One Step Closer to Helping Our Oceans!

Last week, more progress was made toward protecting our oceans. In fact, in the course of one meeting, two great things happened. First, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approved Senator Landrieu’s bill, S. 1400, also known as the RESTORE Act. RESTORE stands for Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States. In a nutshell, this bill would help revive the Gulf Coast States after their economic destruction due to last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill disaster. The bill would help bring revenue to states in the Gulf of Mexico, and renew our resources.

The other great thing that happened, was an “amendment in the nature of a substitute” added to this bill by Senators Whitehouse (D - RI), Boxer (D - CA), Vitter (R - LA), and Sessions (R - AL). “Amendment in the nature of a substitute” means that instead of adding something on to the bill, Senator Whitehouse et al wanted to change the text of the bill. As part of the RESTORE Act, a Trust Fund is to be established, and the money in it invested. Money to this Trust Fund will be paid by those who were charged with penalties for the explosion and sinking of Deepwater Horizon. What that means is that the Trust Fund is established at no extra cost to American taxpayers! The money in the Trust Fund will earn interest, and among other changes to the bill, there was an added section to allow 50% of the money from this Trust Fund to go directly to the National Endowment for the Oceans (NEO).

The NEO is what Senator Whitehouse proposed last year, and again this past May as bill S. 973. It strives to provide funds to a council that will oversee the many agencies doing their part to protect our waters across the country – not solely in the Gulf of Mexico. Almost all the money the Endowment receives will go directly towards the cause of saving our oceans and Great Lakes. Those who receive grants must create a 5-year plan to conduct research and promote the welfare of our oceans and Great Lakes, with specific attention to its economic, social, and ecological well being. This ensures exploration and investigation into long-term conservation methods.

The RESTORE Act, with the new amendment in the nature of a substitute, passed the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Now the bill is off to the Senate floor to be voted on. Last week’s passage just brought us one step closer to protecting and restoring our ocean resources.

Want to get involved? Send a letter or an email, or call your Senator, and tell him or her how great this bill is, and ask your Senator to support S. 1400 when it reaches the Senate floor. See more on our Take Action page.

Helping Species in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Check out what’s going on currently in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the efforts there to save some of our endangered species! Marine Conservation Institute was a strong advocate of the designation of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, and we continue to support efforts to protect the resources there.

Hawaiian birds get new home in case of catastrophe

USA Today:

Naturalists have moved a tiny colony of 24 Hawaiian songbirds to an island 650 miles away in hopes of protecting the critically endangered species from extinction by a stray hurricane or other catastrophe.

Naturalists released the Nihoa Millerbirds on Laysan Island in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii on September 10. A closely related subspecies went extinct on Laysan about a century ago.

The tiny Millerbird weighs less than an ounce. A lively brown songbird, it eats insects it finds in low bushes and bunch-grasses. On Laysan it joins other endangered species, including the Laysan Finch, Laysan Duck and the Hawaiian monk seal.

The project "will reduce the chances that catastrophic events such as hurricanes or the introduction of invasive predators will extirpate the species, since there will be independent populations of Millerbirds on two islands, 650 miles apart," said Loyal Mehrhoff, Field Supervisor for the Pacific Islands Fish and Wildlife Office.

"It is thrilling to see Millerbirds back on Laysan once more, not simply because they have been a missing piece of the island's native ecosystem for so long, but also because this marks a potential turning point in the recovery of the species," George Wallace, the American Bird Conservancy's vice president for Oceans and Islands.

Since being taken to their new island home, several of the Millerbirds have been sighted and "all are looking healthy and behaving normally – a very encouraging sign for the future," Wallace says.

Biologists will remain on Laysan for the next year to monitor the birds' movements and behaviors, including, the team hopes, their first nesting attempts.

