Today’s cruise ships are environmental nightmares. Just one vessel packed with a veritable petri dish of passengers can burn as much as 250 tons of fuel per day, or about the same emissions as 12,000 cars. If the industry is to survive, it will need to adapt quickly in order to adequately address the myriad ecological emergencies facing the planet—and one Norwegian cruise liner company is attempting to meet those challenges head-on.

Earlier today, Hurtigruten Norway unveiled the first designs for a zero-emission cruise ship scheduled to debut by the end of the decade. First announced in March 2022 as “Sea Zero,” Hurtigruten (Norwegian for “the Fast Route”) showed off its initial concept art for the craft on Wednesday. The vessel features three autonomous, retractable, 50m-high sail wing rigs housing roughly 1,500-square-meters of solar panels. Alongside the sails, the ship will be powered by multiple 60-megawatt batteries that recharge while in port, as well as wind technology. Other futuristic additions to the vessel will include AI maneuvering capabilities, retractable thrusters, contra-rotating propellers, advanced hull coatings, and proactive hull cleaning tech.

[Related: Care about the planet? Skip the cruise, for now.]

“Following a rigorous feasibility study, we have pinpointed the most promising technologies for our groundbreaking future cruise ships,” said Hurtigruten Norway CEO Hedda Felin. Henrik Burvang, Research and Innovation Manager at VARD, the company behind the ship concept designs, added the forthcoming boat’s streamlined shape, alongside its hull and propulsion advances, will reduce energy demand. Meanwhile, VARD is “developing new design tools and exploring new technologies for energy efficiency,” said Burvang.

With enhanced AI capabilities, the cruise ships’ crew bridge is expected to significantly shrink in size to resemble airplane cockpits, but Hurtigruten’s futuristic, eco-conscious designs don’t rest solely on its next-gen ship and crew. The 135-meter-long concept ship’s estimated 500 guests will have access to a mobile app capable of operating their cabins’ ventilation systems, as well as track their own water and energy consumption while aboard the vessel.

Next up for Hurtigruten’s Sea Zero project is a two-year testing and development phase for the proposed tech behind the upcoming cruise ship, particularly focusing on battery production, propulsion, hull design, and sustainable practices. Meanwhile, the company will also look into onboard hotel operational improvements, which Hurtigruten states can consume as much as half a ship’s overall energy reserves.

Hurtigruten also understands if 2030 feels like a long time to wait until a zero-emission ship. In the meantime, the company has already upgraded two of its seven vessels to run on a battery-hybrid-power system, with a third on track to be retrofitted this fall.  Its additional vessels are being outfitted with an array of tech to CO2 emissions by 20-percent, and nitrogen oxides by as much as 80 percent.

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Brazil’s coastal waters teem with a rich array of species that paint a living tapestry beneath the waves. This underwater world is particularly special because many of its species are endemic – they are found nowhere else on Earth. The southwestern Atlantic is home to 111 endemic reef fish species, each of which plays a crucial role in the intricate web of marine life.

An uninvited guest has arrived in these tropical waters: the Pacific red lionfish (Pterois volitans). Renowned for its stunning appearance and voracious appetite, the lionfish was first detected off of Florida in 1985 and has spread throughout the Caribbean, killing reef fish in large numbers.

Now it has breached a formidable obstacle: the Amazon-Orinoco river plume, which flows into the Atlantic from northeastern Brazil. This massive discharge of fresh water has long functioned as a barrier separating Caribbean fish species from those farther south along Brazil’s coastline.

Scientists and environmental managers widely agree that the lionfish invasion in Brazil is a potential ecological disaster. As a marine ecologist, I believe mitigating the damage will require a comprehensive approach that addresses the ecological, social and economic harms wrought by this predatory fish.

Tracing the lionfish’s spread

It’s easy to see why lionfish appeal to aquarium enthusiasts. Native to the warm waters of the Indo-Pacific ocean, they are 12 to 15 inches long, with red and white stripes and long, showy fins. They protect themselves with dorsal spines that deliver painful venomous stings.

Lionfish were first detected in the Atlantic Ocean in 1985 off Dania Beach, Florida, probably discarded by a tropical fish collector. Since then they have spread throughout the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and northward as far as Bermuda and North Carolina – one of the most successful marine invasions on record. A close relative, the common lionfish or devil firefish (Pterois miles), has invaded the Mediterranean Sea and is spreading rapidly there.

Lionfish can be eaten safely if they are properly prepared to remove their venomous spines. In Florida and the Caribbean, lionfish hunting tournaments have become popular as a control method. However, lionfish move to deeper waters as they grow, so hunting alone can’t prevent them from spreading.

Marine scientists have anticipated for years that lionfish would someday arrive along the eastern coast of South America. A single sighting in 2014, far removed from the Amazon-Orinoco plume, was likely a result of an aquarium release rather than a natural migration.

Then in December 2020, local fishermen caught a pair of lionfish on coral reefs in the mesophotic, or “twilight,” zone several hundred feet below the mighty Amazon River plume. A scuba diver also encountered a lionfish in the oceanic archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 220 miles (350 kilometers) off Brazil’s tropical coast.

New invasion fronts have quickly opened along Brazil’s north and northeast coasts, covering eight states and diverse marine habitats. More than 350 lionfish have been tallied along a 1,720-mile (2,765-kilometer) swath of coastline.

Aggressive predators without natural enemies

Like many introduced species, lionfish in the Atlantic don’t face natural population control mechanisms such as predation, disease and parasitism that limit their numbers in the Indo-Pacific. A 2011 study found that lionfish on reefs in the Bahamas were larger and more abundant than their Pacific counterparts.

Lionfish thrive in many marine habitats, from mangroves and seagrass beds to deepwater reefs and shipwrecks. They are aggressive, persistent hunters that feed on smaller fish, including species that keep coral reefs clean and others that are food for important commercial species like snappers and groupers. In a 2008 study, when lionfish appeared on reefs in the Bahamas, populations of small juvenile reef fish declined by 80% within five weeks.

Brazil’s northeast coast, with its rich artisanal fishing activity, stands on the front line of this invasive threat. Lionfish are present in coastal mangrove forests and estuaries – brackish water bodies where rivers meet the sea. These areas serve as nurseries for important commercial fish species. Losing them would increase the risk of hunger in a region that is already grappling with substantial social inequality.

Fishers also face the threat of lionfish stings, which are not lethal to humans but can cause painful wounds that may require medical treatment.

Facing the invasion: Brazil’s challenges

Biological invasions are easiest to control in early stages, when the invader population is still growing slowly. However, Brazil has been slow to react to the lionfish incursion.

The equatorial southwestern Atlantic, where the invasion is taking place, has been less thoroughly surveyed than the Caribbean. There has been little high-resolution seabed mapping, which would help scientists identifying potential lionfish habitats and anticipate where lionfish might spread next or concentrate their populations. Understanding of the scale of the invasion is largely based on estimates, which likely underrepresent its true extent.

Moreover, turbid waters along much of Brazil’s coast make it hard for scientists to monitor and document the invasion. Despite their distinctive appearance, lionfish are difficult to spot and record in murky water, which makes it challenging for scientists, divers and fishers to keep an accurate record of their spread.

Still another factor is that from 2018 through 2022, under former President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s government sharply cut the national science budget, reducing funding for field surveys. The COVID-19 pandemic further reduced field research because of lockdowns and social distancing measures.

Making up for lost time

Brazil has a history of inadequately monitoring for early detection of marine invasions. The lionfish is no exception. Actions thus far have been reactive and often initiated too late to be fully effective.

As one of many Brazilian scientists who warned repeatedly about a potential lionfish invasion over the past decade, I’m disheartened that my country missed the window to take early action. Now, however, marine researchers and local communities are stepping up.

Given the length of Brazil’s coast, traditional monitoring methods are often insufficient. So we’ve turned to citizen science and information technology to fill the gaps in our knowledge.

In April 2022, a group of academic researchers spearheaded the launch of an online dashboard, which is updated continuously with data from scientific surveys and local community self-reports. This interactive platform is maintained by a research group led by marine scientists Marcelo Soares and Tommaso Giarrizzo from the Federal University of Ceará.

The dashboard allows anyone, from fishers to recreational divers and tourists, to upload data on lionfish observations. This information supports rapid response efforts, strategic planning for preventive measures in areas still free from lionfish, and the development of localized lionfish removal programs.

I believe lionfish are here to stay and will integrate over time into Brazil’s marine ecosystems, much as they have in the Caribbean. Given this reality, our most pragmatic and effective strategy is to reduce lionfish populations below levels that cause unacceptable ecological harm.

Regions along the coast that are still lionfish-free might benefit from early and preventive actions. Comprehensive surveillance plans should include environmental education programs about exotic species; early detection approaches, using techniques such as analyzing environmental DNA; citizen science initiatives to monitor and report lionfish sightings, participate in organized culls and help collect research data; and genetic surveys to identify patterns of connectivity among lionfish populations along Brazil’s coast and between Brazilian and Caribbean populations.

Brazil missed its initial opportunity to prevent the lionfish invasion, but I believe that with strategic, swift action and international collaboration, it can mitigate the impacts of this invasive species and safeguard its marine ecosystems.

This article has been updated to reflect that the correct number of endemic reef fish species in the southwestern Atlantic is 111.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The quote “take only memories, leave nothing but footprints” is most often attributed to Duwamish Chief Si’ahl, or Chief Seattle. This saying is a core value for the 400 plus parks that make up the United States National Park Service (NPS). However, it is a lesser known quote from Seattle, Washington’s namesake that is at the heart of the second season of National Geographic’s series America’s National Parks.

“This we know; The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.”

[Related: The 10 most underrated national parks in the US.]

That human-Earth connection is a consistent presence in the five-part series that covers the mountain tops of Grand Teton National Park and the interconnected biodiversity in some of the more off-the-beaten-path parks. Such hidden gems include the tropical marinescape of Biscayne National Park in Florida, Voyageurs National Park in the wilds of northern Minnesota, the rugged Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Southern California, and Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.

Code of ethics

Even amongst the dramatic landscapes or the bioluminescent glow of coral reef spawning, the presence of people never fully disappears. Wildlife documentaries must strike a balance between getting the best footage for their films without disturbing nature.

“Most wildlife production companies will have codes of ethics, and will have the same motivation,”  America’s National Parks executive producer Anwar Mamon tells PopSci. “Our motivation is always natural behavior. Animal welfare comes first and it comes above anything that we’re doing. The secret weapon in all of this is local intel.”

For Mamon, working alongside local camera crews, NPS rangers, and indigenous peoples was the first tool in centering priceless local knowledge in producing the series. Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that Mamon was often working with local crews who practically called these parks home, and had years of experience  filming wildlife while impacting their behavior as little as possible. Special attention was also taken to limit the number of crew members at a shoot.

Tools of the trade

Mixed in with this local knowledge, some new tech aided the effort to leave only footprints. Wildstar Films has a department dedicated to helping filmmakers create new gear for their productions. “We’re very lucky. I’m not sure the tech department likes it, but we can go to them and say, ‘we want to do this, is that possible,’” laughs Mamon.

[Related: Connecting national parks could help generations of wildlife thrive.]

A new camera was used for an up-close-and-personal look at some wolf pups in a den in Voyageurs National Park. This part of Minnesota is one of the only places in the lower 48 states that wolves have lived continuously for 8,000 years, and some of the newest members of that legacy hung out in this hideout while their parents hunt. Inside the den are remote cameras about the size of a shoebox capturing their sibling squabbles and slumbers. To hide their scent, the crew covered the cameras in mud and other vegetation in the area. 

“Wolf packs, like all parents, are very protective of their young and won’t let people or any perceived threats near them. But with them being monitored by scientists and with us working very closely with the local rangers, we were able to put quite a few cameras around the den,” says Mamon.

The series also harnesses the power of tech to film some of the parks’ critical, but admittedly less flashy flora and fauna. They used a motion controlled macro rig, which is a robotic arm that can be programmed to capture incredible detail on tiny creatures like the round-leaved sundew in Lake Clark. These “little land mines” are carnivorous plants that use glistening droplets to entice and then eat unsuspecting flies, in an equally beautiful and frightful dinner display.

“Every time we send a crew out, the changing planet, becomes more and more obvious”

Another scary reality that hangs over the series like a specter is climate change in the parks. An analysis by Climate Central of over a century’s worth of warming in 62 national parks found that all 63 percent of the parks have warmed by 2°F or more. 

Alaska’s temperatures are heating up faster than any other state, thus putting the future of the unique animals that live in the extreme elevations and tundra of Lake Clark conditions in jeopardy. Further south, it’s the saltwater mangrove forests in Florida’s Biscayne National Park that store five times more carbon dioxide than tropical forests that play a “priceless role” in the fight against climate change. 

“Most of our production was impacted in some way by our changing planet. And it’s often about the unpredictability of things. That goes to everything from birthing seasons, to the change of any seasons, and weather, especially,” says Mamon. 

The series packages a harsh reality with the hopeful message of connectivity and responsibility that Americans have to these precious landscapes. One of the core messages that the team had was that the parks need our help and that we must look after our own backyards. 

[Related: Yellowstone National Park was never built to take on the rain and snow that comes with climate change.]

The conservation success of California’s Channel Islands National Park is a prime example. After serving as an agricultural powerhouse during the Civil War to keep up with demand for wool, escaped livestock harmed the native population. The island was given the time and space to heal when it was made a National Park in 1980, and animals once presumed extinct, like the northern elephant seal, bounced back. The California brown pelican was taken off the endangered species in 2009.

“It is essentially about a national park that was very much impacted by human activity, agriculture, and has made a staggering comeback, because of the amazing work of local communities and scientists,” says Mamon.

Connecting to the future

You can’t have the signature elk herds of the Grand Tetons or the largest sockeye salmon run on Earth in Lake Clark without the vegetation and smaller animals needed to sustain the big boys. Biodiversity is essential to keeping flora and fauna thriving in the parks. 

That connection extends to the indigenous people who both visit these places and have lived there for thousands of years. In Lake Clark National Park, Ruth Miller, a member of the Dena’ina tribe and Climate Justice co-director for the Native Movement, performs a salmon ceremony. Miller offers the bones of the previous year’s salmon to help the fish recognize their pathway home. “To live sustainably means practicing gratitude and giving more than you take,” she said.

To sustain the bounty of our National Parks for the future, its visitors will need to embrace this same level of gratitude.

America’s National Parks airs on National Geographic on June 5 at 9/8c. All episodes will be available to stream on Disney+ June 7.

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Industrial mining of the deep ends of the ocean for valuable minerals is becoming more of a possibility as companies search for new sources of needed minerals, such as cobalt and lithium. The devastating impacts that this noisy and extractive process could have on the ocean’s numerous species is front of mind for scientists around the world, particularly in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. Now, experts are attaching some numbers to the concerns.

[Related: Deep-sea mining has murky aftereffects.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Current Biology found 5,578 different species in the CCZ, and roughly 88 to 92 percent of these species are entirely new to science. The authors compiled a CCZ checklist of all the species and records to better understand what may be at risk when mining begins. 

“We share this planet with all this amazing biodiversity, and we have a responsibility to understand it and protect it,” co-author and Natural History Museum London deep-sea ecologist Muriel Rabone said in a statement. 

Spanning six million square kilometers from Hawaii to Mexico, the CCZ is one of the most pristine wilderness regions in the world. According to NOAA, it is also home to polymetallic nodules that are a potential source of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements. These materials are becoming increasingly important for modern life, since they are used in making a range of electronics. Polymetallic nodules are also found in deeper regions of the Indian Ocean.

To study the CCZ, researchers travel throughout the Pacific Ocean using techniques such as using remote-controlled vehicles to travel the ocean. They also use simple box core sampling, where a study box is placed on the bottom of the ocean floor to collect samples.  

“It’s a big boat, but it feels tiny in the middle of the ocean. You could see storms rolling in; it’s very dramatic,” said Rabone. “And it was amazing—in every single box core sample, we would see new species.”

In the study, the team sifted through over 100,000 records of the creatures found in the CCZ taken during these expeditions. They found that only six of the new species found in the CCZ—including a carnivorous sponge, a nematode, and a sea cucumber—have been seen in other regions of the world. The most common type of animals in the CCZ are arthropods, worms, sponges, and echinoderms like sea urchins.

[Related: Even mining in shallow waters is bad news for the environment.]

“There’s some just remarkable species down there. Some of the sponges look like classic bath sponges, and some look like vases. They’re just beautiful,” said Rabone. “One of my favorites is the glass sponges. They have these little spines, and under the microscope, they look like tiny chandeliers or little sculptures.”

In the future, the team emphasizes the importance of increasing research efforts in the CCZ that are collaborative, cohesive, and multidisciplinary so that scientists and business alike can gain a deeper grasp of the region’s vast biodiversity. They also stress the importance of learning more about these new species, how they are connected to the greater environment around them, and the biogeography of the area to understand why some species cluster in specific regions more than others.   

“There are so many wonderful species in the CCZ,” said Rabone, “and with the possibility of mining looming, it’s doubly important that we know more about these really understudied habitats.”

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This year is going to be pretty unforgettable, and not in a good way. Climate scientists have predicted the arrival of El Niño, a climate pattern that temporarily warms up waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and will change precipitation and temperature patterns around the world.. The last El Niño event took place from 2018 to 2019.

Each El Niño is unique in terms of how intense the warming effect gets, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. This makes it harder for individual areas along the Pacific, like California and countries in Southeast Asia, to know how to properly prepare for upcoming storms or flooding. 

Past El Niño events can help areas get a broad sense of how strong the next one will be, but as time goes on, Swain says it is likely we will see an increase in extreme El Niño events because of climate change. This upcoming one is expected to make 2023 the hottest year in human history.

What is the forecast for El Niño 2023?

Climate scientists use a variety of tools to predict when and how hard El Niño will hit. Some examples include satellites to track wind and tropical rainfall patterns, ocean buoys to monitor sea surface temperatures, and mini radios strapped to weather balloons that measure air temperature, humidity, and pressure. 

David DeWitt, director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasts an 82 percent chance of El Niño arriving between May and July. A weak El Niño is not out of the question, but the likelihood of a strong El Niño is about 55 percent. There’s also a 90 percent chance of El Niño persisting in the first few months of 2024.

How does El Niño warm the ocean?

During El Niño, weak winds coming from the east cause heat to build up along the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean. As the waters warm up, they transfer heat to the atmosphere and create moisture-rich air that fuels rainstorms and floods.

One sign of an upcoming El Niño event to look out for is Kelvin waves in the Pacific. These aren’t your normal beach waves: They resemble the slow sloshing ones in your bathtub. The long movements pull expanding warm water to the ocean’s surface, which in turn, raises sea levels. They also strengthen El Niño by further reducing how much cold water is on the ocean’s surface. 

[Related: The jet stream is moving north. Here’s what that means for you.]

Recently, satellites orbiting Earth detected two- to four-inch-high Kelvin waves moving west to east along the equator. They also measured higher than average sea levels—another strong clue for El Niño. “If it’s a big one, the globe will see record warming,” NASA scientist Josh Willis said in a statement.

How will El Niño affect global weather patterns?

Brad Rippey, a meteorologist for the US Department of Agriculture, says El Niño is expected to cause flooding in some regions and droughts in others. During the Northern Hemisphere summer (June to August), El Niño will likely suppress Atlantic hurricanes and bring drought in regions such as Central America, the Caribbean Basin, and southern and southeastern Asia. During the Southern Hemisphere summer (December to February), areas like southern Africa, Australia, and the western Pacific Basin will experience more heat, droughts, and fires. 

Some regions of the world, however, will face wetter conditions. Rippey says that parts of South America, such as Argentina, have been reeling from drought because of the long-running La Niña that began in 2020. With El Niño, these areas would finally get doused with precipitation.

Is climate change making El Niño worse?

El Niño and its cooler counterpart La Niña are part of a natural cycle between warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean that was first detected by South American fisherman in the 17th century. That said, climate change is interacting with this cycle and shaping a future with stronger El Niño episodes. “The Earth’s natural climate cycle and climate caused by humans are not independent of each other,” Swain explains. He adds that before global warming, the world’s temperature would reset after El Niño, but now it remains elevated.

The combination of human-caused global warming and short-term warming from El Niño could mean that the second half of 2023 or early 2024 will break global temperature records, Swain says.

Is the world prepared for the switch from La Niña to El Niño?

Yes and no. While most communities have experienced the upturns and downturns of El Niño before, each cycle is different. This upcoming one is no exception.

The level of preparation depends on the country and whether El Niño will trigger more heatwaves or flooding. Another factor is a country’s economy and whether they can afford to invest in protective measures.

[Related: This summer could push US energy grids to their limits]

“It’s usually the places that are most vulnerable that often have the least ability to shift things around to prepare,” says Swain. The 2015-2016 El Niño event, for example, caused heat stress, malnutrition, and disease outbreaks for more than 60 million people living in developing countries. But that doesn’t mean richer countries come out unscathed. For instance, El Niño events in the past 15 years cost the US economy $25 billion. A study published on May 18 in the journal Science estimates the average El Niño cost the global economy $3.4 trillion.

Being a few months away, Swain says it’s unlikely that a resource-poor region can change things around in a short time. “Now the question becomes, how much resilience do these places have to these kinds of natural hazards?”

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Months of painstaking work analyzing over 16 terabytes of imaging and 4K video data has resulted in the first full-sized 3D scan of the RMS Titanic’s stunning, sunken remains.

Per the BBC, specialists working for the deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. began remotely piloting two deep sea submersibles during the summer of 2022. The pair of subs, Romeo and Juliet, collected over 700,000 images over the 3-mile wreckage site during their more than 200 hours of diving time. The results are renderings in such detail that they showcase one of the cruise liner propeller’s serial numbers alongside passengers’ shoes and bottles of unopened champagne.

[Related: How scientists keep ancient shipwrecks from crumbling into dust.]

Over 1,500 people died after the cruise liner struck an iceberg and sank into the frigid Atlantic Ocean waters during its 1912 maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York. Numerous expeditions have surveyed the Titanic’s remains since its rediscovery in 1985, but until now the ocean’s pitch-black environment at 3,800m (12,500ft) coupled with the ship’s sheer size have only allowed murky glimpses and snapshots of wreckage.

Now, however, experts can begin studying the Titanic’s remnants with an entirely new level of detail and precision. In a statement, Parks Stephenson, a longtime Titanic researcher, explained, “What we are seeing for the first time is an accurate and true depiction of the entire wreck and debris site. I’m seeing details that none of us have ever seen before and this allows me to build upon everything that we have learned to date and see the wreck in a new light.”

According to Stephenson, despite knowing the disaster’s cause, we still aren’t sure what really happened when the ship hit the iceberg. “We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies—she might have grounded on the iceberg,” Stephenson told the BBC. Additionally, examining portions such as the ship’s stern could uncover the physics behind how the ship actually landed upon the sea floor.

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

Time is of the essence for future visits to the Titanic’s remains, as microbial life continues to eat away at portions of the ship while other pieces disintegrate within the deep ocean’s hostile environment. But even so, the newest imagery will be an invaluable historical asset for researchers as they continue to learn from one of the 20th century’s most famous tragedies.

The 2022 expedition was detailed by a film crew working alongside Magellan Ltd. for Atlantic Productions, with plans to release a documentary on the project in the near future. 

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A dark side effect of the electricity that helps society run around the clock is the pollution caused by our increasing numbers of lights at night. Light pollution can obscure stargazing, confusing sea turtles when they hatch, and also could be harming coral reefs.   

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

The light pollution from cities along the coast can trick the reefs into spawning outside of their optimal reproductive times, according to a study published May 15 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Corals are critical for the health of the global ocean, but are being increasingly damaged by human activity. This study shows it is not just changes in the ocean that are impacting them, but the continued development of coastal cities as we try and accommodate the growing global population,” Thomas Davies, a study co-author and conservation ecologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom,  said in a statement. 

The moon’s cycles trigger coral to spawn. During these spawning events, hundreds of eggs are released on certain nights of the year. These nights are critical to maintain and recover coral reefs after mass bleaching or other adverse events.

By using a combination of spawning observations and data on light pollution, an international team of researchers showed that the corals exposed to artificial light at night (ALAN) are spawning about one to three days closer to the full moon compared to reefs that are not.

If coral spawn on different nights, coral eggs are less likely to be fertilized and survive to produce adult corals. Population growth is needed now more than ever to help the population recover after disturbing events like bleaching.

The study builds on research from 2021 that mapped out the areas of the ocean that are most affected by light pollution. It found that at 3.2 feet deep, over 7 million square miles of coastal ocean are exposed to biologically important ALAN.  

“This study further emphasizes the importance of artificial light pollution as a stressor of coastal and marine ecosystems, with the impacts on various aspects of biodiversity only now being discovered and quantified,” Tim Smyth, a co-author and biogeochemist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said in a statement. 

The team paired their new data with a global dataset representing 2,135 coral spawning observations taken over the last 23 years. They saw that ALAN is possibly advancing the triggers for spawning by creating a fake illuminance between sunset and sunrise on the nights after the full moon. 

[Related: The best ways to reduce light pollution and improve your quality of life.]

The study looked at coastal regions around the world, but the coral reefs of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in the Middle East are particularly affected by light pollution. These coastlines have been heavily developed in recent years, putting the reefs near the shore at risk. 

“Despite the challenges posed by ALAN, corals in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba are known for their thermal tolerance and ability to withstand high temperatures. However, a disturbance in the timing of coral spawning with the moon phases can result in a decline in new coral recruits and a reduction in the coral population,” Oren Levy, co-author and marine ecologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said in a statement. 

Some individual methods to reduce light pollution, especially for those along the coast, include removing nighttime lighting that is not necessarily needed for public safety, removing all unnecessary light even if it is just one in a backyard, and switching away from white lights to more muted red lights that are less intense.

“By implementing measures to limit light pollution, we can protect these vital habitats and safeguard the future of the world’s oceans. It’s our responsibility to ensure that we preserve the biodiversity of our planet and maintain a healthy and sustainable environment for generations to come,” said Levy.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Bleaching occurs when a stressed marine creature, most commonly a coral, expels its symbiotic algae and turns a ghostly white, often in response to a warming sea. But bleaching affects more than just corals. Giant clams—massive mollusks that can grow more than 1.2 meters in diameter and weigh as much as 225 kilograms—can bleach, too. And in recent research, scientists have learned more about how bleaching disrupts these sessile giants, affecting everything from their nutrition to their reproduction.

Giant clams live on coral reefs and are the largest bivalves on Earth. Like corals, giant clams bleach when they’re stressed, often as a response to excessively warm water. As with a coral, a bleached giant clam expels the algae, called zooxanthellae, that live inside it. These algae dwell in the soft tissue of the clam’s mantle and provide energy for the animal through photosynthesis, leaving a bleached clam with less energy and nutrients. At worst, bleaching can kill giant clams through food deficiency.

Scientists have been studying bleaching in giant clams for decades. In 1997 and 1998, during a brief period that saw extensive coral bleaching worldwide with corals succumbing in at least 32 disparate countries, bleached giant clams were observed from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to French Polynesia after water temperatures in the South Pacific rose significantly. In 2010, similar temperatures in the water off Thailand’s Ko Man Nai Island also led to scores of deaths.

Of the 12 species of giant clams, some are more resistant to heat stress than others. But as scientists are finding, even when a giant clam survives bleaching, other physiological functions can still be severely impaired.

A recent study in the Philippines of wild clams, for example, found that bleaching can hamper their reproduction. Bleaching reduces the number of eggs giant clams produce, and the more severe the bleaching, the fewer eggs they make. Reproducing “takes a lot of energy. So instead of using that energy for reproduction, they just use it for their survival,” says Sherry Lyn Sayco, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan.

Mei Lin Neo, a marine ecologist and giant clam expert at the National University of Singapore who was not involved in the study, says the work contributes to the story of how climate change can have “repercussions on the longevity of species.”

In general, she says, we know much more about how climate change affects corals than marine species with similar physiologies. “By understanding how other symbiotic species respond to climate change, each species becomes a unique indicator on how the overall reef ecosystem is doing.”

Bleached giant clams, it turns out, are often better than corals at coping with bleaching. Near Ko Man Nai Island, 40 percent of the bleached clams re-colored after a few months as the zooxanthellae repopulated in their tissues when temperatures cooled again. After the 1997–1998 bleaching event, over 95 percent of the 6,300 bleached clams near Australia’s Orpheus Island recovered.

Giant clams seem amenable to restocking, too. In the Philippines, where the largest species, Tridacna gigas, went locally extinct in the 1980s, restocking has brought it back.

“Clams are not just any organism,” Sayco says. “It’s not that we are just conserving them for them to be there,” she adds, “they have lots of benefits and ecosystem services, such as [boosting] fisheries [and] tourism.”

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Dead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and elder from the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut tribe.

Despite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become increasingly noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town.

Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the region was called Qikiqtaġruk, meaning “place that is almost an island.” One side of the two-kilometer-long settlement is bordered by Kotzebue Sound, an offshoot of the Chukchi Sea, and the other by a lagoon. Planes, boats, and four-wheelers are the main modes of transportation. The only road out of town simply loops around the lagoon before heading back in.

In the middle of town, the Alaska Commercial Company sells food that’s popular in the lower 48—from cereal to apples to two-bite brownies—but the ocean is the real grocery store for many people in town. Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year.

“We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me. The two of us are crammed into the tiny cabin of Schaeffer’s fishing boat in the just-light hours of a drizzly September 2022 morning. We’re motoring toward a water-monitoring device that’s been moored in Kotzebue Sound all summer. On the bow, Ajit Subramaniam, a microbial oceanographer from Columbia University, New York, Whiting, and Schaeffer’s son Vince have their noses tucked into upturned collars to shield against the cold rain. We’re all there to collect a summer’s worth of information about cyanobacteria that might be poisoning the fish Schaeffer and many others depend on.

