The 29th U.S. Coral Reef Task Force

Source: NOAA

       On Thursday, February 21, 2013 Mike Gravitz, Rachel Keylon, and I attended the 29th U.S. Coral Reef Task Force Meeting at the Department of Interior.  This was an opportunity for concerned citizens and conservation groups to offer public comment on the federal government’s efforts to preserve coral reefs and their associated marine resources. Mike Gravitz, Marine Conservation Institute's Director of Policy and Legislation, shared key messages on key work protecting corals through marine protect areas.  Below please find selected comments focusing on the Pacific Ocean marine national monuments, home to some of America’s most important coral reef ecosystems.

       

        "Marine Conservation Institute advocated and supported the establishment of the four marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean: Papahānaumokuākea, Marianas Trench, Pacific Remote Islands, and Rose Atoll Marine National Monuments. Together these monuments encompass over 335,000 square miles of habitat for an incredible diversity of coral reef species, fishes, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals. Additionally, the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument contains some of the last remaining, relatively intact coral reef and pelagic ecosystems in the Pacific Ocean.

       

        However, many years after the establishment of these monuments, Marine Conservation Institute is deeply concerned that the federal agencies responsible for management of these resources do not have adequate resources to effectively protect and conserve the land, waters, and seafloor of all four marine monuments.

         

        Monument plans and fishing regulations have not been completed and most islands remain essentially unmanaged and unmonitored. Despite their remote location, some of the monuments are subjected to illegal fishing, at risk of groundings by fishing and other vessels, and experiencing illegal visits by boaters who potentially bring invasive species to the islands.  These threats affect the islands themselves, the shallow coral reefs around them, and the open ocean.  

       

       We believe that the USFWS, NOAA and the USCG need adequate funding to complete the management plans and do day-to-day research, surveillance and enforcement. In addition, funds are needed to handle emergencies like storms, tsunamis, marine debris from Japan, and other events.

Source: NOAA

       

       For instance, over 90% of Hawaiian green turtle reproduction and 20% of endangered monk seal reproduction occurs in and around Tern Island in Papahānaumokuākea. A recent severe storm damaged the facility on the island, where government and university researchers conducted vital long-term monitoring on corals, seabirds, sea turtles, and Hawaiian monk seals.These facilities should be restored to  continue vital research and provide a presence against poaching, trespassers, and invasive species introductions. In addition, staff on the island have rescued numerous monk seals, sea turtles and sea birds from entrapment in deteriorating seawalls around the island. Places that are remote, out of sight and out of most minds, such as the Pacific marine monuments, often get the ‘short end of the stick’ when budgets get very tight.  It is hard to justify spending money on places that few citizens will ever visit and enjoy. But it is these very places, the pristine and remote environments that serve as environmental benchmarks, protect rare species, or have extremely high biodiversity that are most in need of our continued support. We hope you will agree that now is not the time to consign our marine monuments to benign neglect. We ask you to fight for continued funding at current or higher levels for these monuments. Unfortunately, the threats won’t go away even if the money does."

      

        Marine Conservation Institute is dedicated to saving the oceans.  In order to save these precious national treasures Marine Conservation Institute works with scientists, politicians, and government officials.  Marine Conservation Institute is vocal on various ocean issues and we encourage you to tell us how you think Marine Conservation Institute is doing!  Please comment and tell us about issues, you the public believe we should be addressing, or about how you think Marine Conservation Institute is performing addressing important conservation issues.

Marine Conservation Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving our living oceans.  We work with scientists, politicians, government officials and other organizations around the world to protect essential ocean places and the wild species in them. - See more at: http://www.marine-conservation.org/who-we-are/#mission

Marine Conservation Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving our living oceans.  We work with scientists, politicians, government officials and other organizations around the world to protect essential ocean places and the wild species in them. - See more at: http://www.marine-conservation.org/who-we-are/#mission

 

A blog to save the Earth 5. Smart like a rock? Kind like a rock?

Being a biologist requires me to think differently than most people.  Most people are driven by questions such as:

“How long will it take me to get downtown in this traffic?”

“What do I not pay so I can make my rent this month?”

“How’d we do versus our competition last quarter?”

“What do I say to our stockholders in our annual report?”

