Five of the biggest marine science stories in 2010

Yes, I caved to the impulse and joined the inevitable cavalcade of “lists” that come at the end of every year.  Why?  Because these lists actually serve an important purpose: they cement the events of the past 12 months in our psyche and provide context about where these events fit into the grand passage of time.  They also give us something to read when we want to procrastinate shoveling snow off the driveway or vacuuming pine needles from behind the couch.  So here they are: five of the biggest marine science news stories from 2010.

5. National Ocean Policy.  Starting off sexy, right? Policy, yeeeahh baby!  No really, it IS a big news story that in July of this year the Whitehouse announced that the US finally has a comprehensive Ocean Policy.  That’s because such a document - and the institutions it enhrines - recognises the critical role that the oceans play in the lives of every American, even those that live far removed from the coasts.  As the biggest per capita consumers (and polluters) on the planet, the absence of a national policy to protect the oceans had long been lamented by marine scientists and consrvationists alike.  Now we have a National Oceans Council and a set of guiding principles for governing the use (and abuse) of coastal oceanic resources.  Its about time!  Read the Executive order here, and the Final Recomendations of the Ocean Policy Task Force here

4. What a load of garbage.  2010 marked the year that the concept of the “great ocean garbage patches” entered the public consciousness.  If you’ve been living under a rock and have no idea what that is, well, it’s the idea that millions of tons of plastic pollution have found their way down urban drains, to creeks, rivers and estuaries and thence to the centers of the great circular oceanic currents called gyres.  There becalmed, these floating fields of plastic debris form giant rafts of death, entering food webs and silently choking millions of animals.  The truth is slightly less dramatic; while the grabage patches are almost mind bogglingly large, the density of plastic particles within the patches is actually pretty dilute.  In fact, you have to sift a lot of water to recover appreciable quantities of the stuff; it’s just that, even then, they have vastly higher concentrations than parts of the ocean more well-mixed by large scale currents.  2010 was the year that scientists recognised that there is not only one patch (in the north Pacific) but probably a patch of sorts in the center of every gyre and that therefore this is a global problem.  Its also the year that the concept hit pop culture, partly from the well-publicised efforts of the Plastiki cruise, but mostly in the form of a new album from progressive UK hip hop outfit Gorillaz called “Plastic Beach”, a theme album conceived when the lead singer was sitting on a beach and realising how much of the sand was actully composed of tiny bits of plastic.  The garbage patch story also added the most excellent word “nurdle” to the lexicon, reason enough for it to appear on this list.  Read more about the adventures of a bona fide garbage patch researcher by following Miriam Goldstein at DeepSeaNews

3. To hack, or not to hack?  It’s pathetic, but perhaps not surprising, that the worlds leaders have not been able to agree on a binding plan of action to reduce carbon pollution and its two biggest impacts on the planet: global warming (both the atmosphere and the oceans) and ocean acidification.  First at the COP15 Copenhagen conference in late 2009 and, more recently, at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico in December, politics consistently trumped the urgent need to reconstruct our industries and economies to prevent exacerbation of the problem (we’re already committed to a certain level of globe-changing temperature and pH shift).  While these “front end” solutions are desperately needed, a number of climate/ocean researchers around the world have been studying “back end” solution, the most familiar of which is carbon sequestration - the idea of catching CO2 from fossil fuel burning and burying it or otherwise preventing it from entering the atmosphere/ocean.  Perhaps the most controversial suggestion is to fertilise the oceans with nutrients that usually limit the growth of plankton (Iron is the best-studied), thereby causing huge plankton blooms that suck CO2 out of the air/water and, ultimately, export it to the bottom of the abyssal oceans.  The controversy of these sorts of planet-level solutions, collectively called “geo-hacking”, arise because they are designed to affect the whole earth ocean/climate system and take place in international waters, so arguments arise about who gets to decide on these sorts of things.  No sooner had I interviewed an expert on ocean fertilisation on this very blog than a UN moratorium was issued preventing any future research on this kind of solution until the risks and impacts are better understood.  C’mon UN - you can’t have it both ways: either make an internationally-binding decision about reducing carbon pollution, or allow people to move forward with alternative solutions, preferably both.  As it stand currently, we’re a boxer with both arms tied behind his back, and that’s never good.

