2. One Fish. Two Fish. Red Fish… No Fish.

3. Snow Caps Cones for Everyone.

4. Too Many Lionfish on the Dance Floor.

5. I See Deadzones.

6. No Escape from Plastic Monstas.

7. Where Have All the Coral Reefs Gone and Where are all the Cod?

8. Goodness Gracious, Great Plumes of Oil…and Mercury…and all that other crap we put in the sea.

9. I’m all alone and there’s no zooxanthellae inside me.

10. Fin.

The post 10 Reasons Why the Ocean’s Struggle is Real first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve got something important I want to share with you that is not getting the attention it should from press or the authorities.  As regular #DeepSN readers will know, I work a lot with whale sharks in Yucatan Mexico as part of the research program at Georgia Aquarium and through association with the Mexican government and Mexican Conservation NGOs like Blue Realm/Ch’ooj Ajauil AC and Amigos de Isla Contoy.  Over the last few years many folks associated with these efforts have worked extensively to understand the largest aggregation of whale sharks in the world,  and we have begun to move towards conserving the extraordinary biodiversity of the marine realm of northern Quintana Roo, from Cancun to Cabo Catoche.  But, there is now a clear and present threat to marine life in this area.

Last year in cooperation with the Mexican national parks agency CONANP and Amigos de Isla Contoy, we (including DSN’s Dr. M!) installed an AIS receiver on the observation tower at Isla Contoy National Park, an incredibly picturesque island north east of Cancun.  This device relays signals from transmitters that are compulsory on all ships over 300 tonnes; signals that indicate ship ID, location, heading, destination and so on.  Our goal was to monitor commercial ship traffic in waters to the east of the island, where the majority of whale sharks gather these days, which is close to a big shipping lane at the western entrance to the Gulf of Mexico.  On July 6, however, we noticed in the data stream a ship doing some weird maneuvers, a ship which eventually came to a stop in the area immediately north of Isla Contoy.  The AIS data showed the ship to be a 300ft long bulk chemical tanker called Atlantic Sun and that she was anchored in less than 10m of water inside the bounds of the Whale Shark Biosphere Reserve, a marine protected area established in 2009 to conserve whale shark habitat.  The area is fedeally protected and anchoring is not allowed without special permitting.  It is certainly NOT appropriate anchorage for a 300ft chemical tanker.

Working with colleagues in Mexico we sent an aerial survey to confirm the presence and disposition of the ship and showed that yes, it was anchored in the protected area.  I contacted CONANP by email to urge an investigation, but to the best of my knowledge the ship remains today anchored in the MPA, some 2 weeks later.  Reports from contacts in Mexico suggest that the ship is either mechanically disabled or out of fuel, or both, and that the company that operates the ship may be in financial difficulties, which may be why they have not summoned a tug to move the ship to a more appropriate anchorage to await repairs or refueling.  There are reportedly six people on board – 5 men and 1 woman – and they are running low on supplies.  We are told that the cargo tanks are empty, which is good, but the ship itself represents a significant risk to healthy reef patches and adjacent bottom habitats, especially if it is disabled.  The potential anchor damage alone is significant.  Oil/diesel leakage and the risk of fuel spill from at-sea refueling should also be considered.  The best course of action is an immediate tow to the nearest safe harbour.

The maddening thing about this is that we warned about the risks of this some time ago.  Oh, and think about what could happen to a crippled tanker in shallow water if THIS continues on its current trajectory…

If you share our concern for the health of the Isla Contoy National Park, and for the whale sharks, manta rays, coral reefs, turtle mating/nesting areas, flamingos, manatees, dolphins, sailfish and frigate birds of northern Quintana Roo, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues in Yucatan Mexico, because so far there has been no press coverage in Cancun (or anywhere else) of this potential environmental disaster and little action from the regulatory authorities.  Marine protected areas and National Parks exist specifically to conserve extraordinary natural assets, but what good are they if we don’t use the provisions that they afford to effectively protect such critical habitats when they need it most?

You can email CONANP at  remolina@conanp.gob.mx

The post The Atlantic Sun is a potential environmental disaster first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“…in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It’s not about the fish; it’s not about the pollution; it’s not about the climate change. It’s about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.”

