"The ocean economy in the USA is larger than the entire farm economy and employs almost twice as many people."
¤PDF by the National Marine Sanctuaries and NOAA on West Coast Sanctuaries and an Ocean Acidification Plan.
¤We post (almost) all videos that have to do with Ocean Acidification. THIS ONE HERE comes from Tufts' University Environmental Biology class and it was done by Valerie Cleland, Anne Elise Stratton, Erica Rigby, Zobella Vinik. Artsy.
¤Interesting study funded by The Nature Conservancy (PDF). It is titled "Detecting regional anthropogenic trends in ocean acidification against natural variability" and quoting the authors it shows "that the current anthropogenic trend in ocean acidification already exceeds the level of natural variability by up to 30 times on regional scales. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the current rates of ocean acidification at monitoring sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans exceed those experienced during the last glacial termination by two orders of magnitude."
¤Scientists from the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar in Barcelona have identified the molecular mechanism that links the increase of water temperature to the inhibition of aromatase. Aromatase is the enzyme responsible for transforming androgens into estrogens, and estrogens are essential in the formation of ovaries in all non mammal vertebrates. So under high temperatures during the larval and juvenile periods of sea bass this epigenetic environmental factor "overwrites" DNA information and turns all initially female sea bass into males.
... which indirectly has to do with what I see as the irrevocable responsibility derived from knowledge, the one that raises the profound moral question of entitlement. We often discuss our choices around the planet and the need for preservation and protection in view of our future survival as a specie. We cry about deforestation in the Amazon jungle imagining all the hypothetical drugs that would have been extracted from plans, fight against overfishing in fear of depletion of a food source, protect air quality with our children's lungs in mind. This barely raises our status in the animal kingdom to that of a sophisticated predator, exclusively focused like the rest on self preservation, lately becoming a plague to all life matter. I am completely certain that the women and men of the next era, if we do not cause our own fall and hope to deservedly call ourselves "evolved" will fully understand the position of responsibility for our actions, acting as we do now on a planetary scale. Those people of the future will obviously continue to plant, harvest, kill to eat, or for protection, will still want a comfortable and happy life, but they will do it all responsibly, placing first that question of entitlement.
My best buddy jokes that the world is like a public toilet: we all want to walk into the same kind of place. The way each one of us leaves it behind is unfortunately another story.
1 Save the Endangered Species Act.
5 Expand awareness of overpopulation.
8 Stem the tide of Ocean Acidification.
"As oceans absorb carbon dioxide, or CO2, seawater chemistry changes and the water becomes more acidic. According to scientists, the oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic due to human CO2 emissions — and this spells trouble for ocean life. First of all, ocean acidification depletes seawater of the compounds that organisms need to build shells and skeletons, impairing the ability of corals, crabs, seastars, sea urchins, plankton and other marine creatures to build the protective armor they need to survive. To make matters worse, fish and other ocean organisms may be adversely affected from the rise in acidity in their ocean habitat. Fish are common ocean prey, and plankton are at the base of the ocean food chain, so when these animals suffer, so do the countless animals that eat them. Ocean acidification could disrupt the entire marine ecosystem.
Since ocean acidification is one of the gravest threats to marine biodiversity, the Center is tackling it head on, and has launched an initiative to protect our oceans from CO2 pollution. The Clean Water Act is the nation’s strongest law protecting water quality, and we’re using the tools provided by this law to stop pollution causing ocean acidification as well as to improve water-quality standards and monitoring for pH. In 2007, we petitioned eight coastal states to declare ocean waters impaired under the Clean Water Act due to ocean acidification, which would require those states to limit CO2 pollution entering waters under their jurisdiction, helping to reduce the devastating effects of ocean acidification. The same year, we also petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to impose stricter pH standards for ocean water quality and publish guidance to help states protect U.S. waters from acidification. Finally, in spring 2009, the agency for the first time invoked the Clean Water Act to address the acidification crisis, calling for data to use for evaluating water-quality criteria under the Act. But when it failed to take action against ocean acidification in Washington state waters — which are in violation of the state’s already lax water-quality standard for pH — we were forced to sue the agency in spring 2009. Thanks to our landmark lawsuit, the next year the EPA recommended that coastal states begin addressing ocean acidification under the Clean Water Act.
We also advocate for the protection of species affected by ocean acidification, most notably elkhorn coral and staghorn coral, which comprise much of the rapidly declining coral reefs of Florida and the Caribbean. These corals were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 2006 as a result of a Center petition, and in September 2007, we sued the National Marine Fisheries Service to speed designation of critical habitat. While elkhorn and staghorn corals are the first species to be listed because of vulnerability to global warming, they unfortunately won’t be the last. The Center will continue to defend our ocean’s life and oppose the pollution that threatens it."
9 Safeguard wildlife and people from pesticides.
10 Protect public lands from dirty energy projects.
Plus a link to their page on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
•Greepeace's blacklist of irresponsible fishing operators and the companies behind them.
They say: "This database is a convenient tool for national fisheries administrators, and anyone interested to quickly check on the compliance status of a foreign vessel trying to unload its catch in port, seeking services in port, seeking a fishing license or to register or flag in a country. Greenpeace also encourages retailers and suppliers to use the database to ensure the fish they source do not come from pirate fishing vessels or from companies involved in such activities."
