Michelle Taylor reports from IPSO 2012

It is amazing what change a year can bring. We have begun the 2012 IPSO Workshop, with ocean scientists and experts on the law of the sea gathering for a second year, to update each other on the latest research from their respective fields on the impacts of climate change, pollution and overfishing – and what solutions are realistic.

There are many familiar faces: the good and the great of the marine science world. The cross section of participants is purposefully broad in an effort to collect and record different opinions and highlight the important synergies across science disciplines: something absolutely necessary in tackling the marine global issues where oceanography, economics, industry, biology, and policy meet.

Many of the worst-case hypothetical scenarios of last year’s IPSO meeting are now presented as likely situations for our ocean’s future (we have spent all day hovering permanently around the worst case IPCC scenarios).

The hardening of my conscience to hearing such bad news is worrying. It is refreshing to have people in the room whose audible gasps at some of the issues facing our oceans remind us all of the gravity of the situation. One such moment comes on hearing from one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change effects in the ocean that ocean warming has now been detected at 4000 metres on the abyssal plain.

Other updates: The so-called dead zones – de-oxygenated ocean zones - are ever-increasing in number and scale, geographically they are everywhere (and we know there is huge underreporting from some regions) and also affect our seas to their furthest depths. Ocean acidification was on no-one’s lips just 8 years ago and is now an enormous problem with a widening body of evidence of impacts. Some of this evidence from naturally acidic sea areas really hit home. For example, how animals may still survive there but the energy it takes to do so limits or stops them breeding and growing… a sad and, frankly, unimaginable situation for coral reefs: the global ecosystem facing the brunt of this “acid attack”.

Some new facets of the scary effects of chemicals we use in everyday life (make-up, perfumes, etc) have on our marine world were presented. The lack of knowledge about how these chemical pollutants will interact with climate change and global warming is of huge concern. Climate change again raises its ugly head in discussions about the future of fisheries; it really doesn’t look good no matter which area of the world you look at. We are too good at catching fish, in fact we actively support it through subsidies. Also, our western lifestyles are simply unsustainable and in many ways outright unfair to the rest of the planet.

As we are focused on finding solutions (it’s the point of this meeting after all), some overarching themes appeared. The two elephants in the room, climate change and human population growth, unsurprisingly fitted in and around most discussions. And they have to be part of finding solutions. These are two seemingly insurmountable issues yet ones that we do as a species have control over if we so wish..

Day 2 We start considering the solutions in earnest. Most of them we already know. As with so much to do with global change, it is the political leadership we would like to conjure from the genie’s bottle.

It is also obvious that industry needs to play a key role in all and any solutions. As does people power. Before this we need good communication and education; an arena scientists are not renowned for and an area for improvement. Changes in language are required as well– it’s not fishing, it’s hunting. And we are really good at it. Better than ever. And, just as the problems when thrown together are a bigger issue (climate change AND chemical pollution for example are greater than the sum of their parts) the solutions need to be equally interconnected, overarching, hard-hitting, and globe changing.

The time lag before the steady increase in CO2 will stop (even if we were to cease its rampant creation right now) means climate change is not going away. But the sooner we get a lid on it the better. Do you really want to live in the Plan B world, the one where we do nothing, the one where the only place to see a tropical coral reef is in an eco-dome? Without action this is what you and I and everyone else faces.

The seamount expedition continues

We are pushing on to our last two seamounts, Sapmer Bank and Atlantis. Middle of What Seamount (MOW) was a very difficult site to work in. The boundary between sub-tropical waters and the sub-Antarctic was running right across the seamount while we were there so tremendously strong currents swept across the entire area. Our Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) was stuck fast to the seabed in several places, unable to move because of the water sweeping past. Despite our tribulations we did manage to glean enough information to get some idea of the life at MOW. We saw some of the famous orange roughy, the fish that live to 150 years old or more and which have been heavily targeted by the fishing industry. Very prominent were small lantern sharks. During many dives with the ROV glowing lights could be seen in the distance and these were the eyes or light organs of these strange animals swimming around in the deep. Other fish avoided them so they must be predators. We also saw areas apparently damaged by trawling, although unlike other seamounts there was no evidence here of lost fishing gear or trash. Some areas were simply breathtaking. Looming out of the darkness on cliffs of ropey lava were trees of bamboo corals over 2 meters in height. Elsewhere we found tremendously rich gardens of bright purple and yellow corals as well as large trumpet-shaped sponges smothered in bright red and yellow crinoids. Above and amongst the coral hovered oreos, another long lived deep-sea fish, with glowing yellow eyes and with a very characteristic swimming motion involving the undulation of the dorsal and ventral fins. This was a fantastic sight and again demonstrates that some of these areas are not completely destroyed. Management of fisheries in such areas is of all the more importance to conserve what remains of these striking but very vulnerable ecosystems.