This past fall, I had the privilege of hearing the renowned ecologist Dr. Jeremy Jackson speak at the 2013 Western Society of Naturalist Meeting. What I most appreciate about Dr. Jackson, is that he gives it to you straight. No bullshit. And I respect that.

I encourage you all to check out his 2010 TED talk “How We Wrecked the Ocean“.

The post How we wrecked the ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For those of you without an iron stomach, hang out in the #DSNSuite more often or, a more palatable version:

The Dirty Martini

2 oz gin

1 tbsp dry vermouth

2 tbsp olive juice

2 olives (and an extra bowl on the side so I can put them on my fingers and eat them…cause I’m cool like that)

How to Dirty your Martini:

1. Place an ice cube and a small amount of water in a cocktail glass. Place in freezer for 2 – 3 minutes. 

2. Fill a mixer with all ingredients including garnish. Cover and shake hard 3 – 4 times. 

3. Remove cocktail glass from freezer, and empty. Strain contents of the mixer into the cocktail glass, include one of the olives, and serve with a mysterious smile.

The post The Dirtiest of Martinis first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The authors used chemical analysis to look for signatures of DWH oil, while simultaneously counting and identifying species of meiofauna (microscopic animals such as nematode worms, copepod crustaceans, etc.) and macrofauna (slightly larger, but still small animals such as polychaete worms). In this way, the presence of oil compounds could be compared with the number of deep-sea species present and the abundance of different organisms.

Aaaand, there’s no questioning these results. Here’s a map of sample sites, where color indicates impact (red = highest impact, with a high chemical signature of oil, low species diversity, and high nematode:copepod ratios, which is a biological indicator of oil pollution):

Now we zoom in and focus on the area surrounding the wellhead:

Since you can’t sample everywhere in the deep-sea, the authors also used their dataset to model the predicted benthic footprint over a wider area. Remember, red is bad:

And again, zooming into the area directly around the wellhead. Shazaam:

In addition to confirming the impact around the wellhead, this modeling approach picks up on shallow water impacts (orange patches off Louisiana, likely driven by surface transport of oil slicks), as well as a predicted area of moderate impact extending 17km to the southwest of the wellhead (remember that deepwater oil plume? Yeah, it seems to have affected animals living in the mud below it).

Note that the red “severely impacted” deep-sea area is 24.4 square kilometers, and the moderately impacted yellow area is 148 sq km (in total, that’s more than TWO Manhattans impacted by oil. Imagine New York City covered in sticky crude twice over…).

When you think about the size of the deep-sea impact, the road to recovery also seems quite grim. We’re talking possibly decades to return to business as normal:

Full recovery at impacted stations will require degradation or burial of DWH-derived contaminants in combination with naturally slow successional processes….Recovery of soft-bottom benthos after previous shallow-water oil spills has been documented to take years to decades [39,40]. In the deep-sea, temperature is uniformly around 4°C, and TOC [total organic carbon] and nutrient concentrations are low, so it is likely that [oil] hydrocarbons in sediments will degrade more slowly than in the water column or at the surface. Also, metabolic rates of benthos in the deep-sea are very slow and turnover times are very long [41,42]. Given deep- sea conditions, it is possible that recovery of deep-sea soft-bottom habitat and the associated communities in the vicinity of the DWH blowout will take decades or longer.

Reference:

Montagna PA, Baguley JG, Cooksey C, Hartwell I, Hyde LJ, Hyland JL, et al. (2013) Deep-Sea Benthic Footprint of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout. PLoS ONE, 8(8):e70540.

The post The Deep-sea footprint of Deepwater Horizon first appeared on Deep Sea News.

There’s nothing quite like the excitement of moving to a new city and getting your first apartment, and for me as for so many others, that feeling is amplified when the city in question is New York.  So it was when I moved from Brisbane to Brooklyn in 2000.  That first apartment was a questionably-legal loft space in a commercial building on the waterfront of the East River, directly adjacent to one of the monolithic pylons of the Manhattan Bridge in a neighbourhood now known as DUMBO.  Man, I loved that loft!  It was a 6 flight walk-up, the nearest laundry was in Brooklyn Heights, the door buzzer was broken and tar dripped on my bed from between the roof beams in summer (I was on the top floor), but it had 13 foot ceilings, wooden floors polished by 150 years of factory worker’s shoes, and a multimillion dollar unobstructed view of the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and all of downtown Manhattan beyond.  I loved nothing more than hanging out that window with a Brooklyn Lager listening to the N train rattle overhead and counting how many different modes of transport I could see at once.