Huge colonies of algae are nothing new, and they’re often beneficial. In the spring, for example, increased light and nutrient levels cause phytoplankton to bloom, creating a microbial soup that feeds fish and invertebrates. But unlike many forms of algae, cyanobacteria can be dangerous. Some species can produce cyanotoxins that cause liver or neurological damage, and perhaps even cancer, in humans and other animals.

Many communities have fallen foul of cyanobacteria. Although many cyanobacteria can survive in the marine environment, freshwater blooms tend to garner more attention, and their effects can spread to brackish environments when streams and rivers carry them into the sea. In East Africa, for example, blooms in Lake Victoria are blamed for massive fish kills. People can also suffer: in an extreme case in 1996, 26 patients died after receiving treatment at a Brazilian hemodialysis center, and an investigation found cyanotoxins in the clinic’s water supply. More often, people who are exposed experience fevers, headaches, or vomiting.

When phytoplankton blooms decompose, whole ecosystems can take a hit. Rotting cyanobacteria rob the waters of oxygen, suffocating fish and other marine life. In the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, cyanobacterial blooms contribute to deoxygenation of the deep water and harm the cod industry.

As climate change reshapes the Arctic, nobody knows how—or if—cyanotoxins will affect Alaskan people and wildlife. “I try not to be alarmist,” says Thomas Farrugia, coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, which researches, monitors, and raises awareness of harmful algal blooms around the state. “But it is something that we, I think, are just not quite prepared for right now.” Whiting and Subramaniam want to change that by figuring out why Kotzebue is playing host to cyanobacterial blooms and by creating a rapid response system that could eventually warn locals if their health is at risk.

Whiting’s cyanobacteria story started in 2008. One day while riding his bike home from work, he came across an arresting site: Kotzebue Sound had turned chartreuse, a color unlike anything he thought existed in nature. His first thought was, Where’s this paint coming from?

The story of cyanobacteria on this planet goes back about 1.9 billion years, however. As the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, they’re often credited with bringing oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere, clearing the path for complex life forms such as ourselves.

Over their long history, cyanobacteria have evolved tricks that let them proliferate wildly when shifts in conditions such as nutrient levels or salinity kill off other microbes. “You can think of them as sort of the weedy species,” says Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most microbes, for example, need a complex form of nitrogen that is sometimes only available in limited quantities to grow and reproduce, but the predominant cyanobacteria in Kotzebue Sound can use a simple form of nitrogen that’s found in virtually limitless quantities in the air.

Cyanotoxins are likely another tool that help cyanobacteria thrive, but researchers aren’t sure exactly how toxins benefit these microbes. Some scientists think they deter organisms that eat cyanobacteria, such as bigger plankton and fish. Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors another hypothesis: that toxins shield cyanobacteria from the potentially damaging astringent byproducts of photosynthesis.

Around the time when Kotzebue saw its first bloom, scientists were realizing that climate change would likely increase the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, and what’s more, that blooms could spread from fresh water—long the focus of research—into adjacent brackish water. Kotzebue Sound’s blooms probably form in a nearby lake before flowing into the sea.

The latest science on cyanobacteria, however, had not reached Kotzebue in 2008. Instead, officers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tested the chartreuse water for petroleum and its byproducts. The tests came back negative, leaving Whiting stumped. “I had zero idea,” he says. It was biologist Lisa Clough, then from East Carolina University and now with the National Science Foundation, with whom Whiting had previously collaborated, who suggested he consider cyanobacteria. The following year, water sample analysis confirmed she was correct.

In 2017, Subramaniam visited Kotzebue as part of a research team studying sea ice dynamics. When Whiting learned that Subramaniam had a long-standing interest in cyanobacteria, “we just immediately clicked,” Subramaniam says.

The 2021 fish kill redoubled Whiting and Subramaniam’s enthusiasm for understanding how Kotzebue Sound’s microbial ecosystem could affect the town. A pathologist found damage to the dead fish’s gills, which may have been caused by the hard, spiky shells of diatoms (a type of algae), but the cause of the fish kill is still unclear. With so many of the town’s residents depending on fish as one of their food sources, that makes Subramaniam nervous. “If we don’t know what killed the fish, then it’s very difficult to address the question of, Is it safe to consume?” he says.

I watch the latest chapter of their collaboration from a crouched position on the deck of Schaeffer’s precipitously swaying fishing boat. Whiting reassures me that the one-piece flotation suit I’m wearing will save my life if I end up in the water, but I’m not keen to test that theory. Instead, I hold onto the boat with one hand and the phone I’m using to record video with the other while Whiting, Subramaniam, and Vince Schaeffer haul up a white-and-yellow contraption they moored in the ocean, rocking the boat in the process. Finally, a metal sphere about the diameter of a hula hoop emerges. From it projects a meter-long tube that contains a cyanobacteria sensor.

The sensor allows Whiting and Subramaniam to overcome a limitation that many researchers face: a cyanobacterial bloom is intense but fleeting, so “if you’re not here at the right time,” Subramaniam explains, “you’re not going to see it.” In contrast to the isolated measurements that researchers often rely on, the sensor had taken a reading every 10 minutes from the time it was deployed in June to this chilly September morning. By measuring levels of a fluorescent compound called phycocyanin, which is found only in cyanobacteria, they hope to correlate these species’ abundance with changes in water qualities such as salinity, temperature, and the presence of other forms of plankton.

Researchers are enthusiastic about the work because of its potential to protect the health of Alaskans, and because it could help them understand why blooms occur around the world. “That kind of high resolution is really valuable,” says Malin Olofsson, an aquatic biologist from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who studies cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea. By combining phycocyanin measurements with toxin measurements, the scientists hope to provide a more complete picture of the hazards facing Kotzebue, but right now Subramaniam’s priority is to understand which species of cyanobacteria are most common and what’s causing them to bloom.

Farrugia, from the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, is excited about the possibility of using similar methods in other parts of Alaska to gain an overall view of where and when cyanobacteria are proliferating. Showing that the sensor works in one location “is definitely the first step,” he says.

Understanding the location and potential source of cyanobacterial blooms is only half the battle: the other question is what to do about them. In the Baltic Sea, where fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture has exacerbated blooms, neighboring countries have put a lot of effort into curtailing that runoff—and with success, Olofsson says. Kotzebue is not in an agricultural area, however, and instead some scientists have hypothesized that thawing permafrost may release nutrients that promote blooms. There’s not much anyone can do to prevent this, short of reversing the climate crisis. Some chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, show promise as ways to kill cyanobacteria and bring temporary relief from blooms without affecting ecosystems broadly, but so far chemical treatments haven’t provided permanent solutions.

Instead, Whiting is hoping to create a rapid response system so he can notify the town if a bloom is turning water and food toxic. But this will require building up Kotzebue’s research infrastructure. At the moment, Subramaniam prepares samples in the kitchen at the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge’s office, then sends them across the country to researchers, who can take days, sometimes even months, to analyze them. To make the work safer and faster, Whiting and Subramaniam are applying for funding to set up a lab in Kotzebue and possibly hire a technician who can process samples in-house. Getting a lab is “probably the best thing that could happen up here,” says Schaeffer. Subramaniam is hopeful that their efforts will pay off within the next year.

In the meantime, interest in cyanobacterial blooms is also popping up in other regions of Alaska. Emma Pate, the training coordinator and environmental planner for the Norton Sound Health Corporation, started a monitoring program after members of local tribes noticed increased numbers of algae in rivers and streams. In Utqiaġvik, on Alaska’s northern coast, locals have also started sampling for cyanobacteria, Farrugia says.

Whiting sees this work as filling a critical hole in Alaskans’ understanding of water quality. Regulatory agencies have yet to devise systems to protect Alaskans from the potential threat posed by cyanobacteria, so “somebody needs to do something,” he says. “We can’t all just be bumbling around in the dark waiting for a bunch of people to die.” Perhaps this sense of self-sufficiency, which has let Arctic people thrive on the frozen tundra for millennia, will once again get the job done.

The reporting for this article was partially funded by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship.

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A dust particle can go on a great voyage. It starts on land; it continues in the air, where winds carry the particle up, up, and away. And—at least for some dust particles—that saga might end with a fall into seawater thousands of miles from where it began.

Dust intrinsically links Earth’s sands, skies, and seas. Particles that fall into water can deliver nutrients that feed life in the sea, creating great algal blooms. Scientists are learning more about the process, but there are many questions they still haven’t answered about how—and if—it works.

In a new study published today in the journal Science, scientists have answered one previous mystery. They’ve shown that more dust does, indeed, create more phytoplankton.

“Understanding how the ocean works is an underlying motivation,” says Toby Westberry, a botanist at Oregon State University, and the paper’s lead author. “It is vast and still poorly understood in many respects.”

Much of the world’s dust begins its journey in the world’s deserts. Winds blowing across the sands might carry some fine particles away. And the longer that sand sits in one place, the more dust that place generates: The world’s great dust generator lies in North Africa: the vast expanses of the Sahara. 

From there, dust particles are passengers of the world’s wind patterns. For instance, North African dust might ride the westerlies to Europe, or it might ride the trade winds from North Africa across the Atlantic. 

Inevitably, some dust falls into the world’s oceans along the way, unloading the cargo it carried from the deserts—elements like phosphorus and iron. The atmosphere is not inert, either, and adds new chemicals to airborne particles: As dust rides high through the skies of Earth’s troposphere, it collects nitrogen from the surrounding air. When dust delivers this nitrogen and other nutrients to the water, they encourage phytoplankton to bloom—tinting the oceans greenchanging the very color of the oceans.

Atmospheric dust isn’t the primary source of nutrients for sea plants; scientists think that they mainly rely on what rises as water upwells from the ocean depths. But dust can still make its mark—especially by delivering iron to parts of the ocean that are deficient in the metal.

Scientists pay close attention to dust particles because of their roles as iron couriers.  “Often, when we think of dust,” says Douglas Hamilton, an earth scientist at North Carolina State University, who was not an author on the paper, “we do link it immediately to the iron.”

There are many questions that remain unanswered about this process. What precise role does the dust play in encouraging phytoplankton? Are there different types of dust that cause phytoplankton to respond in different ways? 

Most pressingly, scientists didn’t know the process worked on a worldwide scale. Past research had shown that dust storms could cause local phytoplankton blooms; experiments had also demonstrated that literally pouring iron into seawater encouraged phytoplankton growth. “We’ve done this work, but does it actually matter?” says Hamilton. “We think it does…it’s been proved for isolated events, but it’s never been proved on the global scale.”

The paper’s authors tried to answer that question. NASA had simulated dust flows in the atmosphere between 2003 and 2016 based on observations of how surface temperatures changed with the days. Unsurprisingly, the simulations stated that more dust fell in regions around the Sahara Desert: in seas like the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.

[Related: The Sahara used to be full of fish]

With that data in hand, the authors turned to satellite measurements of the seas over that same time period: specifically, observations of ocean color, which could indicate phytoplankton. Indeed, phytoplankton grew on the days after the simulation suggested certain parts of the sea would have received a windfall of dust.

The scientists saw such responses across the globe—but the blooms weren’t always equal. In some areas, increased dust led to a boost in the quantity of phytoplankton; in others, increased dust made the phytoplankton healthier, with brighter chlorophyll. In still others, dust didn’t seem to elicit a response at all.

“Why would this be?” Westberry wonders. “Knowing something about the mineralogy of the dust—what it’s composed of and what nutrients it carries—would be helpful to this end.”

Dust isn’t the only source of food airdropped to phytoplankton. Volcanic eruptions and wildfires both spew out nutrients that enter the ocean. “Volcanic ash is not the same as dust, but conveys nutrients much the same,” Westberry says. Meanwhile, scientists have linked megafires in Australia with phytoplankton in the downwind South Pacific. On the other side of the planet, wildfires in northern forests are associated with blooms around the North Pole.

[Related: In constant darkness, Arctic krill migrate by twilight and the Northern Lights]

“This paper is great, it’s awesome,” says Hamilton. “Then the next question is: Right, now, what about all this other stuff which is also out there? What impact is that having, too?” One future area of study is human activity, which causes climate change and wildfires. We may be responsible for desertification, too, creating more sand for winds to carry away. And our industrial activity—pollution and fossil fuels, for instance—pours out particulates of its own. Scientists think these substances might feed phytoplankton, but they don’t fully know how or if it works across the globe.

Fortunately for scientists, they may see a bloom of their own field. In 2024, NASA will launch a satellite called PACE specifically to observe phytoplankton in the ocean.

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Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it will be signing a new research agreement with Proteus Ocean Group, which has been drawing up ambitious plans to build a roomy underwater research facility that can host scientists for long stays while they study the marine environment up close. 

The facility, called Proteus, is the brainchild of Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau.

“On PROTEUS™ we will have unbridled access to the ocean 24/7, making possible long-term studies with continuous human observation and experimentation,” Cousteau, founder of Proteus Ocean Group, said in a press release. “With NOAA’s collaboration, the discoveries we can make — in relation to climate refugia, super corals, life-saving drugs, micro environmental data tied to climate events and many others — will be truly groundbreaking. We look forward to sharing those stories with the world.”

This is by no means new territory for the government agency. NOAA has previously commandeered a similar reef base off the coast of Florida called Aquarius. But Aquarius is aging, and space there is relatively confined—accommodating up to six occupants in 400 sq ft. Proteus, the new project, aims to create a habitat around 2,000 sq ft for up to 12 occupants. 

This kind of habitat, the first of which is set to be located off the coast of Curacao in the Caribbean, is still on track to be operational by 2026, Lisa Marrocchino, CEO of Proteus Ocean Group, tells PopSci. A second location is set to be announced soon as well. “As far as the engineering process and partners, we’re just looking at that. We’ll be announcing those shortly. We’re evaluating a few different partners, given that it’s such a huge project.” 

[Related: Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is building a network of ocean floor research stations]

Filling gaps in ocean science is a key part of understanding its role in the climate change puzzle. Now that the collaborative research and development agreement is signed, the two organizations will soon be starting workshops on how to tackle future missions related to climate change, collecting ocean data, or even engineering input in building the underwater base. 

“Those will start progressing as we start working together,” Marrocchino says. “We’re just beginning the design process. It’s to the point where we are narrowing down the location. We’ve got one or two really great locations. Now we’re getting in there to see what can be built and what can’t be built.”

The NOAA partnership is only the beginning for Proteus. According to Marrocchino, Proteus Ocean Group has been chatting with other government agencies, and expects to announce more collaborations later this year. “The space community in particular is super excited about what we’re planning to do,” she says. “They really resonate with the idea that it’s very familiar to them in extreme environments, microgravity and pressure.”

Marrocchino also teased that there are ongoing negotiations with large multi-million dollar global brand partners, which will fund large portions of the innovative research set to happen at Proteus. “We’re seeing a trend towards big corporate brands coming towards the idea of a lab underwater,” she says. “You’ll see some partnership agreements geared towards advancing ocean science.” 

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They found the victims floating in the water. Some had eyeballs full of air bubbles, others had their stomachs pushed up into their mouths. Many had severe internal bleeding.

Volcanoes can be life-threatening for fish. A major eruption in 2011 in Chile, for instance, killed 4.5 million of them. Researchers have studied how lava flows, hot gases, and deadly debris can cause mass die-offs or even cut fish off from the sea in suddenly landlocked lakes. But few have been able to document in detail the grisly fates experienced by the unlucky fish that find themselves at the mercy of an angry volcano. That’s why when one erupted underwater off the coast of El Hierro in the Canary Islands for 150 days in late 2011 and early 2012, researchers including Ayoze Castro Alonso at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria saw the perfect opportunity to study the intricacies of these piscine casualties.

Ten years later, the devastating eruption of a terrestrial volcano on nearby La Palma, another of the Canary Islands, gave Alonso and his colleagues a chance to see an altogether different way that volcanoes can butcher unsuspecting fish—by overwhelming them with debris.

The scientists detail in a new paper the shocking injuries suffered by 49 fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption and 14 fishes killed by the volcanism near La Palma. “It’s a volcanic eruption in both cases, but the pathological syndromes are completely different,” says Alonso. “One is acute, the other is chronic.”

The underwater eruption near El Hierro superheated the water by as much as 19 °C, reduced the oxygen level, and rapidly acidified the ocean. Alonso and his colleagues found fishes with gas bubbles in their bodies. The team concluded the injuries occurred while the fishes were still alive because the scientists found inflammatory cells indicative of physical trauma and a severe build-up of blood in the fishes’ tissues.

The researchers’ detailed necropsies also hint that the fishes made a fateful dash for safety. Once the El Hierro eruption was underway, Alonso says, the fishes ascended rapidly. “They tried to escape,” he says.

As the fishes swam upward, sudden depressurization likely caused the gases dissolved in their bodies to bubble out, accounting for the bubbles in their eyes and under their skin. Depressurization would also explain why the animals’ stomachs were pushed up into their mouths and why some had overinflated swim bladders. These gas-filled organs expand when fish rise toward the surface.

On La Palma, though, molten lava flowed over land and into the ocean where the sudden clash with cold water quenched it into a glassy rock known as hyaloclastite. Within a week, huge clouds of volcanic ash settled into the water. Fish died after their gills became clogged with ash, or after their digestive tracts were impacted with fragments of glassy hyaloclastite.

Some of the findings are familiar to Todd Crowl, an ecosystem scientist at Florida International University who was not involved in the current study but who witnessed an eruption on Dominica in the Caribbean during the 1990s. A few centimeters of ash fell on the island, Crowl says, contaminating streams and killing thousands of filter-feeding shrimp. “All that ash just completely clogged up [the shrimp’s] filters,” he says.

Alonso and his colleagues’ research is the first to analyze the wounds fish suffer during a volcanic eruption in such detail—in part because getting access to the victims while their bodies are still fresh is incredibly difficult. After the eruptions at El Hierro and La Palma, local officials gathered up stricken fishes and shipped them on ice to the researchers within a matter of days.

Crowl says this rapid collection let the scientists conduct their analyses before the fishes rotted away. “We get fish kills all the time in Florida because of algal blooms and stuff like that,” Crowl says. “But by the time we get the specimens, there’s lots of degradation.”

Volcano ecologist Charlie Crisafulli, formerly of the US Forest Service, who was not involved in the work, agrees that the study of such fresh victims is novel: “We haven’t seen this before.” However, Crisafulli isn’t certain that the fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption actively tried to flee. Alternatively, they might have been stunned by the rapid changes in their environment and simply floated upward in a state of shock.

Though all of this seems deeply unpleasant, Crisafulli stresses there is a bigger picture here worth thinking about. Volcanoes kill, but they also create. Eruptions contribute nutrients to the environment, and lava flows build new land—sometimes entire islands.

“With this so-called destruction and loss of life, also there’s the creation of new habitats,” Crisafulli says. “What was initially a loss ends up becoming a gain through time.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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To mitigate the death and disaster brought by tsunamis, people on the coasts need the most time possible to evacuate. Hundred-foot waves traveling as fast as a car are forces of nature that cannot be stopped—the only approach is to get out of the way. To tackle this problem, researchers at Cardiff University in Wales have developed new software that can analyze real-time data from hydrophones, ocean buoys, and seismographs in seconds. The researchers hope that their system can be integrated into existing technology, saying that with it, monitoring centers could issue warnings faster and with more accuracy. 

Their research was published in Physics of Fluids on April 25. 

“Tsunamis can be highly destructive events causing huge loss of life and devastating coastal areas, resulting in significant social and economic impacts as whole infrastructures are wiped out,” said co-author Usama Kadri, a researcher and lecturer at Cardiff University, in a statement.

Tsunamis are a rare but constant threat, highlighting the need for a reliable warning system. The most infamous tsunami occurred on December 26, 2004, after a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia. The tsunami inundated the coasts of more than a dozen countries over the seven hours it lasted, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Thailand and Somalia. This was the deadliest and most devastating tsunami in recorded history, killing at least 225,000 people across the countries in its wake. 

Current warning systems utilize seismic waves generated by undersea earthquakes. Data from seismographs and buoys are then transmitted to control centers that can issue a tsunami warning, setting off sirens and other local warnings. Earthquakes of 7.5 magnitude or above can generate a tsunami, though not all undersea earthquakes do, causing an occasional false alarm. 

[Related: Tonga’s historic volcanic eruption could help predict when tsunamis strike land]

These existing tsunami monitors also verify an oncoming wave with ocean buoys that outline the coasts of continents. Tsunamis travel at an average speed of 500 miles per hour, the speed of a jet plane, in the open ocean. When approaching a coastline, they slow down to the speed of a car, from 30 to 50 miles per hour. After the buoys are triggered, they issue tsunami warnings, leaving little time for evacuation. By the time waves reach buoys, people have a few hours, at the most, to evacuate.

The new system uses two algorithms in tandem to assess tsunamis. An AI model assesses the earthquake’s magnitude and type, while an analytical model assesses the resulting tsunami’s size and direction.

Once Kadri and his colleagues’ software receives the necessary data, it can predict the tsunami’s source, size, and coasts of impact in about 17 seconds. 

The AI software can also differentiate between types of earthquakes and their likelihood of causing tsunamis, a common problem faced by current systems. Vertical earthquakes that raise or lower the ocean floor are much more likely to cause tsunamis, whereas those with a horizontal tectonic slip do not—though they can produce similar seismic activity, leading to false alarms. 

“So, knowing the slip type at the early stages of the assessment can reduce false alarms and complement and enhance the reliability of the warning systems through independent cross-validation,” said co-author Bernabe Gomez Perez, a researcher who currently works at the University of California, Los Angeles in a press release.

Over 80 percent of tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, but they can also be caused by landslides (often from earthquakes), volcanic eruptions, extreme weather, and much more rarely, meteorite impacts.

This new system can also predict tsunamis not generated by earthquakes by monitoring vertical motion of the water.

The researchers behind this work trained the program with historical data from over 200 earthquakes, using seismic waves to assess the quake’s epicenter and acoustic-gravity waves to determine the size and scale of tsunamis. Acoustic-gravity waves are sound waves that move through the ocean at much faster speeds than the ocean waves themselves, offering a faster method of prediction. 

Kadri says that the software is also user-friendly. Accessibility is a priority for Kadri and his colleague, Ali Abdolali at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as they continue to develop their software, which they have been jointly working on for the past decade.

By combining predictive software with current monitoring systems, the hope is that agencies could issue reliable alerts faster than ever before.

Kadri says that the system is far from perfect, but it is ready for integration and real-world testing. One warning center in Europe has already agreed to host the software in a trial period, and researchers are in communication with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

“We want to integrate all the efforts together for something which can allow global protection,” he says. 

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Industrial mining in the deep ocean is on the horizon. Despite several countries including Germany, France, Chile, and Canada calling for a pause on the field’s development, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the organization tasked with both regulating and permitting deep-sea mining efforts, is nearing the deadline to finalize rules for how companies will operate. Companies, meanwhile, are busy testing the capabilities of their machines—equipment designed to collect polymetallic nodules, rocks rich in cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese that litter some parts of the seafloor.

Top of mind for many scientists and politicians is what ramifications deep-sea mining might have on fragile marine ecosystems, including those far from the mining site. At the heart of the debate is concern about the clouds of sediment that can be kicked up by mining equipment.

“Imagine a car driving on a dusty road, and the plume of dust that balloons behind the car,” says Henko de Stigter, a marine geologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “This is how sediment plumes will form in the seabed.”

Scientists estimate that each full-scale deep-sea mining operation could produce up to 500 million cubic meters of discharge over a 30-year period. That’s roughly 1,000 six-meter-long shipping containers full of sediment being discharged into the deep every day, spawning from a field of mining sites spread out over an area roughly the size of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany.

These sediment plumes threaten to smother life on the ocean floor and choke midwater ecosystems, sending ripples throughout marine ecosystems affecting everything from deep-sea filter-feeders to commercially important species like tuna. Yet discussions of the plumes’ potential consequences are clouded by a great deal of uncertainty over how far they will spread and how they will affect marine life.

To clarify just how murky deep-sea mining will make the water, scientists have been tagging along as companies conduct tests.

Two years ago, Global Sea Mineral Resources, a Belgian company, conducted the first trials of its nodule-collecting vehicles. Scientists working with the company found that more than 90 percent of the sediment plume settled out on the seafloor, while the rest lingered within two meters of the seabed near the mined area. Other studies from experiments in the central Pacific Ocean found that the sediment plumes reached as far as 300 meters away from the disturbed site, though the thickest deposition was within 100 meters. This is a shorter spread than earlier models, which predicted deep-sea mining plumes could spread up to five kilometers from the mining site.

Beyond the sediment kicked up by submersibles moving along the seafloor, deep-sea mining can muddy the water in another way.

As polymetallic nodules are lifted to the surface, the waste water that’s sucked up along with the nodules is discharged back into the ocean. Doug McCauley, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says this could potentially create “underwater dust storms” in upper layers of the water column. Over the course of a 20-year mining operation, this sediment could be carried by ocean currents up to 1,000 kilometers before sinking to the seabed.

Some particularly fine-grained particles could remain suspended in the water column, traveling long distances with the potential to affect a wide range of marine animals. According to another recent study, it’s these tiny particles that are the most harmful to filter-feeders like the Mediterranean mussel.

To avoid these consequences on midwater ecosystems, at least, scientists are advising would-be deep-sea miners to discharge waste water at the bottom of the ocean where mining has already created a disturbance. This would be a departure from the ISA’s messaging, which is to not specify at what depth waste water should be released.

For its own trials last December, the Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian company, says it worked hard to minimize the amount of sediment discharged in the waste water it released at a depth of 1,200 meters.

“We’ve optimized our system to leave as much sediment on the seabed as possible,” says Michael Clarke, environmental manager at TMC. Clarke says he’s skeptical of previously published research projecting vast sediment plumes. “When we were trying to measure the [midwater] plume a few hundred meters away from the outlet, we couldn’t even find the plume because it diluted so much.”

Clarke says the company is currently analyzing both baseline and impact data for its test mining, including looking at how far small particles spread and how long they remain suspended. The results will be submitted to the ISA as part of an environmental impact assessment.

As deep-sea mining inches closer and scientists ramp up their research efforts, it’s important to keep one thing clear: “I can tell you that we’re not going to discover that deep-sea mining is good for marine ecosystems,” McCauley says. “The question is, How bad will it be?”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Northern elephant seals are challenging the world record for the mammal that sleeps the fewest hours a day. The current record holder is the African elephant, who rests a measly two hours daily. Now scientists report that elephant seals also sleep an average of two hours a day when they’re out at sea and do this by splitting their slumber into a series of nap-like “sleeping dives.” 

These findings were published today in the journal Science. 

Elephant seals divide their time between land and sea, though it’s unequal. They spend an average of seven months out of the year in the open ocean and only resurface to breed, molt, and rest. Because they spend so much time in open waters, scientists figured these marine mammals must have developed some way of getting the sleep they need while avoiding detection from predators like the orca whales and great white sharks. But exactly how they do this has been poorly understood.

[Related: Take the best naps, with science]

One challenge in understanding the sleep behavior of elephant seals is finding a device that’s both waterproof and can handle deep-sea pressure. To overcome this, the study team created a flexible head cap that can respond to seals’ twisting and flexing motions. It’s also made up of a synthetic rubber called neoprene, the same material found in wetsuits. The scientists used this cap to monitor the seals’ brain activity, heart rate, and three-dimensional spatial movement.

Scientists outfitted 13 wild seals with the cap. Five were kept in a lab, while the other eight could freely roam around Monterey Bay, California. The EEG recordings collected from the head cap represented brain activity during different sleep stages. 

“We can take the data and use it to recreate what the sleeping dives look like, and also what’s happening within the animal brain, how fast its heart is beating, etcetera,” says lead study author Jessica Kendall-Bar, a Scripps postdoc scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

How do seals sleep in the ocean?

The collected data indicates elephant seals sleep about two hours a day while at sea, though not all at once. When it was time to get a little shut-eye, seals dove hundreds of meters below the surface—the maximum depth was about 1,200 feet—where they would take quick naps lasting less than 20 minutes. 

Kendall-Bar says this “degree of flexibility and sleep duration has really only been demonstrated in birds and is pretty much unprecedented in mammals.”

Dive naps likely evolved as a way for seals to avoid getting attacked since their natural predators lurk near the surface, explains Kendall-Bar. They are also more vulnerable than other marine mammals when resting because they undergo bilateral sleep. This means both halves of the elephant seal’s brain rest when they sleep. Human beings also experience bilateral sleep. 

Meanwhile, fur seals and sea lions experience unihemispheric sleep—one brain hemisphere rests while the other stays awake and monitors for predators.

Different stages of underwater sleep

The study data suggests seals go through one complete sleep cycle during each nap-like “sleeping dive.” When these brief sleep cycles end, the seals return to the surface. This process allows them to rest at depths with lower predation risk while staying vigilant in more dangerous waters. 

During nap dives, the seals entered slow-wave sleep while maintaining an upright posture. They then turned upside down while their sleep cycle transitioned from slow-wave sleep to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. 

“The sleep state of the animal is actually reflected in its movement through the water,” explains Kendall-Bar. 

Once the cycle was complete, the seals immediately woke up and returned to the surface to find food.

[Related: Pendulums under ocean waves could prevent beach erosion]

Since muscle paralysis from REM sleep leaves seals exposed and defenseless, they took the shortest naps possible and compensated for the lack of sleep after reaching land again. As a result, the seals slept five times longer ashore than they did in the water. Some seals even slept up to 14 hours a day on land.