2. BP/Macondo/Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.  Bet you thought that would be number 1 right?  By volume, the largest oil spill in US history, affecting huge areas of the Gulf of Mexico in the peak of seafood season and threatening hundreds of miles of fragile coastal wetlands, surely it should be.  Nope.  Why not?  Well, largely because - disastrous though it was/is - it is both temporally and geographically restricted in its impact.  In other words, its effects will be found primarily in one place and for a limited (albeit relatively prolonged) time.  I argue that it is NOT these events that we (the world) need to be concerned about, but the long-term, chronic, death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of problems.  The biggest of those are global warming and ocean acidification (see number 3).  It’s like the difference between a big financial windfall and the power of investment returns.  The local factory worker who wins a hundred million on the latest Powerball gets the news story, while tons of investors accumulate vast wealth in relative silence due to the inexorable influence of compounding interest and capital gains over time.  The BP spill was an absolute disaster that got a LOT of press and will keep many marine scientists and environmentalists busy for a long time (great coverage of both is at DeepSeaNews), but it’s a one-off event and not even on the radar in terms of the global health of the oceans.

1. Census of Marine Life.  The biggest marine science news of 2010 has to be the completion of the first Census of Marine Life; a phenomenal decade-long effort by thousands of marine biologists around the world to answer one simple question: What lived, lives and will live in the worlds oceans?  The brainchild of Rutgers marine scientist Fred Grassle, the scope was truly gargantuan: over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.  It revealed the chronic undersampling of the deep-pelagic realm and the incredible diversity of seamounts and the tropical, arctic and antarctic depths.  It also brought us some of the most stunning and engaging images of marine diversity ever captured.  The final estimate? Based on extrapolations of survey data, easily 1 million or more eukaryote species and perhaps as many as 10 million bacteria and archaea.  But CoML is so much more than numbers, it’s a peek into a treasure trove of new life, a testament to the phenomenal diversity of the oceans, and an enduring snapshot of the precious biological legacy we are lucky to be part of.  It’s often said that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.  Well, thanks to CoML we have a better idea of what a priceless gift of diversity we’ve got at our fingertips.  Now what are we going to do about it?

I’d love to read your feedback in the comments.  Did I miss anything?

Could it be? The END?

CNN is reporting that the new device put on the wellhead of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon appears to have stopped the leak and is holding under the pressure, at least for now.  Lets all cross fingers that this marks the end of major leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.

Implications of the first sighting of whale sharks in the gulf oil slick

I recently experienced a moment of genuine dread regarding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was neither a familiar nor comfortable feeling. What is it that invoked such a powerful feeling after a disaster that has been underway for the last 80-odd days, now? Something that struck a little close to home, of course: the first direct impact to whale sharks. You may have seen this story coming across the wires over the past two days about NOAA scientists who, while on an aerial survey of the impacted area, observed 3 whale sharks swimming among ribbons of surface oil, not 4 miles from the epicenter of the Deepwater Horizon spill. This observation has serious implications; let me explain.

Whale sharks are widely-ranging tropical migratory sharks that are unusual among their more toothy relatives in that they eat plankton. Two of the adaptations they use to pursue this lifestyle – surface filter feeding and an exquisite sense of smell – make them especially susceptible to the impacts of the oil spill. I had all but convinced myself (perhaps wishfully thinking) that whale sharks would be able to sense the altered chemistry of the affected water bodies and avoid the area. It now seems that this is not the case; the observation by the NOAA scientists suggest that either whale sharks cannot tell the difference between polluted and unpolluted water, or they can tell the difference but do not alter their behaviour in such a way as to avoid the ribbons and plumes. As USM researcher Eric Hoffmayer states in the article, this is the realization of the worst fears of whale shark scientists, and I count myself among those.

How can it be that whale sharks are unable to tell the difference if their sense of smell is so good? One simple explanation is that the olfactory abilities may be extremely selective. Scientists don’t know exactly what sort of chemicals whale sharks are homing in on when they seek out patches of food in the ocean – indeed, addressing this question is one of the goals of this year’s whale shark research program at Georgia Aquarium – but we have some good candidate molecules. If the whale shark sense of smell is highly tuned to these compounds and relatively insensitive to other families of chemicals, like hydrocarbons (oil and gas), then it’s certainly possible that whale sharks simply cannot detect the problem.

That’s when the second adaptation, surface filter feeding, becomes a liability for whale sharks trying to negotiate the deadly emulsions and surface slicks in the Gulf. To fully appreciate why this is such a problem, we need to look a little more closely at the filtration apparatus whale sharks use to feed.