We also had to contend with bad weather again over this seamount. The previous evening we had winds of more than 60kts and the sea rose fairly quickly to give everybody a poor night’s sleep. It even stopped us working for about 24 hours. Yesterday we were able to recommence with oceanographic measurements in the afternoon. Plans were changed again to accommodate the gap in work. This has been a very busy cruise for me managing a lot of shifts in work schedules for one reason or another. Everyone remains buoyant on board, and there is the looming prospect of finishing science and then steaming home for Christmas, something that everyone is looking forward to.

Mountaineering in the Indian Ocean

We are just into week three of the cruise. Coral seamount was reluctant to give up its’ secrets and we have contended with bad weather and various minor issues with equipment. In the end, however, we have documented incredibly an incredibly beautiful deep-sea ecosystem inhabitated by many remarkable animals. Particularly striking have been the corals and the sponges. The former range from white stony corals with bright orange polyps to tree-like octocorals, including a remarkable species which is bright purple. The sponges are often a creamy white colour but are remarkable for their amazing forms, from vase-like dimpled colonies to enormous undulating brain-like shapes, trumpets or plates. Almost everything comes with its’ resident other creatures. For example, the corals almost always come with a particular species of brittlestar, some large with snake-like arms. Squat lobsters inhabit almost every coral and sponge, their golden eyes reflecting the lights of the ROV. Miniature glass-like lobsters swim about by flapping their tails when the ROV lands near a coral. Hermit crabs, giant snails and carpets of anemones are also things we have observed. We have also seen evidence of human impacts, all the way out here more than a thousand miles from the nearest land. We are constantly accompanied by seabirds and I’ve counted more than 40 great wandering albatrosses from the vessel. There are also shy albatross, cape pidgeons, white chinned petrels and others. We have also seen sperm whales diving on Coral Seamount, a witness to the importance of this feature to ocean predators. More surprising perhaps was the fact that we also saw fur seals around the seamount summit. I had no idea that such relatively small creatures would be seen so far out to sea.

Everyone is working incredibly hard. For me, organising the various types of work we are doing around the weather is a complex and daily task. The other scientists are very busy recording information, collecting and preserving samples, analysing the chemistry of seawater and the flow of currents around the seamounts. Even mapping these features with acoustics has been hampered by difficult conditions. The crew remain positive and cheerful and everyone looks forward to mealtimes, the cooking has been great.

Yesterday (November 21^st) we arrived at a new seamount, Melville Bank, one we know has been heavily fished in the gold rush for orange roughy in the early 2000s. This fish, in case you are not aware, lives to as much as 150 years old and does not reproduce until it is 30 or 40 years of age. It is very vulnerable to overfishing and the “goldrush” fishery on the South West Indian Ocean ridge only lasted a few years before stocks collapsed. It is rumoured that a lot of fishing gear was lost on the seamounts and we look forward with some trepidation as to what we may find on this seamount. On the acoustic maps it is incredibly rugged, with cliffs and steep slopes. Tomorrow we will dive and find out for the first time what lives on Melville Bank, for no other human has seen what this seamount looks like underwater...

The Seamounts Cruise Gets Going

After a very pleasant day or two at Cape Town RRS James Cook sailed at 14.00 on Monday 7^th November. It was a beautiful sunny day and the ship moved smoothly out of the Waterfront harbour and out to sea. We all stood on the foredeck taking photographs of Table Mountain as the ship swung to the east to take up the first station. Cape fur seals were lying in rafts dotted here and there and would lazily swim off or suddenly dive as the vessel approached. Cape gulls drifted past and gannets flew low over the water passing by without heed to the ship. We made a stop and deployed the CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth), a large metal frame with water sampling bottles and instruments for measuring temperature, oxygen concentration and fluorescence (chlorophyll) in the water column. After this it was time to calibrate the multifrequency echosounders we use to look at the behaviour of the animals living in the water column during the trip. This was a very fiddly operation requiring the suspension of a small metal sphere underneath the hull-mounted echosounders of the ship using a combination of three lines deployed from what resembled fishing rods over the side of the ship. We had heard horror stories about how long this operation could take but we were very lucky with calm weather and immediately managed to get echoes from the sphere. Outside fur seals swam around the ship. They were very sociable, often gathering in small groups, prodding each other with their noses or scratching or grooming themselves with teeth or flippers. Occassionally one would hang, tail up out of the water and head down on the surface. At one point out metal sphere and lines suddenly moved back towards the stern of the ship and we were quite suspicious that the seal’s curiosity had got the better of them and they had come to investigate our calibration sphere. We could see the seals diving on the echosounders as they were blowing trails of bubbles as they dived down to 70 or 80 meters below the ship, occasionally coming up chasing small fish (we had seen a large male trap some fish between the harbour wall and the ship while it was moored in Cape Town and then proceed to gorge itself for half an hour or more). The whole operation was completed by 02.00 on Tuesday morning, much quicker than we were expecting, at which point we recommenced our journey towards the first seamount, Coral. The moon appeared between clouds and the ships wake was bright blue green with bioluminescence, an amazing sight.