“What really stood out for me is the fine-scale analysis the researchers did to identify the different sleep states and how they were able to translate this analysis to estimate sleep patterns in seals at sea,” says Cassondra Williams, a comparative physiologist at the National Marine Mammal Foundation who was not involved in the study. “This will be an important tool for future behavior studies of pinnipeds freely diving at sea.”

Most diving naps took place just near the shore. While northern elephant seals are not currently endangered (in the 1800s, they were almost hunted to extinction), Kendall-Bar and her team are concerned that shipping traffic and traps on the seafloor may be disturbing their habitats. Understanding when and where seals slumber could help conservation efforts and ensure seals get all two hours of their beauty sleep.

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In Dick Ogg’s 25 years of commercial fishing, he’s had a few close encounters with whales—mostly while pulling Dungeness crab pots off the ocean floor. “I’ve had whales right next to me,” within about five meters, says Ogg. “They follow me, they watch, they’re curious. And then they go on about their business.”

Ogg is fortunate his interactions have been so leisurely. For nearly a decade, California’s whales and crabbers have been locked in a persistent struggle. From 1985 to 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported an average of 10 whales were entangled in fishing gear each year along the west coast of the United States. But between 2015 and 2017, that number jumped to 47 entanglements per year. Since 2015, most of the identifiable gear found on entangled whales has been from crab pots. For crabbers, efforts to protect whales from entanglement often hit their bottom line.

The Dungeness crab fishery is one of California’s largest and most lucrative; until recently, it was considered one of the most sustainable fisheries in the state. In recent years, managers have sought a balance between protecting whales and ensuring crabbers’ livelihoods. But as climate change transforms the northeast Pacific and whales are increasingly at risk of being entangled in crabbers’ lines, that delicate balance is beginning to unravel.

The 2015 crabbing season was a catastrophe for both crabbers and whales. A marine heatwave nurtured a bloom of toxic algae that pushed anchovies close to shore, and the whales followed. That year, NOAA recorded 48 entangled whales along the US west coast—nearly five times the historical average. The algae also rendered the crabs inedible, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) delayed the start of the fishing season by several months. The federal government declared the failed season a fishery disaster.

In 2017, the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the CDFW over the spate of entanglements, prompting the department to set up a rapid risk assessment and mitigation program that closes portions of the Dungeness crab fishery when whales are nearby. The new approach has decreased entanglements, but it’s come at a high price for commercial fishers.

The CDFW has a handful of other tools they can use to protect whales, such as shortening the crabbing season and limiting the number of traps crabbers can drop. But according to a recent study, the only measure that could have effectively protected whales during the heatwave—shortening the crabbing season—is the one that would have hampered crabbers the most. And even then, these strong restrictions would have only reduced entanglements by around 50 percent.

If a similar marine heatwave hits again, entanglements could spike, too, says Jameal Samhouri, a NOAA ecologist and author of the paper. “It’s going to be really hard to resolve these trade-offs,” he says. “There may be some hard choices to make between whether we as a society want to push forward conservation matters or allow the fishery.”

Every year since the CDFW set up its mitigation program, the fishery has faced closures. Since 2015, the crabbing season has only opened on time once. Though the heatwave is gone, a boom of anchovy has kept whales close to shore.

For Ogg, the most difficult part of the season is waiting to go fish and not having any income. “It’s been really, really tough for a lot of guys,” he says. Another recent study calculates that in 2019 and 2020, whale-related delays cost California Dungeness fishers US $24-million—about the same as they lost during the heatwave in 2015.

Smaller boats, the study showed, were most severely impacted by the closures. It’s a trend Melissa Mahoney, executive director of Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, has seen firsthand. While a large boat might set hundreds of crab pots in a day, smaller vessels can’t make up for a shortened season. “I just don’t know how long a lot of these fishermen can survive,” Mahoney says.

With climate change, marine heatwaves are now 20 times more frequent than they were in preindustrial times. As the Earth grows warmer, heatwaves that would have occurred every 100 years or so could happen once a decade or even once a year. In this hotter world, balancing the needs of both crabbers and whales will only grow more difficult.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The high seas — the ocean waters that begin 230 miles offshore — cover 43% of the planet’s surface and are home to as many as 10 million species, yet remain one of the least understood places on Earth. Among the region’s many mysteries are how Pacific salmon, one of the West’s most beloved and economically important fish, spend the majority of their lives — and why many populations are plummeting. Combined with how little we know about what climate change is doing out there, such questions make the area an international research and conservation priority.

These sprawling waters, though, are a mostly lawless zone, beyond the reaches of any national authority and governable only by international consensus and treaties. They face tremendous challenges that no nation can address alone: Climate change is causing marine heat waves and acidification, while overfishing and pollution are crippling ecosystems, even as pressure grows from companies and nations eager to drill and mine the ocean depths. In early March, negotiators representing nearly 200 nations came to a historic agreement aimed at protecting the ocean’s creatures and ecosystems. When the new United Nations High Seas Treaty was announced, marine scientists and conservationists around the globe rejoiced.

But what will the treaty actually mean for conservation in a region about which humanity knows less than the moon? When it comes to Pacific salmon, will the new treaty’s tools — and the international symbolism and momentum involved in agreeing to them — aid efforts to manage and protect them? Do the provisions go far enough? Here’s what the experts say.

The treaty’s protective tools may not be what salmon need

The treaty’s top provision establishes a road map for creating marine protected areas (MPAs) in international waters. Like national parks for the ocean, MPAs are zones that typically limit fishing or other activities to preserve ecosystems and species. When adequately enforced, they are widely considered to be a powerful tool for ocean and coastal conservation. They are also seen as key to reaching the U.N.’s goal to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans by 2030 — a goal the world is woefully behind on, with just 3% to 8% currently protected.

But when it comes to Pacific salmon, it is unclear whether MPAs can do anything at all. Salmon fishing in international waters has been banned since the 1990s, so future MPAs there will not reduce fishing. And while boosting enforcement of fishing bans may benefit other species, many believe illegal salmon fishing on the high seas is extremely low.

Still, some salmon experts believe that high seas marine preserves could provide indirect protection: By limiting other fishing, they could prevent salmon from being caught accidentally. They might also help preserve important marine food webs, though such ecosystems are vast, mobile and hard to monitor.

“If salmon used those (protected areas) as part of their migration and ocean habitat, then, yes, it could be beneficial,” said Brian Riddell, retired CEO and current science advisor to the Canadian nonprofit Pacific Salmon Foundation. “But to associate changes in marine survival to (an MPA), I think would be very, very difficult.”

MPAs also don’t address climate change or the marine heat waves that many researchers believe are a key factor in recent salmon declines. Matt Sloat, science director at the Oregon-based Wild Salmon Center, said that limiting global emissions would do more to protect salmon.

Although much remains unknown, recent research suggests that salmon ranges in the ocean are shifting or shrinking because of temperature changes. Salmon are also getting smaller, suggesting there may be more competition for fewer resources. “And then (hatcheries) are putting billions more hungry mouths into that smaller area,” Sloat said, referring to the sometimes-controversial state, federal and tribal hatcheries in the U.S. and other countries that raise and release quotas of juvenile salmon each year to maintain local fisheries. He believes that improving international coordination of the scale of those releases, rather than governing remote ocean habitats, might also improve salmon survival in the ocean.

It may boost collaboration and high seas research

Another section of the treaty bolsters collaborative research in international waters. Although the treaty’s language is directed more at support for developing nations — to ensure that new knowledge reflects the priorities of more than just the wealthiest coastal nations — salmon researchers hope that any overall increase in funding and interest in high seas research could help solve the mystery of what actually happens to salmon there.

While much is known about the environmental factors affecting salmon in their coastal and riverine habitats, scientists call the open ocean a “black box” into which salmon disappear for years. “We don’t even know where our salmon are,” said Laurie Weitkamp, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2022, seeking answers, she led an expedition that was part of the largest-ever high seas salmon research effort in the North Pacific, during which five vessels and more than 60 international scientists surveyed 2.5 million square kilometers (nearly 1 million square miles) in the Gulf of Alaska.

The open ocean has always been a bottleneck for salmon survival; Weitkamp said that, even historically, “95% of the salmon that enter the ocean never come back.” Once, those numbers were predictable based on coastal and river conditions. Now, she said, scientists’ guesses are often wildly wrong. All known conditions will point to a good return, Weitkamp said, “And then it’s just like, where are they? What happened?”

Researchers have been trying to understand what they’re missing in salmon’s ocean habitats, but work on the high seas is extremely expensive: Expeditions cost tens of thousands of dollars a day, but can collect only small amounts of data because salmon are widely dispersed and hard to find. She said the scale of the information gathered during the 2019-2022 expeditions she was part of was possible only because so many ships and nations worked together. It’s the kind of collaboration the treaty may help to inspire — directly in some cases, and symbolically in others — as nations sign on.

“Collaboration is absolutely essential,” said Riddell, who was also part of the 2019-22 expeditions. “We need a dedicated, ongoing program,” to understand what’s happening to salmon and to strengthen ocean and climate models. He hopes the High Seas Treaty will lead to more support and interest in that work.

Ratification and Indigenous inclusion are not guaranteed

This year, many salmon runs are expected to hit record lows, impacting the ecosystems, economies and communities that depend on them. Chinook returns in Oregon, California and Alaska are forecast to be so low that offshore recreational and commercial fishing this spring has been cancelled in many areas. The Klamath River chinook run, upon which the Yurok Tribe relies for cultural and economic security, is expected to be the lowest in history.

“International effort to preserve and protect ocean habitat is critical to restoring these historic salmon runs,” said Amy Cordalis, an attorney, fisherwoman and Yurok tribal member who has served as the tribe’s general counsel. But “those efforts must accommodate traditional uses of those areas.”

In 2020, during negotiations on what became the High Seas Treaty, a group of scientists published a report calling on the United Nations to better incorporate Indigenous management perspectives, which they said were not adequately represented in discussions at that time. The final treaty, which includes language recognizing Indigenous rights, did better than most to include Indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge, said Marjo Vierros, a coastal policy researcher at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the report. “How that plays out in implementation is of course a different question.”

The draft treaty, which is now being proofread, still must be ratified by member nations — a political process that may yet stall out in the U.S. Due to conservative Republican opposition, the United States has yet to ratify the 40-year-old U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea — the last treaty to govern international waters — though U.S. agencies say the country observes the law anyway.

That treaty drew the current boundary between state-controlled waters and the high seas, established rights for ships to navigate freely in international waters, and created an international body to develop deep-sea mining rules — a process that also remains, for now, unfinished. 

Researching at sea, “you gain a whole new understanding for how big (the ocean) really is,” Weitkamp said, and how much of its influence on salmon, climate and humanity remains unknown. “The ocean, especially the North Pacific, is just enormous.”

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Scientists have found dozens of species of coastal invertebrates organisms thriving Oscar the Grouch style in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Roughly 620,000 square miles long, or twice the size of Texas, the floating garbage heap is located between Hawaii and California. Five large spinning circular currents constantly pull trash towards the center of the patch, and it is considered the largest accumulation of ocean plastic on Earth.

These creatures found thriving in trash like crabs and anemones are normally found along the coasts, but the study published April 17 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution says that dozens of species have been able to survive and reproduce on the plastic garbage.  

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

“This discovery suggests that past biogeographical boundaries among marine ecosystems—established for millions of years—are rapidly changing due to floating plastic pollution  accumulating in the subtropical gyres,” co-author and marine ecologist Linsey Haram said in a statement. Haram conducted this research while working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The team only recently discovered these “neopelagic communities,” or floating communities of organisms living in deep ocean waters. Organic matter in the ocean decomposes within a few years at most. But plastic debris lasts significantly longer, thus giving the animals a place to live and procreate.  

The team analyzed 105 plastic samples that were collected by The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization that is working on scalable solutions to get rid of ocean plastic, during their 2018 and 2019 expeditions. The samples were found in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a large zone that makes up most of that northern Pacific Ocean and is the largest ecosystem on Earth. Incredibly, 80 percent of the plastic trash that the team looked at showed signs of being colonized by coastal species. Some of the coastal species were even reproducing in their plastic homes, such as the Japanese anemone.

“We were extremely surprised to find 37 different invertebrate species that normally live in coastal waters, over triple the number of species we found that live in open waters, not only surviving on the plastic but also reproducing,” said Haram. “We were also impressed by how easily coastal species colonized new floating items, including our own instruments—an observation we’re looking into further.”

[Related: Ocean plastic ‘vacuums’ are sucking up marine life along with trash.]

While biologists already knew that coastal species can travel towards the open ocean on floating debris or on ships, it was long believed that these species couldn’t thrive or establish new communities at sea. Differences in temperature, water salinity, and the available nutrients between these two environments seemed too vast, but human-caused changes to the ocean ecosystems have forced marine biologists to rethink these ideas. 

“Debris that breaks off from this [garbage] patch constitutes the majority of debris arriving on Hawaiian beaches and reefs. In the past, the fragile marine ecosystems of the islands were protected by the very long distances from coastal communities of Asia and North America,” co-author and UH Mānoa oceanographer Nikolai Maximenko said in a statement. “The presence of coastal species persisting in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre near Hawai‘i is a game changer that indicates that the islands are at an increased risk of colonization by invasive species.”

According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world produces roughly 460 million tons of plastic annually and this figure could triple by 2060 if government action is not taken soon. Some individual actions to reduce plastic use is shopping more sustainably, limiting use of single-use plastic like water bottles and plastic utensils, and participating in beach and river clean-ups.

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To curb climate change, governments across the globe have set goals to achieve “net zero emissions.” This means that for every unit of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere, the same amount is removed through a nature-based solution—like forest protection—or artificial ones like carbon capture technology. 

In an effort to reach net zero by 2050, the Biden administration is investing in a promising strategy: blue carbon.

Blue carbon is a nickname for the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere and stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems. It’s a focus of the administration’s Ocean Climate Action Plan, announced in March. 

It’s a type of carbon sink—natural or artificial reservoirs that absorb and store CO₂, the heat-trapping gas primarily responsible for warming the planet. But scientists are still figuring out how people can support this process and warn that it’s not the solution to the climate crisis.

What is blue carbon?

First, you should know that blue carbon isn’t really blue.

“We just call it blue because we’re associating it with the ocean,” says Matthew Costa, a postdoctoral scholar researching blue carbon at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. 

Carbon dioxide is like food for plants, which suck the gas out of the atmosphere and use photosynthesis to convert it into plant matter. Plants in the ocean and on the coast do the same thing. Some of that plant matter, which stores carbon, gets trapped in sediment and can stay there for hundreds or even thousands of years. This process results in a carbon sink. 

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics]

It’s an example of an ecosystem service, which is an aspect of a natural environment that benefits people. Other examples include forests that filter our air, wetlands that buffer against storms, and the plants we eat. “We put it in the service context in economics terms because it’s basically a service that the system is doing, but we don’t have to pay for it,” Costa says. 

Salt marshes, mangroves, seagrass beds, and kelp forests are the ecosystems people generally refer to when discussing blue carbon in the United States. Mangroves are in southern Florida and some parts of Texas and Louisiana, while most algal beds are on the West Coast. Salt marshes are found on coastlines, while seagrasses are wherever there’s ocean water.

The top meter of sediment in the open ocean stores about double the amount of carbon stored on land, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Dead animals and plants, which hold carbon, sink and become buried in the seafloor. Phytoplankton—tiny single-cell organisms found throughout the ocean—play a significant role in this carbon burial. 

But since the ocean is so vast, tracking how much carbon is stored is difficult. And more importantly, strategies for increasing carbon storage in the open ocean, like increasing phytoplankton growth, are less established and feasible than strategies for managing coastal ecosystems, according to Costa.

Why is blue carbon important?

While researchers stress that blue carbon won’t “solve” the climate crisis, it is one of many approaches governments can take to chip away at their net zero goals. 

Coastal ecosystems around the globe make up only a few hundred thousand square kilometers, which is relatively small compared to the ocean. But they are particularly good at absorbing carbon. Carbon accumulates in mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses at a rate ten times faster than in terrestrial ecosystems. These areas also store about four times more carbon than terrestrial forests, according to Trisha Atwood, an associate professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University.

Costa says there are two reasons why these coastal ecosystems are more potent at storing carbon than forests, another major carbon sink. First, carbon builds up in the sediment, not just in the plants. Second, coastal ecosystems also import carbon from other environments. For example, when the tide rolls in and out in a tidal marsh, it carries particles of organic matter, which contain carbon. That organic matter also gets trapped in the sediment, storing even more carbon. 

“When a giant tree falls to the forest floor, that trunk is sitting on the forest floor within a couple of years,” Costa says. Fungi, insects, and microorganisms quickly break down the wood and roots. Subsequently, the carbon transforms back into CO₂. 

“Those organisms are eating that material and breathing it out, just like when we eat food and breathe out CO₂,” Costa adds. “So that carbon has a lower residence time, we’ll say it doesn’t get to spend as much time trapped in that ecosystem.” 

Meanwhile, carbon tends to stay in coastal sediment once absorbed. The exception to this is when it’s disturbed by people. 

“If you bulldoze that salt marsh or mangrove, or you disturb and dredge the sediment or something like that, you can then release a lot of that carbon,” Costa explains.

How much can blue carbon help?

Atwood stresses that restoring blue carbon ecosystems is different from replanting a forest, and we have to be careful not to over-promise what blue carbon can achieve.

“These systems are often in difficult-to-reach places, and seagrasses are submerged so they are not really visible,” she explained over email. “As a result, they can be hard to monitor, and we need a good way to ensure that restoration and protection efforts remain effective through time.”

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

However, if these coastal ecosystems are restored, they can do more than store carbon. Atwood says these natural spaces also reduce the impact of storms on coastal communities, act as nursery habitats for economically important fisheries species, and bring in tourism.

Ultimately, investing in blue carbon is just one of the many actions we must take to mitigate climate change, says Costa.

“This is not a sort of a silver bullet,” he says. “If we’re protecting these ecosystems and not reducing our emissions, we’re not going in a good direction.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Offshore wind is one of the fastest-growing sources of renewable energy, and with its expansion comes increasing scrutiny of its potential side effects. Alessandro Cresci, a biologist at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, and his team have now shown that larval cod are attracted to one of the low-frequency sounds emitted by wind turbines, suggesting offshore wind installations could potentially alter the early life of microscopic fish that drift too close.

Cresci and his colleagues made their discovery through experiments conducted in the deep fjord water near the Austevoll Research Station in Norway. The team placed 89 cod larvae in floating transparent mesh chambers that allowed them to drift naturally, then filmed as they subjected half the fish in 15-minute trials to the output of an underwater sound projector set to 100 Hz to mimic the deep thrum put out by wind turbines.

When left to their own devices, all of the cod larvae oriented themselves to the northwest. Like the closely related haddock, cod have an innate sense of direction that guides their ocean swimming. When the scientists played the low-frequency sound, the baby fish still had a northwest preference, but it was weak. Instead, the larvae favored pointing their bodies in the direction of the sound. Cresci thinks the larvae may be attracted to the 100-Hz sound waves because that low frequency is among the symphony of sounds sometimes part of the background din along the coastline or near the bottom of the ocean where the fish might like to settle.

As sound waves propagate through water, they compress and decompress water molecules in their path. Fish can tell what direction a sound is coming from by detecting changes in the motion of water particles. “In water,” says Cresci, fish are “connected to the medium around them, so all the vibrations in the molecules of water are transferred to the body.”

Like other creatures on land and in the sea, fish use sound to communicate, avoid predators, find prey, and understand the world around them. Sound also helps many marine creatures find the best place to live. In previous research, scientists have shown that by playing the sounds of a thriving reef near a degraded reef they could cause more fish to settle in the area. For many species, where they settle as larvae is where they tend to be found as adults.

Even if larval fish are attracted to offshore wind farms en masse, what happens next is yet unknown.

Since fishers typically can’t safely operate near turbines, offshore wind farms could become pseudo protected areas where fish populations can grow large. But Ella Kim, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who studies fish acoustics and was not involved with the study, says it could go the other way.

Kim suggests that even if fish larvae do end up coalescing within offshore wind farms, the noise from the turbines and increased boat traffic to service the equipment could drown out fish communication. “Once these larvae get there,” Kim says, “will they have such impaired hearing that they won’t be able to even hear each other and reproduce?”

Aaron Rice, a bioacoustician at Cornell University in New York who was not involved with the study, says the research is useful because it shows that not only can fish larvae hear the sound, but that they’re responding to it by orienting toward it. Rice adds, however, that the underwater noise from real wind turbines is far more complex than the lone 100-Hz sound tested in the study. He says care should be taken in reading too much into the results.

As well as noise pollution, many marine species are also at risk from overfishing, rising ocean temperatures, and other pressures. When trying to decide whether offshore wind power is a net benefit or harm for marine life, says Rice, it’s important to keep these other elements in mind.

“The more understanding that we can have in terms of how offshore wind [power] impacts the ocean,” he says, “the better we can respond to the changing demands and minimize impacts.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Climate change is giving us stronger, more destructive ocean waves, which in turn exacerbate already serious coastal erosion issues. With this in mind, researchers are designing a new underwater engineering project that could help literally swing the pendulum back in humanity’s favor. As first highlighted by New Scientist on Sunday, a team at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Marine Science are working on MetaReef—a system of upside-down, submersible pendulum prototypes capable of absorbing underwater energy to mitigate wave momentum.

Although still in its laboratory design phases, MetaReef is already showing promising results. To test early versions of their idea, the team tethered together 11, half-meter-long plastic cylinders to the bottom of a narrow, 50-meter long tank. Each cylinder is made from commercial PVC pipes, filled with air to make them less dense than water, and subsequently waterproofed with polyurethane foam. A steel cable then anchors each cylinder with just enough tension to keep them in place underwater, while also able to swing back and forth depending on currents’ strength and direction.

[Related: Maritime students gear up to fight high-seas cyberattacks.]

It’s not as simple as just anchoring a series of tubes under the waves, however. Researchers needed to hone both the cylinders’ size and distance between one another to ensure optimal results that wouldn’t accidentally create a watery echo chamber to exacerbate current strengths. Once the parameters were fine tuned, a piston at one end of the tank generated waves that interacted with the cylinders. By absorbing the tidal energy, the team’s MetaReef managed to reduce wave amplitudes by as much as 80 percent.

Of course, ocean current interactions are much more complicated than pistons splashing water in a relatively small tank. Speaking with New Scientist, Mike Meylan,  a professor of information and physical sciences, warned that especially strong storms—themselves increasingly frequent—could easily damage pendulum systems deployed in the real world. That said, researchers are confident that MetaReef’s customizability alongside further experimentation could yield a solid new tool in protecting both threatened coastlines, and valuable structures such as offshore platforms. This malleability is contrasted with artificial coastal reefs, which while effective, are much more static and limited in placement than MetaReef, or similar designs.

The team is presenting their findings this week at the annual International Workshop on Water Waves and Floating Bodies held in Giardini Naxos, Italy. Although societal shifts in energy consumption remain the top priority to stemming the worst climate catastrophes, tools like MetaReef could still offer helpful, customizable aids that deal with damage already done to our oceanic ecosystems.

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Melting ice sheets in Antarctica can retreat much faster than scientists previously thought. A study published April 5 in the journal Nature found that at the end of the last Ice Age, parts of the Eurasian Ice Sheet retreated up to 2,000 feet per day. This rate is 20 times faster than previous measurements. These changes far outpace even the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which are estimated to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day. 

The new findings could be crucial to better understanding today’s ice melt.

The Eurasian Ice Sheet was the third-largest ice mass during the last Ice Age and retreated from Norway about 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it had a span of almost 3,000 miles. Mirroring these retreats are ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, which have lost more than 6.4 trillion tons of ice over the past three decades. Both of these modern-day ice sheets are responsible for more than one-third of total sea level rise. 

“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at,” Christine Batchelor, study co-author and physical geographer from Newcastle University, said in a statement. “Our results show that pulses of rapid retreat can be far quicker than anything we’ve seen so far.”

[Related: We’re finally getting close-up, fearsome views of the doomsday glacier.]

For this study, an international team of researchers used high-resolution imagery of the seafloor to see how the ice sheet changed over. They mapped out more than 7,600 small-scale landforms called “corrugation ridges” on the seafloor around where the ice sheet once stood. The ridges are less than eight feet high and are spaced around 82 to 984 feet apart. These types of ridges are believed to have formed when the ice sheet’s retreating margin moved with the tide. Seafloor sediments are pushed into a ridge every low tide, so two ridges would have been produced during two daily tidal cycles. The spacing helped the team calculate the enormous speed of retreat. 

This kind of data on how ice sheets reacted to past periods of warming can help inform computer simulations which predict future ice-sheet and sea-level change. It also suggests that these periods of rapid melt may only last for days to months, which are relatively short periods of time from a geologic standpoint. 

“This shows how rates of ice-sheet retreat averaged over several years or longer can conceal shorter episodes of more rapid retreat,” study co-author and University of Cambridge glaciologist Julian Dowdeswell said in a statement. “It is important that computer simulations are able to reproduce this ‘pulsed’ ice-sheet behavior.”

[Related: Ice doesn’t always melt the same way—and these visuals prove it.]

Understanding these seafloor landforms also showcases the mechanics behind rapid ice retreat. The study found that the former ice sheet retreated most across the flattest point of its bed where, “less melting is required to thin the overlying ice to the point where it starts to float,” explained co-author and Cambridge glacial geophysicist Frazer Christie from Scott in a statement. “An ice margin can unground from the seafloor and retreat near-instantly when it becomes buoyant.”

The team believes that pulses of similarly quick retreat could soon be observed in some parts of Antarticia, including West Antarctica’s vast Thwaites Glacier. Nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier,” Thwaites could undergo a similar pulse of rapid ice retreat since it has recently retreated close to a flat area of its bed.

“Our findings suggest that present-day rates of melting are sufficient to cause short pulses of rapid retreat across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, including at Thwaites,” said Batchelor. “Satellites may well detect this style of ice-sheet retreat in the near-future, especially if we continue our current trend of climate warming.”

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Discovered in 2014, stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has rapidly spread in the warm waters of the Caribbean. The mysterious ailment that targets hard corals has harmed more than 22 species of stony corals in Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Cases have been confirmed in at least 20 other countries and territories. A 2022 study of the coral species Pseudodiploria strigosa estimated a between 60 and 100 percent mortality rate in the Caribbean alone. 

While the precise cause is unknown, scientists are working to develop effective treatments. In a study published April 6 in the journal Communications Biology, a team of scientists describes the first effective bacterial probiotic for treating and preventing SCTLD. Using a probiotic provides an alternative to using the broad-spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin. So far, using amoxicillin has only been proven to treat the disease, and also runs the risk of promoting antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

[Related: Disease-resistant super corals can save vulnerable reefs.]

Once coral is infected with SCTLD, its colony of polyps can die within only a few weeks. “It just eats the coral tissue away,” Valerie Paul, co-author of the study and a marine biologist and chemical ecologist at the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Florida, said in a statement. “The living tissue sloughs off and what is left behind is just a white calcium carbonate skeleton.”

While probing how the disease spreads, Paul and a team noticed that some fragments of great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa) quickly developed SCTLD’s characteristic lesions and died, while other pieces didn’t get sick at all. While the precise cause of the disease is unknown, pathogenic bacteria was a suspected culprit in the disease’s progression, since antibiotics were an effective treatment for the disease.

With this in mind, the team collected samples of the naturally occurring, non-pathogenic bacteria present on a pair of disease-resistant great star coral fragments. After testing the samples, the team tried to identify if there were any naturally occurring microorganisms protecting some great star corals from the SCTLD.     

The team used three strains of harmful bacteria from corals that had previously been infected to further test 222 bacterial strains from the disease-resistant corals. While they found that 83 strains that had some antimicrobial activity, a strain named McH1-7 particularly stood out. Further chemical and genetic analysis of McH1-7 confirmed the compounds behind its antibiotic properties and the genes behind those compounds.

[Related: Scientists grow stunning, endangered coral in a lab.]

When they tested McH1-7 with live pieces of great star coral, the tests revealed a final piece of decisive proof: McH1-7 stopped or slowed the progression of the disease in 68.2 percent of the 22 infected coral fragments. It even prevented the sickness from spreading during in all 12 transmission experiments.  

Some next steps for the team are to develop better delivery mechanisms to use this probiotic method at scale in the ocean. The primary method of applying this coral probiotic now is to wrap the coral in plastic to create a makeshift mini aquarium and then inject the helpful bacteria, which would not be feasible on a large scale. It is also not clear if this bacterial strain isolated from the great star coral will have the same effects for other coral species.

To the team, it is still a welcome bit of news, as it could help prevent inadvertently spawning an antibiotic resistant bacteria and help corals in an ever changing climate.  “Between ocean acidification, coral bleaching, pollution and disease there are a lot of ways to kill coral,” Paul said. “We need to do everything we can to help them so they don’t disappear.”

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Over half a century since she was captured in the Pacific Ocean near Puget Sound, Lolita the Orca may return to her home waters. Lolita, also known by her Lummi name Tokita or Toki, was captured in Penn Cove off the coast of Washington State in 1970 when she was roughly 4 years old. She is believed to be the oldest orca in captivity.

The Miami Seaquarium in Florida announced its plans to move Lolita home at a press conference with nonprofit group Friends of Lolita and philanthropist and owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, on March 30. The move comes after growing pressure from animal rights groups, lawsuits from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and anger and possible lawsuits from the Lummi Nation.

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales.]

Irsay did not say how much the relocation would cost, only citing a “big number.” 

