Seaweeds and corals go through the media meat-grinder

“If it bleeds it leads” is a common meme in the journalism field, but when it becomes the mantra of science reporting, sometimes the real message gets lost in translation. Unfortunately, so it is with a new paper from Doug Rasher and Mark Hay down the road at Georgia Tech. In their work, published in PNAS this week, they show that algae from coral reefs can have toxic effects on adjacent corals including bleaching (expulsion of the symbiotic algae that are responsible for much of the corals success) and even death. They provide evidence that these effects are mediated by lipid soluble compounds and that they are much reduced on reefs that have healthy herbivorous fish populations to keep the algae in check. There, I summarized their work in 2 sentences. It’s disappointing, then, that the NSF (NSF for goodness sake!) turned that into “Killer Seaweed: Scientists Find First Proof that Chemicals from Seaweeds Damage Coral on Contact”. Unfortunately, that kind of catch-phrase gets picked up all over, so that MSNBC ran with “Killer seaweed threatens corals: Innocent-looking species turns into an assassin of nearby reefs” (assassin? Really?!). The Georgia Tech website went with “Research shows that chemicals from seaweed kills corals on contact”. Not as dramatic perhaps, but more reasonable. Ed Yong at Discover Blogs chose to emphasise the fish side of the story: “Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals”; both these seem fine to me, but honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with using the title of the paper “Chemically rich seaweeds poison corals when not controlled by herbivores”. I think Rasher and Hay did a good job distilling the essence of the paper into a punchy and information-dense title. In any case, its frustrating to see crux of a paper lost in attempts to sensationalise the story, as did all the outlets who went with the “killer seaweed” theme.

Putting aside the press treatment, I think there’s an important part of the story missing from this paper. In it, Rasher and Hay report that in the absence of herbivores, 40-70% of common seaweeds cause bleaching of a model coral species (Porites), depending on where you are. If you average that – 55% - then roughly half of seaweeds were toxic to their model coral. On this proportion and their comparison of overfished and non-overfished reefs, they base the conclusion that these algae are bad for corals, that herbivores suppress the algae and, therefore, that overfishing will increase coral declines by allowing toxic algae to proliferate. All of these seem reasonable ideas, but I kept asking myself: what about the reciprocal effect? What percentage of corals are antagonistic to algae? If, say, half of all corals can damage adjacent algae, then the net effect of all this antagonism at the largest scale is zero. If half of algae kill corals and half of corals kill algae, it could be zero sum. This seems important to me, because it would undermine the conclusion that overfishing of herbivores will necessarily lead to declines in reef corals. Indeed, I could make the reverse argument that overfishing of corallivores (fish that eat corals) might lead to proliferation of corals and therefore the decline of reef algae. We just don't know because that work hasnt been done. 

Of course, you can’t include everything in a single paper and I would expect the authors to respond to my point by saying that the experiments I describe were beyond the scope of their project. But I think it could have been a better paper if they acknowledged that there’s another possibility that cannot be excluded, based on work that’s yet to be done.

Rasher, D., & Hay, M. (2010). Chemically rich seaweeds poison corals when not controlled by herbivores Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912095107

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.

If you can catch lightning in a jar, why not gas in a puddle?

Imagine if you could take all the greenhouse gases and somehow keep them away from the atmosphere, where they would otherwise contribute to global climate change.  Well that's kind of the idea behind SOFEX, a huge experiment done by marine scientists a few years back (my buddy and fellow Aussie Pete Strutton was involved).  The idea stemmed from an observation that the growth of plankton (which absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and multiply) in the oceans is limited by some nutrients, especially iron.  So, if we fertilise the oceans with iron, perhaps we can get the plankton to "bloom", suck up all the carbon and then sink to the bottom, taking the greenhouse gases with them.  The colour picture hereabouts shows a satellite view of an artificial bloom created by adding iron to the ocean.  It was actually a neat idea, except I could never shake off the feeling that the stuff would resurface one day and that it was just delaying the inevitable; it depends to some degree on whether the sunken material gets buried on the bottom or not, I guess.

Well, the idea recently received another blow; a new paper in PNAS reports that the sort of plankton that bloom after iron fertlisation are the same ones (Pseudonitzschia ) that produce domoic acid, a nasty toxin that causes horrible problems as it accumulates higher up the food chain, especially in sea lions and other marine mammals.

Marine mammals are kind of a sacred cow in biology, so my guess is that that will be that for iron fertilisation.  Ironically enough, the whole problem with domoic acid in the oceans, which is a relatively new phenomenon, may have climate change as its root cause anyway - blooms of Pseudonitzschia are supposed to have increased in frequency and intensity because of environmental changes.  You can't win, sometimes.