Like most plankton-feeding fishes, whale sharks use filters in the mouth/gill cavity to sift food particles from the water (see the exellent illustration by Emily Damstra at right). And like most plankton-feeding fishes, these filters develop from structures associated with the gills and gill rakers (cartilaginous rods that come off the leading edge of the gills and protect the gills from fouling and shape the current of water across the breathing surface). Where whale sharks differ radically from other planktivores like, say, anchovies, is that they do not have feathery interlocking gill rakers that serve to filter the plankton but can be disengaged from each other to allow bulk water flow out through the gill opening. Rather, their filters are so derived and so heavily branched that they form a single continuous pad that occupies the space between gill arches; it looks a lot like a black scouring pad. The gill arches cannot be disengaged from each other; thus, anything that goes in the mouth must be small enough to pass through the filters (less than 2mm, or about 1/12th of an inch), or it must be swallowed, or be spat back out through the mouth (something they are surprisingly good at!). In a paper currently in the review process, comparative anatomist Phil Motta from USF is describing the full functional anatomy of these structures; he took the photo of the filter pad surface shown hereabouts based on material samples from Georgia Aquarium.

The implication here is that oil that finds its way into the mouth, if it is not to be swallowed or to foul the filters, must be continually spat back. OK, I hear you say, perhaps if the whale sharks avoid feeding, there won’t be a problem. If only it were that easy. Whale sharks do not only use their mouths for feeding, they use them for breathing. They need to be passing water continually across the filters and thence across the gills, in order to keep the body supplied with oxygen. For the whale shark swimming in oil-affected waters, therefore, the animal’s breathing needs and the susceptibility of their feeding filters to fouling are in complete opposition.

If whale sharks are swimming into oil-polluted waters and fouling their filters with oil, what does that mean? In my best estimation, it means that the oil spill represents an extremely serious threat to whale shark health. I am by no means the first person to suggest this. Nature identified whale sharks as one of the 5 species most likely to be affected by the oil spill, and other scientists like Bob Hueter from Mote Marine Laboratory have also highlighted the risks. The true toll that the spill exacts on the Gulf of Mexico whale shark population will not be known for some time, but the thought of dead or dying whale sharks sinking silently into the depths (dead sharks generally sink, not float) is yet more motivation to put an end to the spill and to undertake immediate and extensive research and conservation programs to assess the damage and plan a road to recovery for the whale sharks – and all the other affected wildlife – in the Gulf of Mexico.

12,081ft - The oceans, by the numbers

I was inspired by recent articles highlighting a revised calculation of the ocean’s average depth as 12,081ft, to consider the seas in a numerical light today. To that end, here’s a few random, sourced numbers and back-of-the-envelope calculations that might be food for thought:

0.87% = Amount we can see by diving from the surface (about 100ft) over the average depth
0.28% = Amount we can see by diving over the deepest part (Challenger Deep, Marianas Trench off the Philippines)
2.9 = Number of times deeper the deepest part is, compared to the average.
5,400 = Number of mammal species in the world
25,000 = Number of fish species in the world
Millions? = Number of marine invertebrates species in the world (no-one really knows)
2.3 Million = The number of US citizens directly dependent on ocean industries (source: NOAA)
$117 Billion = Value of ocean products and services to the US economy (yr 2000, source: NOAA)
50% = US population living in coastal zones
48% = The proportion of all human-produced CO2 absorbed by the oceans in the Industrial era (NatGeo)
0.1 = The pH drop in the surface oceans since 1900
0.35 = Expected pH drop by 2100 (source)
18 = The number of times more heat absorbed by the oceans than the atmosphere since 1950 (source - TAMU). Global warming is an ocean process far more than an atmospheric one.
3.5 Million = Estimated tons of plastic pollution circling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and growing.

And yet:

30 = Number of times thicker the atmosphere is (out to the “edge of space” about 60 miles) than the average ocean. That would be the atmosphere that astronauts describe as a “thin veneer” on the planet…
0.06% = Thickness of the average ocean, compared to the radius of the earth. I think we can argue that the water is the veneer, not the air
$4.48 Billion = NOAA’s 2010 budget, including the National Ocean Service, Weather Service and Fisheries Services. (source NOAA)
$18.7 Billion = NASA’s 2010 budget, i.e. 4 times the size of the agency that looks after our own planet (source NASA)
$664 Billion = Department of Defense base budget 2010, not counting special allocations (source DoD)
0.6% = The amount you would need to cut Defense in order to double the NOAA budget

Some sources:
http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/~nbo/FY10_BlueBook/NOAAwide_One_Pager051109.pdf
http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/~nbo/10bluebook_highlights.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0715_040715_oceancarbon_2.html  
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/oceansandclimate.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20080625100559/http://www.ipsl.jussieu.fr/~jomce/acidification/paper/Orr_OnlineNature04095.pdf  