“I’m excited about being part of Lolita’s journey,” Irsay told reporters, according to NPR. “Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved whales, just loved whales because [of] the power, the greatness of them and how gentle they are. She’s lived this long to have this opportunity and my only mission … is to help this whale to get free.”

While this is welcome news, many obstacles remain, particularly the logistics of transporting the ailing 7,000 pound whale from Florida up to Washington State, as well as preparing the 57-year-old to live back in the wild after living in captivity for over 50 years. 

According to the Miami Herald, the goal is to place Lolita back in the sea and reunite her with her family, the L pod of southern resident orcas. This unique group of orcas spend the summer and autumn months in Puget Sound and were added to the endangered species list in 2005. Their population has “fluctuated considerably” since the 1970s, with pods “reduced during 1965-75 because of captures for marine parks,” according to NOAA Fisheries. 

“If she is healthy enough to be transported, the issue is her skill set,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado, who has been an advocate for Lolita and improvements at Seaquarium, told the Herald. “She doesn’t know how to catch or hunt. We’re not really sure if she can communicate with other whales because she’s been alone. Now we kind of have to retrain her.” 

The team will likely borrow methods used to move Keiko, the orca from the 1993 movie Free Willy. Keiko was moved from a tank at a marine park in Mexico to an aquarium in Oregon, and then on a US Air Force cargo plane to a sea pen in Iceland. Keiko eventually swam to Norway and lived in the ocean for five years. He died of pneumonia in 2003.

[Related: California Bans Captivity, Breeding Of Orcas.]

MS Leisure, who owns the Miami Seaquarium, announced in March 2022 that Lolita, who had fallen ill, would no longer be put on display for shows in the whale stadium. In June 2022, an assessment from two veterinarians not affiliated with the seaquarium found that Lolita’s condition had improved. 

She now lives in an 80-foot-long by 35-foot-wide by 20-foot-deep tank, which inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture have closed to visitors until the stands and tank are repaired.

Some animal rights activists hailed the decision as a long time coming and hope other marine parks follow suit. 

“If Lolita is finally returned to her home waters, there will be cheers from around the world, including from PETA, which has pursued several lawsuits on Lolita’s behalf and battered the Seaquarium with protests demanding her freedom for years,” the PETA Foundation’s vice president and general counsel for animal law Jared Goodman, said in a statement.  “If the Seaquarium agrees to move her, it’ll offer her long-awaited relief after five miserable decades in a cramped tank and send a clear signal to other parks that the days of confining highly intelligent, far-ranging marine mammals to dismal prisons are done and dusted.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

As humans age, our bodies are often graced with fine lines, gray hairs, and flecks of hyperpigmentation on our skin known as age spots. Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins get spots with age, too. And as scientists have revealed in a recent study, the onset of dolphins’ speckling is so predictable it can be a noninvasive way to gauge the dolphins’ age.

Age is a crucial metric for understanding dolphin populations. Many ways of calculating a dolphin’s age exist, such as counting the layers of dental material in their teeth or analyzing DNA from a skin sample. But they’re all somewhat invasive. That’s why developing a model for estimating age by simply looking at dolphins’ dots is so interesting.

Ewa Krzyszczyk, a dolphin researcher at Bangor University in Wales who was not involved in the study, says the new technique “is a really useful tool.” By estimating a dolphin’s age, Krzyszczyk says, scientists can answer important questions, such as when a dolphin stops weaning, when it reaches sexuality maturity, or when a dolphin shows signs of deterioration from old age. “It gives a more well-rounded idea of what’s going on in your population that can then help with conservation,” she says.

The discovery that dolphins’ dots reflect aging stems from research led by Genfu Yagi, a marine mammal researcher at Mie University in Japan. Previously, Yagi had analyzed a compendium of underwater footage taken of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Mikura Island, near central Japan. Since many of the individual dolphins were known from birth, Yagi could trace how their speckles emerged as they grew.

“The speckles first appear around the genital slit at 6.5 years of age,” says Yagi. Over time, he says, this treasure trail expands toward the head and up toward the back. By the time dolphins are around eight years old, speckles start on their chest, and by around 17, the spots reach their jaw. Wild bottlenose dolphins typically live between 30 and 50 years.

To use these speckles to estimate age, Yagi created a new system that quantifies the density of speckles on various parts of the body. This weighted speckle density score is then correlated with age. Yagi says his speckle-counting method works for dolphins between the ages of seven and 25 and has a margin of error of 2.58 years—more accurate than estimating age from DNA samples.

“The strength of this study is that it does not require special techniques, facilities, high costs, or any invasive surveying,” says Yagi. “Anyone can estimate a dolphin’s age.”

At the moment, Yagi’s formula can only be used for the Mikura Island Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin population because speckling onset could differ between geographic locations. He says, however, that the same modeling technique could work for other dolphin populations.

So far, dolphins are the only cetacean known to develop spots, with pantropical and Atlantic spotted dolphins getting dark spots on their bellies and light spots on their backs. Yagi says scientists don’t know exactly how or why these speckles form.

“This is a very rare trait, as few mammals other than dolphins continue to change body coloration throughout their lives,” he says.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Everything we’ve learned about dinosaurs essentially comes from fossils. But million-year-old rocks and bones have left a few hulking gaps in our understanding of the prehistoric world. Dinosaur Mysteries digs into the more secretive side of the “terrible lizards,” and all the questions that keep paleontologists up at night.

DINOSAURS DOMINATED EARTH. We all know the trope. The stupendous reptiles were so numerous and unique that they claimed a 150-million-year-long chunk of Earth’s history as the Age of Dinosaurs. 

But talking about a single group of organisms “dominating” the planet is silly. For one thing, the only dinosaurs bobbing in the ocean waves were carcasses, washed out by coastal storms.

Oceans have covered the vast majority of our planet for billions of years and contain more than 96 percent of Earth’s water at present. Dinosaurs, so far as we can tell, never made the sea their home. And paleontologists still don’t know why.

If there’s anything more challenging than understanding why a species evolved a particular way, it’s trying to backtrack on the evolutionary roads it didn’t take. Nature is full of invisible barriers and bottlenecks that open and close based on previous change. We usually don’t perceive these biological constraints until we run into a “Why not?” question. And even then, it can be difficult to distinguish between what’s actually impossible and what simply didn’t happen due to coincidence. In the case of the dinosaurs, though, we have a few clues as to why the seas remained beyond their domain.

For the most part, dinosaurs were atrocious swimmers. But it took decades for paleontologists to figure this out as they waited for the right fossil tracks, analyses of dinosaur bone structure, and computer methods capable of estimating the buoyancy of dinosaurs. During much of the 20th century, when experts insulted living reptiles and dinosaurs alike by characterizing the extinct saurians as dimwitted slowpokes, some paleontologists thought long-necked sauropods like Brachiosaurus could only support their weight in water. They also posited that the “duck-billed” dinosaurs, or hadrosaurids, plunged into lakes when tyrannosaurs stalked too near—the only defense herbivores that weren’t covered in armor or horns could have, apparently. Starting in the 1970s, paleontologists realized that fossilized tracks and other clues about the sauropods and duck-bills indicated they lived in terrestrial environments and weren’t adept in water. Not only that, but the relatively few trace fossils made by swimming dinosaurs—scrapes in the sediment from when they kicked their feet—were created by carnivorous dinosaurs, undercutting the idea that water was a refuge for plant eaters. 

A key dinosaurian trait may have prevented the reptiles from getting cozy in the water. The bony respiratory systems of sauropods and theropods show evidence of a unique set of air sacs connected to the lungs and other parts of the respiratory system. These soft-tissue pockets allowed the creatures to breathe more efficiently than mammals by keeping new air constantly flowing instead of relying on distinct inhales and exhales. (Birds have the same feature, with the added benefit that it keeps their skeletons light by filling bony spaces with air.) But when modeling how these air pockets would have affected dinosaurs’ swimming ability, paleontologists found that even large species would have acted like inflatable pool toys—too light for their size to be stable in the water. Adaptations to a life aquatic usually involve denser bones as a form of natural ballast—too much internal air would make dinosaurs work too hard to stay submerged. So much like us, while some dinosaurs could swim, they certainly weren’t diving neck and neck with the prehistoric sea turtles and plesiosaurs.

The same problem comes up for dinosaurs that were once considered skilled swimmers. The sail-backed, roughly 50-foot-long Spinosaurus has a few anatomical hallmarks associated with dipping and diving: Some of its bones seem extra dense, like those of other semiaquatic animals, and its tail is long and eel-esque, like a giant hitched-on paddle. But recent studies have found that Spinosaurus’ airy skeletal structure would have made it unstable in water too, and that the huge sail would have hampered the dinosaur’s ability to chase after prey while submerged. It’s more likely that the creature, once heralded as the world’s first swimming dinosaur, was more of a wader that plodded through the shallows as it tried to ambush fish. While additional evidence might alter the picture, especially because no one has found anything close to a complete Spinosaurus skeleton, for now the dinosaur most closely associated with the water was less aquatic than an alligator.

In all, after more than two centuries of searching, paleontologists have not identified a single dinosaur fossil that definitely spent most of its life at sea. The few specimens dug up from marine sediments—like the beautifully preserved armored Borealopelta from Alberta—represent dinosaurs that perished inland or along the coasts and were washed out to sea by storms or local flooding. Some became food for sharks and marine reptiles; some formed temporary reefs; and some quickly got buried under rock and soil, preserving their scales in place. But there were plenty of other reptiles in the sea—fish-like ichthyosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs that were the ocean equivalent of Komodo dragons—that prove the dominion of dinosaurs was exaggerated. 

Of course, we know that dinosaurs eventually did wander into the water. For example, about 5 million years after the asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous, the first ancestors of penguins took the plunge. Today, these water-savvy birds “fly” by flapping their wings underwater and sport a variety of adaptations, from hydrophobic feathers to salt-excreting vessels in their bills, that allow them to spend a great deal of their time in the ocean. But they still reproduce on land, shedding yet another clue to why extinct dinosaurs never hit the deep blue.

So far as we know, all dinosaurs laid eggs—from the very first terrible lizard (“dinosaur” translated into Greek) 243 million years ago to the chickadees bouncing around on the sidewalk in the present. Whereas other marine reptiles repeatedly evolved ways to give birth, likely starting with the soft-shelled eggs that some snakes and lizards retain today, dinosaurs don’t seem to have ever evolved a different capability. Or perhaps they did but were so late to the party that the seas were already full of nimble, sharp-toothed reptiles ready to munch on any awkward dino-paddlers. The ancient world of the dinosaurs was one that ended at the shoreline, leaving plenty of space for other creatures to rule the water.

We hope you enjoyed Riley Black’s column, Dinosaur Mysteries. Check back on PopSci+ in May for the next article.

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On March 21, President Biden hosted the White House Conservation in Action Summit. His administration announced two new national monuments aimed to conserve and restore land, a possible new marine sanctuary in the Pacific Ocean, and the “first of its kind” Ocean Climate Action Plan.

“Our natural wonders are literally the envy of the world,” President Biden said while addressing the summit. “They’ve always been and they always will be as central to our heritage as a people and essential to our identity as a nation.”

[Related: ‘Humanity on thin ice’ says UN, but there is still time to act on climate change.]

Here’s a look at some of the announcements and plans from the summit.

Two new national monuments

Biden announced two new monuments, one in Nevada and another in Texas. Nevada’s Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, “will honor Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples while conserving our public lands and growing America’s outdoor recreation economy,” according to a press release from the Biden Administration.  The new national monument site spans more than 500,000 acres of rugged landscape close to the California and Arizona state lines. It’s home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, some almost 900 year-old Joshua Trees, and the sacred desert mountain Avi Kwa Ame.

“The Mojave people, known as the people by the river, hold Avi Kwa Ame in our hearts,” said Fort Mojave Indian Tribal Chairman Timothy Williams at the summit. “Avi Kwa Ame, also known as Spirit Mountain, lays within the vast landscape of the pristine land of Southern Nevada. It is a place we know as our creation. It is the beginning of our traditional songs, and it is the place that Nevada nations throughout the southwest hold sacred.”

In southern Texas, the new Castner Range National Monument intends to honor veterans, servicemembers, and Tribal Nations, while expanding access to the outdoors for the El Paso community. Castner Range is located on Fort Bliss and was once a training and testing site for the United States Army during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. 

Castner Range also hosts significant cultural sites for Tribal Nations, including the Apache and Pueblo peoples, the Comanche Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma. 

“Today’s historic announcement has been decades in the making,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, who has pushed for this designation. “Generations of activists have dedicated countless hours and resources toward achieving this once seemingly impossible goal. It brings me such joy to know that El Pasoans will soon be able to enjoy the beauty of this majestic, expansive landmark for years to come.”

[Related: Biden sets an ambitious goal to protect 30 percent of US lands and waters.]

Protecting Pacific Remote Islands

President Biden will direct Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondoto to consider a new National Marine Sanctuary designation within the next 30 days. The designation will protect all US waters near the Pacific Remote Islands (PRI’s). These remote islands and atolls located in the Central Pacific have nearly 777,000 square miles of water around them and expanding the current protections in these areas would further President Biden’s “30 by 30” plan of conserving at least 30 percent of U.S. ocean waters by 2030. 

If enacted, the area would be larger than Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, an area that protects 583,000 square miles around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. President Barack Obama expanded the area in 2016 and the monument is already helping to restore large fish species like tuna.

“Our world’s oceans are at mortal risk, a breaking point precipitated by the unsustainable overfishing and other resource extraction, debris and land-based pollution, exacerbated and compounded by the devastating and pervasive marine effects of climate change,” said Representative Ed Case, D- Honolulu from Makapu’u to Mililani and Ko Olina. “As a nation, we have a duty to ensure the long-term survival of the PRI’s ecological, scientific and cultural value.”

US Ocean Climate Action Plan

According to President Biden, the first-ever Ocean Climate Action Plan will “harness the tremendous power of the ocean to help in our fight against the climate crisis.” He touted building more offshore wind farms to reduce carbon emissions, fortifying coastal communities, and better fisheries management in the speech and this new plan for the ocean. 

The plan outlines actions to meet three major goals: creating a carbon-neutral future without the harmful emissions that cause the climate to change, accelerating nature-based solutions, and enhancing resilience through ocean-based solutions like blue carbon that will help communities adapt and thrive in the face of an ever-changing climate. 

[Related: In the latest State of the Union, Biden highlights infrastructure, chips, and healthcare.]

To many environmental advocates, the plan comes not a moment too soon. On March 20, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their Sixth Synthesis Report on climate change, which found that there is still a chance for humanity to avoid the worst of climate change’s future harms, but it might be our last chance.

“It’s reassuring that President Biden is taking the climate crisis seriously and ensuring that our oceans are factored into the plan to address it. To date, our oceans have helped protect us from the worst impacts of climate change, and we know they can play an outsized role in keeping the planet from warming to catastrophic levels,” said Oceana’s Vice President for the United States, Beth Lowell, in a press release. “But in order for that to happen, countries like the United States must stop the expansion of dirty and dangerous offshore drilling.”

Oil drilling was front and center at some of the protests the same day as the conservation summit. Climate activists gathered outside the Interior Department, protesting what they call Biden’s “climate hypocrisy.” Representatives from activist groups like Democracy Now! demanded that the Biden Administration change course on the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska. On March 13, President Biden approved the $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal land, despite a campaign promise of “no more drilling on federal lands, period.”

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Seaweed is one of the most variable, sustainable substances on earth. Scientists have used it to make new plastics, medical devices, food, biofuels, and more. But right now, one variety of aquatic plant is also making a giant toxic bloom that can be seen from space. 

Meet the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt—a nearly 5,000-mile-long, thickly matted sheet of sargassum algae floating between Mexico and West Africa. Sargassum, a genus of large brown seaweed, is pretty much harmless —or even beneficial—out in the open ocean. But when it creeps up on beaches, it can be a serious problem. And it’s growing. 

While these seaweed mounds may serve as carbon sinks and fish habitats when floating asea, as the mass inches closer to land, it can diminish water and air quality, smother coral reefs, and restrict oxygen for coastal fish. Huge piles of the seaweed typically turn up on Florida beaches around May, but the seaweed is already starting to swamp beaches in Key West, Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, tells NBC. As of last week, 200 tons of the marine plant are expected to wash up on beaches in the Mexican Caribbean. 

[Related: This fossilized ‘ancient animal’ might be a bunch of old seaweed.]

With these pile-ups come even more pile-ups—of dead fish. According to the Independent, around 1,000 pounds of fish were cleared from Florida’s St. Pete Beach this month, and 3.5 tons of dead fish have already been removed in the past two weeks from the state’s Manatee County Parks.

The seaweed can be a huge problem for infrastructure. “Even if it’s just out in coastal waters, it can block intake valves for things like power plants or desalination plants, marinas can get completely inundated and boats can’t navigate through,” Brian Barnes, an assistant research professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, tells NBC. Not to mention, one 2022 paper linked the hydrogen sulfide that rotting seaweed emits to serious pregnancy complications, alongside headaches and eye irritation. 

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

While some types of seaweed make for awesome, sustainable products, this kind of sargassum is virtually useless. Using it as a fertilizer or compost is tricky, thanks to its high heavy metal content. Some scientists have argued for sinking the massive carpet of algae to the bottom of the ocean to use as carbon capture and storage. 

“There is a lot of carbon biomass associated with sargassum–about 3m tonnes in the Great Sargassum Belt,” Columbia University oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam tells The Guardian. 

For now, it’s probably best to keep an eye out for beach closures, event cancellations, and warnings as the season attracts more people—and smelly seaweed—toward the coast. 

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For gardeners, rabbits are a common cause of headaches, as they munch on a laundry list of vegetation, from berries and vegetables to perennials and woody plants. Aquaculturists like oyster farmers have the same problem, except not from fuzzy mammals. Marine rays are the main culprit, especially given that more than 80 percent of marine aquaculture consists of some of the rays’ favorite things to “crunch” on: bivalve mollusks.

[Related: Listen to the soothing sounds of a snacking stingray.]

When culturing hard clams (Mercenaria mercenaria), the bivalves must be placed at the bottom of a marine environment where they then grow to a sellable size. Clammers use mesh netting, plastic, or wire covers to protect their clam lease, similar to using a wire fence to try to keep rabbits out of a vegetable garden. However, the effectiveness of using these methods for highly mobile marine predators like rays hadn’t fully been tested until very recently. 

In a study published March 7 in the journal Aquaculture Environment Interactions, a team from Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and the Mote Marine Laboratory studied how the whitespotted eagle ray (Aetobatus narinari) interacted with clams enclosed in anti-predator materials. These rays are a formidable opponent with strong jaws, crushing fused teeth, and nimble pectoral fins. 

In a large outdoor tank, the team used aerial and underwater videos to assess the rays’ responses to various anti-predator materials. One plot of clams were placed inside polyester mesh bags that also had a latex net coating, another under a high density polyethylene (HDPE) netting, and a third under chicken wire cover netting. The control plot of clams were unprotected. 

After the completion of each trial, the team noted the number of crunched clams and how frequently the rays visited the various randomized patches. While the undersea hunters were capable of consuming clams through bags, the anti-predator treatments reduced clam mortality four- to tenfold compared to control plots where the clams were unprotected. The double-layered treatments (bags with cover netting) had the lowest clam mortality.

“Based on our findings, many of the current anti-predator grow-out strategies used in the hard clam shellfish aquaculture industry appear capable of reducing predation by large predators like whitespotted eagle rays,” said study co-author Matt Ajemian, director of the Fisheries Ecology and Conservation Lab at FAU, in a statement. “In par­ticular, bag treatments with cover nettings achieved the highest clam survival rates, although it is important to note that this did not appear to completely deter rays from interacting with the gear.”

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

The observations suggest that the rays appear to be capable of interacting with the aquaculture gear for longer periods of time, which potentially diverts them from other natural feeding habitats such as sand and mud flats.

“These habitat associations could expose these sensitive animals to other risks, although we are just beginning to understand them and admittedly have a lot more to learn,” said co-author Brianna Cahill, a research technician at Stony Brook University, in a statement. “Contrary to what we expected, rays did not prefer control plots (mimicking natural conditions) over treatment plots with anti-predator gear. This suggests a real possibility that these rays are interacting with shellfish aquaculture gear in the wild, as suggested by our clamming industry partners.”

The researchers also observed the rays interact with the treatments on the deterrents, including using their lower dental plate to dig through the sediment at the bottom of the tank to access the clams in the unprotected control plots and to move the gear.  

More testing could reveal whether chicken wire, a common deterrent in Florida, is actually beneficial. Earlier studies suggest that the electric field of the metal could be detected by rays and sharks and might overstimulate them, protecting the farmed shellfish. 

“Given the frequency of interactions we observed with chicken wire in our experiment, we question whether chicken wire is a deterrent, an attractant, or neutral, as it may not have a powerful enough signal to influ­ence the rays,” said Ajemian. “Still, we have more questions than we started with, and look forward to investigating this further with other species and deterrent types.”

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A floating wind turbine prototype has generated its first 1kWh of power off the coast of Spain’s Canary Islands, marking a major milestone in its makers’ goals to begin manufacturing their novel design at scale. Not to mention, it’s one of the first deployed floating turbines with a tension leg platform (TLP), an innovation that drastically reduces damage to sea floors.

Created by Spain-based X1 Wind, the startup company’s X30 floating prototype is the result of years of planning and fine-tuning, as well as includes several unique components and adaptations. At one-third the size of the final proposed turbine, X30 utilizes PivotBuoy, an augmented single point mooring (SPM) setup that allows the floating platform to passively align with wind currents, much like a classic weathervane. This eliminates the requirement of an active yaw actuator and ballast systems, thus minimizing the turbine’s overall weight and maintenance needs.

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

X30’s tension leg platform addition provides boosted environmental benefits. In this setup, a TLP is kept stable and at rest using steel rods anchored to the sea floor with either suction anchors or caissons. The legs remain stretched via the turbine’s platform tension beneath the water line, and its braces will limit the turbine’s vertical movement atop the waves.

From there, a 1.4km underwater cable feeds the X30 prototype’s energy generation into the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands’ (PLOCAN) existing offshore test site smartgrid.

X1 Wind’s floating turbine design was first envisioned in 2012 by company cofounder Carlos Casanovas while a student at MIT. Since then, Casanova’s team has worked to bring the concept into the real world. The project first began its design phase in April 2019, before moving onto its manufacturing stage throughout the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Final assembly and construction finished in October 2022 in 50m deep waters off of the Canary Islands.

Once thought a pipe dream, offshore floating wind turbines are increasingly showing themselves to be an extremely promising asset in sustainable global energy generation. Speaking in 2022, Axelle Viré, an associate professor of Floating Offshore Wind at Delft University of Technology, estimated that floating wind turbines could be expected to generate between 150-200 gigawatts of energy in the coming decades. Currently, fixed wind turbines only generate 12 gigawatts. 

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

“Floating wind is set to play a vital role supporting the future energy transition, global decarbonisation and ambitious net-zero targets,” Casanovas stated in a statement on Tuesday. “Today’s announcement marks another significant stride forward for X1 Wind accelerating towards certification and commercial scale ambitions to deliver 15MW platforms and beyond in deepwater sites around the globe.”

X1 Wind hopes to move into full-scale production after its prototype testing is completed, with their floating wind turbines each generating 15mW of clean energy anchored in deep sea environments around the world.

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On land, rivers and mountain ranges can divide species into genetically distinct populations. In the vast expanse of the ocean, where there is seemingly little to stop fish and other sea creatures from going where they please, scientists have long expected marine species to find it easier to mix. But ongoing research shows there’s more than just geographic barriers keeping populations separate, and marine species often have a higher genetic diversity than anticipated.

Hannes Baumann, a marine scientist at the University of Connecticut, says that for years the prevailing notion was that species in the ocean didn’t form separate populations. “But the last 20 years has demolished that concept,” he says. “Now everywhere we look we see differentiation.”

Protecting that genetic diversity is a focus of conservationists. At a recent meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the agency’s members adopted a new framework setting overarching goals for conservation efforts, including preserving genetic diversity within species to safeguard their ability to adapt to changing conditions.

“Genetic diversity is especially important for resilience,” says Sebastian Nicholls, from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ ocean conservation program, which works closely with CBD member states to help them meet their commitments on marine conservation issues. “If there is too little diversity, a species may be susceptible to a single pathogen or environmental stressor.”

A strong example of the value of that diversity comes from the recent discovery by Baumann and his colleagues that the northern sand lance, an important forage fish, is actually two populations.

By sequencing the genomes of hundreds of northern sand lance living from Greenland to New Jersey, the scientists found that the fish population is split in two—one group dwells north of the Scotian Shelf, off the east coast of Canada, and one lives farther south.

There is something curious about the Scotian Shelf, says Baumann. No obvious barrier prevents fish from crossing the divide and mixing with their neighbors, but it seems that their offspring do not survive when they do. Baumann suspects a change in water temperature centered around the shelf is to blame—the southern waters are too warm for the cold-adapted northern fish, and vice versa. The shelf also separates populations of other species, including lobsters, scallops, and cod. “This confirms with yet another species that the Scotian Shelf is almost a universal genetic barrier,” says Baumann.

More than a curiosity, the genetic minutiae of this little fish is surprisingly important. Sand lance are a cornerstone of ocean ecosystems. Just about everything eats the slender forage fish, including 72 species of fishes, birds, and mammals.

Theoretically, the existence of a population adapted to warmer water should help the species weather the stresses of climate change because it is more likely to thrive and spread northward as the ocean warms. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on their northern neighbors, since other unique adaptations could become important in the future, Baumann says. “Even if we don’t know which variant is the important one, we need to preserve all of them.”

The problem is, scientists know very little about the genetic diversity of most marine species, especially in the deep sea, says Nicholls. Many marine ecosystems are remote and difficult to get to, making it challenging to understand what diversity actually exists. “We don’t really know what’s out there; we’re discovering new species all the time,” he says, “so it’s even harder to get information about genetic diversity.”

Nicholls says the best tools to preserve both the genetic diversity we know about, and that which we don’t, are strong networks of marine protected areas. At the CBD meeting, members also agreed on a target of protecting 30 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2030. “If we protect enough of the ocean, populations can replenish themselves and spill over into adjacent areas, maintaining diversity both within and outside their boundaries,” Nicholls says.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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It’s been a long time coming, but on March 4, representatives from more than 100 countries agreed on language for a new United Nations (UN) treaty to protect marine life. Nicknamed the High-Seas Treaty, the agreement reached by delegates of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), is the culmination of talks facilitated by the UN that first began over 20 years ago. 

The planet’s marine life is facing multiple threats from overfishing, the effects of climate change, fossil fuel extraction, and escalating noise from vessel traffic. A 2021 study published in the journal Nature estimates that the shark and ray species that live in the open ocean have declined over 70 percent since 1970. Now, possible deep sea mining for minerals is putting unprotected areas of the world’s oceans in more danger.

[Related: The future of American conservation lies in restoration, not just protection.]

The High-Seas Treaty aims to create more marine-protected areas and more conservation measures in the high seas–a huge expanse of ocean covering almost 50 percent of the world. While there are international agreements and organizations that regulate the high seas, most focus on economic activities (shipping, fishing, mining, etc.). Environmental advocates say that these regulations do not always take biodiversity into account and the high seas are home to human rights abuses and laws are limited. 

Marine protected areas have been shown to benefit both fish and human interests. A 2022 study published in the journal Science found that carefully placed no-fishing zones like the 582,578 square mile wide Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii can help restore the populations of tuna and other large fish species.

The treaty also establishes basic ground rules for conducting environmental impact assessments for commercial activities in the oceans. Individual countries typically are in charge of the sea floor and waters about 200 nautical miles from their shores before the high seas begins. Currently, the world’s open oceans have no international body or agreement that primarily focuses on protecting marine life and this treaty aims to change that if enacted. Now that the language of the agreement is settled, countries will need to formally adopt it and then ratify the treaty itself. This ratification step usually requires legislative approval.

The high seas are home to a wealth of biodiversity, from tiny phytoplankton up to massive blue whales. It’s also where some of Earth’s most mysterious creatures like anglerfish and hatchetfish live. Many species that are found closer to shore like salmon, dolphins, turtles, and tuna, also spend a lot of their lives in the high seas during long migrations, which is partially why agreements like this are needed to extend the protections beyond national boundaries.  

[Related: World governments strike historic deal to protect planet’s biodiversity.]

The legally binding pact is also seen as a crucial component in the effort to reach a target to bring 30 percent of the world’s land and sea under protection by 2030 called 30 by 30. This agreement was struck at the United National Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in December 2022. 

“Today the world came together to protect the ocean for the benefit of our children and grandchildren,” Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs of the United States Monica Medina told The New York Times. “We leave here with the ability to create protected areas in the high seas and achieve the ambitious goal of conserving 30 percent of the ocean by 2030.”

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The clock is ticking for many low-lying coastal areas. Sea level is rising faster than at any time in recorded history, promising to radically redraw the map. At a broad scale, we know this to be true. But knowing precisely which plots will be inundated and which will remain dry land is a much more daunting task. That effort may have an ally almost no one would have guessed: one of the smallest and least conspicuous forms of life—lichens.

More than 18,000 species of lichens have been described worldwide. Each is a community made up of one or more species of fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria. This combination has enabled lichens to survive in diverse and often hostile conditions, everything from tropical heat to bitter Antarctic cold.

To scratch out its niche, each species has developed to tolerate different levels of temperature, light, air quality, and other factors. Because of this sensitivity, lichens are already used by scientists to gauge environmental disturbance, such as the influence of logging or nitrogen pollution. Lichens also vary in their salt tolerance. It’s this property, says botanist Roger Rosentreter at Idaho’s Boise State University, that makes them so useful in understanding sea level rise.