Catching the F-train to Coney Island each day for work, I routinely passed the highest point in the NY Subway system, a graceful elevated arc of bridge at Smith and 9th Streets that weaves between long-defunct illuminated signs on Civil War era warehouses.  And every day I would look down from that bridge into one of the darkest, most shameful corners of the NY metropolitan area and a stark example of all that is wrong with 400 years of poorly constrained urban development in NY: The Gowanus Canal.

Gowanus Canal: the name alone is enough to nauseate most visitors to that little corner of western Brooklyn.  It’s greasy rotting wooden bulkheads, rafts of oily plastic pollution, scummy skin of god-knows-what and rank smell (oy vey, the smell!) assault the senses like few other bodies of water I have ever known (although some back bay areas of Rio and urban streams in Delhi give it a good run!).  I don’t know what’s scarier, that such a cesspool is allowed to exist in the greatest city in the world, or that most residents of Gowanus, Red Hook and Carroll Gardens  wander about their daily lives of Metrocards, bodega knock-off sunglasses and limp pizza slices – folded of course – oblivious (or worse, acclimatised) to the unmitigated environmental disaster that snakes from Greenwood cemetery to the harbour.  Of course I’m not the only one who would gag at the mere thought of that fetid ditch, and it seems like there might finally be some action to make a major restoration of the Gowanus Canal area: it was listed as a Superfund site by the US-EPA in 2010 and the agency is now considering options about how to clean it up.

Gowanus Creek was an original feature of the natural shoreline of the western tip of Long Island that is now Brooklyn and was named after a chief of the resident Canarsee native tribe.  As the industrial revolution exploded in NY, that part of Brooklyn began to develop rapidly and the water quality in the creek began it’s inexorable decline.  In the mid-19th century the creek was engineered into a 1.5 mile canal and began to be used to transport materials to and from the slew of ink, paint, gas, coal, chemical and other factories proliferating in the surrounds.  The low-lying salt marsh was reclaimed, the channel dredged and the shoreline hardened with concrete, boulders and wooden beam bulkheads, with the work completed in 1854.  Here’s where the first major error took place.  The original canal design was supposed to maintain good tidal flushing of the creek using a system of locks, but these were value engineered out of the plan, all but ensuring that the upper reaches would eventually become both polluted and starved of the life-giving oxygenated water otherwise delivered twice daily by the (unfortunately gentle) NY tides.  This situation was exacerbated as the surrounding wetlands continued to be drained for residential development; the first sewerage pipes from these areas were directed into the creek in 1858.  An agreement to redirect these to the East river in the 1860’s was never executed, so the canal continued it’s pollution from both the 50-odd factories in the area and an expanding series of raw sewage discharges.  An attempt was made to improve the flushing of the canal at the turn of the century by connecting a major stormwater drain (like, 17ft diameter!) from Greene Street to the canal, but rather than flush the canal with oxygenated seawater, it simply provided a periodic input of freshwater washed from the hardened streets of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, with all the unimaginable filth that inevitably went with that.  This situation couldn’t last, so a new pipe was built to the harbour and fitted with a pumping station to force seawater from NY Bay into the upper reaches of the canal with a 7 foot propeller.  This arrangement didn’t cure the canal’s ills, but it did get it through the busiest part of its history when up to 25,000 vessels a day transited the Gowanus (nowadays its “just” a thousand or so).  At that time it was the nation’s busiest commercial waterway, moving 6 million tons of cargo each year in the years around WW1.  The pumping station flushing system operated until (so the story goes), a maintenance worker accidentally dropped a manhole cover on a critical part of the motor in 1960, permanently disabling it; the pumping station never operated again.  These days the canal is used less, but is no less contaminated; the sediments have high levels of persistent pollutants like PCBs and PAHs and the marine pathogen counts are off the chart from continued sewage inputs and stormwater runoff.