“How many more 2-year election campaigns can I endure?”

and the like.

Figure 1. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
 is rising (as measured by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration on Mauna Loa HI since 1958)

I have the pleasure and obligation of thinking things like “If atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing (Figure 1) at a rate of 3.4% per year or 2.1% per year, but we have very little understanding about when we’ll pass the tipping point that sets off reorganization of the Biosphere into a new state, how can we best raise and deploy the resources needed to maintain the world’s marine biota?”

It’s a coupled question: It couples natural science (How far can you push the biota until you hit the tipping point?) and social science (What 5, 10 or 20 key institutions’ failures are most likely to trigger collapse?).

I’m talking collapse here.  Did anyone in power read Jared Diamond’s brilliant Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Diamond 2005)?  Many people love nature because whatever process got us here is worthy of our love and respect.  But for most people, conservation is not about idealism or kindness or respecting the gentler teachings of their religions.  It’s about surviving.

Living things created the conditions in which people evolved.  People should love fishes not just because we eat them but because fish keep us alive without our having to pay them (the ecosystem services wild fishes provide are not taxable, and, hence, quite illogically, do not get counted when researchers calculate the wealth of nations with measures such as GDP).  Humankind’s continued existence utterly depends on those kinds of crucial subsidies to humans from the world’s biota.  That’s why I’m stunned by the power in the arguments of my friend Rashid Sumaila (e.g., Sumaila et al. 2008).  Rashid explains how we’re destroying the world’s fish and fisheries.  Didn't other mothers tell their kids the Aesop fable The goose that laid the golden eggs? as Rashid’s and my mother did? 

Killing the living things that keep us alive is not a good strategy for anyone.  We and our generations won’t look kindly on anything or anyone that dramatically changes functioning of the Biosphere.  But being good to our biota means they’ll be good to us.  We like that.  Good planets are hard to find (unbeknownst to me, there’s a neat song with that name; you can hear it by clicking after the end of the second paragraph in this post by the NY Times' Andrew Revkin.

As a biologist, I tend to think over much longer periods than the daily head count, the weekly till, the annual report, etc., fast rhythms the world increasingly lives by.  How many kids start saving for their retirement in their 20s?  It’s just my nature to focus on longer horizons in space and time.  Seeing the middle of the ocean as well as the tide pool, the Cambrian Explosion as well as the Sixth Extinction.

I learn new stuff every day.  But as a scientist, one thing I’m pretty certain of is that the fate of life in the oceans has been shaped by visitors from space: big pieces of unconsolidated or wreaked planets called asteroids.

Figure 2.  The meteor that exploded over Tunguska, Russia
 in 1908 flattened a large area of forest. 
Photo from www.sciencephoto.com

On 15 February, while the world was expecting a very close drive-by from a very fast-moving rock in space, a somewhat smaller rock caught everyone by surprise, streaking through the thin blue layer of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth.  Moving at about 40,000 miles per hour, it exploded in the atmosphere not too far from Chelyabinsk, Russia.  And it was a rare event.  The rock, estimated at about 55 feet in diameter, weighing about 10,000 tons, as much as a World War II heavy cruiser, was the largest object known to have hit the Earth since 1908, when one about the same size exploded 1,200 miles further east in Russia.  The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor exploded in the atmosphere with a force estimated at nearly 500 kilotons, about 30 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  For reasons I don’t fully understand but astronomers probably do, the 1908 Tunguska meteor (Figure 2) made a bigger explosion.

In both cases we humans were lucky.  Things would have been different if they had hit the atmosphere at a different angle and smashed into a city.  We were lucky these times.

The Earth was less lucky 66 million years ago when another but much bigger 6-mile in diameter mass of rock hit what is today the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.  Since the publication of an amazing paper by Alvarez et al in 1980, it’s been increasingly clear that the Chicxulub impact was colossal, great enough to kill off the dinosaurs on land, mosasaurs and other big marine reptiles, ancient relatives of squid called ammonites and many, many other kinds of life.  Big enough to kill off perhaps 75% of the species on Earth.

The speeding asteroid that did this didn't have a mind to think about what it was doing.  It didn't care that it had a devastating impact for life on Earth.  It was a mindless and heartless piece of rock.