“Lichens are a good indicator of site history,” says Rosentreter, who has studied lichens and related species for over 40 years. Specifically, the species of lichens that grow on a coastal site may be an effective indicator of low levels of saltwater intrusion and spray, which can be caused by infrequent flooding or storm events. Since sea levels are continuing to rise, any site that has experienced occasional salt water in the past is likely to see more frequent flooding and storm effects in the future.

Recently, Rosentreter and his wife, fellow Boise State botanist Ann DeBolt, studied the lichen communities of two state parks near West Palm Beach, Florida. One park, on a barrier island, is subject to frequent salt spray and storm flooding, while the other is inland just 500 meters away. The scientists found two surprisingly different lichen communities at each site. By comparing the two, they started building a list of lichen species that can be useful indicators of the long-term or historical presence of salt water.

It takes more than just salt sensitivity to make a lichen a good indicator of whether a site has experienced the first effects of sea level rise. The lichen’s own life history also comes into play.

Species like the powdery medallion lichen (left photo) can be killed if subjected to too much salt water by a storm or flood. But this lichen’s quick reproduction lets it swiftly recolonize after the sea recedes. Larger species with slower growth and reproduction, and also low salt tolerance, like the ruffled blue jellyskin (right photo), can better tell the saltwater history of a site. These salt-intolerant lichens could not have survived and grown if a saltwater event like storm spray or flooding had occurred at any point during their life. Since some lichen species can live for decades or longer, the record they provide can be both hyperlocal in space and extensive in time.

Of the 48 different lichen species Rosentreter and DeBolt found at their two Florida survey sites, 11 are reliable indicators of salt water’s presence. Seven of the species only like to grow in places with very low saltwater impact, while four are salt tolerant, so finding them growing suggests the site has a moderate history of salt and a higher risk of being affected by rising seas.

In general, they found that the species that best indicate if a site will be relatively safe from sea level rise and saltwater inundation are lichens that are larger and leafier and often light green or blue in color. But lichens can be tricky to identify, and some promising indicator species look quite similar to less useful ones. “You’ve got to be at least an intermediate plant person to figure it out,” says Rosentreter.

“The good thing is, these aren’t just in Florida. They’re in the whole southeast coastal plain,” he says. Reports on iNaturalist, for instance, put the ruffled blue jellyskin all along the US East Coast and beyond.

Borja G. Reguero, an expert in conserving natural defenses against sea level rise at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the research, sees parallels between how coastal communities and lichens handle environmental change. “It makes a lot of sense to find those indicator [species] where the frequency of spray or flood events are over a threshold where some species are not able to live anymore,” he says. “You could say the same thing about humans and coastal infrastructure. You get to a tipping point where specific neighborhoods get flooded so regularly that they don’t get insurance.”

Modern science offers an array of tools to study sea level rise, from satellite data to groundwater and soil sampling. Lichens could be another way to see, at smaller site-specific scales, where the sea is coming next, and just as importantly, where it is not.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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A new era of biodegradable medical sensors may be on the horizon thanks in part to competitive cooks. According to Conor Boland, a materials physics lecturer in the University of Sussex’s School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, watching contestants on MasterChef utilize seaweed for a vegan gelatin alternative in desserts made him wonder where else those versatile properties could come in handy.

The results, recently published in the journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, detail how Boland’s team combined graphene with natural materials including rock salt, seaweed, and water to create a new health sensor that is not only biodegradable and edible, but potentially more accurate than existing synthetic options.

[Related: Kombucha may have a surprising new use in tech.]

To make their new, effective monitor material, researchers first created a thin film using a mixture of seaweed—a natural insulator—and electrically conductive graphene. Once soaked in a salt bath, the substance absorbed the water to form a soft, spongy hydrogel akin to the standard synthetic adhesive sensors seen in hospitals. Unlike existing products, however, the new, natural biomedical sensor is so thin and lightweight, the authors described the seaweed mixture as resembling a second skin or temporary tattoo.

Bio-technological hybrid products are increasingly coming to the forefront as cutting edge, sustainable, and innovative advances across a variety of fields—from “brain organoid intelligence” models in computers, to circuit boards built from dried kombucha cultures. Echoing the new seaweed sensors’ conceit, recent developments in biodegradable smart bandages that promise faster healing times. And it’s not seaweed ‘s first tech rodeo—the watery plant serves as a muse for all manner of products and materials lately, including new bioplastics, sustainable farming, and biofuel.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

The medical sensor industry is extremely lucrative—valued at over $6 billion in 2021, with estimates to rise to as much as $10 billion by 2027. Despite advances in technology, the discarded synthetic products still present a huge waste problem. As Boland explains, “The mass production of unsustainable rubber and plastic based health technology could, ironically, pose a risk to human health through microplastics leaching into water sources as they degrade.”

For Boland, recently becoming a parent provided an additional frame for the importance of his team’s work. “As a new parent, I see it as my responsibility to ensure my research enables the realization of a cleaner world for all our children,” he said, although without specifying if the edible sensors are appetizing to toddlers. That said, you can always try your hand at homemade agar-agar jelly.

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This article was originally featured on Grist.

Celebrations in a beachside California city will soon have to take place without an iconic, single-use party favor: balloons.

The city council of Laguna Beach, about 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles, banned the sale and use of all types of balloons on Tuesday, citing their contribution to ocean litter as well as risks from potential fires when they hit power lines. Starting in 2024, people using balloons on public property or at city events could incur fines of up to $500 for each violation. (Balloons used solely within people’s homes are exempt.)

The ban is part of a growing nationwide movement to restrict balloon use, as well as a broader item-by-item push to restrict problematic single-use products like plastic straws and bags. For now, most balloon-related state and city legislation only targets the intentional release of helium-filled balloons, but experts say outright bans on using any type outside are gaining traction as people better understand their environmental consequences. Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 2016 banned any balloon filled with a gas that’s lighter than air, and there are similar bans in places like East Hampton, New York, and Solana Beach and Encinitas, California.

“Plastic in the ocean and environment generally is gaining more attention,” Chad Nelsen, chief executive of the nonprofit environmental organization Surfrider Foundation, told Grist. “It’s good that people are looking at these disposable, single-use items that we have been using every day and not thinking about the consequences.” He said California beach cleanups organized by Surfrider in 2022 collected a total of nearly 2,500 balloons.

Balloons, especially those filled with helium, often become ocean pollution after just a few hours of use. Those made of latex — a kind of soft, synthetic or natural material that may take decades to break down — can be mistaken for food by marine animals and birds. When ingested, latex can conform to birds’ stomach cavities, causing nutrient deficiency or suffocation. 

Balloons made of mylar, a kind of plastic coated in thin metal, basically never break down. “They stick around truly until the end of time,” said Kara Wiggin, a doctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The plastic strings attached to them can strangle marine life and then chip into microplastics that contaminate drinking water and the food chain.

Mylar balloons can also get tangled in power lines, leading to power outages or fires. According to the city of Riverside, California, balloons caused more than 1,300 minutes of power outages for its publicly owned water and electric utility in 2021. Other cities and utilities report thousands of ratepayers losing power each year when balloons get caught in power lines.

Wiggin said balloons are just a small part of society’s broader addiction to single-use items, but that banning them is “low-hanging fruit.” “We don’t throw things purposefully into the environment, but we often do that with balloons,” she told Grist. “That’s a practice that needs to be stopped.”

Nelsen said there are plenty of balloon-free ways to keep the fun going, including paper-based decorations, streamers, flags, kites, and pinwheels — many of which can be safely reused dozens of times. “Let’s find a way to celebrate kids’ birthdays without killing marine life,” he said.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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There’s a case to be made that the world’s greatest forests are not terrestrial. That’s in large part due to kelp. Like their less watery counterparts, kelp forests play an important role in carbon cycling across the planet, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis and sequestering the carbon beneath the ocean’s surface. 

Kelp forests are located in shallow coastal waters across the globe, including in the northeast and all along the Pacific coast in the United States. Despite taking up only a tiny fraction of the ocean, they’re incredibly diverse. Charles Darwin marveled at just how many species are present in kelp forests in his diary while aboard the HMS Beagle. However, they are incredibly fragile ecosystems. Once disrupted, it’s very difficult for the forests to recover.  

[Related: Sea urchin sperm is surprisingly useful to robotics experts.]

With the presence of purple sea urchins off the coasts of the western United States, the destruction of kelp forests has become much faster. But new research from Oregon State University published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that the sunflower sea star, a 24-armed behemoth of a sea star living in kelp forests on the west coast may be a major asset to preserving those important ecosystems, namely by fighting off pesky sea urchins.

Sea urchins are a natural part of the ecosystem, and act as scavengers, feeding on dead kelp and other detritus that falls to the ocean floor. However, when there’s not enough food for them to go around, past research has found that they’ll begin feasting on living kelp. This disrupts the ecosystem, and if not left in check, leads to the formation of an urchin barren, with no kelp to be seen and urchins packed tightly along the ocean floor. Once a barren forms, the rebirth of a kelp forest is all but impossible. Any new kelp growth will promptly be devoured by the urchins, which are able to survive with little food and will live for at least 20 years. 

Marine biologists long ago realized that the predators of sea urchins are part of the problem. Sea otters, considered one of the keystone species of the ecosystem, have been hunted to endangered status. Other predators, like the sunflower sea star, would have to pick up some of the slack. Unfortunately, a sea star wasting disease has decimated the population in the last decade, leaving the population critically endangered. 

This study examined just how effective the sunflower sea star is as a predator of sea urchins by raising well-fed and starving sea urchins in a lab setting. After about six weeks of collecting and raising urchins, the researchers let 24 sea stars free to feed. The sea stars consumed an average of 0.68 urchins a day, and when the urchins were starving, like they are in nutrient-poor urchin barrens, sea stars ate even more. That is a major difference between the sea stars and other predators, like otters, who are picky when it comes to choosing what urchins to eat, preferring healthy urchins that are less common in a barren. 

[Related: A virgin birth in Shedd Aquarium’s shark tank is baffling biologists.]

“Eating less than one urchin per day may not sound like a lot, but we think there used to be over 5 billion sunflower sea stars,” Sarah Gravem, a research associate at Oregon State said in a release. Although there’s no consensus on just how devastating sea star wasting disease has been, most estimates place the loss at around 90 percent of the population. “We used a model to show that the pre-disease densities of sea stars on the U.S. West Coast were usually more than enough to keep sea urchin numbers down and prevent barrens,” Gravem adds.

With this knowledge in mind, future research can focus on how exactly to use sunflower sea stars to keep sea urchin populations in check—and hopefully restore kelp forests in the process.

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As the world warms, animals living near the coast are being battered by stronger storms, rising seas, and extreme temperatures. While fish, birds, and other species might be able to escape—often toward the poles—many marine creatures can barely move, let alone speed out of the way.

Scientists have long known that on hot days more mobile shoreline creatures like crabs take steps to control their body temperature by scuttling into cool crevices. Less mobile animals such as barnacles and limpets, meanwhile, just have to cope as best they can. Yet with extreme heatwaves becoming more common, Lily McIntire, an ecologist at San Diego State University in California, was curious to know where intertidal creatures spend hot days and what happens to their internal temperatures.

For the past few years, McIntire has been making epoxy resin models of various intertidal animals—from fast-moving crabs to slower snails and limpets to immobile animals like barnacles—and dotting them around the shoreline in Northern California. Affixed with temperature loggers, the resin replicas are designed to heat up and cool down at the same rate as the real creatures. By then watching where real animals spend their time, and using nearby models to determine their internal body temperatures, McIntire got a glimpse into how the beach’s tiny inhabitants handle the heat.

The preliminary data, which was presented at a recent conference, shows that on hot days the faster creatures manage to keep their body temperatures stable by hiding out in cooler areas, while less mobile animals bake in the sun. On cool, cloudy days, McIntire’s experiments show that slow creatures in the intertidal zone sit at around 15 °C. But in hot, sunny weather, she found they can heat up to around 30 °C.

McIntire says it’s not entirely clear how animals deal with extremely hot days, like those during the heat dome that afflicted the Pacific Northwest in 2021 with temperatures above 40 °C, as none occurred during her experiments.

However, she says in extreme heat it is possible that faster-moving animals like crabs will fare worse than sessile ones. The reason, she explains, is that while mobile creatures can head for a shady spot, sessile species have likely evolved better physiological ways to deal with temperature extremes. For instance, many snails and mussels have heat shock proteins that help them cope with heat stress by protecting other important proteins. But these adaptations to high temperatures have limits, McIntire says.

Michael Burrows, a marine ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science who was not involved in McIntire’s project, expects that with ongoing warming mobile shoreline creatures will not be able to spend as much time hunting and foraging, while slower creatures like barnacles will disappear from warmer parts of the seashore. The overall result, he says, could be akin to cutting off the lower links of the food chain.

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The humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) along Australia’s eastern coast might be giving up singing their signature songs to find a mate. As the competition for females has increased, a new study theorizes that instead of crooning their love songs, the male whales are switching to fighting each other and are possibly staying quiet for their own survival. 

Humpback whale songs have been studied for more than half a century, following the development of better underwater microphones in the 1970s that allowed scientists to record them. Only male humpbacks are known to make these elaborate sounds. It is believed that this allows them to attract mates and assert their dominance among other whales. 

[Related: Boat noise is driving humpback whale moms into deep, dangerous water.]

The population of whales surveyed for the new study, published February 16 in the journal Communications Biology, is a conservation success story. Only about 200 whales were in the area in the 1960s and they have since come back from the brink of extinction. They have been able to survive and thrive primarily due to commercial whaling largely stopping in 1986. 

The team used data from 1997 to 2015, when the humpback whale population in eastern Australia exploded from roughly 3,700 whales to 27,000. As the population of whales increased, competition for mates also grew.

“In 1997, a singing male whale was almost twice as likely to be seen trying to breed with a female when compared to a non-singing male. But by 2015 it had flipped, with non-singing males almost five times more likely to be recorded trying to breed than singing males,” said study co-author and marine biologist Rebecca Dunlop from The University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences, in a statement. “It’s quite a big change in behavior so humans aren’t the only ones subject to big social changes when it comes to mating rituals.”

According to Dunlop, if the competition for a mate is fierce, the last thing a male would want to do is let another male know that a female is in the area by singing. It could attract unwanted competition and be risky. 

“With humpbacks, physical aggression tends to express itself as ramming, charging, and trying to head slap each other. This runs the risk of physical injury, so males must weigh up the costs and benefits of each tactic,” said Dunlop. 

In an interview with the Associated Press, Simon Ingram, a marine biologist from University of Plymouth said who was not involved with this study said, “Such a big increase in animals over the time they were studying gave them a unique opportunity to get insights about changes in behavior. Clearly singing became incredibly valuable when their numbers were very low.”

[Related: A rare humpback whale ‘megapod’ was spotted snacking off the Australian coast.]

The humpbacks in eastern Australia have rebounded close to pre-whaling levels and have even been taken off of the threatened species list. The team can continue to track how the whales’ social behavior changes with their increased numbers.

“Singing was the dominant mating tactic in 1997, but within the space of seven years this has turned around,” said Dunlop. “It will be fascinating to see how whale mating behavior continues to be shaped in the future.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In 2015, scientists surveying a protected area of seafloor in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a region known for its high concentration of the polymetallic nodules sought after by would-be deep-sea miners, came across an eerie sight: a mass grave of millions of red crabs. This many dead crabs in one place is shocking enough, but at a depth of 4,000 meters, it was a baffling find.

“It took us three or four days to actually realize that these are pelagic crabs”—animals that are supposed to be much nearer the surface—says Erik Simon-Lledó, the lead author of a paper documenting the find and a marine biologist at the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre. “It is a bit embarrassing, but it [was] so unexpected. Nobody had heard of such a massive deposition in the abyss.”

While red crabs are abundant in the eastern Pacific and are noteworthy for washing up en masse on beaches in California and Baja California, Mexico, finding them at such depth in such numbers is unheard of. Even more bizarre, the grave was 1,500 kilometers offshore. This is so far from the crabs’ spawning areas off the northwestern United States that it would have taken the current at least a year to push them to the point where they eventually sank.

So many crabs drifting far offshore and sinking to the seafloor would have attracted droves of hungry predators and scavengers, so the scientists aren’t sure how the crabs remained relatively intact. Most creatures on the abyssal seafloor feed on the tiny bits of waste that fall from the surface, making these crabs, in comparison, a fantastic dinner. “Get your forks, mates, we have quality dinner now,” says Simon-Lledó with a laugh.

The researchers suspect the sheer number of crabs involved has something to do with it. Millions of crabs descending to the seafloor are simply too many to be eaten. “Swarms can have millions and millions of crabs, especially when there are perfect conditions for their development, like algal blooms or different climatic events,” explains Simon-Lledó.

The scientists can’t say whether this mass “crab fall” is just a one-off coincidence or a periodic event. Masses of millions of dead crabs do wash up on beaches every couple of years, so in principle the same could be happening in the abyss but has gone unnoticed until now. That’s Simon-Lledó’s preferred interpretation, which is supported by the fact that there were two to three times more scavengers in the crab graveyard than in the rest of the scientists’ survey area in the CCZ.

The researchers calculate that this single event represents one and a half times the carbon flux that the area would normally get in a whole year. The excess carbon will eventually make its way into the food web, supporting a richer ecosystem than we would typically imagine existing here—an ecosystem where deep-sea mining could do a great deal of damage.

The area where Simon-Lledó and his colleagues found the crabs is not being eyed for mining. But Amanda Ziegler, a researcher at UiT the Arctic University of Norway who was not involved in the study, says it is the same kind of habitat as other areas in the CCZ that do have claims for deep-sea mining. “So it is possible that this kind of crab fall [has] occurred somewhere that might also be a claim area, but that’s hard to say since it’s so difficult to assess such a big area,” she says.

Trips to the deep sea are expensive, and funding bodies often prioritize mapping a new area over returning to one that is already mapped. So the research team has not been able to return to see the aftermath of the crab fall or to see whether there have been more depositions.

“Our paper shows that there is more environmental variability than we would think in abyssal areas,” says Simon-Lledó. “It also shows how little we know about this environment that we will potentially be mining in a few years.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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From the shore, you have to squint to see them—the 50 or so objects that look like large black duffel bags floating in several rows near the surface of Napeague Bay in East Hampton, New York. And if it’s dark, or the wind churns up waves, you might not spot them at all. To get a better look from the beach, you really need binoculars, which is what Adam Younes uses when he wants to do a visual check of these bobbling floats marking his oyster farm. But on most days, he putters his small boat 805 meters offshore to the site, easily navigating the nine-meter channels between the rows, to check on the cages suspended just below the water’s surface. Within each cage, hundreds of oysters fatten up until their salty, soft inner bodies are big enough to be served at seaside restaurants and galas and probably aboard the yachts that occasionally sail by.

In 2016, Younes picked this four-hectare plot, about half the size of a baseball field, because it was a 10-minute drive from his house. He named his oyster farm Promised Land, a biblical reference to a peaceful resting place. The area’s shores and marshes and quietly swaying woods have always felt like heaven to him.

Yet, the name didn’t live up to reality. Younes soon found out that some people didn’t want the oysters there, including members of the coveted Devon Yacht Club who often convene in a one-story cedar-shingled building roughly half a kilometer away on the shores of Napeague Bay. Between 2018 and 2021, members from Devon and other yacht clubs, along with area residents, aired their grievances about aquaculture and oyster farms like Younes’s during a series of long, and what at times felt like deadlocked, public meetings. The meetings were part of a 10-year review of the aquaculture lease program by Suffolk County, which East Hampton is a part of. Locals, particularly those who were boaters, accused oyster farmers of obstructing access to nature with their floating gear. “We’re going to pave paradise and turn it into a parking lot,” one resident said, paraphrasing a popular antidevelopment song to make a point about floating farm gear.

Younes never imagined that his farm, his promised land, would unleash so much disapproval. More than a year later, the memories of the review continue to haunt him. “Talking about this still makes me sick and angry,” he says, with a heavy sigh. “It was an emotional fight.”

Oyster farmers across the United States and parts of Canada are being confronted by a growing population of coastal residents who are upset about where farms are going up. Along the US East Coast, as well as in other prime oyster-growing regions such as Washington State and British Columbia, tempers have flared. Coastal homeowners are making passionate speeches at local meetings and enlisting lawyers, as Devon Yacht Club did, to help appeal farm leases they deem are too close to where they live and play. “It’s probably as contentious as it’s ever been,” says Ben Stagg, who, until the end of 2022 was chief of shellfish management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, an agency that manages that state’s oyster leases. At one point in 2022, Stagg had about 260 lease applications to look through, and of those, 30 percent were being protested by locals, a rate that he says has generally tripled in recent years.

The disputes come just as North American interest in oysters is growing. Oysters are increasingly recognized as a sustainable seafood, and they capture their own food from the water column, benefiting the ecosystem. An oyster is like nature’s Brita pitcher: it can filter about 189 liters of water per day, removing excess nitrogen and phosphorus. As climate change progresses, oyster aquaculture could also help mitigate some of the issues coastal communities are facing, suggests Nick Ray, a biogeochemist at Cornell University in New York who does research in aquaculture. The oyster’s filtering abilities reduce pollution, and cages full of oysters serve as a living coastal buffer against storm surges and erosion, he says.

After struggling early in the pandemic, some farmers in the United States described the summer of 2021 as “bonkers” as they worked overtime to deliver oysters to customers who were craving the salty bivalves after a long period of COVID-19-induced restaurant closures. Chuck Westfall, an oyster farmer and executive of the Long Island Oyster Growers Association, says that demand was so high people kept buying even after all the premium oysters were sold, gladly snatching up those he would consider a little subpar because they hadn’t had the time to grow. Farmers are saying 2022 was another good year, though demand cooled a bit.

Unsurprisingly, potential newcomers to the industry seem to be taking note. In some areas, like Maine and North Carolina, applications for oyster farms are on the rise. In most states, farmers essentially rent water space for a set amount of time. Stagg approves leases as big as 101 hectares, roughly one-third the size of Central Park in New York City. In Suffolk County, Younes and other farmers can lease four hectares for 10 years. Many states have interactive maps that show the available space, sites the state has vetted and deemed appropriate for aquaculture (although in some places, the auditing occurred long before nearby residential development took off). A farmer submits an application for a particular site and a review process follows—resource managers like Stagg consider factors such as the farm’s size, water depth, and other nearby activity before approving the application. In some states, local residents must be notified of the proposal, and there’s a public comment period where they can chime in. But not every state allows input, and even where there are opportunities for public comment, residents often argue they are not properly informed about a prospective farm’s size, location, or methods.

Friction in the oyster world seems to stem from differing beliefs about what the water should primarily be used for: work or leisure? Is it for kayaking and boating or for producing food? Is it meant to be devoid of “eyesores” so people can look onto a smooth, glassy surface from their decks or yachts? Some people would say all of the above, that it’s all possible, but areas where those demands overlap are where the conflicts tend to erupt. In uberwealthy East Hampton, members of the Devon Yacht Club and other residents argued that Younes’s floating cages were a hazard to navigation. Curt Schade, one of the club’s former board members, says the area is heavily used for recreational boating, especially in the summer when the club runs a youth sailing program. In public review hearings, club members also made sure to mention Devon’s historical ties: they had been sailing those waters for more than 100 years. “If the cages had been on the bottom, there really would have been very little conflict,” Schade says, referring to another aquaculture method where oyster cages are anchored to the sea or bay floor, rather than floated near the surface.

Younes points out that his cages are near the surface only between June and October, which helps him get higher yields since there is more food for the oysters to feast on near the surface and he’s better able to monitor the shells and address any problems; after that, he drops the cages to the seafloor. Unfortunately, the months the cages are on the surface are also peak sailing season.

If you travel north from East Hampton across Long Island Sound, you’ll land on the southern shores of Rhode Island. Here, the landscapes feel nearly identical to East Hampton: cedar-shingled homes near smooth beaches framed by swaying beach grass. The community issues echo across the sound, too—here, the waters have also become a source of tension between some residents and oyster farmers. The sleepy town of Tiverton, tucked into the southeastern corner of the state, may not have the same concentration of monied residents as East Hampton, but people are just as adamant about protesting certain oyster farms. In the summer of 2021, dozens of yellow signs began showing up on manicured lawns in Tiverton, urging residents to Act Now!!! The signs were put up by community members who oppose a proposed oyster farm. Unlike Younes’s farm, which is accessible only via boat, the roughly half-hectare farm on the Tiverton site could be reached by wading into the relatively shallow waters of the Sakonnet River. Brothers John and Patrick Bowen, the two farmers behind the proposed site, were attracted by the alternative to running a boat to a location farther offshore and also noted the site wasn’t great for swimming or kayaking.

But some residents think the farm’s placement is actually its flaw and have differing ideas about the area’s use. “It’s a public access point with free parking, used by many to fish, kayak, and swim,” says Kenneth Mendez, a Tiverton resident. He equates the operation’s location to putting an organic farm in the middle of a public baseball field. “I think most people would say, No, we’re not okay with that,” he says. “There are other areas to farm. And this area is valued and has social good and impact for all those who use it.”

In both coastal communities, residents voice concerns that oyster farms would be privatizing and profiting from space that has always been public.

Farmers think these space concerns are overblown. “Kayakers and small boats would be able to easily navigate through our lease area,” the Bowen brothers explain by email. “Our proposal will not prevent anyone from fishing. All proposed gear will be subtidal, not visible above the waterline (except four mandatory corner marker buoys).”

Because his site is 805 meters offshore, Younes believes boats have more than enough room to go around the farm. “And they do it every day. Sometimes they even go through my site,” he says. When he submitted his public comment letter during the review process, he attached several photos. They showed bluebird skies, small waves cresting on the bay, and a smattering of sailboats, all appearing to navigate the waters around this operation with ease. At least in those still images, the farm and boats seem to coexist peacefully, all enjoying a promised land.

Other industry supporters point out that boating comes with the inherent responsibility of paying attention and navigating around objects, be it other boats or oyster farms. “If you are a recreational boater, you should be aware of hazards—there are many,” says Karen Rivara, president of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association and an oyster farmer in Southold, New York. “Other boaters are the biggest danger, not gear.”

On the briny, unsettled surface, these disagreements can sometimes look like a class rift—a clash between the working class and coastal elites, between people who make their living in the water and those whose work has afforded them the opportunity to purchase properties, like second homes, on the water. In the past few years, there’s been an influx of people and money into many coastal towns. By some estimates, the population of Southampton, a wealthy area of New York that’s part of the Hamptons, nearly doubled in 2020 as affluent New Yorkers fled the newly circulating coronavirus. (Home prices in some areas doubled from 2020 to 2021; the median sale price in July 2022 was US $2.5-million, with several homes selling for $30-million or more.) A similar pattern unfolded in coastal communities in Rhode Island, North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and Maine.

As new residents pour in, the population shift could be ushering in people who might not have an appreciation for, or connection to, coastal economies. Although oysters have been harvested for centuries in the wild, aquaculture in its current form, with gear and floats, is comparatively new. Many people haven’t had the time to get used to it, let alone romanticize it like they do other types of marine industries. “If you go to Maine, there are far more lobster buoys per acre than there are oyster cages in Narragansett Bay,” says Jules Opton-Himmel, owner of Walrus and Carpenter Oysters in Narragansett, Rhode Island. People paint pictures of the colorful buoys or travel to see them, thinking they’re quaint, he says. Lobster harvesting is “part of the culture there, and people accept it and like it. But there’s not that cultural history [with oyster farming] here.”

Still, it’s important not to generalize—research shows that wealth is actually not a strong predictor of aquaculture support. A 2015 study from Vancouver Island University in British Columbia found that factors like affluence or even living near the water or knowing someone who works in the aquaculture industry aren’t good indicators of a person’s attitude toward oyster farming. Instead, attitudes seem to vary by community, says study coauthor Grant Murray, now a marine social scientist at Duke University in North Carolina. “And we don’t really know why that is … it could be due to local culture or networks of people who talk to each other and convince one another that it’s good or bad.”

The tensions between residents and farmers bring up a larger question: If the water is a public good, whose needs and wants will ultimately prevail? And who gets to decide that? In Virginia and other states, resource managers like Stagg make the call. If a lease is protested, Stagg would try to work with both parties to come up with a compromise, becoming less like a government official and more like a marriage counselor. Typically, after some back and forth between farmers and residents, he was able to scooch leases a few meters over. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s often enough to appease both parties. But not every alternate location will work. To the general public, water may look like water pretty much anywhere you go. But factors such as depth, currents, temperature, and sediment composition can vary even within just a few meters and can impact the success of an oyster-growing site.

Stagg also admits that finding common ground between residents and farmers is getting harder. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I think I am pretty good at trying to negotiate these [leases]. But it’s getting really difficult because people really dig in pretty, pretty hard,” he says. “People don’t have unfettered access to the water like they did in the past. And they don’t like that.” He started to turn down lease applications in areas he thought would be contentious.

If resource managers like Stagg can’t help opposing groups find a compromise, cases usually move on to the local city council or courts, where they can get stuck as appeals and counter-appeals are volleyed between parties. The process becomes costly, time consuming, and emotionally taxing. When community members objected to one of Opton-Himmel’s leases in Rhode Island, he tried to resolve things the traditional way: by going to local meetings to explain his business plan. But his neighbors remained unsatisfied, and they hired an attorney. So he did, too. Yet neither group would budge.

