Marine Debris: Drowning in Trash

Killer Garbage in Our Oceans

Earlier in July, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel, the Oscar Elton Sette, pulled over 50 metric tons of marine trash from the waters of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, otherwise known as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. NOAA’s marine debris operations manager Kyle Koyanagi lamented afterwards, “The ship was at maximum capacity and we did not have any space for more debris.” Before we attribute this extraordinary amount of garbage to the recent Japanese tsunami, it must be noted that not a single piece of garbage could be traced back to Japan. In fact, roughly the same amount of trash is hauled out from the area each year. Since the mission began in 1996, cruises have removed more than 700 metric tons of debris, but there is still more.

Recovered fishing nets and gear on the deck of
the NOAA ship Oscar Elton Sette.
Photo courstesy of NOAA/Dan Dennison.

Marine trash poses a great danger to sea life. In Papahānaumokuākea, a marine national monument established with the intent of protecting the last few pristine coral reefs and pacific island habitats in our national waters, garbage chokes out natural life in the reefs and shore. Of the 50 tons of ocean litter removed on the latest cruise, approximately half was composed of broken fishing gear and plastic collected on and around Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. 

See more about the impacts of marine trash.   

The remains of dead baby albatrosses reveal the
devastating and far-reaching impact of plastic pollution on
Midway Atoll, which is 2000 miles from any mainland.
Photo courtesy of NOAA/Chris Jordan.

It is important to remember that, while the consequences of the Japanese tsunami have brought this issue to national attention, marine trash is neither a new nor a transient problem. By the time a massive, 70 foot dock washed ashore in Oregon, ocean currents had already concentrated trash in the oceans into massive “garbage patches.” The largest of these, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is conservatively estimated to be bigger than the state of Texas. What is it composed of? Plastics and derelict fishing gear, mostly, but also chemical pollutants and other miscellaneous trash. This debris circulates through the ocean gyres until it is broken down into microscopic parts or driven back ashore.

     Trained NOAA marine debris diver carefully disentangles               Trained NOAA marine debris diver carefully removes a 

         an endangered Hawaiian monk seal in the NWHI.                                derelict fishing net from a coral reef in the NWHI. 

           Photo courtesy of NOAA Fisheries Service.                                       Photo courtesy of NOAA Fisheries Service.

Read about what you can do to help!

As Koyanagi reminded the nation, “[M]arine debris is an everyday problem, especially right here in the Pacific.” Two bills currently moving through Congress, the Marine Debris Reauthorization Amendments of 2011 (H.R. 1171) in the House and the Trash Free Seas Act of 2011 (S. 1119) in the Senate, would provide NOAA the funding and resources necessary to continue its Marine Debris Prevention and Removal Program. These bipartisan bills are vital to NOAA’s efforts to address and manage the threat of ocean litter to our coastal communities and wildlife. 

Call your Congressional Representatives today and ask them to push for these pieces of legislation so that we may continue to work towards a trash free ocean.

Marine debris covers a beach on Laysan Island in the Hawaiian
Islands National Wildlife Refuge, where it washed ashore.
Photo courtesy of Susan White, USFWS

   

Debate on corals is broad, but too shallow

Corals have a future – we need to go deeper to see it

 In his July 13, 2012 New York Times OpEd "A World Without Coral Reefs", Roger Bradbury asserts that the world's coral reefs are unsalvageable, the delicate ecosystems irreversibly devastated by overfishing, pollution, and ocean acidification. Following its publication, numerous blogs, opinion pieces, and reports from scientists and conservationists alike debated the accuracy and implications of Mr. Bradbury's claims. We at the Marine Conservation Institute noticed, however, that deep sea coral habitats have been conspicuously absent from the discussion. In an attempt to rectify this oversight, our resident deep sea coral expert Sandra Brooke wrote the following response to Mr. Bradbury's article. 

By Sandra Brooke

The Marine Conservation Institute and our coral experts have followed the ongoing discussion on corals in the pages and the DotEarth blog of the New York Times with great interest. The alarming opinion piece by Bradbury (“A World Without Coral Reefs”) and backers like Randy Olson has been met with more reserved opinions by other respected marine conservation leaders, like Carl Safina and John Bruno. But this discussion on corals is missing a vital perspective – that of deep sea coral habitats, not just the more visible shallow reefs that are predominantly found in the tropics.

  

Sea pens, such as these Ptilosarcus gurneyi found in Alaska, grow in
soft sediment, as opposed to the rocky hard-bottom preferred by
most deep-water corals. Photo Credit: P. Malecha, NOAA Fisheries.

 The science on deep sea corals lags far behind shallow tropical corals. But deep sea corals are vital both as habitats and spawning grounds for some fisheries species, and they are globally distributed from the Arctic to the Southern oceans. Some species of deep sea stony corals form complex structures that provide similar – although not identical – ecosystem services as shallow tropical reefs: habitat for abundant and diverse associated fauna, commercial fish breeding grounds, and potential medicines for human use. And while human impacts on deep sea corals are different from shallow corals, they can be equally devastating – especially in the form of destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling.

Yellow Enallopsammia rostrata stony coral and pink
Candidella imbricata. Photo Credit: "Mountains in the Sea"
scientific party, NOAA, and the Institute for Exploration.

Deep sea corals also show very different tolerance to ocean pH levels and lower aragonite satuarate states than shallow corals. Because CO₂ dissolves more easily in cold water than warm, deep sea corals are already living in lower saturation states than warm corals. Increased acidification may harm the corals’ ability to form the structures that maintain not only their own survival, but that of the marine life depending on them. Calcification takes energy, so increased biological energy needed to form and maintain deep sea coral structures may diminish the corals’ other biological processes, including reproduction. This could lead to deep sea corals slowly diminishing in complexity, scale, and in the biological diversity they support as habitats. We still don’t know the lethal and sublethal tolerances of deep sea stony corals to changing ocean pH levels. Scientists at the Marine Conservation Institute are trying to better forecast the impacts of ocean acidification over time for a variety of coral habitats – particularly the reef-building scleractinians, Lophelia pertusa, and Solenosmilia variabilis – to identify which areas are most resilient to changing ocean conditions, representing the best prospects for conservation. We are also examining OA impacts on soft corals in waters surrounding the Aleutian Islands, one of the most biodiverse deep sea coral sites anywhere in the world.

Christmas Tree Coral (Antipathes dendrochristos) off of
Southern California. Photo Credit: Mark Amend, NMFS SWFSC
Fisheries Ecology Division, NOAA

 While the global picture of corals is gloomy in both the shallow and deep seas, the overall evidence is strong that marine protected areas protect not only corals, but the associated biological diversity that they support – fishes, invertebrates, marine mammals, seabirds, and more. In light of the evidence of coral declines and global overfishing, it is incumbent on policymakers and marine advocates to identify and protect the diverse marine ecosystems that are still biologically productive – by creating large, well-funded and properly-managed MPAs as safety nets for the global ocean ecosystem.