There IS life in the canal yet.  No longer will you find the creek’s famed fat oysters that Mark Kurlansky wrote about and there’s certainly nothing in there you would want to eat, but the occasional bass & spider crab pass through, and apparently there are some very interesting and adaptable microbes found in the tar-like sediment sludge.  Supposedly a Minke whale swam into the canal in 2007, beached itself and died, but its hard to say whether it got sick because it went into the canal, or went into the canal because it was sick.  Either way, with dissolved oxygen levels consistently below 1ppm (the definition of “anoxic”), persistent chemical pollution and 20 active combined sewer overflows, the canal is still as nasty as ever.

Current NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has resisted the Superfund listing of the Gowanus because it means ceding some authority over city property to the feds and adding a 5th (count ’em!) superfund site to the western part of Brooklyn, which affects public perception and – no doubt – real estate values.  But, radical problems require radical solutions and the Superfund listing and associated restoration process (& funding) offers the canal probably it’s best chance to see some meaningful improvement.  Degraded urban sites can be renewed.  Great work has been done at nearby Brooklyn Bridge Park, for example, which was built in DUMBO around the time I was there and involved removing hardened shorelines, creating a pebble beach on the East River and building grassy areas and playgrounds now popular with the families that have moved into the area as “gentrification” has progressed.  A remediation plan is expected to be chosen shortly with restoration efforts in the Canal to commence later this year and continue until the Canal meets federal standards.  One day in the not-too-distant future, then, I’d love to go back to NY, take a ride on the F-train to Smith and 9th and look down into a new sort of canal.  I don’t expect to see a Thoreau-ian idyll of waving cord grass and bluefish chasing silversides in the shallows, but it sure would be nice to NOT see the rainbow of oil on water, half a rusty shopping cart and an Oldsmobile slowly sinking into the sludge.

Sources/Further reading – Kevin Olsen’s excellent list of Gowanus Canal resources including the two two pictures above. NY Magazine’s “A Brief History of Slime” by Christopher Bonanos. And of course, Wikipedia

The post FEATURED POST: A (fetid) river runs through it, the Brooklyn edition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

• I’ll take my fish in oil please. PLoS One published an article by Fodrie and Heck concluding that immediate catastrophic loss of fish was avoided in the Gulf oil spill. They also found change in the species present from before and after.  Although this is tentatively good news that coastal fish populations are unscathed for now, I remain skeptical.  As the authors are quick to note, we know little of “the potential long-term impacts facing fishes as a result of chronic exposure and delayed, indirect effects.”
• How sharks make you money. Slate publishes a great article by Juliet Eilperin discussing how shark conservation also makes economic sense.  “A recent Australian study found that, over the course of its lifetime, a reef shark off Palau brings in $1.9 million to the nation’s economy, and shark tourism brings Palau $18 million annually.”
• I sure do miss those worms.  In 1978, an experimental dredging for polymetalic nodules occurred in the deep-sea floor of the tropical Eastern Pacific.  Milijutin and colleagues sampled this area twenty six years later. After nearly three decades of recovery time, the number and diversity of nematodes has still not recovered.
• No really geo-sequestration is great idea. A new study again in my favorite journal, PLoS One, demonstrates that the cockamamie geo-sequestration scheme of fertilizing the oceans with iron is bad for the deep sea. Iron enrichment near the Southern Indian Ocean lead to changes in the types of species that lived on the deep-sea floor.  Interestingly, the living communities began to take on one of the key characteristics of  polluted marine communities, a few species became really abundant and every other species became rare. The message from this and the last study seems to be leave metals where they are.
• Holy shit. Of course nothing has stirred deep-sea scientists recently like the paper by Kato et al. The group found that rare-earth elements and the metal yttrium used in electronics and green technologies are found in abundance on the deep Pacific seafloor.  From the paper, “We estimate that an area of just one square kilometre, surrounding one of the sampling sites, could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements.” Given China’s monopoly on rare-earth elements and the pressure to supplant this, you can see this presents a considerable conservation risk the deep sea.  Of course some think this is a pipe dream taking decades and billions of dollar to develop.  But given the economic and political pressure and the ingenuity of the Japanese, I would rather opt on the conservative side and have conservation in place.  Word on the wire is that the International Seabed Authority is promptly acting and the deep-sea scientific community moving to issue a statement.
• Double holy shit.  A new study calls for seven commercially valuable species to be placed on the IUCN Redlist. These include White and Blue Marlin, Spanish and Australian Spotted Mackrel, and Bigeye, Atlantic Bluefin, and Southern Bluefin Tuna.  The IUCN is expected to update their list in near future.  This will greatly bolster conservation efforts in EEZ’s but conservation in international waters will still remain a challenge.
• Crying myself to sleep again tonight.  A great new study that still makes me want to cry by my friend, Derek Tittensor with Boris Worm demonstrates that 9 of 13 species of tuna and billfish occupy less ocean now than they used to.  Atlantic Bluefin Tunn have seen almost a 50% reduction in their ocean range since 1960.
• Not getting my hopes up again. Taiwan is poised to ban fishermen from killing sharks for fins.  As Parasight says on Twitter “Believe it when i see it enforced”
• I’m really never getting out of bed again. Drilling is now approved off world heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. “The approval to explore for gas allows Shell Australia to drill an exploration well 50km west of the boundary of the marine park.” What could go wrong? Thanks CK for bringing that to my attention.
• Thinking about a vacation.  Go ahead! Ecotourism may be our last hope.