One day, Opton-Himmel received an email from the Young Farmer Network with an ad for a mediation service; he called the number and set up an appointment. A few months later, on a July afternoon, Opton-Himmel and seven community members met with a mediator at the public library. He remembers the initial mood as tense: “Nobody shook hands, and this was before the pandemic.” But a few hours later, the tenor changed as each side got to know the other. Opton-Himmel learned that these residents had been saving for decades to retire on the water, and the view they were getting with his floating cages in the distance wasn’t the empty bay they had been daydreaming about. “And they said [to me], ‘Oh, well, we just thought you were a greedy capitalist doing an illegal thing that you knew you could get away with,’” he says. (There was a misunderstanding about how many cages he could use.) After several meetings, they reached a compromise: Opton-Himmel agreed to move his farm to another site, but he could expand and have eight times more cages. He still had to get all the necessary government approvals, but residents agreed to not protest his lease. “The mediation was the key to finding a solution,” he says. “Otherwise, we would probably still be fighting to this day.”

On Long Island, oyster farmers aren’t sure they have anything more to give. “I don’t see much room for compromise because we’ve already given up quite a bit,” says Younes. After the 10-year review process, Younes was able to keep his farm in place, but the county took away nearly 5,200 hectares of potential aquaculture cultivation zone. “Those are economic opportunities and aquaculture opportunities for the future of Suffolk County that are gone,” he says, adding that he’s heard that the exhausting review process has deterred others from setting up new farms.

States have been looking for ways to get ahead of the conflict. Instead of leasing out smaller parcels of water in increasingly developed areas, some states, like North Carolina, are considering designating aquaculture zones in more remote areas—say, 50 or 100 hectares of water subdivided into several farms. While this idea could mitigate conflicts between neighbors, Murray says that there are risks to lumping everyone together. Storms and water-quality issues, for example, could destroy entire oyster yields. And there’s no guarantee that those remote shorelines won’t eventually become desired by people looking for their own slice of coastal paradise, the next promised land. In Tiverton, Mendez, an opponent of the current location of the Bowen farm, supports something relatively more modest: that oyster farms be placed at least 305 meters from the shore. Similar efforts have been successful in places like New Zealand, which requires a much more significant five-kilometer buffer between the coast and aquaculture farms. (Of course, this solution means that farmers are burning more fuel to get to their sites.) But even that cushion may not appease dissenters: in Suffolk County, Younes and other farmers are already required to be at least 305 meters offshore, and that regulation clearly hasn’t been enough to dodge conflict.

As coastal communities continue to squeeze in more people, more yachts, and more recreation, states might have to revisit current aquaculture programs to see what’s viable now. Farmers and residents may find that compromise is easier when they channel the creatures they’re fighting over. Not by hardening their shells, but instead by softening their stances about what can and can’t be done on the water so that they see each other as neighbors who can coexist, rather than opponents. Oysters can be an important protein for the future and a buffer against some climate change impacts only if society can balance competing interests.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The water off the coast of San Diego, California has been looking a bit like something out of a Lisa Frank illustration. Don’t worry, it is all in the name of science. 

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington are working on an experiment aptly titled PiNC, or Plumes in Nearshore Conditions, that is using pink dye to investigate how small freshwater outflows interact with the surfzone.

[Related: Humans are altering Earth’s tides, and not just through climate change.]

The first of three planned dye releases began on January 20 and the remaining releases are planned for late January and early February.

The project is focused on the estuary and surrounding coastline at Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. Three streams (Carroll Creek, Carmel Creek and Los Peñasquitos Creek) feed into the lagoon, which feeds into the Pacific Ocean. Estuaries and rivers play an important part in delivering freshwater in addition to sediments and contaminants to the coastal ocean. 

By releasing an environmentally safe pink dye into the mouth of the estuary, the PiNC research team is able to track what happens when small-scale plumes of more buoyant freshwater meet the denser, more salty, and often colder environment and breaking waves (or surfzone). 

“I’m excited because this research hasn’t been done before and it’s a really unique experiment,” said Scripps coastal oceanographer Sarah Giddings, who is leading the PiNC study, in a statement. “We’re bringing together a lot of different people with different expertise, such that I think it’s going to have some really great results and impacts. We will combine results from this experiment with an older field study and computer models that will allow us to make progress on understanding how these plumes spread.” 

Drones, a jet ski equipped with a fluorometer (which measures the fluorescence or light emitted from the dye), and sensors are tracking the movement of the fluorescent pink dye. Several moorings and sensors are beyond the breaking waves and along the seafloor to measure the ocean’s currents and conditions (water temperature, tide, salinity, etc.).

[Related: Some rivers suddenly change course, and we may finally know why.]

The team says that the PiNC experiment will provide a first-ever view of the buoyant plume and wave mixing dynamics that are at play and aim to improve understanding of how ocean waves interact with small-to-moderate outflows of freshwater. The data from this study can then help quantify the spread of sediment, pollutants, larvae, and other important material.

This specific site was chosen because it is a “prime example” of what happens when a small river plume discharges material  into the surfzone along a relatively uniform stretch of coastline

“Los Peñasquitos Lagoon is a very dynamic system, with different elements changing each day, often even over the course of one day,” said Alex Simpson, a Scripps postdoctoral scholar and member of the research team, in a statement. “I am looking forward to seeing how the balance of physical forces—ocean waves competing against river outflow—determine the fate of the estuary water as it enters the coastal ocean on the days that we conduct our field experiment.”

The dye releases occur at a point in the tide cycle when the water level is falling called an ebb tide. This ensures that the dye is carried out of the estuary and into the coastal ocean. The pink dye can be seen by the naked eye for several hours after the deployment. While the dye doesn’t pose a threat to the environment, beachgoers are advised to swim in areas further south or north of the estuary on the days that the dye is released due to the active research. 

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There’s a new rogue iceberg floating around Antarctica. The almost 600 square-mile iceberg broke off of the Brunt Ice Shelf on January 22, according to scientists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Researchers at BAS’ Halley Research Station have been tracking the ice shelf’s behavior for several years.

The Brunt Ice Shelf itself is close to 500 feet thick. It “calved” when a crack called Chasm-1 that has naturally been developing over the last few years extended across the whole shelf, causing the new iceberg to break free. 

[Related: An East Antarctic ice shelf has collapsed.]

“This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behaviour of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change,” said Dominic Hodgson, a glaciologist with BAS, in a statement. “Our science and operational teams continue to monitor the ice shelf in real-time to ensure it is safe, and to maintain the delivery of the science we undertake at Halley”. 

While the area of the ice shelf that houses the research station is unaffected by recent calving events, Brunt has a complex geological structure and the impact of calving events remain unpredictable.

The first signs of changes in Chasm-1 were spotted by satellites in 2012. It began to widen, and the BAS moved Halley Research Station 14 miles inland in 2016. By the following year, BAS began only deploying staff to the station from November to March (Antarctic summer) the following year.

“Our glaciologists and operations teams have been anticipating this event. Measurements of the ice shelf are carried out multiple times a day using an automated network of high-precision GPS instruments that surround the station,” said BAS Director Jane Francis, in a statement. “These measure how the ice shelf is deforming and moving, and are compared to satellite images from ESA, NASA, and the German satellite TerraSAR-X. All data are sent back to Cambridge for analysis, so we know what is happening even in the Antarctic winter – when there are no staff on the station, it is dark for 24 hours, and the temperature falls below minus 50 degrees C (or -58F).”

[Related: Giant ice cracks in Antarctica stymie important research for the second winter in a row.]

BAS says the changes in the Brunt Ice Shelf are a natural process and that there isn’t any connection to recent rapid calving events on Larsen C Ice Shelf. This shelf had extensive surface meltwater when an iceberg the size of Luxembourg broke off of the ice shelf in 2017, but still no evidence that climate change has played a significant role. 

Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told The Washington Post that while the iceberg “is a huge mass of ice, about 500 billion tons … it is far from being the largest iceberg ever seen, which rivaled Long Island. These large iceberg calvings, sometimes as large as a small state, are spectacular. But they’re just part of how Antarctica’s ice sheet works. Most of the time they have nothing to do with climate change.”

Currently, BAS has 21 staff at the station who will maintain power supplies and facilities until February 6.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

The world’s aquatic habitats are a heady brew of pollutants. An estimated 14 million tons of plastic enter the ocean as trash each year. Further inland, more than 40 percent of the world’s rivers contain a pharmacopeia from humans, including antidepressants and painkillers. Heavy metals like mercury from industrial waste can also make an appearance. And agricultural fertilizer can leach from the soil into rivers, eventually reaching the ocean.

There are an estimated 20,000 species of fish in the world — and possibly many more. They and many other organisms that live in “contaminated systems are contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals,” said Michael Bertram, a behavioral ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Studies.

Bertram and other researchers are increasingly finding that these compounds may alter fish behavior. In some experiments, the pollutants appear to alter how fish socialize, either by exposing them to psychoactive drugs or by altering their natural development, which may change how they swim together and mate. Others appear to make fish take more risks which, in the wild, could increase their odds of getting unceremoniously taken out by predators.

The effects of the pollution, according to researchers working in the field, still have many unknowns. This is due in part to the vast number of variables in real ecosystems, which can limit scientists’ abilities to infer how pollutants impact fish in the wild, said Quentin Petitjean, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental sciences at Institut Sophia Agrobiotech in France, and co-author of a 2020 paper that looked at existing literature on pollution and fish behavior. “In the wild, fish and other organisms are exposed to a plethora of stressors,” he said.

Still, these altered behaviors could have big impacts, according to Bertram. Like many living things, fish are important parts of their ecosystems, and changing their behavior could hinder or alter their roles in unexpected ways. For instance one study suggests that various chemical pollutants and microplastics can impact the boldness of prey fish species. Although the authors note that this isn’t likely to lead to population collapse, these “subtle behavior modifications” could reduce fish biomass, alter their size, and ultimately harm predators as well. Just this one effect, they add, “may be a hidden mechanism behind ecosystem structure changes in both freshwater and marine ecosystems.”

But humans have a funny way of showing their appreciation. One example: People regularly flush psychoactive substances, which then find their way into aquatic ecosystems. In 2021, Bertram and a team of researchers published a paper digging into how a common antidepressant, fluoxetine, better known under the brand name Prozac, affected guppies’ propensity for shoaling, or swimming in groups. Over two years, the team exposed groups of guppies to different concentrations of fluoxetine: a low concentration (commonly seen in the wild), a high concentration (representative of an extremely contaminated ecosystem), and no fluoxetine at all.

At the high exposure concentration, the guppies appeared to be more social, spending more time shoaling. However, this was only the case in of male-female pairs, not when the fish swam solo. Previous research by Bertram and colleagues shows that the medication increases the amount of time guppy males spend pursuing females. “Being intensely courted” by males, Bertram said, the females will preferentially choose the larger school to distract them and “to avoid this incessant mating behavior.”

While drugs like Prozac are designed to change brain function, there are other, perhaps less obvious ways pollution can change behavior. For instance, pollutants may alter the microbiome, the collection of microscopic organisms like fungi and bacteria that exist on or in an organism. In humans, disruptions of microbial life have been linked to disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, dementia, or even simply cognitive impairment. Research published in 2022 suggests that fish brains may also rely on the collection of minuscule organisms.

In the study, researchers worked with two groups of zebrafish embryos that they had rendered germ-free, functionally stripping them of microbes. Into the containers holding one group of embryos, the team immediately introduced water from a tank with full-grown zebrafish to give the disinfected population a microbiome. After a week, they did the same for the other group.

After yet another week, the researchers ran a series of experiments, putting two fish from the same group in neighboring tanks to see if they would swim alongside each other, a shoaling behavior previously identified.

The fish deprived of an early life microbiome spent much less time doing this behavior than those in the control group. Of the 54 control fish, nearly 80 percent spent their time near the divider between the tanks, compared to around 65 percent of the 67 in the other group. Exposure to microbes early in life is important for the development of social behavior, said Judith Eisen, a neuroscientist and one of the paper’s authors.

The researchers also looked at the brains of the fish using powerful microscopes. Normally, cells called microglia move from the gut to the brain early in the fishes’ lives, Eisen said, around the time their microbiome starts to develop. The fish that lived without microbiomes for a week, she and the team found, had fewer microglia in a particular brain region which has been previously linked to the shoaling behavior. In normal brains (including human ones), these cells perform synaptic pruning, which clears away weaker or less used connections.

Of course, the germ-free state of those zebrafish, Eisen said, would not exist in nature. However, some human pollutants like pesticides, microplastics, and metals like cadmium appear to alter fish microbiomes. Considering shoaling is often a protective behavior, a diminished shoaling response may cause problems in the wild. “If it doesn’t want to hang out with other fish — that might open it up to predation,” Eisen said.

Pollutants can impact behavior beyond shoaling, and saltwater ecosystems as well. In a 2020 study, researchers took Ambon damselfish larvae back to the lab and exposed some of them to microplastic beads. Then, they returned the young fish to different stretches of the Great Barrier reef — some of which were degraded and others that were still healthy — and observed how they acted. The team had also tagged the fish with tiny fluorescent tags, and returned to the reef several times over three days to check on their survival rate.

The fish that had been exposed to microplastics showed more risk-taking behavior and survived for less time before being preyed upon, according to the study. Nearly all the tagged fish that were exposed to microplastics and set free near dead reefs died after around 50 hours. Meanwhile, around 70 percent of unexposed fish released near living reefs survived past the 72-hour mark. According to the paper, while the health of the reef was a factor in risk behavior, fish exposed to the plastics had a survival rate six times lower than those not exposed to the compounds.

According to Alexandra Gulizia, one of the paper’s authors and a Ph.D. student at James Cook University, there needs to be more work looking into the components of plastics and how they affect fish. For instance, bisphenol-A, more commonly known as BPA, is a common additive to make plastics more flexible. It also appears in natural habitats and research suggests it can decrease aggression in fish. Gulizia added: “I think that we’re only just touching the surface of the chemical impacts that microplastics are having on fish and fish behavior.”

How this all plays out in the wild is hard to assess. Eisen noted that other factors that could impact the microbiome include nutrients in the water, water temperature, diet, and salt concentration. Another, perhaps more direct complication: Contaminants can appear simultaneously, and in different amounts, Petitjean said. For instance, one 2016 paper shows that 13 percent of 426 pollutants in European rivers have been shown to be neuroactiv

Another complication is simply that not all organisms will act the same — even within the same species. According to Eisen, model organisms, such as zebrafish, are chosen to represent a wide range of species, just as mice are often used to study human health in medical research. But changes to pollutants and other factors could differ from species to species. Bertram noted that using model organisms saves researchers the trouble of studying every single species, but also that there should be more studies into different fish.

At face value, some behavior changes might not even look that bad. Increased mating behavior — like in the case of guppies exposed to fluoxetine — could seem like a boon for the species. However, one species thriving over another tends to throw natural habitats out of whack, Bertram said. His previous work suggests that Prozac similarly increases invasive eastern mosquitofish mating behavior. This could help it thrive and outcompete native species. Additionally, at some concentrations, cadmium can increase fish activity, potentially helping them find food. However, the more they eat, Petitjean said, the more exposed they could be to microplastics.

Given these circumstances, he added, experiments in the lab need to inject as much complexity as possible into their methods to better replicate real, wild systems. Some research does try this. Bertram’s work showed the test guppies either a predatory or a similarly sized, non-predatory fish prior to their experiments, while Gulizia and her team performed parts of their experiment in the wild. Some studies also expose fish species to water taken from the environment — and the pollutants that come with it.

Despite the unknowns, Bertram said that changes to how fish go about socializing, mating, or finding food are unlikely to be good. “At the end of the day,” he continued, “any change to the expression of natural behaviors will have negative, unintended consequences.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Earthlings, get ready for your closeups.

Close-up Photographer of the Year has revealed its fourth annual contest winners, and the results are a doozy. With 11 different categories, the Top 100 features everything from octopuses and Atlas moths, to trails of pheromones and the delicate cross sections of leaves.

The story behind the overall winner (seen above):

“Northern pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea) are carnivorous, allowing them to survive in nutrient-poor bog environments. Here there is no rich soil, but rather a floating mat of Sphagnum moss. Instead of drawing nutrients up through their roots, this plant relies on trapping prey in its specialised bell-shaped leaves, called pitchers. Typically, these plants feast on invertebrates—such as moths and flies—but recently, researchers at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station discovered a surprising new item on the plant’s menu: juvenile spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum).

This population of Northern Pitcher Plants in Algonquin Provincial Park is the first to be found regularly consuming a vertebrate prey. For a plant that’s used to capturing tiny invertebrate, a juvenile spotted salamander is a hefty feast!

On the day I made this image, I was following researchers on their daily surveys of the plants. Pitchers typically contain just one salamander prey at a time, although occasionally they catch multiple salamanders simultaneously. When I saw a pitcher that had two salamanders, both at the same stage of decay floating at the surface of the pitcher’s fluid, I knew it was a special and fleeting moment. The next day, both salamanders had sunk to the bottom of the pitcher.”

– Photographer Samantha Stephens

The next entry period for the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards will open in March. But before you start prepping your cameras, get a little inspiration by scrolling through more of the recent winners below.

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Let’s talk about sex. Partnerless sex that is. While this form of sex isn’t typically associated with reproduction, generating offspring without a partner is common in small, spineless animals like sea stars and stick insects, but it is more rare in vertebrates. Through a process called parthenogenesis, some female animals in the order elasmobranch that includes sharks, rays, and skates can fertilize an egg using their own genetic material. 

This process is usually reserved as a last resort for sharks if there aren’t any mates to go around, but a recent study revealed that female zebra sharks at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois, reproduced by themselves, even though there were healthy males in the same enclosure.

[Related: Shark Week may be hurting, not helping, its namesake creature]

“This changes what we think we know about parthenogenesis and why it occurs,” says Lise Watson, assistant director of animal operations and habitats at Shedd Aquarium and a co-author of the study, in reference to the biological phenomenon behind these partner-less births. “From observing our population for 20 years, we have a long history with them. One thing that we’ve noticed is sometimes the females are not very receptive to males at certain times, or at all.”

While previous studies have detailed parthenogenesis in zebra sharks at other aquariums, the report published in December 2022 in the Journal of Fish Biology is another step in understanding why these births happen. This research focuses on a female zebra shark—a dark fish with yellowish stripes found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans—that lived in Shedd’s Wild Reef exhibition.

In 2008, Watson and her colleagues moved a clutch of eggs to a baby shark nursery behind the scenes, where they could safely hatch beyond the limelight of an aquarium tank.

An analysis of the newly hatched shark pups’ DNA revealed seemingly impossible results. The pups didn’t have any genetic markers with any of the potential fathers. They had identical copies of some alleles, or alternative versions of a gene. This showed that they were getting DNA strands from their mother rather than two different parents. 

“These pups didn’t match any of the mature males that were in the enclosure. But they did match the female that laid the eggs,” says Kevin Feldheim, a biologist and researcher at the neighboring Field Museum and co-author of the study, in a statement. 

Offspring born from parthenogenesis often die young, and the shark pups in this study only survived for a few months.

“We don’t exactly know why they have shorter lifespans,” Feldheim tells Popular Science. “In genetics, in general, inbreeding is bad and what can happen is the expression of a lethal recessive [gene], or the expression of two alleles that essentially cause you to die.” 

But it’s still unclear exactly what causes animals born in this manner to die before sexual maturity, while others will survive. “In one species called the white spotted bamboo shark, an aquarium found that one of their females gave birth by parthenogenesis, and then one of those offspring actually went on to reproduce parthenogenetically herself,” says Feldheim.

The findings in zebra sharks have implications for not only the continued care of zebra sharks in zoos and aquariums, but also for conservation efforts focused on their wild counterparts.

“Sharks studied in the field always face some barriers,” says Sara Asadi Gharabaghi, a PhD candidate at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran and member of Minorities in Shark Sciences, who was not involved in the study. One of those barriers is not being able to access the DNA of all of all adults and offspring to find biological parents.

“Sharks are the same as all animals trying to survive, so it would not be surprising to have pups from virgin birth either in the wild, even if we can’t prove it,” Asadi explains. It’s possible that sharks living in deep sea zones might use the same tactic, she adds

[Related: Baby sharks are eating the birds that live in your backyard]

For scientists studying endangered sharks in the wild and in aquariums, understanding reproduction will help conservation strategies. 

Zebra sharks are listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, and aquariums like Shedd are working to preserve the species. Their genetic tests are part of a Species Survival Plan, or SSP, which brings together expert advisors to maximize genetic diversity and protect endangered species long-term. 

One aspect of an SSP is to determine “the genetics of the population and the sustainability of that population,” Watson says. Through genetic analysis she and her colleagues can make assumptions about how related an individual shark is to the whole group. From there, they can measure what the population size might look like for the next 100 years. 

“Studying these animals in our care is the foundation of us being able to help this species in the wild,” says Watson. “The care that we do for these animals here is of utmost importance for us.”

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The planet’s oceans tell us a lot about the Earth’s health as a whole, especially in the face of climate change. According to countless studies, the major indicators of a changing climate in the ocean aren’t looking good. Climate change in the ocean can be measured by three indicators: rising temperature, salinity contrast (how salty vs. how fresh the water is), and the separation of the water into layers called ocean stratification. By all three measures, the ocean needs help. And fast.

According to a study published January 11 in Advances in Atmospheric Science, ocean heat, salinity contrast, and stratification do not show any signs of slowing down, and better forecasting of these changes is needed to prepare for the extreme climate future ahead. The study found that a new record of 0-2000m ocean heat content (OHC) was set and recorded in 2022, and roughly ~10 zetta Joules (ZJ) of heat was added into the ocean. A zetta Joule is unit used to measure “work” or “heat”. For context, 1 Joule is about the amount of work of lifting an apple a meter into the air—this is around 10²² times that.

[Related: Here’s how much climate change intensified 2020’s hyperactive hurricane season.]

The study summarizes two datasets from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) and NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) that analyze observations of ocean heat content and the impacts of the heat since the 1950s. According to the authors, both data sets consistently say that the upper 2000m OHC hit a record high in 2022.

“Global warming continues and is manifested in record ocean heat, and also in continued extremes of salinity. The latter highlight that salty areas get saltier, and fresh areas get fresher and so there is a continuing increase in intensity of the hydrological cycle” said Lijing Cheng, co-author and a researcher for the IAP/CAS, in a statement.

The amount of heat going into the ocean can have serious consequences, including fueling wetter and stronger hurricanes. These consequences can also arise very quickly. Additionally, increasing saltiness and ocean stratification can change how carbon, oxygen, and heat are exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere. This change in interaction can cause a loss of oxygen in the water called ocean deoxygenation, which harms both marine life and life on land. Reducing the amount of fish in the ocean can also economically harm communities dependent on fishing.

[Related: The ocean’s iodine helps create clouds, but high levels burn through the ozone layer.]

“Some places are experiencing more droughts, which lead to an increased risk of wildfires, and other places are experiencing massive floods from heavy rainfall, often supported by increased evaporation from warm oceans. This contributes to changes in the hydrologic cycle and emphasizes the interactive role that oceans play,” said Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the paper and researcher at both the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Auckland, in a statment.

Higher water temperatures and salinity contribute to mixing instead of water layering, which is only part of what can throw off the delicate balance between oceans and the atmosphere. The authors say that continued tracking of Earth’s cycles and changes will help scientists determine strategies for preparing for the consequences from changes to the hydrologic cycle and Earth’s increasingly warming oceans.

“The oceans are absorbing most of the heating from human carbon emissions,” said co-author Michael Mann, a co-author and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Pennsylvania, in a statement. “Until we reach net zero emissions, that heating will continue, and we’ll continue to break ocean heat content records, as we did this year. Better awareness and understanding of the oceans are a basis for the actions to combat climate change.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The constant thrum of ship engines and other human noises can be a real nuisance for many sea creatures, disrupting their feeding, navigation, and communication. Now a new study shows that ship noise can also kill the mood for amorous crabs.

To date, most studies on marine noise pollution have focused on how it affects large marine mammals such as whales. Kara Rising, a graduate student in marine ecology at the University of Derby in England, however, was curious how it affects often-overlooked crustaceans. No previous studies have looked at how noise affects mating behavior in invertebrates, she says, despite its obvious influence on the success of a species.

“All animals are there for the three f’s,” says Rising: “Fighting, feeding, and … mating. If any one of those is interrupted, you expect it to have some population effects.”

To find out how noise pollution affects crab mating, Rising collected male green shore crabs from beaches in Cornwall, England, and placed them one by one in a small aquarium. Next to the crab, she put a decoy female—really, a yellow sponge with toothpick legs doused in synthetic sex pheromones. “Sight is not the most important sense for the crabs when mating, but they do like a nice pair of gams,” Rising says.

Crab sex is more complicated than you might think. Shore crabs mate after the female has molted when her shell is still soft. The male rises up onto his legs and, with claws held outstretched, climbs onto the female’s back, wrapping his legs around her in a “love embrace,” says Rising. They stay that way for a couple of days, with the male protecting the vulnerable soft-shelled female until she is ready to release her eggs.

In general, the crabs seemed happy trying to impregnate the pheromone-soaked sponge. But then Rising started the real experiment. By playing recordings of ship sounds, she found that too much noise can disrupt this delicate affair. The crabs were far less likely to attempt to mate with the sponge decoy when it was loud than when it was quiet.

Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, says the work adds to scientists’ growing understanding of how animals are affected by noise pollution. He says this study is particularly significant because it’s focused on an understudied species and because it looks at how noise affects a behavior with a direct effect on population dynamics.

Duarte hopes that as it becomes clearer how many ways human-caused noise can affect marine species, regulators will take stronger steps to protect against it. “This adds to the pool of evidence that should eventually lead to more regulation of how humans introduce noise into the environment,” he says.

Rising says that because her study was fairly small and preliminary, there are things she’d like to investigate further under more robust, controlled laboratory conditions, such as whether males will abandon the females if the noise starts after they have established their embrace. But she says it is an important first step in expanding our understanding of the consequences of underwater noise.

“We should be looking more at how noise affects the species we don’t think about as much,” she says. “Everyone thinks about the whales, but the poor little crabs need to have sex, too.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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OVER THE LAST CENTURY, seas have risen by roughly a foot, making sunny-day floods a regular occurrence, particularly on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Under the most dire climate scenarios, the ocean around the United States will go up another two to seven feet by the year 2100. As higher tides climb up America’s coastlines, which are far too developed to move residents away from the water entirely, the country will need to embark on a campaign of coastal defense building—sea walls, levees, and floodgates—to protect urban areas as varied as Houston, New York City, and Charleston.

In the South, where seas are rising fastest and hurricanes are intensifying, much of that work has already begun. Those efforts hold clues for how future strategies might take shape across the country. Buffering the nation’s coastlines, experts warn, will require thinking beyond conventional barriers like levees. “We can’t afford to turn our entire East Coast into downtown New Orleans. Imagine what the cost of that would be,” says Pippa Brashear, who leads resilience planning at SCAPE, a landscape architecture firm behind engineered oyster reefs being installed off NYC’s Staten Island.

The builders of the most expansive traditional ocean barrier in the US are likely to break ground soon. Over the summer, the Army Corps of Engineers—the federal agency responsible for the bulk of national flood infrastructure—received $31 billion from Congress to build a “spine” of protection for Houston and Galveston. The project, which would protect the cities and Galveston Bay’s industrial corridor from hurricanes, is modeled on Dutch coastal defenses; it will chain together sand dunes, levees, and sea walls. The central component, a 2-mile cement gate system known locally as the “Ike Dike,” will swing closed during storm surges. Once the Corps breaks ground, the project will take 15 to 20 years to build—by which time, critics say, it may fail to protect against future storms due to shifts in sea levels and climate.

Miami-Dade County has decided to pursue another path, one that coastal experts say could be more flexible against changing baselines. Last year, county and city governments rejected a proposed Corps sea wall in favor of a “hybrid” plan from a local developer that would absorb and redirect water. It shields the mainland first with oyster reefs, then an earthen ridge covered in mangroves, and, finally, a much shorter sea wall. In September, the Corps agreed to reexamine its plan, and it expects to break ground on the approach it selects in 2025.

Nature-based flood control projects like Miami’s might be able to address more risks than hard infrastructure alone. Corps-designed sea walls can hold back surges, but they aren’t necessarily capable of defending against high-tide floods or heavy rain. In some cases, the barriers can even trap waves on the wrong side. A system designed to soak up water can resist different types of stress—while also creating wildlife habitat and urban green space. Although houses might still need to be elevated on pilings, “You’re still able to live day to day” on the coast, Brashear says.

Engineered wetlands and barrier islands won’t replace sea walls entirely, however. They also require intensive maintenance and monitoring, says Joshua Lewis, an ecologist specializing in urban water management at Tulane University’s ByWater Institute. But rebuilding, if governments are willing to invest in it, presents an opportunity: Because marshes and breakwaters must be restored after powerful disasters, he says, “You have to be willing to have them fail and re-imagine them.” Each time, hopefully, you get better at withstanding the ocean’s might.

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Early on Monday morning, delegates at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) reached a historic deal representing the most significant effort ever to protect the world’s dwindling biodiversity. It also provides funding in an effort to save and preserve biodiversity in lower-income countries.

The “30 by 30” deal was agreed upon by delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered in Montreal, Canada. The pledge vows to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

[Related: Why you can’t put a price on biodiversity.]

“We have in our hands on a package which I think can guide us as we all work together to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on the path to recovery for the benefit of all people in the world,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu said to applause just before dawn on Monday. “We can be truly proud.”

However, the ambitious goals face a steep climb. Countries have fallen short of goals set in similar deals. A 2010 meeting in Japan was the last time this governing body set any major conservation targets, and they have not met any of them.

