Saving Seafood

The oceans are suffocating: Climate change is causing low oxygen levels

November 3, 2016 — Global climate change produces many effects — warming air energizes the atmosphere and intensifies storms; warmer water expands and raises sea level; storage of more carbon dioxide in the oceans is acidifying large realms. Now it is becoming clear that another, profound result of human activities is underway: lower oxygen levels in our oceans.

The world’s oceans, coastal seas, estuaries, and many rivers and lakes are experiencing declines in dissolved oxygen. Long known as an issue associated with sewage discharges and fertilizer runoff, the problem now is exacerbated by climate change, often independent of nutrient loads, and is global in scale.

If left unchecked, this decline will result in losses of fisheries and biodiversity, poorer water quality, and knock-on effects ranging from falling tourism to reduced marine ecosystem services.

In 2015, scientists from around the world formed an IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission)-UNESCO working group called the Global Ocean Oxygen Network or GO2NE, of which I am a member. Our goals are to raise awareness about this problem, called deoxygenation, and stimulate research and policy to understand and mitigate it.

The how and why of oxygen in water

The aquatic environment holds dissolved gases; oxygen is one of them. Add in aquatic plants, a CO2 source, nutrients and light, and the resulting photosynthesis creates biomass and oxygen. Add more nutrients, and more photosynthetic production occurs. Consumers of the plant matter also use oxygen in the process and recycle the nutrients and carbon from organic to inorganic forms. This simplified cycle describes most aquatic ecosystems.

Read the full story at Salon

New Hampshire Sen. Ayotte Questions NOAA on At-Sea Monitoring and National Standard Eight

February 24, 2016 — The following was released by the Office of Senator Kelly Ayotte:

This week during a Senate Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard Subcommittee hearing, U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte questioned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Deputy Assistant Administrator for Regulatory Programs Samuel Rauch on the administration’s recent announcement that it would require New England fishermen to pay for its at-sea monitoring (ASM) program beginning March 1, 2016.

“I look at your budget: $5.4 billion for 2015, and you can’t find $3.78 million to fund at-sea monitoring, which is consistent with what many of us have written in the 2015 appropriations bill for NOAA,” asked Ayotte. “I can’t believe that we have a system where we’re going to put iconic fishermen out of business. The large folks – they’re going to be fine. The small fishermen – they’re done.”

Ayotte has long been a strong and consistent voice for New Hampshire’s small boat fishermen in fighting against onerous federal regulations. In September, she introduced legislation to terminate NOAA’s independent third-party ASM program unless NOAA fully funds the program using dollars within the its existing budget. Ayotte and Senator Jeanne Shaheen also previously called for a full investigation into NOAA’s ASM program for the Northeast Multispecies Fishery, which includes New Hampshire’s coastal region.

Also in September, Ayotte hosted a roundtable discussion in Portsmouth with NOAA officials, fishermen, and business leaders to discuss concerns regarding fishing regulations, federal catch-share limits, NOAA’s process for determining fish stocks, the implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and the imposition of fees for at-sea monitors on commercial fishing vessels.

Read the release from the office of Senator Kelly Ayotte

More plastic than fish in oceans by 2050

January 19, 2016 — The world is flooded with plastic garbage.

There will be more plastic than fish in terms of weight in the world’s oceans by 2050, the World Economic Forum warned Tuesday.

Plastic has become one of the world’s most popular materials, combining amazing functionality and very low production costs. Its use has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years and is expected to double again in the next 20 years.

Almost everybody in the world comes into contact with it — over a quarter of all plastic is used for packaging, the most popular use of the material.

But only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling. The reuse rate is terrible compared to other materials — 58% of paper and up to 90% of iron and steel gets recycled.

It gets worse. Almost a third of all plastic packaging escapes collection systems and ends up in nature or clogging up infrastructure.

Read the full story at CNN Money at KCRA

 

Remember the Oceans!

