May 5, 2021 — The gulf’s sardine fishery has collapsed four times in the past 30 years, and researchers in California worry about the future of the sardine industry.
Alfredo Giron of Stanford University and Octavio Aburto of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked at how sardines are faring.
The study shows that there are natural boom-bust cycles where the small fish are plentiful and then scarce.
August 8, 2019 — Researchers with a joint venture of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CalCOF) are finding it a slow summer for biological productivity in US west coast waters, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
CalCOF, which expanded from a program organized in 1949 to better understand the collapse of the California sardine industry, cruises the coast quarterly to check fisheries, marine ecosystems and water chemistry. This time the scientists spent 16 days reviewing the Southern California Bight and California Current.
April 26, 2019 — Marine animals are twice as vulnerable to climate change-driven habitat loss as their land-dwelling counterparts, a new survey published in the journal Nature finds.
As Mark Kaufman reports for Mashable, the analysis—centered on around 400 cold-blooded species, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans and lizards—suggests marine creatures are ill-equipped to adapt to rising temperatures and, unlike land animals that can seek shelter in the shade or a burrow, largely unable to escape the heat.
“You don’t have anywhere to go,” Natalya Gallo, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study, tells Kaufman. “Maybe you can hide under a kelp leaf, but the entire water around you has warmed.”
Speaking with National Geographic’s Christina Nunez, lead author Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, further explains that ocean dwellers “live in an environment that, historically, hasn’t changed temperature all that much.”
Given that cold-blooded creatures rely on their surroundings to regulate body temperature, relatively stable marine ecosystems have actually made their inhabitants more susceptible to significant temperature changes. And while ocean temperatures are still much lower than those on land, as Anthony J. Richardson and David S. Schoeman point out in an accompanying Nature News and Views piece, marine heat waves, increased carbon dioxide pollution and other products of global warming are driving Earth’s oceans to higher temperatures than ever before.
To assess the threat posed by warming waters, Pinsky and her colleagues calculated “thermal safety margins” for 318 terrestrial and 88 marine animals. According to Motherboard’s Becky Ferreira, this measure represents the difference between a species’ upper heat tolerance and its body temperature at both full heat exposure and in “thermal refuge,” or cooled down sanctuaries ranging from shady forests to the depths of the ocean.
December 27, 2018 — Four researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography have earned state grants to study how climate change is shifting conditions on the Pacific Coast, including cliffs and tide pools.
Together they were awarded $1 million from the California Ocean Protection Council to create maps, models and other data sources that will help chart the changes to California’s coastline, and guide strategies to deal with them.
The council was created in 2004 as part of the California Ocean Protection Act, and works to maintain “healthy, resilient and productive ocean and coastal ecosystems.” The grants of $250,000 to each scientist are part of a larger project to fund research on topics such as sea-level rise and coastal resilience, marine pollution and renewable energy.
Marine biology professor Ronald Burton will use “DNA metabarcoding,” a method of high volume genetic analysis, to identify fish eggs and determine which species are spawning from La Jolla to Santa Cruz. Jennifer Smith, an associate professor of marine biology, is building 3-D images of rocky intertidal zones to study how sea-level rise will affect the wealth of marine life in tide pools.
Scientist Adam Young will map the stability of coastal cliffs and detect “erosion hot spots.” And associate professor Brice Semmens will develop a time series of bass species abundance dating back to the late 1940s in order to guide management of the popular recreational fishery.
November 14, 2018 — Scientists behind a major study that claimed the Earth’s oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.
Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists’ work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth’s oceans “have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought.”
“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”
The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements. As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper’s conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time.
The central conclusion of the study — that oceans are retaining ever more energy as more heat is being trapped within Earth’s climate system each year — is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions. And it hasn’t changed much despite the errors. But Keeling said the authors’ miscalculations mean there is a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought.
“I accept responsibility for what happened because it’s my role to make sure that those kind of details got conveyed,” Keeling said.