While the document includes reforms to subsidies that make fuel and food so inexpensive in some parts of the world, some environmental advocates want tougher language around those subsidies.

“The new text is a mixed bag,” Andrew Deutz, director of global policy, institutions and conservation finance for The Nature Conservancy, told the Associated Press. “It contains some strong signals on finance and biodiversity but it fails to advance beyond the targets of 10 years ago in terms of addressing drivers of biodiversity loss in productive sectors like agriculture, fisheries, and infrastructure and thus still risks being fully transformational.”

In addition to the 30 by 30 pledge, the deal aims to raise $200 billion by 2030 to preserve biodiversity. The financing package asks for increasing the money that goes to low-income countries in Africa, Asia, and South America by at least $20 billion per year by 2025 and by $30 billion annually by 2030.

The financing component of the deal was one of the more contentious issues. Countries home to most of the world’s rainforests and habitats wanted reassurances that money from donors and governments would help them better protect landscapes and police against illegal logging and poaching.

Colombia’s environmental minister Susana Muhamad emphasized that the agreement must, “align the resources and the ambitions.” Additionally, Democratic Republic of Congo environment minister Ève Bazaiba, told The Washington Post over the weekend her country is committed to the “30 by 30” goal, but that her government needs financial helps to protect the Congo Basin. “When it comes to fauna, we need to have the means to achieve this objective,” she said.

[Related: Here’s where biodiversity is disappearing the quickest in the US.]

Before the vote, Pierre du Plessis, a negotiator from Namibia who helped coordinate the African group, told the AP, “all the elements are in there for a balance of unhappiness which is the secret to achieving agreement in UN bodies. Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, not necessarily everything they wanted.”

Today, Canada’s environment minister Steven Guilbeault compared the 30 by 30 deal with the United Nations’ landmark 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries pledged to keep global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally closer to 1.5C (2.7F). “It is truly a moment that will mark history as Paris did for climate,” Guilbeault said to reporters.

This deal was also over two years in the making. The final proceedings were originally scheduled for 2020 in Kunming, China, but were postponed and moved to Montreal due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Human beings are the driving force behind the planet’s dramatic loss of biodiversity. The forces of climate change, pollution, and habitat loss have threatened more than one million animal and plant species with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. Additionally, about 1 out of 5 people depend on 50,000 wild species for income and food.

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Both cargo ships and luxury yachts are vulnerable to the buildup of algae, barnacles, and various other marine organisms as they journey through the world’s waters. The aquatic hitchhikers aren’t simply an eyesore—barnacles can compromise boats’ integrity, as well as drastically slow them down due to drag resistance. To combat this, manufacturers have long turned to toxic, copper-based “antifouling” paints to protect the hulls of large vessels, which discourages organisms from growing on the surfaces, and often eventually kills those that do manage to attach themselves.

Unfortunately, the biocides within these paints are the cause of frequent concern from environmentalists, as they remain within water systems for decades while harming local ecosystems by poisoning species and their environment. Recently, scientists showcased how an existing alternative to popular copper-based antifouling agents is not only potentially better for the environment, but also appears to be more effective.

[Related: World’s largest shipping company reroutes ships to protect world’s largest animals.]

In a collaborative study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, researchers tested biocide-free, silicone-based coatings alongside more traditional copper-based paint at three Baltic Sea region sites, only to find that the silicone kept surfaces cleaner for a longer period of time than its toxic forebears.

“We actually left our test panels at one of the test sites. These have now been under the surface for over two years. We can see that the silicone paint still works well and, more importantly, works better than the copper paint,” Maria Lagerström, a researcher in marine environmental science at Chalmers University, said in a public statement.

According to the researchers, an estimated 40 percent of copper inputs within the Baltic Sea originate in antifouling paints. “As the Baltic Sea is an inland sea, it takes 25–30 years for the water to be exchanged. This means that the heavy metal remains for a very long time,” Lagerström adds. “It is therefore important to be aware of the substances we release.”

Unlike biocidal paints, silicone coating options rely on their smooth surface properties instead of toxic chemicals that are harmful to marine life. Silicone coats are simply too slick for most barnacles and algae to develop—not only that, but whatever life manages to form on hulls eventually fall off as ships travel through water.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

Although silicone alternatives have been available for years, the maritime vessel industry has been slow to adopt the paint over biocidal copper standards. As Chalmers University reports, as of 2014, silicone coatings only comprised about 10 percent of the market share for shipping vessels, with recreational boating employing them even less. “Both the shipbuilding industry and the leisure boating sector have one thing in common: they are highly traditional. People like to use the products they are used to, and they are also skeptical as to whether non-toxic alternative solutions really work,” says Lagerström.

The newest research makes clear that, while silicone appears far less toxic than biocidal copper-based paints, they may still be harmful in other ways. The study’s conclusion cites the high variability in currently available silicone coating products coupled with their comparative lack of regulatory oversight to biocidal paints as causes for concern. Even without biocides, some silicone variations still show toxic effects from their leachable materials, particularly within the first months following their application. Other silicone fluids, while not necessarily toxic, remain within marine environments for extremely prolonged periods of time, and could thus pose unseen threats. While the research team still maintains silicone coatings’ superiority to provably harmful biocidal copper-based paint, the study urges future research into these potential issues to ensure the creation of the safest possible products.

Transitioning to silicone antifouling coating is a great first step towards healthier sea travels, but far from the only reform needed right now. Additionally, ocean routes require reexamination to better protect endangered animals, alongside the alternations that must come from international climate change regulations. Last year, advocates also pressed for the development of net-zero overseas shipping lanes to cut back on carbon emissions.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

It’s low tide in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, California, and Hannah Hensel is squishing through thick mud, on the hunt for clams. The hinged mollusks are everywhere, burrowed into the sediment, filtering seawater to feed on plankton. But Hensel isn’t looking for living bivalves—she’s searching the mudflat for the shells of dead clams.

“I did lose a boot or two,” she recalls. “You can get sunk into it pretty deep.”

Hensel, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, is studying shells, which are composed of acid-buffering calcium carbonate, as a tool that could one day help shelled species survive in the world’s rapidly acidifying oceans.

The inspiration for Hensel’s research comes from Indigenous sea gardening practices. On beaches from Alaska to Washington State, First Nations and tribal communities built rock-walled terraces in the intertidal zone to bolster populations of shellfish and other invertebrates. Although these sea gardens have not been documented farther south, clams were also vital sustenance in central California. Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people harvested clams for food and shaped shells into bead money, says Tsim Schneider, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. “So taking care of your clam beds was actually kind of protecting your vault, your bank,” says Schneider.

In the sea gardens of the Pacific Northwest, caretakers crushed the shells of harvested clams and mixed the fragments back into the beach. Recent research has shown multiple positive effects of this broken shell “hash,” from opening spaces in the sediment so young clams can more easily burrow and grow, to releasing chemical cues that encourage larval clams to settle nearby.

This millennia-old practice may hold the key to addressing a new crisis. As humans burn fossil fuels, oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making seawater more acidic. At lower pH levels, clams and other shellfish struggle to build shells. As their protective structures weaken and dissolve, the animals become vulnerable to damage and predation. But studies suggest that adding shell fragments to clam beds could release carbonate into the water, potentially neutralizing acidity caused by the greenhouse gas.

To find out whether shell hash could help California’s clams survive increasingly acidic conditions, Hensel brought shells from the tidal flat back to the lab, where she crushed them with a mortar and pestle and mixed the fragments into four plastic buckets of sand. Hensel filled these buckets, and four others containing sand alone, with local seawater and added the pinky nail–sized progeny of Pacific littleneck clams collected from Bodega Bay. She bubbled carbon dioxide through the seawater in half of the buckets to increase acidity. With their delicate shells, young clams are thought to be especially vulnerable to acidification.

After 90 days, Hensel dug up all the clams. Comparing the buckets containing more acidic seawater, she observed that the bivalves burrowed in shell hash had grown bigger than the clams in sand alone. Strangely, though, the larger clams were not heavier, and Hensel plans to cross-section the shells to assess whether the new growth was thinner or less dense.

The results inform researchers that shell hash does have a buffering effect under certain conditions, says Leah Bendell, a marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, who was not involved in the study. “It was a well-done lab experiment.”

Bendell also studies the buffering power of shell hash. Working with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Bendell and graduate student Bridget Doyle added shell fragments to clam beds in Burrard Inlet, near Vancouver, British Columbia. In that study, hash reduced pH fluctuations in seawater seeping through the sediment, which can vary markedly with rising and falling tides. Although the reduction was limited to areas with coarse sediments, and the hash did not reduce the overall pH, Bendell sees the results as a hint of something promising. Given a longer period of time, shell hash could have a greater effect on pH in certain clam beds, she says.

Shell hash may not be a panacea for ocean acidification everywhere, but Bendell and Hensel are slowly piecing together how carbonate might help individual beaches weather caustic conditions. Next summer, when Hensel begins adding shell hash to Bodega Bay’s clam beds, she will incorporate another element of traditional sea gardening. Indigenous caretakers regularly tilled clam beds, loosening the sediment and mixing in shell fragments. This repeated digging could bring oxygen to burrowed clams, open more space in the sediments, and alter seawater chemistry, Hensel says, and she plans to measure how the physical process affects both seawater chemistry and clam growth.

Schneider is hopeful that Hensel’s work will improve the health of his community’s clam beds, and the two researchers are discussing ways to involve the Indigenous communities around Bodega Bay. “I think it would just be really rewarding to see community members from my tribe having opportunities to be back out on the landscape to interact with traditional resources in the ways that our ancestors did,” Schneider says.

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Color is one of the most distinguishing features of a coral reef. Corals are colorful primarily due to the pigments produced by the proteins inside of the coral, that reflect a variety of light. They then absorb one color of light, which then determines what color they appear to be. Brilliant hues might also help save the world’s threatened reefs. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS Biology, describes a new low-cost staining method that uses color to help scientists track coral larvae as they disperse and eventually settle in coral reefs.

[Related: Disease-resistant super corals can save vulnerable reefs.]

Coral reefs are currently threatened by pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, and more. The marine invertebrates reproduce by producing trillions of microscopic larvae that can travel up to 62 miles and then settle into the seabed. Their tiny size and massive travel radius make tracking the larvae a challenge.

A team of researchers collected nearly 3,000 larvae from lab-reared corals of Acropora spathulata and Platygyra daedalea to test this new tracking method. The larvae were then incubated with one of four colored dyes at different concentrations.

The team found that two dyes– neutral red and Nile blue– successfully stained the coral larvae, while having minimal impact on their survival and eventual settlement in the sea floor. They then tested these two dyes on four other coral species in the lab, and found it successfully stained 90 percent of the larvae.

However, testing in a lab is more like testing in a fish tank compared to the open ocean. To test this technique in the field, the team used eggs from wild spawning corals on the Great Barrier Reef and cultured them in larval pools in the Lizard Island Lagoon off the northeastern coast of Australia. They stained 10,000 larvae with the Nile blue dye and detected successful settlement of stained larvae on some of the tiles placed in the lagoon.

[Related: Scientists grow stunning, endangered coral in a lab.]

“We have developed a novel method for colouring large numbers of coral larvae (millions to billions),” said Christopher Doropoulos, a marine ecologist with CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere, and a co-author of the study, in a statement. “Our method allows for immediate differentiation and visual tracking of coral larvae from dispersal to settlement, and will facilitate a wide range of de novo studies of larval behaviour and ecology.” Doropoulos co-wrote the study with George Roff, also a marine ecologist at CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere, Australia’s largest government-supported science research agency.

According to this study, this method is a quick, simple, and non-toxic approach to studying coral larvae dispersal that only costs about one US dollar to stain 100,000 larvae. Additionally, the different color dyes could be used as a color code to differentiate between groups or coral species, in conservation planning, studying behavioral ecology, and reef restoration experiments.

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Most bodies of water are naturally teeming with microbial life—and the Mediterranean Sea is no exception. Now, the Mediterranean’s microscopic marine organisms have a new way of getting around. They are hitching a ride on a growing fleet of plastic ships: microfibers. 

In a recent study published on November 30 in the journal PLOS One, a team of biologists from Sorbonne Université in France have discovered 195 species of bacteria living on microfibers floating in the Mediterranean Sea. According to their analysis, a single microfiber could be home to more than 2,600 bacterial cells. While not all marine microbes on the plastic particles were dangerous, the researchers were particularly concerned about the level of bacterial species that could be potentially harmful to wildlife and humans.  

“Plastics are a relatively new substrate in the ocean,” says Ana Luzia de Figueiredo Lacerda, study author and a marine plastic pollution researcher at Sorbonne Université. “We are discovering what is living [on plastics] to see the diversity of bacterial groups, and among these groups, what can be potentially pathogenic or invasive.”   

A 2020 United Nations Environment Program report estimates that 730 tons of plastic waste end up in the Mediterranean Sea every day, leaving more than 64 million tiny floating particles per square kilometer in certain areas, including plastic microfibers. In fact, of all the world’s major oceanic basins, the Mediterranean has the highest concentration of microfibers. These small synthetic strands are released from sources such as fraying fishing nets, textile producers, or loads of laundry, explains Lacerda. “It’s one of the most abundant types of microplastic in the oceans,” she says. The high salinity and density of Mediterranean waters may also cause greater concentrations of the fibers to float near the surface, the new study notes.

[Related: The secret to longer-lasting clothing will also reduce plastic pollution]

Across the world’s oceans, plastic pollution has created a new artificial community for marine microbes—which researchers call the “plastisphere.” Free-floating bacteria and other microbiota can secrete sticky molecules that help them latch on to substrates, like wood, microalgae, or sediment. Once attached, the bacteria produce more of these sticky molecules to allow even more microbes to glom on, causing a biofilm to grow, Karen Shapiro, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis, explained in an email to PopSci. But the problem with plastics is that they last much longer than natural substrates in marine environments, increasing the risk and spread of microbial contamination, Lacerda says. Some types of plastics are less dense than sea water and float on the surface where they can be carried long distances by ocean currents. 

“The plastic works like a boat to these organisms,” Lacerda explains. “They transport species across regions, which could lead to changes in the function of the natural system.”  

When colonized by bacteria, the plastics can smell like food to marine wildlife that might consume them by mistake. Not only does that mean the microplastics work their way through the food chain, past studies have shown that toxic chemicals in plastics could provoke hormonal dysfunctions that affect growth and reproduction in some wildlife groups, including orcas and oysters.

To find out what kinds of bacteria microfibers might be harboring in the Mediterranean Sea, Lacerda and her colleagues collected samples from the northwestern end near the coasts of Monaco and Nice, France. After isolating the microfibers, the team used microscopy and DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria species on the fibers and compared them to the free-floating bacteria in the water. Among the 195 species living on the microfibers, Lacerda and the authors flagged a “great quantity” of pathogenic Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a bacteria that can cause seafood poisoning in humans. 

Previous studies have found pathogenic marine microorganisms on plastics in the ocean, such as Aeromonas salmonicida, which can infect and kill salmon, and Arcobacter species, which can cause illness in people. “In one particular sample, the authors found nearly a third of the bacteria species to be V. parahaemolyticus, which is a notable proportion and of possible concern given its pathogenic potential,” Shapiro, who was not involved in the recent research but has also studied the plastisphere, wrote in her email. “These anthropogenically derived fibers that end up in our oceans could mediate disease transmission for sea life but also people that consume shellfish that can concentrate these contaminants.” V. parahaemolyticus thrives in warm brackish waters where filter feeders like oysters are typically cultivated.

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit]

Locating where microfibers—and the harmful species they carry—are abundant can help people know if certain bodies of water are safe for bathing, farming, or fishing, Lacerda says. Climate change could further the spread and pathogenicity of plastic-dwelling microorganisms that are influenced by temperature, including V. parahaemolyticus. “As the temperature of the ocean is increasing, the virulence and [plastic] adhesion of the organism also increases with the increase in temperature,” Lacerda says. This is especially important in a sand-locked sea like the Mediterranean, which is warming faster than other regions in the world. As a result, “we could expect that the plastisphere in the Mediterranean Sea could respond faster to climate change,” Lacerda notes. 

According to Shapiro, the study’s findings in the Mediterranean add to the growing body of evidence that marine bacteria thriving on plastic waste is “a global phenomenon that deserves more attention.” She and Lacerda both think there need to be more investigations on the interactions between pathogens and different contaminants such as plastics to get a better understanding of how humans are altering—and harming—marine ecosystems.

“I do believe that the general public should be aware of this problem and understand that plastic pollution in the ocean doesn’t affect only marine wildlife, but can affect us,” Lacerda says. As the plastic problem continues to grow, she adds, “we have to look for another way of living.”

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Millions of sharks, rays, and skates are accidentally killed every year as bycatch within the global fishing industry—an especially staggering number when considering that a quarter of all those species are currently considered endangered. Previously, fishers could do very little to discourage the predators from going after the longline bait meant for intended targets like tuna, but a simple and ingenious new technology is showing huge promise in finally changing course. Highlighted via a study published earlier today in Current Biology, a small device dubbed SharkGuard recently decreased the number of unintended shark catches by as much as 90 percent through exploiting one of the animals’ most impressive senses.

The premise behind SharkGuard is relatively simple, but extremely effective: the device is essentially a small, localized electric pulse emitter attached alongside longline lure bait. As fishers draw their many lines through the ocean waters, the invention shoots out an electric field that discourages sharks, rays, and similar predators who hunt primarily through electroreceptors located in their snouts, known as ampullae of Lorenzini. While unpleasant to the sharks, the charges don’t seem to bother tuna much at all.

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

According to the new study, two fishing boats went on a total of 11 trips off the coast of southern France last year, during which they used 22 longlines deployed with over 18,000 hooks. The resulting hauls showed 91 percent fewer sharks and 71 percent fewer rays, while tuna harvests were barely affected by the SharkGuard additions. Although each SharkGuard currently requires frequent battery recharges and a set of 2,000 costs around $20,000, researchers are currently working to improve the charge times. But when it comes to large-scale commercial tuna harvesting budgets, $20K is, well, relatively small fish.

In the near future, scaling up SharkGuard availability could have an extremely dramatic and near immediate effect on reversing an unnecessary, destructive byproduct of commercial fishing. Until then, keep an eye on those great white shark counts off US coasts—more of them is a good thing, actually.

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In August 2014, the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole was suddenly awash with microscopic life—gripped by an algae bloom that covered the Laptev Sea, a large chunk of the East Siberian Sea, and part of the open Arctic Ocean. In a regular year, late summer is a quiet time for the Arctic. Long past is the regular spring phytoplankton bloom that supports so much activity. By August, the algae that bloomed in the spring have sucked most of the nitrogen out of the water, leaving the region practically devoid of microscopic creatures and the larger animals that eat them. So where did this bloom come from?

Because the Arctic Ocean ecosystem is typically limited by the availability of nitrogen, researchers including Douglas Hamilton, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University, started looking for where a glut of the nutrient might have come from to trigger the bloom. One by one, Hamilton and his colleagues examined various ocean-based sources, such as the upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water or the runoff from rivers. Nothing seemed to add up.

Convinced that no oceanic source was bringing in enough excess nitrogen to spark such a massive bloom, the scientists were left with just one option. “The only place left was the atmosphere,” Hamilton says.

Eventually, the scientists pinned down the most likely culprit: huge wildfires that were raging across Siberia thousands of kilometers south—fires that were burning through forests and, notably, nitrogen-rich peat. The smoke from those fires had drifted north where it deposited its nitrogen in the nutrient-starved water.

The work echoes a similar study, published last year, which shows that iron in the aerosols from wildfires in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 fertilized anomalous algae blooms in the Southern Ocean. Joan Llort, a biogeochemical oceanographer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain who worked on that study, says that as wildfires increase in frequency and intensity because of climate change, especially at higher latitudes, we may see more of these fertilization events and increasing numbers of blooms in traditionally nutrient-poor regions.

“We can’t say for certain yet as we have only recorded a couple of these events so far, but it seems to be going in that direction,” Llort says.

For many coastal areas, more algae blooms could be a problem. Some algae release toxins, while the decomposition of all that phytoplankton can deplete oxygen levels in the water. Increasing wildfires in California, for instance, could bring more harmful blooms to the Pacific coast, says Llort.

In the Arctic, however, the changes could be much more profound.

The Far North is undergoing a process of “borealization.” Rapidly warming and increasingly ice-free, the Arctic Ocean is coming to look a lot more like the North Atlantic. In fact, fish from boreal regions farther south are already shifting north, chasing their preferred water temperature. But the Arctic Ocean is much less productive than the North Atlantic. Even though the temperature is right, these migrating fish are not finding everything they need to survive. For these new arrivals to thrive, the Arctic Ocean will require big new inputs of nutrients to support them. Like the input from wildfires.

For the Arctic Ocean, then, if increasing wildfires and the 2014 bloom are a sign of things to come, this higher flow of nutrients could transform Arctic ecosystems.

“If we keep seeing more of this in the future,” Hamilton says, “we can expect the Arctic Ocean to be getting significantly more nitrogen than it has been for the past several thousand years.”

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Beluga whales are incredibly sensitive to noise. Social animals that live in the Arctic, belugas use their keen sense of hearing to communicate over long distances, find prey, and elude crafty predators like killer whales. But all is not quiet on the Arctic front. As the Arctic warms and the ice melts, ship traffic is on the rise, suffusing these once-tranquil waters with the throbbing thrum of propellers and engines.

Scientists have known since the 1980s that beluga whales’ sharp senses can pick up boat noise from up to 80 kilometers away. But this noise is much more than a nuisance—it can divert belugas away from feeding, nursing, or resting grounds, cause stress, and interfere with their ability to hear each other and perceive important information about their environments, like how deep the water is or where to locate prey. In a new study, scientists led by Morgan Martin, a zoologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, reveal in unprecedented detail how belugas will flee, dive, and otherwise rush to escape the distressing din.

In 2018, a group of scientists with Fisheries and Oceans Canada got permission from the Inuvialuit Game Council to tag eight male beluga whales with GPS trackers and time-depth monitors, which log where a beluga is in the water column every second. When Martin was handed the data set, she was excited to find that the loggers yielded “unbelievably cool, precise, beautiful tracks” as the whales swam around the eastern Beaufort Sea. “We could see exactly what depth they were diving to and how long they were down there,” she says.

By looking at these 3D whale tracks side by side with ships’ locations, which were broadcast by the vessels’ onboard automatic identification system transponders, Martin and her colleagues modeled and mapped the recorded encounters between belugas and ships. They also created animations of each interaction.

The belugas’ most common reaction to a loud noise, they found, was to abruptly change direction. Sometimes the whale would circle back once the ship had passed to continue on its journey.

In other cases, a beluga confronted with a noisy ship would make a sharp V-shaped dive, descending and ascending quickly rather than staying submerged as it typically would when foraging. Other times, the whales would dive just below the surface and hightail it away from the noise. If a beluga was already swimming away from a ship, it wouldn’t change its heading, but the study shows that the whale would swim faster than average when a ship was within its hearing range.

Valeria Vergara, a marine mammal scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation who wasn’t involved in the research, says the study’s findings reaffirm just how sensitive belugas are to noise.

Sound is the main way many marine animals communicate and understand their environments. When a noisy boat goes by, Vergara says, the sound completely shuts down or masks belugas’ vocalizations and can lead to chronic stress. Not only that, but swimming an extra 50 kilometers off course to avoid the noise uses up energy that is especially precious in the freezing Arctic.

“When we’re talking about [noise pollution in] really important habitats like feeding grounds or covering grounds or nursery areas, then you have a problem,” she says.

“Underwater noise,” says Martin, “is one of the most pervasive forms of pollution.” But unlike an oil spill, which can linger for years or more, noise pollution, she says, is “a form of pollution that’s completely, absolutely eradicable if you just remove the source of it.”

To help beluga whales, she says, ships need to be made quieter. More than that, she adds, policymakers need to consider setting up marine protected areas and quiet sanctuaries in key beluga habitat.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Every year, more than 14 million tons of plastic pollute the ocean and threaten the life of various marine species. About 80 percent of all marine debris is plastic, which demonstrates the extent of global plastic pollution.

Boat builders, sailors, and engineers have developed technological innovations like the Seabin to minimize all sorts of litter floating in the ocean. These mechanical cleanup inventions are fixed-point devices designed to separate and remove marine debris from various bodies of water. They work by sucking water from the surface and intercepting floating debris or lifting trash from the water onto a conveyor belt that gathers everything in a dumpster.

However, they might have a limited benefit in reducing plastic pollution. Research shows the devices may even capture unknowing marine organisms, which is a problem because they threaten marine life.

The rate of waste generation exceeds the rate of litter cleanup

A recent Marine Pollution Bulletin study examined a Seabin in the Southwest United Kingdom and found that it captured an average of 58 litter items per day, mainly consisting of polystyrene balls, plastic pellets, and plastic fragments. The authors also found that the device caught one marine organism—like sand eels, brown shrimps, and crabs—for every 3.6 items of litter captured (or roughly 13 marine organisms per day), half of which were dead upon retrieval.

The marine organisms may be attracted to the device to forage or seek refuge. Their mortality rate also appeared to increase with retention time in the machine. Some died due to being captured, possibly under the weight of the surrounding material, says Florence Parker-Jurd, study author and research assistant in the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

“At its current stage of development, the study found that in the environment examined, the quantity or mass of litter being removed by the device was minimal when considered alongside the risk of by-catch,” says Parker-Jurd. She adds that manual cleaning efforts with nets from pontoons tend to be more efficient and less resource intensive than the Seabin in environments like marinas, harbors, and ports, even though it was designed to operate in these locations.

“Technological innovations have a part to play in reducing marine litter, particularly in coastal environments where they can complement existing cleanup efforts,” says Parker-Jurd. “This study has highlighted the need for robust, formal evaluations of such devices, especially given the increasing use and geographic spread of the Seabin and similar devices.”

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

Although the study only formally evaluated one device, similar issues may apply to other marine cleaning devices. Things like the lack of an escape route, long periods of operation, and the time out of the water to separate marine life from organic matter and litter before it returns to the water can all contribute to the entrapment of marine organisms, says Parker-Jurd.

Moreover, the current capacity of technological efforts to reduce plastic collection is limited in comparison to the extent of the plastic pollution problem. “Though there are no estimates of the overall removal of plastic and other debris from these devices, there is near consensus among experts that the magnitude of trash collected pales in comparison to the amount of waste that enters our environment,” says Meagan Dunphy-Daly, director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory Scholars Program. She was not involved in the study.

There haven’t been many scientific studies on the effectiveness of various technologies in removing plastic pollution from the environment—or their rate of marine by-catch—but self-reported effectiveness is often higher than peer-reviewed reports on the efficacy, says Dunphy-Daly. Weather, current, and the location of the device deployment have to be considered when it comes to the effectiveness of cleanup technologies outside their pilot phases.

Dutch non-profit The Ocean Cleanup went under fire recently for the heap of plastic debris they cleaned from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which some experts say was too clean for plastics that were supposedly in the water for years. The organization argued that there was no visible build-up of algae and barnacles because the water in the garbage patch lacked nutrients. Most of the plastic floated above the water, but conservation experts also refuted that.

“Further studies need to evaluate the types of marine life being captured in these devices to determine population-level effects and weigh the risks and benefits of using these cleanup technologies,” says Dunphy-Daly.

Technology must go hand-in-hand with reducing plastic production and use

Developing and implementing technologies to reduce litter is only part of the solution. When there’s an oil spill, you don’t just focus on removing the oil from the surface of the water—you stop the leak and clean it up, says Dunphy-Daly.

The leak has undoubtedly continued in the case of global plastic pollution. She adds that combating it requires a comprehensive approach that targets all stages of the plastic life cycle, from reducing overall production to cleaning up what has entered the environment.

That said, the invention of cleanup devices effectively draws attention to the problem of marine litter. Last year, Coldplay partnered with The Ocean Cleanup and sponsored an Interceptor, a watercraft or vessel intended to remove plastic from rivers before they reach the ocean.

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

“Hopefully, by generating public interest with these technologies, we can also gain support for targeting other life stages of plastic and reduce overall plastic pollution,” says Dunphy-Daly.

A 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine argued that recycling processes and infrastructures are insufficient to manage the gross amount of plastic waste produced. The authors recommended several interventions to reduce waste generation, like establishing a national cap on virgin plastic production and a ban on specific disposable plastic products.

Mechanical marine cleaning devices can shape perceptions around the issue of marine litter and potentially create a reliance on technological solutions to environmental problems. Therefore, these sorts of interventions should continue to be evaluated, says Parker-Jurd. According to a 2022 Societies paper, there is excessive optimism around technology and scientific advancement. Still, the man-made problems of the planet cannot be solved by modern and efficient technology alone.

Even though the invention of cleanup devices is unlikely to alleviate one’s responsibility for waste and litter completely, evidence of their psychological impacts is currently lacking and should still form a crucial part of future research, says Parker-Jurd. She adds, “our primary focus should remain on implementing a systematic change in the way we produce, use, and dispose of plastics.”

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On a snowy January morning in 2022, I walk into Duo, an exclusive little restaurant in the heart of the southern Italian town of Lecce, carrying a polystyrene box filled with two frozen plate-sized jellyfish. Antonella Leone, a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, is with me holding an authorization letter for chef Fabiano Viva to legally handle the sea creatures. Viva awaits us at the restaurant’s entrance, greets us with a hearty handshake, and takes the cooler. Within minutes, his assistant is defrosting the jellyfish under the tap. Viva laces up his white apron, fills a pot with water, and ignites the stove.