November 25, 2015 — On Nov. 30, more than 140 world leaders, including President Obama, will meet in Paris for the beginning of a historic two-week conference on climate change. There’s already been a flurry of voluntary national pledges, increasing confidence that the meeting will likely result in the first global agreement on emissions reductions. What they won’t be discussing, however (due to diplomatic quirks), is the effect of climate change on the world’s largest and most important ecosystem: the oceans.

That’s a shame. As I wrote this summer in Rolling Stone, there’s increasing evidence that the world’s oceans are nearing the point of no return. They’re getting hit with a double whammy—rising temperatures and acidification—that together are forcing fundamental changes to the basis of the planet’s food chain.

So far, the oceans have absorbed about 93 percent of all the additional heat energy trapped by rising greenhouse gas concentrations. That’s already prompted the loss of about 40 percent of the world’s coral reefs, accelerated by a series of worldwide bleaching events in which exceptionally warm water temperatures prompt normally symbiotic algae to become toxic—the most recent of which was just this year. Since coral reefs—the “rainforests of the sea”—support a quarter of all marine life on just 0.1 percent of the ocean area, a mass extinction may already be underway. If we lose the oceans, we lose everything.

Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have surged to record highs far beyond any previous measurements. That means krill and anchovies have been forced into a narrow corridor of relatively cooler water close to the shore, and predators like whales are feasting on the dregs of an ecosystem. Along the coast of California, there’ve been sightings of rarely present species such as white pelicans, flying fish, Mexican red crabs, and nearly extinct basking sharks. Last year, a subtropical Humboldt squid was caught in southern Alaska—along with a thresher shark that was also far from its natural range. After a startling number of starving baby California sea lions began washing up on shore a couple of years ago, a colony has taken up residence in the Columbia River in Oregon. Marine life is moving north, adapting in real-time to the warming ocean. But for how much longer?

Read the full story at Slate

CINDY ZIPF: Potential harm to marine life lies beneath Rutgers’ sea level study

July 4, 2015 — NEW JERSEY — In direct response to Lincoln Hollister’s June 10 op-ed titled “As N.J. sea levels rise, politics trumps science,” how tragic for such a distinguished professor of geology to profess such bunk.

Let us all agree on one fact, geologists study non-living matter –rocks, soil, sand, minerals. Hence, they are not experts in the field of marine biology, and would not be the “go to” scientists to determine harm from a seismic ocean blasting study led by the Rutgers Geology Dept. Would you go to a plumber for heart surgery? So while it’s a free country and they are welcome to an opinion about the effect of the Rutgers study on marine life – 250-decibel blasts, every five seconds, 24 hours a day for 30 days, in a tiny (as the ocean goes) area of ocean off Barnegat Light – it is not a studied one, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Read the full opinion piece at The Star Ledger 

 

 

What If the Oceans Were National Parks?

June 29, 2015 — ASPEN, Colo. — Next year will mark the centennial of the U.S. National Park Service. In the 100 years since it was established, the national parks have become one of America’s most popular federal programs. Now, marine scientists and conservationists want to do for the oceans what the National Park Service did for the land.

When the National Park Service was proposed, “it was a really crazy notion,” said Jane Lubchenco, prominent marine scientist and former administrator of NOAA, to an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “It was so far from people’s thinking that wilderness was important to protect in and of itself.” Parks and other wilderness now define the American landscape, Lubchenco said. Today, she said, we think about the oceans the way we thought about wilderness 100 years ago, when few Americans had ever visited Yosemite or Yellowstone.

“Fourteen percent of land—all around the world, all countries—is set aside in some kind of protected status,” Lubchenco said. The equivalent for oceans? 3.4 percent, according to the World Database on Protected Areas. And of that, Lubchenco pointed out, only one percent is fully closed off from extractive activities such as fishing.

Half a century ago, we thought the oceans were too big to fail, said Sylvia Earle, Lubchenco’s co-panelist. “But under the surface, it’s shocking.” Earle, NOAA’s first female chief scientist, is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. The oysters of Chesapeake Bay, she said, have declined to one percent of their historic population, because of factors such as overfishing and pollution. “How long till we get to the point where we can eliminate whole categories of wildlife?” she asked.

Read the full story at The Atlantic