March 6, 2017 — Gray’s Reef is a run of small ridges in the ocean off northern Georgia that looks like a Western rock canyon underwater. It’s swarmed by a stunning diversity of more than 300 different kinds of marine creatures and fish. And it’s more threatened than any one expected. The entire Southeast coast is.
The ocean water there is acidifying — becoming more corrosive, more poisonous — even faster than the air above it, where the acid is supposed to be coming from. There must be other sources. Finding them could be key to protecting marine life and a multi-million fishing industry and food source.
That in a nutshell is why the newly formed Southeast Ocean and Coastal Acidification Network met in Charleston this week to work out priorities for monitoring and research.
Its goal is to pull together “the state of the science” as it applies to the Southeast, bring in commercial anglers and other interests for their in-the-field observations, then develop plans to prevent the sort of ecosystem collapse that occurred on the West Coast with shellfish, according to organizer Debra Hernandez in an earlier story.