Laysan, at 1,023 acres, is the second largest of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It is located in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, approximately 790 miles northwest of Honolulu. It is one of America's newest national monuments, having been created in 2006 by President George W. Bush.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/09/niohao-millerbird-songbirds-taken-650-miles-to-protect-against-catastrophe-in-hawaii/1

News in Marine Conservation

Marine Conservation Institute wanted to highlight this article from the National Ocean Service:

$36.8 Million to Help Restore Natural Resources Injured by Cosco Busan Oil Spill

State and federal trustee agencies will use most of the funds from a $36.8 million settlement of natural resource damages to restore natural resources injured by the Nov. 7, 2007 oil spill in the San Francisco Bay and to improve Bay Area recreational opportunities impacted by the spill. The funds are part of a $44.4 million settlement with Regal Stone Limited and Fleet Management Limited, the companies responsible for the container ship Cosco Busan that spilled 53,000 gallons of oil into the bay after hitting the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The trustees, including the California Department of Fish and Game, California State Lands Commission, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management, estimate that the spill killed 6,849 birds, impacted 14 to 29 percent of the herring spawn that winter, oiled 3,367 acres of shoreline habitat, and resulted in the loss of over one million recreational user-days.

Approximately $32.3 million will be spent on a wide variety of restoration projects. The trustees have released a Draft Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan for public comment. The plan proposes specific projects to address specific injuries. About $5 million is proposed for bird restoration, $4 million for habitat restoration, $2.5 million for fish and habitat (eelgrass) restoration, and $18.8 million for recreational use improvements. An additional $2 million will fund restoration planning, administration, and oversight, with any unused funds to be spent toward more restoration.

read more: http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/weeklynews/sept11/cosco-busan.html

Marine Protected Areas Far and Wide

In the story below, scientists from the University of California were asked to share their perspectives on marine protected areas (MPAs) - where we've been, where we're going, and how experiences in the US - including those of scientists from Marine Conservation Institute - have helped to shape MPAs around the world. The story can also be found online here.

Evaluating marine parks in the high seas

By Erik VanceWednesday 7 September 2011

California is a leader in protecting marine life and areas, and UC scientists play an important role in studying, advising and shaping policy that must balance the environmental needs of the ocean with those of millions of users.

In 2006, President George W. Bush sat down at a tiny table in the East Wing of the White House and signed a piece of paper that instantly created a truly massive national monument. It was larger than all the national parks combined, 46 of the 50 states, and the nation of Germany.

While some called it an environmental breakthrough, others grumbled that it didn’t really count as a park. That’s because unlike almost every other national monument to come before, it protected not land, but water.

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (tongue-twistingly renamed Papahānaumokuākea) Marine National Monument brought the concept of a “marine protected area” (MPA) into mainstream consciousness. Over the past couple of decades, governments across the world have scrambled to protect swaths of national waters from overfishing, oil extraction and other practices that damage the environment.

“MPAs started as kind an insurance policy against management failure in the ocean,” says Steve Gaines, dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s sort of like what we did on land. In the face of lots of human impacts, people eventually get to the point where they say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to set aside some of these natural places.’”

California is seen by most in this new field as a leader of MPAs. And while Hawaii might have the biggest park, no other place in the country has so effectively combined research and policymaking into a series of underwater parks. And no one in the world has done it so close to a heavily-populated coastline.

MPAs have been around for decades, but it was in the early 1990s that they really picked up speed in an organized way. Along with them came controversy. Fishermen, oil drillers and the shipping industry were afraid to lose access to parts of the ocean. No one was sure what to forbid or how to enforce it. And there was the question of whether they would even help sea life that much.

Regardless, in 1999, California took the plunge and created the Marine Life Protection Act. Previously, California’s protected waters were like most others — somewhat piecemeal, some barring fishing, others banning oil drilling. The Marine Life Protection Act essentially brought all these reserves under one roof and mandated a comprehensive plan to strategically protect the ocean resources of the state.

“It’s one thing to say we are going to create a giant no-take zone in the northwest Hawaiian Islands where you have like 15 fishing boats total,” says Gaines. “It’s an island out in the middle of nowhere. That’s fine, but what do we do in places where there are a lot of people?”

That is the genius and the challenge of the California system. It must balance the needs of the ocean with the needs of millions of users. To do that, the state has had to rely heavily on scientists like Gaines through a series of scientific advisory panels. This has given California’s ocean scientists — especially those at UC — a truly unprecedented opportunity to study, advise and shape marine protection.

As the years passed, scientists and policymakers began stitching together a series of protected areas — some of which are very strict, others less so. Very quickly, scientists realized that it wasn’t enough to just put aside a few or even a few hundred square miles of ocean.

