapping the salmon genome, dolphins and ichthyosaurs. Finally, if you can only conserve one thing, what would it be? – This is the root of a difficult question facing coral reef conservators. Do you concentrate on the core of the reef? – science is starting to show that the fringes of the reef (an other eco-systems?) are more genetically diverse, and may offer a stronger pool of organisms better able to survive ongoing climatic change…
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Lots of interesting articles over the last week, some physiology – how sharks and seals find their food, and how far can crocodiles migrate? Prehaps my favourite was the article on classifying arrow-worms, a group I knew nothing about them before the article. There is also a nice set of maps of North Americal marine ecosystems, which you can view on Google Earth. Maps almost had a separate section this week, with 3D maps of the oil-spill being computed by the University of Texas at Austin. Unfortunately the article was so uninformative that I couldn’t see any point in referencing it…
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