•Vermont Law Top Ten environmental watch list 2012.
Vermont Law School, which has one of the top-ranked environmental law programs in the USA, just released its second annual Top 10 Environmental Watch List of issues and developments that should be closely followed in 2012.
•NOAA's list of coastal counties in the USA (PDF).
If you read this far you deserve to know that a couple of the links are arbitrary when not preposterous.
•Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientists have launched a sophisticated, unique tool to study the effects of Ocean Acidification on deep-sea animals in their native habitat, using free-flowing water. The idea behind Free-Ocean Carbon Enrichment (FOCE) is to create a test area on the seafloor where seawater pH can be controlled. Small animals can be placed in the test chamber and their behavior and physiological responses monitored.
Read more about the fascinating experiment HERE.
•Two papers recently published in Global Change Biology by scientists from Australia, the US and France provide an interesting look at how the threat of Ocean Acidification to reefs vary from one to another.
"Overall, CO2 enrichment and ocean acidification is bad news for coral reefs", says Dr. Ken Anthony, Research Team Leader for the Climate Change and Ocean Acidification team at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "But some reef areas take up more CO2 than they produce (through photosynthesis), which can lower the vulnerability of neighboring reef areas to ocean acidification. On the other hand, reef areas with greater coral cover produce more CO2 than they consume (through calcification and respiration) and that adds locally to the ocean acidification threat". Dr Joanie Kleypas of the National Center for Atmospheric Research believes that "If we can start to understand which areas of large reef systems such as the Great Barrier Reef can counteract pH changes locally and which areas cannot, then we are better able to assess the relative risks of ocean acidification".
"Reef managers have been faced with the problem of ocean acidification as a uniform threat affecting all reef areas equally. These new studies are a first step to help reef managers understand how some areas might in fact lower the impact of ocean acidification in neighboring areas, whereas others will further acidify themselves. Seagrass beds, for example, can significantly reduce CO2 levels in the water, providing more favorable chemical conditions for neighboring reefs", says Dr Anthony. Continue reading HERE.
•I recently saw an advertising piece about the use of biodegradable bags and plastic wrappings on sailing boats. Sailors around the world should embrace the idea and commit to only using compostable and biodegradable bags, leading an example and modestly fighting the alarming presence of plastics in the oceans. The particular brand is called BioBag, and HERE is the page where you can read more about the benefits of using such products.
•David Shiffman, a PhD Student and research assistant at the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program asked for our vote in the 2011 Blogging Scholarship (which provides $10,000 towards education and research expenses) finals. I already voted for him and his shark conservation blog HERE. If you want to vote too just remember that it is the bubble next to "David Shiffman: Southern Fried Science".
•Two or three blog posts ago I wrote about insular dwarfism and this week I have some news about animals diminishing in size: recent studies indicate that climate change might be shrinking numerous plant and animal species. David Bickford, from the National University of Singapore believes ectotherms (cold-blooded animals like toads, turtles and snakes that rely on environmental heat sources) are changing a lot. The study draws information from fossil records as well as "comparative studies and research implicating anthropogenic climate change over the last hundred years". For example, fossils from a warming phase during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum indicate that burrowing invertebrates like beetles, bees and ants shrank in size by up to 75%. In the seas, each degree of warming has been shown to decrease the size of fish by up to 22%, but the biggest threat to marine life could be the reduced growth rates of phytoplankton in response to acidification, which "could negatively affect all ocean life because it forms the basis of the marine food web", says Bickford.
You can read more in THIS CNN piece.
•Researchers in Spain are using posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows to track the evolution of heavy metal pollution in Mediterranean waters all the way back to 4,500 years ago.
The first heavy metal residue is found in the strata going 2,800 years back, coinciding with the first mining and metal work by Romans and Greeks. During the last 1,200 years the presence of metals has increased gradually, but it was within the last 350, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, that the levels began to skyrocket, with a significant increase in the presence of lead, zinc and arsenic. These threatened seagrass beds can be invaluable to research, but they more importantly serve as a great filter and storer of heavy metals along the Mediterranean shoreline.
As a footnote, the posidonia meadows around the coast of the island of Ibiza are over 5 miles long and are believed by some to be the biggest and eldest living organism, continually growing for over 100,000 years.
Read about it (in Spanish) HERE.
•A new study by a group of European scientists led by Michael T. Burrows, from the Scottish Marine Institute, reveals that, although ocean temperatures are increasing at a slower rate than in the atmosphere, its progress and effects on sea life is quite similar. Spring keeps coming two days earlier every year and regional temperatures are traveling North and South from the equator at an average speed of 27 kilometers per decade. Also, the rate of warming seen by the scientists was greatest in equatorial oceans, which is also where biodiversity is currently highest, the analysis shows.
Species are having to either migrate to keep living within the same temperatures or, in some cases, modify their reproductive times. But these options are not available for all animals. Arctic species cannot migrate to colder regions and in places like the Mediterranean, where the sea is enclosed between Europe and Africa, a migration North is not possible. Carlos Duarte, research scientist for the Consejo Superior de Investivaciones Científicas in Spain concludes: "when the speed of climate change is faster than the speed organisms can disperse or when there are physical barriers that make dispersion impossible species can only adapt or become extinct." The ARTICLE in the online edition of El País. The information published in the journal SCIENCE IS HERE.