The post Does Weeping Help? Recent Conservation News first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Follow along with Fukushima researchers first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Japanese authorities said Tuesday they had discovered for the first time fish swimming off the country’s Pacific coast carrying high levels of radioactive materials. The finding, the latest blow from the nuclear crisis, is stoking concerns about environmental damage to local marine life, the safety of the nation’s food supply, and the viability of Japan’s iconic seafood industry, which was already struggling following the tsunami

via Japan Finds Radiation in Fish – WSJ.com.

Also make sure to check our Julia Whitty’s excellent post on the currents off Japan and how the radiation will spread.

The post Japan Finds Radiation in Fish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When a blowout occurs at great depths, colder temperatures and high pressures cause the formation of solid, ice-like methane hydrates.  Thus, deepwater blowouts produce plumes that are less buoyant.  If the water column is stratified with different densities of water masses, the rise of the plume may terminate.  Even with small density gradients in the water column the plume could be trapped. Oil from a deepwater blowout may finally arrive at the surface due to the individual buoyancies of oil droplets.  Thus, the resulting oil slick from a deepwater blowout can only be predicted by knowing both the distribution of different size oil droplets and the local current regime.

Because of these complications Johansen in 2003 stated “Modeling of deep-water releases of gas and oil is a demanding task that implies conventional plume theory in combination with thermodynamics and mass transfer calculations.”  In other words, modeling a deep-water plume, requires the combination of multiple complex theories and equations. “ In total, without major modifications, blowout models derived for shallow to moderate water depths can be expected to produce unrealistic predictions of plume behavior and surface spreading when applied to blowouts from deep-water.”

The retention of the plume in deepwater, and the complicated dynamics governing it, was exemplified in 4 experiments conducted in 2000 at 840 meters in the Norwegian Sea.  A gas and oil mixture was pumped to depth and released into the water.  The total volume of oil at the surface estimated from aerial surveys was 78% smaller than that released at depth.   Johansen’s models of the experimentally produced plumes were generally in good agreement but required multiple model additions including: modeling bubble instability, an understanding of dissolved gas saturation condition necessary for sustained hydrate formation, maximum droplet rise velocity, a first order decay model to account for the loss of surface oil due to natural dispersion and evaporation, and the empirical sized distribution of droplets.   The take home point…the already complex models required more complexity.

Johansen recommended in 2003 that deepwater plume models needed enhancement by incorporating more information on currents and stratification, gas behavior, and hydrate formation.

In relation to the BP oil spill, perhaps some points should be stressed.

1. Much of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout is not at the surface but residing deep in the water column, i.e. we are only seeing the tip of an oily iceberg.
2. The retention of the plume in deepwater was to be expected from both modeling and experimental results published in 2003 and earlier.  The denial and shock by BP in response to reports of the existence of a deepwater plume by the scientific community was completely unwarranted.
3. Details of the total amount of oil residing in the water column, its extent, and eventual spread, may require levels of data and modeling complexity beyond our reach.

Johansen, O. (2003). Development and verification of deep-water blowout models Marine Pollution Bulletin, 47 (9-12), 360-368 DOI: 10.1016/S0025-326X(03)00202-9

The post The Complex Science of Predicting Oil Plumes first appeared on Deep Sea News.