IPSO - Every Second Breath

Any of you, wherever you are, whatever you are doing can pause now and connect directly with the ocean. Just breathe.

That breath came from the sea.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/oceans-on-brink-of-catastrophe-2300272.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/20/marine-life-oceans-extinction-threat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/ipso-2011-ocean-report-mass-extinction_n_880656.html

http://www.earthtimes.org/conservation/marine-species-risk-mass-extinction/1053/

http://crisisboom.com/2011/06/21/worlds-oceans-in-shocking-decline/

http://www.rferl.org/content/science_panel_grave_ocean_stresses_threaten_extinctions/24241383.html

http://www.euronews.net/2011/06/21/environmental-doomsday-unless-oceans-respected/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110621101453.htm

http://britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/blog/2011/06/21/the-state-of-our-oceans/

http://www.globe-net.com/articles/2011/june/21/are-the-world%E2%80%99s-oceans-on-the-brink-of-disaster.aspx?id=7142

You can only love what you know

It’s August, the holiday season, when many of us will be taking trips to the coast and spending time next to the oceans. Many of us will even go “rockpooling” or fishing with a small net. The oceans are a source of fascination for many of us, harbouring strange and colourful animals. I am amazed at how early this fascination can begin. My two daughters, aged 3, now regularly demand to look at the “shark book” or the “fish book” and both will sit either side of me and identify “hammerhead shark” “leopard shark” or “blue shark”. They are particularly fascinated by the shark’s large teeth and that sharks are a bit scary and might eat you, which of course happens very rarely (even more rarely nowadays that we have decimated many shark populations). Their capacity to absorb information is a constant source of surprise to me. They are also identifying eels, stingrays, corals, sea anemones and sea horses. Of course, it helps when your dad is a marine biologist.

Several things occur to me when the girls are displaying proto-marine biologist behaviour. The first is what will the oceans look like when they are my age or older. Unfortunately, at the present rate of degradation, the oceans will be a poor place even compared to today. Many corals reefs will be gone completely. Those remaining will be under severe stress and probably a mix of coral and algal species, a shadow of the reefs my wife and I dived on when I was younger. Wild-caught fish will be a rare and expensive luxury. Many more stocks will be gone with some projections suggesting that all the major fish stocks targeted today will have collapsed by 2050. Dead zones will have spread, as will the toxic red tides that poison everything they come into contact with. It’s a pretty depressing picture and it is the future generations that will suffer from our carelessness.

The other thing that occurs to me is that young children have an innate fascination with the natural world. I guess mine are very lucky in that they are privileged to live in a comfortable house, they have plenty to eat and have parents that are interested in their welfare. This fascination is stimulated by the fact that mum and dad will answer all their questions on what animals they see and so on and they will take an active interest in what they are looking at and doing (snails are particularly popular, being examined for many minutes while they come out of their shells, as are butterflies, which are pursued around the garden, and froglets). It is great that such young people are so interested in the world they live in, which begs a further question. Why is it that so many people seem to lose interest in the world they live in when they get older? This of course is not a simple question. Life for many of us is fast-paced and stressful. Getting a few minutes to consider our place in the world and how to live in it is difficult. We’re bombarded by a huge advertising (brain-washing) machine to attempt to attain a lifestyle lived by the “rich and famous”. This happens to such an extent that many of us will buy luxuries that we cannot afford even to the detriment of basic requirements for life, such as nutritious food. Amazing.