“You may have a positive effect on the surrounding ecosystems. But beyond the distance that larvae go from that MPA, that MPA is having no effect on the rest of the state,” says Mark Carr, an ecologist at UC Santa Cruz. “The goal is not just to protect what’s within the protected area, but then presumably to have an influence outside the protected area as well.”

Carr, Gaines and many other UC scientists were active in the creation of the current network of California MPAs. The challenge now, they say, is to have the largest impact with a limited amount of protected area. The other challenge is to understand how MPAs can be good not only for the ocean but for the fishermen who depend on it.

“Do marine reserves compensate fishermen for lost fishing ground? That’s the fundamental question,” says, Ben Halpern, a UC Santa Barbara researcher in marine ecology and conservation biology.

After years of work, scientists now can say with confidence that creating an MPA increases the number of fish within its boundaries (presuming the MPA is designed correctly). But fishermen tend to collect along those boundaries, catching much of what swims out. Certainly we can’t just put the whole ocean under lock and key. So the question is, how can an MPA help both fishermen and the population as a whole? And how much do we need to protect?

In many ways, California’s is the perfect coastline to study MPAs. That’s because most of the fish that we eat don’t move all that far and can spend their entire lives in safety. However, out in the open ocean, sea life has to log a few miles in order to find food. Over the past few years, scientists across the world have begun thinking about something called a “pelagic” MPA, which would attempt to protect wandering species like sharks and tuna. If we thought protecting rockfish was hard, protecting tuna brings on a whole new level of complication.

“Tuna don’t even have a home range,” says Lou Botsford, a fisheries modeler at UC Davis. “[So far] we were protecting species with a home range of 5, 10 or 20 kilometers. These are species that range over thousands of kilometers.”

Botsford’s lab is in some ways the final destination for data collected by scientists like Gaines and Carr. He gathers mountains of information and tries to predict how certain fish will react to a given MPA. He says that although the scientific community is excited about pelagic MPAs, the challenges probably are too great for them to work. For one thing, it would require designating swaths of international waters the size of continents. It then would require enforcing those designations across national boundaries.

That is not to say that the lessons learned here in California need to stay here. As word has spread of the success of the California MPA system, countries like Britain, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil have been anxious to invite UC scientists to share tips and results from the massive California ocean experiment.

Their perspective often can be crucial. Sara Maxwell (in photo at top), a research associate at UC Santa Cruz, says she was studying sea turtles at a MPA in Gabon when she saw something strange.

“We knew that there was this marine protected area in place. But we also knew that the bycatch and strandings were still incredibly high. One year I found more dead turtles than living turtles within the marine protected area,” she says.

The Gabonese had very few resources to enforce any kind of regulations. So Maxwell and her team isolated one region in the south, near the border with Congo, where the turtles congregated over just a couple of months in the fall. They advised the government to focus efforts in that region, during that time; as a result, the Gabonese were able to protect the turtles during a crucial period in their life cycle.

This doesn't mean that California scientists have a perfect understanding of how MPAs work in the ocean. In fact, they are just at the beginning. Botsford says that the most useful data from the California MPA network is only starting to come in. Once they have watched ocean populations ebb and flow for a decade, California may rewrite how the world protects its oceans.

“In 10 years we’re going to have an unprecedented sense of how well these things work,” says Botsford. “It is something that the university has contributed to a lot. Not only us at UC Davis, but UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego as well.”

Marine Conservation Institute in the News!

Check out this great article from the Washington Post, featuring our President and CEO, Elliott Norse, PhD:

Scientists Call for End to Deep-Sea Fishing

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: September 6

Industrial fishing in the deep sea should be banned because it has depleted fish stocks that take longer to recover than other species, according to a paper to be released this week by an international team of marine scientists.

The article, published in the scientific journal Marine Policy, describes fishing operations that have in recent decades targeted the unregulated high seas after stocks near shore were overfished.

Describing the open ocean as “more akin to a watery desert,” the scientists argue that vessels have targeted patches of productive areas sequentially, depleting the fish there and destroying deep-sea corals before moving on to new areas.

Certain deep-sea species have gained widespread popularity — including orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish, otherwise known as Chilean sea bass — only to crash within a matter of years.

Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Institute and the paper’s lead author, said the world has turned to deep-sea fishing “out of desperation” without realizing fish stocks there take much longer to recover.

