Human Shadows on the Seas

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: February 26, 2008

In 1980, after college, I joined the crew of a sailboat partway through a circumnavigation of the globe. Becalmed and roasting one day during a 21-day crossing of the western Indian Ocean, several of us dived over the side. Within a few swimming strokes, the bobbing hull seemed a toy over my shoulder as I glanced back through my diving mask. Below me, my shadow and the boat’s dwindled to the vanishing point in the two-mile-deep water. Human activity seemed nothing when set against the sea itself.

Just a few weeks later, on an uninhabited island in a remote part of the Red Sea, I was proved wrong. The shore above the tide line was covered with old light bulbs, apparently tossed from the endless parade of ships over the years.

Now scientists are building the first worldwide portrait of such dispersed human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

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Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: February 26, 2008
The New York Times

Researchers who studied a string of Pacific Ocean atolls are painting the first detailed picture of pristine coral reefs and how they can be disrupted by people — particularly, they said, by fishing.

The researchers, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and elsewhere in the United States and abroad, surveyed every form of life last summer in the northern Line Islands, a chain south of Hawaii. Their survey encompassed everything from microbes to sharks and other big fish at the top of the food chain.

“Reefs without people” were healthier than populated reefs, they say in a report to be posted Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE. The ecosystems at Kingman and Palmyra, the northernmost and least populated atolls, are dominated by large predators like sharks and groupers, and corals there are robust, they said, while Tabuaeran and Kiritimati to the south, the most populated atolls, are characterized by fleshy algae, small plankton-eating fish and degraded corals.

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View the SLIDE SHOW with beautiful pictures of reefs in the Line Islands

Our Exhausted Oceans

A NY Times Dot Earth piece on historical abundance/diversity of ocean life.

 

Click here to read more.

 

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/our-exhausted-oceans/

 

The Associated Press: World's Largest Marine Reserve Declared

Move over Papahanaumokuakea ....

The Associated Press: World's Largest Marine Reserve Declared: "World's Largest Marine Reserve Declared
By RAY LILLEY – Feb 13, 2008
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The tiny Pacific islands nation of Kiribati declared the world's largest marine protected area Thursday — a California-sized ocean wilderness that includes pristine reefs and eight coral atolls teeming with fish and birds.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, or PIPA, lies about halfway between Hawaii and Fiji and also includes undersea mountains. It will conserve one of the Earth's last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems.
Kiribati Environment Minister Tetapo Nakara said the government wanted to conserve the area's 'biological diversity.'"

A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems

Scientists create the first global map of the damage humans have done to our oceans.

Check out their map and their website here.

Excerpt:
What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind.

The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth - a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean's biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence.

The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems.

Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008, shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched.

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How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat it

By TARAS GRESCOE
Published: February 20, 2008
The New York Times

LATE last year, a flotilla of fluorescent jellyfish covering 10 square miles of ocean was borne by the tide into a small bay on the Irish Sea. These mauve stingers, venomous glow-in-the-dark plankton native to the Mediterranean, slipped through the mesh of aquaculture nets, stinging the 120,000 fish in Northern Ireland’s only salmon farm to death.

Closer to home, the Asian carp, which has been working its way north from the Mississippi Delta since the 1990s, is now on the verge of reaching the Great Lakes. This voracious invader, which weighs up to 100 pounds and eats half its body weight in food in a day, has gained notoriety for vaulting over boats and breaking the arms and noses of recreational anglers. Having outcompeted all native species, it now represents 95 percent of the biomass of fish in the Illinois River and has been sighted within 25 miles of Lake Michigan. The only thing preventing this cold-water-loving species from infesting the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world, is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

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Innovative experiments to help corals adapt to warmer water

Andrew Baker of the University of Miami will begin experiments to test whether humans can help corals adapt to global warming by providing them with more heat resistant zooxanthellae.

Read the full article here.

A Tale of Two Cities

Habitats and Fishing in the Gulf of Maine: A Tale of Two Cities is an undersea video presented by Dr. Les Watling at the 2008 AAAS annual meeting, illustrating the difference between trawled and undisturbed habitats.

Please visit http://www.mcbi.org/what/AAASsymposia.htm for more interesting AAAS presentations!