There are many people (I am no exception), organisations, and even the governments calling for changes in our lifestyles, to live a life of lower consumption of resources, and pointing to various aspects of the degradation and destruction of the natural world. Many people now simply switch off when the next environmental doom story is put before them in the media. This is because these events do not affecting them directly but moreover, I am convinced in many cases it is because they have ceased caring. Perhaps we are targeting the wrong people or more correctly the wrong generation of people. Education about the importance of the Earth in supporting life, including human life, and the role which plants, animals and ecosystems have in maintaining the Earth system must begin at the earliest age. Only then will people grow up with enough passion about the environment that they actually care about the way in which they live. As the saying goes, you can only love and care for what you know about. It was how I got interested in the oceans. Spending hours on a small beach in Ireland and time out fishing with my grandfather and uncles and even, dare I say it, sitting in front of the TV with interested parents watching the “World About Us”, “Jaques Cousteau” and “Life on Earth”.

Evidence of the decline of ocean surface phytoplankton since the turn of the century

5th August 2010

You may have seen the press coverage of the paper by Boyce and colleagues (Nature 466: 591-596). The paper relates a clever study where scientists have examined chlorophyll data obtained through various methods, including very primitive ways of assessing the transparency of the sea, to figure out how levels of primary production have changed since 1899. For those of you who find that confusing let me explain. On land, the primary producers are the plants that we are all familiar with, grass, trees, shrubs and so on. These plants use the sun’s energy to trap (fix) carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and they use this to synthesise organic molecules (photosynthesis). These form the basis of the energy that drives life and the molecules that form structures, enzymes and so on. Animals graze plants and this energy and material is used by them to grow, and these animals in turn are eaten by other animals (predators) and so on, forming successive layers or trophic levels of food chains, many of which go to form foodwebs. In the oceans, carbon is fixed through the same process of photosynthesis but in this case most of the work is done by tiny cells, phytoplankton, that live in the surface layers of the ocean (upper 150m depth). The phytoplankton are grazed by zooplankton, tiny animals that also live in the surface layers of the ocean, and these in turn are preyed on by larger animals, including fish and so on up to the large marine predators we are familiar with such as sharks and tuna. Some very large animals also graze on zooplankton, such as baleen whales short-circuiting lengthy food chains which lose a lot of the energy of primary production at each step.

Whilst people are familiar with the process of photosynthesis on land, and they are aware that plants can be used as food (cereals like wheat etc), they may not be aware that about half of the production on Earth takes place in the oceans. We do not directly consume phytoplankton but we do eat fish, that ultimately live off the phytoplankton, and which feed many millions of people and provide a livelihood for many others. However, photosynthesis also has other critical effects that are important to maintaining the balance of the Earth’s life support system. These include the production of oxygen, a by-product of photosynthesis, and the draw-down of CO₂ from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. It is the latter that has meant that the oceans have taken up nearly half of humankind’s CO₂ emissions. The oceans are providing us with food, with the air we breathe and they clean up the atmosphere through the process of photosynthetic primary production.

The paper by Boyce and colleagues (2010) demonstrates that the concentrations of phytoplankton in the surface layers of the ocean have declined in 8 out of 10 of the major ocean regions of the world. This is occurring mainly through an effect of global warming. When the surface layers of the ocean are heated up they have a lower tendency to mix with the cooler deeper layers, a process called stratification (layering) of the surface of the oceans. The phytoplankton only live in the surface waters because they require sunlight to photosynthesise and therefore to live. However, they also require nutrients other than carbon to synthesise organic molecules, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus but also other nutrients such as sulphur and iron. As the phytoplankton grow in surface water layers they use up these nutrients and their growth becomes limited. The phytoplankton cells undergo a form of starvation. Tropical oceans are naturally stratified, whilst in temperate seas stratification occurs during the summer but storms during the winter mix up the surface layers of the oceans with deeper, nutrient rich water, annually replenishing the nutrients phytoplankton need to grow. Global warming has increased the level of stratification throughout the oceans and thus has caused a decrease in global primary production by phytoplankton through reducing the supply of nutrients from deep water to the oceans surface.

The simple fact is that almost all life in the oceans, with the exception of chemosynthetic communities that are based on chemical energy, depend on surface production by phytoplankton. Even the deepest living organisms live off the rain of dead cells and occasional carcasses descending from the surface layers of the ocean. Much of this material arrives in the deep sea in the form of marine snow, aggregates of dead phytoplankton cells, cast off skins of zooplankton, faecal material etc. The reduction in surface primary production will have impacted almost other marine life in the oceans, even reducing the production of the fish that we eat. That this has been happening for so long is disturbing. It seems that even by the turn of the twentieth century production was declining as a result of industrial activity, a long time before we became aware of climate change.