Now, as many scientists have pointed out, the Earth is experiencing another mass extinction event.  But this time it is not a mindless, heartless rock whose impact is threatening the millions of species.

It is our own species, humankind.

Science doesn't know everything.  Scientists don’t have all the answers yet.  There are still lots of important things we don’t know.  But we can say with very high certainty that it wouldn't have been pleasant to be living on Earth when the last mass extinction was underway 66 million years ago.  And we can say that the mass extinction that’s now accelerating isn't going to be very nice for us and our loved ones either.

There’s a good chance that we humans won’t survive it.

So the two crucial questions are:

1)       Are we smart enough to see what will happen should we choose not to change our trajectory? and

2)      Do we care enough for this beautiful blue Earth and its corals and dolphins and millions of other species, including ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, to decide that we must prevent this from happening?

Let’s get personal because this isn't a decision we can leave to some vague “others” in the future.  The question is, will I and will you, our friends and the leaders we vote for choose to ignore the overwhelmingly compelling scientific evidence and fail to act in time?  Or will we choose save us from our species’ impacts?

We’re not going to have a lot of time to decide our answer.

Elliott Norse, Founder and Chief Scientist, Marine Conservation Institute

Diamond, J (2005).  Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking Books, New York

Sumaila, UR  L Teh, R Watson, P Tyedmers and D Pauly (2008).  ICES Journal of Marine Science 65 (6): 832-840.  doi: 10.1093/icesjms/fsn070

A blog to save the Earth 4. Outer space and inner space

At first, it might seem as if humans’ desire to go into outer space is in competition with the idea that we should focus on exploring and benefiting from spaces on our own planet, such as our oceans. That’s probably true in a number of ways that are worth exploring in this blog. But there are also ways that space exploration benefits marine science. Here’s one from Scientific American.

Algorithms developed for identifying locations in images taken by the Hubbell Space Telescope can be adapted to identifying whale sharks.

Look at the distinctive pattern of stars in this nebula:

The core of the star cluster in the nebula NGC 3603 is shown in great detail in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA, ESA

Well, each of the world’s largest sharks, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) has its own distinctive constellation of spots.

Whale shark from blog.utopiadivevillage.com

To conserve whale sharks, it’s important to know their movement patterns. Using this algorithm could be quite useful for identifying individual whale sharks to learn where they go.

Thank you Hubbell Space Telescope, NASA and ESA!

Elliott Norse, Founder and Chief Scientist, Marine Conservation Institute

A blog to save the Earth 3. A hero for the oceans

To a lot of people, heroes are guys with big muscles who carry guns. Think Rambo and his more recent movie and video game look-alikes. Heroes prove themselves in battle. But today I’ve just learned that one of my real-life heroes—Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey—won’t be running for reelection.

The Rock is a lot of people’s idea of a hero. Photo from www.glamzzle.com

What Senator Lautenberg has done for the oceans and the world’s people makes him a hero, even though he’s no Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson or The Rock. Frank is the real deal.

Perhaps I’m strange when it comes to heroes, but most of mine don’t fit that cartoonish image. Some are just kids like Malala Yousafza, who took a bullet because she believes that girls deserve an education. Some gave their lives in the effort to call attention to ways people are harming our environment, like marine biologist Rachel Carson. Some are brave visitors to heretofore unexplored parts of our world, like Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle, who witnesses the fascinating, fragile beauty of life in the depths of the oceans. Some are like my mother Harriett, who became a military policewoman during World War II to safeguard the homefront while our family’s men were fighting in Europe and the Pacific.

Men can be heroes too. Some of my heroes fought on the battlefield, like Mom’s younger brother and my namesake, Elliott Albert. Tall and thin, he lied about his age to join the US Army at 16, earned his first Purple Heart as a member of the 4th Ranger Battalion, then joined the First Special Service Force (the Devils’s Brigade) before earning the Bronze Star and his second Purple heart posthumously in the Anzio breakout of 1944. He was a hero to my family and the community where I grew up, someone I’ve admired and loved all my life, even though I never met him.

Senator Frank Lautenberg, his fiancée (now wife) Bonnie, yours truly and my wife Irene in Lisbon, Portugal.