The study’s lead author was Laure Resplandy of Princeton University. Other researchers were with institutions in China, Paris, Germany and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
November 1, 2018 — The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday.
Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by Earth’s atmosphere — the yearly amount representing more than eight times the world’s annual energy consumption.
In the scientific realm, the new findings help resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans before 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, differing types of temperature records — and an overall lack of them — contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up.
The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.
December 21, 2017 — Each year between February and June, the fish gather to spawn in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. The fish, a type of croaker called the Gulf corvina, meet in water as cloudy as chocolate milk. It’s a reunion for the entire species, all members of which reproduce within a dozen-mile stretch of the delta.
When the time is right, a few days before the new or full moons, the male fish begin to sing. To humans, the sound is machine guns going off just below the waterline. To female fish, the rapid burr-burr-burr is a Bing Crosby croon. Make that Bing cranked up to 11.
Marine biologists who recorded the sound describe the animals as the “loudest fish ever documented,” said Timothy J. Rowell, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Rowell and Brad E. Erisman, a University of Texas at Austin fisheries scientist, spent four days in 2014 snooping on the fish with sonar and underwater microphones. The land surrounding the delta is desolate, Rowell said. Fresh water that once fed wild greenery has been diverted to faucets and hoses.
But the delta is alive with the sound of fish. “When you arrive at the channels of the delta, you can hear it in the air even while the engine is running on the boat,” Rowell said. Sound is measured differently in water than in air; still, the fish are as loud as lawn mowers, Rowell said.
Read the full story from the Washington Post at Science Alert
April 18, 2016 — Human defense mechanisms could be disrupted by the presence of a class of organic pollutants in fish and other food, according to new research.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, appears to be the first to identify the mechanism by which chemicals like flame retardants—present in many household furniture items, like sofas and mattresses—and the pesticide DDT block a key protein from removing toxins from the body. P-glycoprotein, the protein in question, defends against toxins that entered the body by transporting them for removal. The new research shows that persistent organic pollutants, known as POPs, latch onto proteins and prevent them from functioning.
“These environmental chemicals form intimate interactions,” says study author Amro Hamdoun of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “But instead of being expelled, these proteins interfere with the ability of p-glycoprotein from doing its job.”
Awareness about the risks of POPs is nothing new. Public health campaigners have sought to remove POPs from the environment for decades, and a 2001 treaty even committed countries to take measures to reduce human exposure to the pollutants.
April 18, 2016 — The West Coast’s famously abundant fisheries are at risk as the region’s waters become more acidic, a group of scientists have warned.
The researchers, with the West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Science Panel, this month released a report that projects dire changes to ocean chemistry and marine life, and recommends ways to avert it, including restoring kelp forests and eelgrass beds, and combating local marine pollution.
The panel, including Andrew Dickson, a professor of marine chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, convened in 2013 to study how global carbon emissions are lowering pH and reducing oxygen levels in the ocean off the West Coast.
“Although ocean acidification is a global phenomenon, emerging research indicates that the U.S.-Canadian West Coast will face some of the earliest, most severe changes in ocean carbon chemistry,” the report states.
February 1, 2016 — When you go out for seafood, are you aware of what that fish on your plate might have been exposed to while swimming around in the world’s oceans? According to new research, fish populations around the world have been contaminated with industrial and agricultural pollutants known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego examined hundreds of peer-reviewed reports that stretched from 1969 through 2012. Some of the pollutants that were identified in the study included 20th century “legacy” toxins like DDT, which is banned in the U.S. and no longer widely used worldwide, and mercury, as well as more contemporary pollutants like coolants and other industrial chemicals like flame retardants.
“Based on the best data collected from across the globe, we can say that POPs can be anywhere and in any species of marine fish,” study co-author Stuart Sandin said in a press release.
However, there were some signs of improvement. The researchers found that the concentrations of pollutants contaminating fish populations have been dropping at a consistent rate over the past 30 years.
Read the full story at CBS News