Oill spills and Tar balls – know thine enemy

One of the more intriguing aspects of oil spills, including the DeepWater Horizon spill currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico (DeepSeaNews has covered it well), is the formation of tar balls.  These are globby blobs of bitumen-like material that are found on the sea floor or washed up on beaches after a spill. There's a few theories about how they form, but the general concept is that as the more volatile parts of the oil mixture evapourate, the mixture becomes thicker, heavier and stickier, until eventually the blob becomes heavier than seawater and sinks. On the bottom, the sticky blob incorporates sediment and its ball-like shape is reinforced by the rolling actions of currents or surf, in much the same way as you roll cookie dough into balls before putting them on the baking tray (mmmmmm….cookies….ahem). Sometimes this process makes for a grainy crust on the outside and a soft center, a bit like a Ferrero Rocher (mmmmm....chocolate....why do my analogies always involve food?).  There’s some other theories of formation that concern flocculation (oil sticking to clay) and emulsion (oil and water making a mousse of sorts - again with the food), but the prevailing idea seems to be that of smaller blobs of weathered oil coalescing and incorporating sediment. The net results is a gooey mess that is characteristically hard to remove if it sticks to you (or an animal), pongs of petroleum and is generally unpleasant.  The photo at left from NOAA's image library shows a tarball on a beach in California

Other than their B-grade horror movie nature (The Blob – aiieeeeee!) and the formation process above, I confess not knowing much about tar balls, so I went to the literature to see what’s out there. The answer: not much. A Web of Science search for “(tar ball) or tarball” 1945-2010 gets you precisely 26 hits. Now that is interesting! I would have thought that there would be far more, given the attention that is focused on oil spills when they happen. Much of the research has focused on chemical fingerprinting to identify where a given tar ball originated. In other words, the presence and absence of certain chemicals in a tar ball can tell you what sort of oil the ball formed from, and pretty accurately too. This has allowed some other studies that have shown that you have to be careful about blaming all the tar balls on a beach on one spill; there’s often a pretty good background level of tar balls from previous spills and even natural sources of oily substances. This is especially so for really small tar balls in the mm size range.

So what’s the long-term prognosis on tar balls in the environment? It doesn’t look like that question has been thoroughly answered yet.  Clearly they persist long after many more obvious signs of oil are gone.  Its tempting to think that they may be largely inert, especially those that form a good crust on the outside that reduces stickiness and prevents chemical interactions with the outside. But really, it seems like there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to understand these curious byproducts of oil spill accidents.

Post your eyewitness accounts of the Gulf oil spill here

I think we'd all love to hear from people who live on or near the gulf coast and may have observations or stories to tell about their experiences of the oil spill.

Leaked government report about the Gulf oil spill

I haven't posted anything about the Gulf oil leak because others have covered it so well (see Dr. M.'s excellent timeline at DSN), but this story about a leaked coast guard report caught my eye

Concern is that the leak rate could get ten times worse; if the wellhead goes then the job of fixing it also gets an order of magnitude harder.  The story sounds as though this is a distinct possibility.  I don't know enough to judge, but it certainly sounds like bad ju-ju.

Me and Terry Hughes, we got Kwan

This is a little spooky. Terry Hughes of the Center for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies in Australia, whom I know only vaguely, has been quoted on the topic of the Shen Neng 1, that Chinese coal ship that ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. His somewhat dismissive tone sounds creepily like my recent rant on the subject.

He said:
"The [Shen Neng 1] ship grounding, in the scheme of things, is not a major incident. It's bad if you happen to be one of the corals the ship parked itself on, but it's tiny in the face of the real problem: global warming."

I said:
"I am not worried in the slightest about this incident.  Not that its a good thing - far from it - but this accident is nothing more than a tree, obscuring us from seeing one big and scary forest [burning fossil fuels]."

Terry, you're my Ambassador of Kwan.

Q: When is a ship like a tree?

A: When you can't see the forest for it.

You may have followed some press in the last week or so about a Chinese coal ship, Shen Neng 1, that ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and spilled some of its fuel oil.  This has caused a regular frenzy in the Aussie media and the global conservation and environmental news-o-sphere.  There have been all sorts of calls for prosecution of the shipping company and new stringent regulations for the transport industry and so on, along with dramatic accounts of the damage the ship did and the risky salvage operation that came next.  But you know what?  I am not worried in the slightest about this incident.  Not that its a good thing - far from it - but this accident is nothing more than a tree, obscuring us from seeing one big and scary forest.