“We’re now fishing in the worst places to fish,” Norse said in an interview. “These things don’t come back.”

As vessels use Global Positioning System devices and trawlers, which scrape massive metal plates across the sea bottom, the catch of deep-water species has increased sevenfold between 1960 and 2004, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

“What they’re doing out there is more like mining than fishing,” said Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The estimated mean depth of fishing has more than tripled since the 1950s, from 492 feet to 1,706 feet in 2004, according to Telmo Morato, a marine biologist with the department of oceanography and fisheries at the University of the Azores in Portugal and one of the paper’s authors.

Fishing subsidies help sustain this practice, according to Rashid Sumaila, the paper’s other author, who directs the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. He said high-seas trawlers around the world receive roughly $162 million each year in government handouts, which amounts to a quarter of the value of the fleets’ catch.

“That is what is keeping most of them in business,” Sumaila said.

Bottom-trawling can crush deep-sea corals, which can live for as long as 4,000 years, the scientists noted. Some fish species of the deep live for more than a century, and while they can spawn many eggs, there can be several years in which juveniles fail to make it into adulthood.

Orange roughy, which Australia declared a threatened species in 2006, take 30 years to reach sexual maturity and live up to 149 years. The leafscale gulper shark, one of several deep-water sharks targeted for its liver oil, “matures late, has only 5-8 pups per year and lives to be 70 years old,” the authors write.

Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fisheries science, questioned the paper on the grounds that several long-lived species off the Pacific Coast, such as geoduck clams, have been harvested sustainably at very low levels. In many cases, fishing operations take just 1 percent of the population, he said, and this keeps the stocks from collapsing.

“There’s no question [a ban] can be done,” Hilborn said in an interview, adding that the international regulatory regimes may not be up for the task. “The question is, is it worth it?”

Hilborn said that while deep-sea corals might be sacrificed in the pursuit of fishing, humans had accepted similar trade-offs when clearing old-growth forests for farmland. “Some of these habitats will probably be changed by fishing. Some of those corals will be gone,” he said. “From a conservation perspective, maybe we shouldn’t fish at all, and the ocean should be left pristine. Where is the food going to come from?”

But Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, said the costs of deep-sea fishing far outweigh the benefits.

“It’s a waste of resources, it’s a waste of biodiversity, it’s a waste of everything,” Pauly said. “In the end, there is nothing left.”

Maria Damanaki, the European Union’s commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, said in an interview that she would like to reduce fishing on the high seas and cut subsidies for deep-sea trawlers.

“I’ll try. I really agree there’s a danger there, so we have to be prudent,” said Damanaki, adding that nations such as France, Denmark, Portugal and Spain resist such efforts. “We have to try to persuade them to stop this.”

Deep-Sea corals, such as those in the photo above, can be severely harmed due to bottom-trawling.

Degraded Reefs in One of Our Monuments

Kingman Reef: Black Reef vs. Pristine Reef (photos: Gareth Williams and Jim Maragos)

Imagine turquoise waters teeming with vibrant corals, colorful fish, graceful turtles, and menacing sharks. Now imagine cloudy ocean waters crowded with dark red and black algae and bacteria, devoid of wildlife. Unfortunately, the latter is happening in some of our nation’s reefs.

Many of our world’s coral reefs are in trouble. Now, a group of scientists are bringing to light yet another threat to some of our nation’s most pristine coral reefs in their newly released paper “Black Reefs.”

The islands studied are part of a chain of eleven islands (called the Line Islands) and are located in iron-poor regions of the central Pacific Ocean. However, a number of ship groundings have occurred on these coral islands and have unnaturally introduced iron to the environment. As detailed in the scientific paper, the introduced iron from the degrading vessels has caused the coral reefs to be overtaken and killed by harmful algae and bacteria.

Two of the devastated reefs are located in one of our nation’s national monuments – the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument composed of National Wildlife Refuges. At least 250 acres of coral habitat have been destroyed so far, and scientists report that the destruction continues at a rapid pace.

In order to stop the destruction, the authors of the paper recommend that the shipwrecks be removed immediately. As the primary caretaker of these particular reefs, the Department of the Interior’s US Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for removing them.

The wrecks’ continued presence threatens the health of some of the world’s most beautiful reefs. Spread the word!