Senator Lautenberg became a hero to me when we met in 1996 in Lisbon, Portugal. He was one of 15 US Senators and House Members who participated in a wonderful Aspen Institute conference on national security and the environment. I had the honor of being chosen to speak to these elected officials on the role of fisheries and oceans in nations’ security.

Senator Lautenberg asked some of most thoughtful questions. He also did all he could to make me feel like a friend, not just an expert to interact with in public, when people were watching him. Indeed, he, his fiancée, my wife and I enjoyed the simple pleasure of an afternoon in Lisbon including time in an ice cream parlor together. We talked about oceans, our families and life in general. It was a wonderful occasion for Irene and me.

Long before I met him, Senator Lautenberg had made my life better by championing an end to cigarette smoking on commercial airplanes. Considering how much I travel for my work, he’s probably saved years of my life and millions of years of other people’s lives by doing that.

Based on the trust we built in Portugal, I visited Senator Lautenberg in Washington DC on a number of occasions to ask him to do good things for the oceans. Because I knew that bottom trawling, the world’s most destructive fishing method, is a major threat to corals in the deep sea, I asked him to co-sponsor The Deep Sea Coral Protection Act in the Senate, which he did in coordination with a bipartisan group of US Representatives including Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Frank Pallone, Jr. of New Jersey. Their efforts ultimately led to important improvements to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 2006.

Senator Lautenberg didn’t do it because I was helpful to his campaign. He did it because he cares about the oceans, and he reminded me again and again that fighting to protect the oceans is the right thing to do.

Senator Lautenberg knows something about heroes. For years, outside his Senate office door, he’s displayed thousands of photos of brave men and women who’ve died fighting for American ideals. I’ve gone back to see him many times, usually to ask him to help strengthen protections for our oceans. He’s always greeted me like a trusted friend and listened.

After many years of public service, Senator Lautenberg, who is 89, will leave office in January 2015. Between now and then, I have no doubt that he’ll work to do good things for people and the oceans he so deeply cares about.

I’m proud to consider Senator Frank Lautenberg my friend and ocean hero.

Elliott Norse, Founder and Chief Scientist, Marine Conservation Institute

Pirates on the High Seas!

Out on the seas there is a dangerous threat to fishing communities and fish themselves!  That danger is IUU (illegal, unreported, and unregulated) fishing, or pirate fishing!  Pirate fishing also uses un-regulated gear and non-safe fishing practices which can harm the sea floor and other marine creatures such as sea turtles, sharks, and birds.  Specifically pirate fishing occurs when foreign vessels fish inside another country’s waters without permission or they report catching less fish than they actually did; fish in international waters in places, at times, or with fishing gear that is prohibited by regional fishery management bodies; or commit various other fishing-related violations.

Pirate fishing is becoming a large problem not just for the U.S., but for the world.  Worldwide the loss economically from pirate fishing is between $10 billion and $23.5 billion.  This loss of revenues can really affect fishing communities by taking resources unsustainably. 

Source: Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

The highest level of pirate fishing occurs on fish that feed or live near the bottom of the seafloor, lobsters, and shrimps/prawn.   In the international fish trade one in every five fish is caught illegally and it is thought that the U.S. alone imports around $2 billion a year in illegal fish.

On February 11, 2013 there was a bipartisan effort by Senators Rockefeller (D-WV), Murkowski (R-AK), Begich (D-AK), Schatz (D-HI), Cantwell (D-WA), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR), Merkley (D-OR), Hirono (D-HI), and Nelson (D-FL) to stop illegal fishing.  They introduced two bills, the Pirate Elimination Act and the International Fisheries Stewardship and Enforcement Act, S. 1980, to combat pirate fishing.   These two bills were first introduced by the late Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) in 2009.  With your participation we can remember the late Senator by asking congress to pass these bills.

Marine Conservation Institute strongly supports the bipartisan bills to end pirate fishing.  Will you stand up with us and contact your local Member of Congress about supporting the two bills?  We all want healthy oceans for future generations and that includes supporting our local fishing communities and protecting their legacy of fishing.  Please write to your local Member of Congress and tell him/her that you support the passage of the Pirate Fishing Elimination Act and the International Fisheries Stewardship and Enforcement Act.

Let’s protect our oceans!