The main reasons I am not especially bothered by the Shen Neng accident are that (1) it affected a very limited area - the G.B.R. is really B.I.G. and one ship can only damage so much of it; and (2) it was a single event in time - this was not a process or an ongoing problem, but a singular disturbance.  Science shows us that the GBR, and reefs in general, are amazingly resilient to violent disturbances like this; a decent cyclone can literally turn a reef upside down, and a couple of years later you'd never know the difference.  Indeed, periodic disturbances may  be really important for maintaining a healthy reef ecosystem.

No, the Shen Neng is just a tree, obscuring us from seeing the forest that really threatens the future of the GBR and all reefs.  Its not the 2km gash that the hull cut in the reef, nor is it the tons of fuel oil leaked into the water; it's the very concept of burning that fuel oil, and burning the thousands of tons of coal that the Shen Neng 1 was carrying.  When you consider all the other ships and all the coal and fuel they were carrying that day and every day, and all the cars in the world, the power plants and so on ... ach, you get my point.  THAT'S what we ought to be worried about, because both of the main effects of increased atmospheric CO2 - warming and ocean acidification - will likely result in unrecoverable damage to All reefs. Everywhere. In our lifetime.  Warming is directly linked to lethal bleaching events, while acidification disrupts the ability of reefs to lay down their skeleton and grow.   Oh yeah, and lets not forget the drowning effects of sea level rise, too.  The more I think about it, the more it seems that jumping up and down about the Shen Neng is hypocritical (coal is one of Australia's biggest exports, after all) and akin to complaining about the deck chair arrangements of another, even bigger, ill-fated ship.  (Ironically, if Titanic sailed today, she probably wouldn't have to worry about icebergs...)

Of course, its a false dichotomy, we should be worried about BOTH the Shen Nengs of the world AND the global climate change/ocean acidification.  But I only have so much energy/capacity for worrying about these things, so with a limited anxiety budget, I feel compelled to focus on the bigger issue and what (if anything) we can do about it - to try to reduce consumption and to try to make sensible decisions that are mindful of how much energy is involved and what the broader impacts might be.

In other words, to worry about the forests - and let the trees take care of themselves.

Plastiki update

If you're not following the unusual Plastiki expidition, its a boat made of thousands of plastic drink bottles, sailing across the Pacific to raise awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans.  They've now travelled 1900 nautical miles and are about 1000 miles east of Hawaii.  Follow them here or on Twitter as @Plastiki

The ghost of fishers past

The folks you see out on their boats on the bay are not the only ones fishing; those who came before them still get a slice of the action, as this recent article about the retrieval of "ghost gear" from the Chesapeake Bay illustrates.  In many trap-based fishing industries, like lobsters and crabs, a significant number of traps are lost during the course of regular fishing efforts.  In addition, when a fishery turns bad, as happened in the Long Island Sound lobster fishery in 1999, some fishers cut their losses, and their marker floats, quit the fishery and just leave their gear where it is on the bottom of the bay.

The problem is, ghost gear like this keeps on fishing, long after the fisher has moved on to other endeavours.  The design of the trap continues to attract animals, even without bait, because the trap is basically a refuge or cave.  Those that enter are unable to leave and as they die they may act as bait to attract yet more animals to feed on their body.  In this way, the trap becomes a sort of "biomass black hole", sucking in animals from all around, for as long as the trap holds together.  Nets can ghost fish too, especially gillnets or any kind of trawl that can trap fish or strangle a reef

We used to trawl up ghost lobster gear all the time when I was working in Long Island Sound.  Indeed, few days on the water went by without snagging someone's old gear at some point, which speaks to the density of gear that's out there in some inshore waters.  I'm glad the fishers and the resource management agencies are working together to address the problem, because its one of those awful chronic out-of-sight, out-of-mind issues that can erode a fishery despite everyone's best efforts to manage things properly.  If you find ghost gear, call your local DEP or DEC, even the EPA, and let them know so they can come and retrieve it.

Picture of ghost gear on a coral reef from NOAA

Bon Voyage, Plastiki

Some enterprising folks have built a tri-maran out of 12,000 two liter plastic softdrink bottles.  Dubbed the "Plastiki", she took to sea today, on her maiden voyage from San Francisco to Sydney.  Along the way, the Plastiki will serve as a floating demonstration platform for sustainable technologies, and will spend some quality time in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where vast amounts of floating plastic debris are becalmed in the heart of the enormous gyre current of the North Pacific.

Follow the Plastiki on Flickr here, and on their website here.  Best of luck and kind winds, folks.  If you begin to lose buoyancy, I guess you can always reach overboard and grab another bottle from among the flotsam, you know, to repair the hull with.  :-/