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: Read the rest of this entry »
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…) Read the rest of this entry »
a broad clawed porcelain crab in the palm of a hand
Thanks to everyone who turned up to brave a rather windy Roa Island. Unfortunately the wind made it difficult to see into pools and the sea at the shore line, and the sky was overcast meaning little light for photography. However it didn’t rain (much) and I think everyone had an interesting time looking for critters with the tide out so far. I was really happy to see the two species of porcelain crab – broad clawed Porcellana platycheles and long clawed Pisidia longicornis – as these have been recorded here before and I have been looking for them at Roa without success. Unfortunately I left my survey sheets in the car at the car share point, but I think it was probably more enjoyable as an informal event anyway; if anyone has any lists/records of what they saw it would be really useful to have a copy to compare with past data.
A hermit crab sizes up a potential new home. It has a firm grip on this new shell, but does it already have an occupant?
The oldest data we have for Roa Island is a survey by Clare & Jones from 1968 and exercises like this walk highlight the rapidly changing landscape of scientific knowledge and naming of species. For instance, one find I have made preparing for the shore walk was the strawberry anenome Actinia fragacea; this species does not appear on the Clare & Jones survey, so is it a new species for this area? The answer is that we can’t tell – in 1968 the strawberry anenome was widely regarded as a colour form of the beadlet anenome Actinia equina, which does appear on the Clare & Jones list and so it could easily have been present. Despite having some excellent baseline data we have to be very careful how we compare our findings today back to it.
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
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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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! Read the rest of this entry »
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). Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
The Chagos Islands and surrounding seas were designated a Marine Protected Area by the UK government in early April 2010. The Chagos has the world’s largest coral atoll and 55 tiny islands set in quarter of a million square miles of the world’s cleanest seas. This is the UK’s greatest area of marine biodiversity.
To see short film which shows the wonderful life click on following link: protectchagos.org
