Saving Seafood

Despite Many Threats, Some Coral Reefs Are Thriving

September 10, 2018 — RAROTONGA, Cook Islands — Twenty-one degrees, 12 minutes south of the equator, 2,771 miles south-southeast of the southern tip of the island of Hawaii, 30 feet below 4-foot swells, Nicole Pedersen swims slowly, wearing a wetsuit, headband, and full scuba gear and carrying a custom-built plexiglass-and-PVC case the size of a tackle box. Within it, twin DSLR cameras automatically photograph a reef a quarter-mile off the coast of Rarotonga. It’s the last of 12 dives she and colleagues from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have made over three days of their research expedition here.

Pedersen, 25, is a staff researcher at Scripps, part of the University of California, San Diego, and the image digitization coordinator for a natural experiment called the 100 Island Challenge, launched in the summer of 2016. The images she’s gathering—4 billion pixels comprising 70 to 80 gigabytes of data, just from today—will ultimately help the team build a three-dimensional model of the 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) plot of reef Pedersen is swimming over in a lawn mower pattern.

As she gently flaps her black-and-yellow fins, maintaining as constant a speed as is possible underwater where waves and currents can toss her off course, marine ecologists Stuart Sandin and Brian Zgliczynski swim alongside her, counting every fish in the plot and marking on a waterproof data sheet each one’s species and approximate size. The more than 4,000 dives the team will make over five years are the data-collection component of an unprecedented attempt to characterize five examples of every type of reef on the planet—twice—to see how each is responding to climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, overfishing, and the other insults humans have been throwing at many of them with increasing frequency and intensity over the last few decades.

The 100 Island Challenge is so wildly ambitious that even one of its co-leaders, Scripps coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith, thought it would be absurd to try when Sandin, the project’s lead investigator, and Zgliczynski, a postdoctoral researcher, pitched it to her several years ago. “You guys are idiots,” Zgliczynski says she told them.

Over a dinner of wahoo fillets and Cooks Lager, the local brew, following the first day of diving in Rarotonga, the scientists say they could already see that the island’s reefs, alive with new growth of diverse coral species and crowded with fish scraping away excess algae, are not like those that have dominated the news lately. “Coral reefs are bleaching four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s, scientists say,” read a Washington Postheadline in January. “Coral Reefs at ‘Make or Break Point’, UN Environment Head Says,” blared another January story in The Guardian. “Coral reefs at risk of dissolving as oceans get more acidic,” announced Reuters in February.

Unchecked coastal development pollutes reefs; illegal, unreported, and unmonitored fishing depletes them; carbon dioxide emissions inhibit their ability to grow; and historic ocean warming has in recent years caused back-to-back bleaching events that threatened reefs worldwide, including potentially as much as half of the Great Barrier Reef’s northern corals. Still, although the bad news is undeniable, it’s not the only story. “And it’s not the story when communities take control of their marine ecosystem,” Sandin says. “When a community is engaged and listens to what’s underwater, they can keep it going.”

Read the full story at Scientific American

 

As warming sea devastates coral, Florida Keys economy will suffer

June 25, 2017 — Twenty feet under water, Nature Conservancy biologist Jennifer Stein swims over to several large corals and pulls several laminated cards from her dive belt.

“Disease,” reads one, as she gestures to a coral that exhibits white splotches. “Recent mortality,” reads another card. Along the miles of coral reef off the Florida Keys, Stein and her fellow divers have found countless examples of this essential form of ocean life facing sickness and death.

The pattern of decay is shaping up as one of the sharpest impacts of climate change in the continental United States – and a direct threat to economic activity in the Keys, a haven for diving, fishing and coastal tourism.

The debate over climate change is often framed as one that pits jobs against the need to protect the planet for future generations. In deciding to exit the Paris climate agreement and roll back domestic environmental regulations, the Trump administration said it was working to protect jobs.

But what is happening here – as the warming of the sea devastates the coral reef – is a stark example of how rising temperatures can threaten existing economies.

Read the full story from the Washington Post at the Portland Press Herald

Coral Reef Die-Off Reaches Record Duration, Says New Research

February 26, 2016 — Rising global temperatures combined with an especially powerful El Niño are causing one of the biggest coral reef die-off events ever recorded.

The researchers, who are monitoring and forecasting offsite link the loss of corals from disease and heat stress due to record ocean temperatures, report that the global coral bleaching event that started in 2014 could extend well into 2017.

Approximately 500 million people worldwide depend upon reefs for food and to protect coastlines from storms and erosion. Coral reefs provide habitat, spawning and nursery grounds for economically important fish species; provide fishing, recreation, and tourism jobs and income to local economies; are a source of new medicines, and are hotspots of marine biodiversity. Reefs contribute approximately $29.8 billion to world economies each year. In the United States, NOAA Fisheries estimates the commercial value of U.S. fisheries from coral reefs is more than $100 million.

“We are currently experiencing the longest global coral bleaching event ever observed,” said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “We may be looking at a 2- to 2½-year-long event. Some areas have already seen bleaching two years in a row.”

According to Eakin, the length of the event means corals in some parts of the world have no time to recover before they are hit by more bleaching. The current global bleaching event is hammering some reefs repeatedly.

Scientists first observed the current global coral bleaching event beginning in mid-2014, when bleaching began in the western Pacific Ocean. In October 2015, as the current El Niño was still strengthening, NOAA scientists declared the third global bleaching event on record was underway.

The NOAA coral scientists point out that reefs that bleached in 2015 in the Caribbean and Florida Keys have just started to recover, but may start bleaching all over again as early as July. Eakin also notes that in the Pacific, corals in Fiji’s nearshore waters are bleaching with lots of dead coral for the second consecutive year, and could be worse than last year.

Read the full story at Canada Journal