Leone is part of a small group of scientists who have been studying Mediterranean jellyfish for the past 12 years. For the last seven, they have involved chefs, testing ways to get the general public interested in eating the marine invertebrate.

“The idea of eating a jellyfish never crossed our minds, because we would only see one every once in a while,” Leone explains. But as several species of local and alien jellyfish became increasingly abundant—such as in 2014 when a jellyfish bloom saw 400 tonnes of the barrel jellyfish per square kilometer carpeting the massive Gulf of Taranto—Leone wondered what they could do with them.

But convincing Italians to eat jellyfish is like enticing them to try pineapple on pizza––not a simple task. Southern Italians eat octopus, sea urchin, and other sea creatures, but jellyfish are largely ignored. Selling jellyfish for human consumption is prohibited in the European Union, as regulators still do not consider the sea creature a safe, marketable food due to historical lack of interest in them as a food source, which is why Leone arrived at Duo with a permission letter in hand.

Safety concerns around jellyfish don’t seem to be a problem in China, where jellyfish have been on the menu for almost two millennia. (A favorite is an appetizer of chilled jellyfish seasoned with dark vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, chicken stock powder, and sesame oil.) Today, 19 countries harvest up to one million tonnes of the gelatinous sea dweller, contributing to a global industry worth around US $160-million.

Paired with forward-looking chefs like Viva, Leone and her team began researching ways to make jellyfish tasty and safe for Mediterranean menus in 2015. As ocean fish stocks continue to deplete at alarming rates, and jellyfish seem to be thriving, more and more people are asking if eating jellyfish will effectively mitigate the jellyfish problem, and if they will become a sustainable and safe source of food. But can jellyfish become a food of the future, not just for adventurous diners eating at upscale restaurants, but for all?

Jellyfish are in a broad group of aquatic animals that marine biologists refer to as “gelatinous macrozooplankton.” There are some 4,000 known species worldwide, probably others unknown. They can be as small as a cereal flake, like the highly venomous Irukandji box jellyfish mainly found off the coast of Australia, or have tentacles up to 36 meters long, like the enormous lion’s mane jellyfish. Jellyfish are an important part of marine ecosystems and serve as meals to 124 fish species and 34 other animals, such as the leatherback sea turtle.

But all is not well in the jellyfish world. Since the turn of this century, scientists have witnessed a worrying increase in jellyfish populations in various parts of the world. According to Lucas Brotz, a researcher who has long studied jellyfish at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, it’s not easy to understand the reasons behind the phenomenon.

“Not all jellyfish are increasing in all places, but we do see a sort of sustained major increase in many areas around the world,” says Brotz. And there are myriad reasons that could be driving this change, among them alien jellyfish species being introduced into new areas and range expansion as climate change and warming waters favor some species over others.

Like other marine invertebrates, jellyfish will reproduce in great numbers when conditions are right. Nutrient pollution and warming waters in some parts of the world have resulted in higher-than-normal jellyfish blooms and situations that can have negative repercussions on infrastructure, tourism, and more. Video by the Hakai Institute

The jellyfish increase is being felt particularly hard in places like the Mediterranean Sea and along the coast of Japan. Hordes of jellyfish have destroyed fish farms, clogged power plants, capsized fishing boats as they weighed down nets, and upended tourism by making waters unsafe for swimming. And their presence can impact creatures they share the sea with, too.

“Imagine [something the size of] the biggest oil tanker in the world, traveling along the Mediterranean coasts to Israel, consuming all the plankton,” says Stefano Piraino, Leone’s husband and a marine biologist and jellyfish expert at the University of Salento in Lecce, as he explains how massive blooms of jellyfish can hog all the plankton that other planktivores need.

Seeing the new availability of jellyfish in the Mediterranean, Piraino joined Leone in her quest to find possible culinary uses of jellyfish.

Back at Duo, Viva slips on latex gloves and carefully lifts the Rhizostoma pulmo jellyfish from below the running tap. They’re still a bit frozen, quite unlike the dried jellyfish used in Eastern cuisine, which must be rehydrated before use. Viva slips the jellies into a pot of boiling water and starts to stir.

When Leone started studying how jellyfish could be used for food or food ingredients—and how they could be preserved for later use—she stumbled upon one main problem. The primary method to preserve jellyfish, as perfected in Asia, was to dehydrate them using the chemical compound alum. But alum is considered toxic for human consumption and its use doesn’t meet the European Food Safety Authority’s standards. So Leone and her colleagues set out to devise a new and nontoxic way to desiccate edible jellyfish.

Her team overcame the drying challenge by using calcium salts instead of alum and went on to experiment with dried, fresh, and frozen jellies, turning them into mousse, meringue, seasonings, and thickeners.

The magic of turning gelatinous macrozooplankton into food and food products happens in Leone’s lab at the Institute of Sciences of Food Production, where she and her team of seven run their experiments. A long steel testing table with two shelves of transparent jars and scales at its center separates the expansive room. Inside an industrial fridge rest racks of test tubes containing jellyfish extracts to study.

But it is one thing to do research in a lab, and another to convince Italians to consider replacing fish with jellyfish in a soup. According to a 2020 study led by Luisa Torri, a professor of food science and technology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, there might be some hope for acceptance. The study surveyed 1,445 people on their attitude toward the idea of consuming jellyfish, taking into consideration traits such as age, behavioral habits, and mouthfeel, and showed that young, well-traveled people with higher education levels and sensitivity to the environment are the ones more likely to eat jellyfish.

I fit that category, so when Viva invites me to take a whiff of the white foam now bubbling rapidly on the stove, I try to keep an open mind.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply. “It smells like oysters,” I tell him.

“You need to disconnect your brain from what you know,” says Viva. “You need to detach yourself from the food in your memory.”

Is the key to accepting an unusual food making new food memories? If that’s the case, we’ll need to find a way to get jellyfish from the sea to dinner tables.

As well as helping to deal with future seas full of jellyfish, fishing for these creatures has been touted as a way to help small-scale European fishers, who are struggling with low fish stocks.

“A source of income? That would be great!” says Rocco Cazzato, a sixth-generation small-scale fisher from Tricase Porto, at the idea of fishing jellyfish. “But I would never eat them, not even if it’s the last thing left in the world to eat.”

Cazzato recounts the pain of pulling on his fishing nets crowded with jellyfish that he could not sell, and he says that if jellyfish were in demand locally like the commonly consumed scorpionfish, those jellyfish in the net would help small fishers like him make ends meet.

Although Leone is working to fill the information void, knowing which jellyfish are edible and safe for consumption is still a question few researchers are tasked with answering. According to Brotz, while many different jellyfish types are increasing worldwide, only a handful of them are preferred for human consumption. And just because they seem to be more abundant, it doesn’t mean that fishing them will be a panacea. The title of a 2016 paper Brotz coauthored says it all: “We should not assume that fishing jellyfish will solve our jellyfish problem.”

The paper advises caution: jellyfish are understudied, and the effects of removing them from the ecosystem, even when they are in excess, are unknown and potentially negative. Some jellyfish, for instance, act as nurseries for juvenile fish, and jellyfish can be both predator and prey in food chains.

Silvestro Greco, research director at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station, echoes the concern that fishing isn’t necessarily the way to combat jellyfish blooms. He fears that once industrial jellyfish extraction begins, quick depletion might have unexpected consequences on local marine environments. In the early 2000s, for instance, a portion of the fishing fleet in the Gulf of California, Mexico, diverted its efforts to harvesting jellyfish. Fishers and processing plant workers quickly profited from the new market, but overfished the resource, leading to the rapid depletion of jellyfish.

Still, some fishers are poised to launch if a fishery opens—there is already Asian interest in fishing jellyfish in the Mediterranean. But even with interest from fishers, if there’s no market, then there’s no point.

According to Leone, the enterprise of getting jellyfish to the masses needs an entrepreneur willing to invest the several thousand euros needed to request that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) accepts jellyfish as edible food for sale, allowing them to be legally sold in fish markets and restaurants.

Leone believes that, with her team, she’s gathered the scientific research to support such an application to EFSA and that some entrepreneurs have shown interest. It’s only a matter of time before some species of jellyfish make the list of approved European foods, she says, and she’s keen to broker the divide between fishers, markets, and chefs.

Creating this market could help artisanal fishers, the ones most affected by jellyfish blooms, Leone says. “They come back with nets full of jellyfish and three fish inside. If jellyfish would become accepted edible food, they could sell it as sea products like others.”

Leone first targeted curious chefs—ones without preconceptions, eager to accept a challenge—in 2015, and they became important team members. Leone and her team are part of the EU-funded GoJelly project that looked into innovative uses for jellyfish—including in fertilizers, cosmetics, and nutraceuticals, and for snaring microplastics. Membership means that Leone can regularly bring Viva and other chefs jellyfish to experiment with in their kitchens and find ways to make the sea creature appetizing. Over the years, Viva has tried the jellyfish pickled and dehydrated like chips, and as an ingredient in soups and pasta sauces.

The most significant difficulty that Pasquale Palamaro, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Indaco on the island of Ischia, encountered was the drop in weight as the jellyfish was cooked.

Jellyfish are 95 percent water and a small percentage of proteins, so when the animal dies, it loses much of the water. To avoid this loss, Palamaro believes they have to be consumed fresh within a few hours of harvest or stored safely frozen or preserved with the calcium salt technique that Leone developed.

Palamaro boils the Pelagia jellyfish from the Mediterranean for one minute, marinates it in citruses for an hour, and then seasons it with pumpkin seed oil before serving it with quinoa. Gennaro Esposito, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense, prefers to pair the jellyfish with marinated cucumbers, chili kefir, and lettuce paste. Leone has collected the more successful recipes of these chefs and others in the freely available European Jellyfish Cookbook.

But not all chefs are convinced of the jellyfish’s culinary potential. In 2017, Greco, a marine biologist but also a food scientist and an avid cook, fried 50 kilograms of Pelagia jellyfish at the Slow Fish conference in Genova, Italy, to create awareness about the rapid rise in jellyfish numbers in the Mediterranean.

“It was a success,” Greco says, “but because they were fried. Everything fried is good.”

He believes jellyfish don’t have an interesting texture and don’t make a compelling case for culinary indulgence. All in all, he doesn’t believe that jellyfish will be quickly adopted by cuisines that traditionally never used them.

But according to Leone, jellyfish today are in the same situation as tomatoes in the 16th century. Tomatoes, now a key ingredient in traditional Mediterranean cuisine, were unknown before being brought over from the Americas around the 1550s. At first, they were thought to be toxic and unhealthy. Still, possibly thanks to forward-looking cooks, or simply because of necessity, tomatoes began appearing on pizzas and in parmigiana and pasta sauce, ultimately becoming part of the Mediterranean diet.

Whether or not jellyfish take a similar trajectory and become accepted in Western markets is hard to say, but many of our favored seafoods are declining or have already collapsed explains Brotz. “We may get to a point where there is no other seafood available.”

Back in the kitchen at Duo, Viva has turned one of the two jellyfish into a soup, adding tomato sauce, olive oil, a garlic clove, and a pinch of parsley. He offers me a serving.

I spot the turgid tentacles and part of the cap floating in the orange liquid, and my stomach turns. The first spoonful of broth goes down quickly. It tastes like a delicious––and fishy––tomato soup. Then I search for a piece of the jellyfish. I hesitate. I slurp it up.

It feels like a gulp of the sea itself as the flavor of the jellyfish unfurls in my mouth with the strength of a tsunami. The texture reminds me of calamari or a piece of fat from a cooked steak. As I chew, trying to repress the impulsive disgust, I think of cooked tripe. I swallow.

I look at Viva and say, honestly: “It tastes like the sea!” He smiles, agreeing.

As I take a few more polite spoonfuls, the words of Esposito, the chef of Torre del Saracino, come to mind. He’d pointed out that jellyfish carry a stigma of fear, but that the instinct to avoid them can be unlearned. Through cuisine, “we transform a fear and a dread into a taste, which is better,” he said.

I reflect that my hesitancy might be a result of cultural heritage—this food is as unfamiliar to me as a tomato was to my ancestors over 500 years ago—as Viva prepares the other jellyfish. He coats it with flour and deep-fries it in vegetable oil.

This time, it is crunchy and crispy—like a French fry. And, of course, it tastes great.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

The post Italian chefs are cooking up a solution to booming jellyfish populations appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Wearing a navy-blue polo neck emblazoned with the Florida Aquarium logo, Keri O’Neil hugs a white cooler at Miami International Airport. “Coral babieeeeees,” she says, before letting out a short laugh. Relief. The container holds 10 plastic bottles teeming with thousands of tiny peach-colored specks. Shaped like cornflakes and no more than a millimeter in length, they are the larvae of elkhorn coral, an endangered species that is as characteristic to the reefs of the Florida Keys and the Caribbean as polar bears are to the Arctic or giant sequoias to Sierra Nevada.

With the larvae kept at 27 °C inside their insulated cooler nestled in the trunk of her car, O’Neil drives back to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, where she works as senior coral scientist at the aquarium’s Center for Conservation. Once there, the larvae begin their metamorphosis from free-swimming specks into settled polyps, the beginnings of those branching, antler-like shapes that define this species. O’Neil and her colleagues provide everything the coral needs for a strong start in life: warm water with a gentle flow, symbiotic algae that find a home inside the coral’s cells, a soft glow of sunlight, and some ceramic squares “seasoned with algae” that act as landing pads for the larvae.

The transformation of larvae into polyps was the final step in a coral breeding project that began on the shores of Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, in the summer of 2018 and involved a cadre of conservationists and scientists who each specialize in one specific stage of coral development. From collection of eggs during mass spawning events to the cryopreservation of sperm, and from fertilization to larval growth, every step had to go swimmingly for the project to have any chance of success. “It’s like the most stressful relay on Earth,” says Kristen Marhaver, a coral scientist at the Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity Foundation in Curaçao, who helped start this relay race by collecting eggs during a nighttime dive at a reef that’s a 45-minute drive from her laboratory. As O’Neil was picking up her coral “babies” in Miami, a second team of scientists at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida, received its own. The pressure on both labs was immense. To fail now would be to drop the baton just before the final straight.

But, if anything, their efforts were too successful; hundreds of larvae settled as translucent and fragile blobs of tissue (each a single polyp) and then started to divide, branching into the clear waters of their shallow, open-top tanks. Elkhorn coral grows an average of five to 10 centimeters per year, a bamboo-like pace for corals in general. To stop them becoming entangled, O’Neil had to cut, separate, and move her colonies to different paddle pool–sized tanks over the course of the next year. “We almost ended up with a six-foot-by-four-foot [1.8-meter-by-1.2-meter] solid piece of elkhorn coral made up of 400 different individuals,” she says. “They were just outgrowing the tanks.”

The rows of coral in O’Neil’s tanks are a window into a former world. The reefs of the Florida Keys were once dominated by elkhorn coral. Visiting these islands that curl southward from Florida like the tip of a bird of prey’s beak, biologist, conservationist, and writer—most notably of Silent Spring, but also of several books on the ocean—Rachel Carson peered into the shallows using a “water glass,” an instrument akin to a glass-bottom bucket. Through this simple portal, she saw great stands of “trees of stone,” a forest of coral. Today, after decades of disease, coastal development, and bleaching, over 95 percent of the state’s elkhorn coral have been lost. And this population isn’t just depleted in number, like a forest that’s been felled, but is also impoverished from within. Some reefs in the Keys descend from a single individual that has reproduced via fragmentation—bits break off the parent coral and start a new colony. This mode of reproduction allows corals to spread, but without the genetic mixing that comes with sex, these clones are more susceptible to disturbances such as disease. The coral larvae raised by O’Neil at the Florida Aquarium are different; they are the product of sperm and egg, a shuffling of genes, and the growth of genetically unique clumps of coral. Reintroducing them could provide a boost to the coral’s genetic diversity—a quick stir to the gene pool—and could save a denuded ecosystem. Their reintroduction could also spell its doom.

Hidden inside the genetic code of the Florida Aquarium’s coral is a map of an atypical origin: the eggs collected from Curaçao were fertilized using sperm from the Caribbean, including Florida. Although the same species (Acropora palmata), these coral populations would never breed in the wild. The distance between the two is hundreds of kilometers and contains the island blockade of the Greater Antilles—an impossible journey for any sperm. The coral housed in the Florida Aquarium are the products of human hands, the latest addition to a recent—and often controversial—trend in conservation known as “assisted gene flow,” shuttling existing genetic diversity to new places.

No hands have offered more assistance to these coral than those of Mary Hagedorn, senior research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who is based at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Hagedorn flew to the Caribbean to guide this project from start to finish. It is her research that made this work possible. Since 2004, she has developed cryopreservation techniques that can freeze coral sperm and—just as importantly—keep them fertile upon thawing. Although cryopreservation has been used for IVF in humans and other mammals for decades, it’s only in the last few years that other coral conservationists have adopted Hagedorn’s techniques for coral sperm. At a time when these methodologies are most needed, Hagedorn’s work has matured into a solid science, says Tom Moore, a coral restoration manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the time of this project and now in the private sector. “I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more of this done in the course of the next few years.”

Without the option to freeze sperm, coral conservationists have been forced to work within the few hours these sex cells remain viable. In Florida, Moore says, scientists from the Lower Keys would drive north to meet colleagues from the Upper Keys and swap sperm samples on the side of the road, fertilizing eggs there and then before the sperm stopped swimming. With the option to freeze sperm using liquid nitrogen, however, samples can be transported long distances—from Florida to Curaçao, for example. Then, when eggs are collected from the reef, the sperm can be thawed and used in concentrations that make fertilization most likely. Hagedorn’s work opens up new possibilities that, just a few years ago, were largely ignored.

Self-funded for many years, Hagedorn’s research was nearly stopped altogether in December 2011. Her savings had run out and funders didn’t seem to see the potential of her work. “I was a month away from closing my lab,” she says. Then she received an unexpected call from the Roddenberry Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up in memory of Gene Roddenberry, the writer of Star Trek. Since Hagedorn’s work fit the criteria for bold and unique science, the foundation wanted to fund her research for five years. Since then, her work has grown to include frozen larvae, frozen coral symbiotic algae, and frozen coral fragments, and it has been adopted by labs around the world. To help her cryopreservation methods spread, Hagedorn runs workshops and shares her techniques freely; the instructions to build her equipment can be downloaded and then manufactured with a 3D printer.

As with IVF in humans, coral fertilization is not a perfect science. In a study published in 2017, Hagedorn and her colleagues showed that fertilization rates from frozen coral sperm are significantly lower than from fresh sperm, roughly 50 percent versus over 90 percent. And these figures were based on coral that lived as neighbors on the same reef. The researchers wanted to increase genetic diversity in the future (through assisted gene flow), but it was still unknown whether populations that had been isolated for thousands of years could produce viable offspring, especially after their sperm had been frozen. The idea to breed elkhorn coral from the Florida Keys with those from Curaçao was the most extreme test yet of Hagedorn’s methods. It was a moonshot for coral conservation, says O’Neil. “We wanted to do something that had never been done before.”

Marhaver thought that they had a five to 10 percent chance of success. To have hundreds of healthy coral now sitting in tanks barely crossed her mind. Conservationists are more attuned to the vibrations of endangerment, extinction, and loss. To have a moonshot succeed is unfamiliar territory. With the impossible now possible, the next hurdle is moving from the lab to the ocean, a leap that not everyone is comfortable with.

As in medical practice, the first rule of restoring ailing ecosystems is primum non nocere, “first, do no harm.” And what concerns Lisa Gregg, program and policy coordinator at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the organization that decides the fate of the Florida-Curaçao coral, is that they aren’t suited to the local conditions of the Florida Keys, a place that Carson referred to as having an atmosphere that is “strongly and peculiarly [its] own.” These islands are formed from sedimentation, while those of Curaçao and the eastern Caribbean are founded on volcanic activity. Plus, the Florida Keys also have their own unique combination of problems, from infectious disease to coastal development, and from hurricanes to coral bleaching. “We have a lot of problems here,” says O’Neil. “And it is quite likely that the corals that are still alive in Florida after everything that’s happened to them are probably the ones that are best suited to living in Florida and providing offspring that may be capable of surviving in Florida.” If Curaçao genes were introduced, they might lead to lower rates of reproduction, shorter life spans, or lowered resistance to local diseases. Imperceptible at first, such “outbreeding depression” can slowly weaken a population, generation by generation. To introduce genes that haven’t experienced the same history could be a ratchet toward extinction.

The risk of such outbreeding depression is very low, however—a doomsday forecast for Florida’s reefs, many conservationists think. “I’m not so concerned that there’s a huge risk of the Curaçao [genes] causing a major detriment to the native Florida population,” says Iliana Baums, head of marine conservation and restoration at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, who has studied elkhorn coral since 1998. “But that’s based on my knowledge of the literature for other species and modeling and so on. I don’t have any direct evidence for that.” Direct evidence would require reintroduction, a catch-22 of conservation; the very thing that is controversial and potentially dangerous is also the route to understanding.

Gregg was clear with O’Neil, Marhaver, Hagedorn, and their colleagues from the beginning of this project. “They knew right off the bat … that they were not going to be able to out-plant [the coral]. It was never in question.” The FWC has a “nearest neighbor” policy when it comes to conserving Florida’s coral reefs, she says. “With Acropora palmata, I believe the nearest neighbor would be Cuba or Belize. But other acceptable areas to bring corals in from would be Mexico or the Bahamas. If you’ve got corals coming from Curaçao, that’s leaps and bounds away from Florida.”

After nearly 20 years of research and the near closure of her lab, Hagedorn is tired of waiting. She is sympathetic to the FWC’s approach, but also believes that this large population of captive coral should be introduced—in “a restricted and monitored fashion”—given the critical status of A. palmata. “There’s so little coral in Florida now, it’s just a joke,” she says. In addition to tracking their precipitous decline, scientists have tried to find evidence that new, sexually produced elkhorn coral are settling in the area, but they regularly come back empty-handed. Since this species releases sperm and eggs en masse once a year, the lack of natural recruitment is a worrying sign that such mass spawning events are failing. Warmer waters, pollution, a thick covering of algae, and the rarity of mature coral all add up to prevent new baby coral from settling. Whatever the case, successful sexual reproduction—the fertilization of egg and sperm to create a swimming larva—is so low that it no longer supports this population. “Every year, we seem to lose more [coral] without making more, because sexual reproduction isn’t working,” says Baums. “None of us could’ve imagined that these coral populations would die out this fast. I don’t think any one of us could have really wrapped our heads around that, even 10 years ago … I think we’re at the stage that we need to try something new.”

Even with this precipitous decline, there is still time to try a less extreme version of assisted gene flow, O’Neil says. Now that the Florida-Curaçao experiment has been a success, her team can consider crossing coral from Mexico, the Bahamas, or Cuba—just a relative stone’s throw away—with Florida stock. These populations are able to mix naturally: although sperm can’t survive the journey, the planktonic larvae can travel the current from the Bahamas to Florida so are considered part of the same subpopulation. Gregg says that she would support any elkhorn restoration project that conforms to the FWC “nearest neighbor” policy. Until then, such assisted gene flow will remain limited to laboratories and aquariums.

In December 2021, O’Neil said goodbye to the coral she had raised from peach-colored larvae to hand-sized elkhorn recruits. With the project’s end, they were being transported from the Florida Aquarium to the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, where they joined the rest of the coral grown as part of this study. Some are being exposed to warmer temperatures to see if they are better able to survive in the warmer waters predicted for the future. Others will be transported to museums and aquariums around the United States. The rest sit patiently and continue to divide, to grow, polyp by polyp. They may never be introduced into the wild, but their mere existence opens a wide-angle vista for coral conservation. If such disparate populations can be crossed and grown by the hundred, almost anything is possible. The next coral babies that O’Neil collects from the airport will have simply traveled a shorter distance in their cooler.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

The post Scientists grow stunning, endangered coral in a lab appeared first on Popular Science.

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Today, there are more ways to take photos of the underwater world than anyone could have imagined at the start of the millennia, thanks to ever-improving designs for aquatic cameras. On one hand, they have provided illuminating views of life in the seas. But on the other hand, these devices have inundated marine biologists with mountains of visual data that have become incredibly tedious and time-consuming to sort through. 

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California has proposed a solution: a gamified machine-learning platform that can help process videos and images. It’s called Ocean Vision AI, and it works by combining human-made annotations with artificial intelligence. Think of it like the ebird or iNaturalist app, but modified for marine life. 

The project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between data scientists, oceanographers, game developers, and human-computer interaction experts. On Tuesday, the National Science Foundation showed support for the two-year-project by awarding it $5 million in funding. 

“Only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of hours of ocean video and imagery captured has been viewed and analyzed in its entirety and even less shared with the global scientific community,” Katy Croff Bell, founder and president of the Ocean Discovery League and a co-principal investigator for Ocean Vision AI, said in a press release. Analyzing images and videos in which organisms are interacting with their environment and with one another in complex ways often require manual labeling by experts, a resource-intensive approach that is not easily scalable.

[Related: Why ocean researchers want to create a global library of undersea sounds]

“As more industries & institutions look to utilize the ocean, there is an increased need to understand the space in which their activities intersect. Growing the BlueEconomy requires understand[ing] its impact on the ocean environment, particularly the life that lives there,” Kakani Katija, a principal engineer at MBARI and the lead principal investigator for Ocean Vision AI, wrote in a Twitter post.

Here’s where artificial intelligence can come in. Marine biologists have already been experimenting with using AI-software to classify sounds, like whale songs, in the ocean. The idea of Ocean Vision AI is to create a central hub that can collect new and existing underwater visuals from research groups, use these to train an organism-identifying artificial intelligence algorithm that tell apart the crab versus the sponge in frame, for example, and share the annotated images with the public and the wider scientific community as a source of open data. 

[Related: Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is building a network of ocean floor research stations]

A key part of the equation is an open-source image database called FathomNet. According to NSF’s 2022 Convergence Accelerator portfolio, “the data in FathomNet are being used to inform the design of the OVAI [Ocean Vision AI] Portal, our interface for ocean professionals to select concepts of interest, acquire relevant training data from FathomNet, and tune machine learning models. OVAI’s ultimate goal is to democratize access to ocean imagery and the infrastructure needed to analyze it.”

Ocean Vision AI will also have a video-game component that serves to engage the public in the project. The video game the team is developing “will educate players while generating new annotations” that can improve the accuracy of the AI models. 

Although the game is still in prototype testing, a sneak peek of it can be seen in a video posted by NSF to YouTube showing an interface which asks users whether a photo they saw contained a jellyfish (images of what a jellyfish looks like are present at the top of the screen). 

Here’s what the current timeline for the project looks like. By next summer, the team will expect the first version of FathomNet (which is in beta right now) to be active, with a preliminary set of data. In 2024, the team will start exporting machine learning-labeled ecological survey data to repositories like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and look into building a potential subscription model for institutions. During this time, the modules of the video game will be integrated into other popular games as well as museum and aquarium experiences. After field testing different versions, the team will finalize their design and release a standalone, multiplatform game in late 2024. 

“The ocean plays a vital role in the health of our planet, yet we have only observed a tiny fraction of it,” Katija said in a press release. “Together, we’re developing tools that are urgently needed to help us better understand and protect our blue planet.”

The post Your gaming skills could help teach an AI to identify jellyfish and whales appeared first on Popular Science.

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Great white sharks are the epitome of an apex predator. In the ocean, these toothy creatures easily hold one of the top spots on the food chain (though the odds of one killing a human are 1 in 3,700,000). But recent drone and helicopter footage of an aquatic attack reveals that another marine mammal seems to have an upper hand. 

For the first time, biologists filmed direct evidence of killer whales attacking and killing white sharks in South Africa. The first video was captured by drone in May 2022 in the Mossel Bay region, revealing three orcas cornering and fatally biting a three meter-length white shark. The shark’s body was not seen or recovered after the bloody battle. This video, along with extended helicopter footage of this attack and shark tag data, were published this week in the journal Ecology. 

The first video recorded by a drone pilot was initially released in June, but the team later received cell phone footage recorded from a helicopter pilot that had been filmed on the same day. They were able to identify that the killer whales in the helicopter video were the same ones in the drone pilot video—spotting a particularly well-known shark hunter, named Starboard. The evidence suggests that the pod had gone on an hour-long hunting spree, killing potentially four white sharks in total. The researchers decided to adjust and resubmit the paper with the new information. This provides new insight into the rarely-seen evasive behavior of great whites—a species that had once dominated South African waters but is now experiencing a rapid decline. 

“I still remember viewing the footage for the first time and feeling a whole mixed bag of emotions,” Alison Towner, lead study author and senior shark scientist at Marine Dynamic Academy in Gansbaai, South Africa, told PopSci in an email. “We had been analyzing evidence on these interactions since 2017 and had often been challenged on whether this really was occurring in South Africa. I guess the footage put those questions to bed as it is irrefutable evidence that orcas are hunting white sharks here.”

[Related: Even blue whales aren’t safe from orcas]

Orcas are like “wolves of the ocean,” says Towner—they commonly capture prey in organized pods. In two of the recorded attacks, the team was able to witness the killer whales slowly and closely approach sharks. Instead of fleeing, the great white will swim in tight circles around the orca while keeping it within sight—sharks being highly visual creatures. This is a common strategy that seals and turtles also use to successfully evade sharks, explains Towner. But since killer whales hunt in groups, the tactic might not be as effective. 

“I was in awe of how the orcas strategize and hunt but one cannot help but feel for the sharks, too,” Towner says. “It’s quite haunting seeing white sharks being circled and killed by larger predators.” 

Particularly, the orcas seem to have a taste for liver. The video shows them chomping on the sharks’ abdomen and tearing out their liver, which could be seen floating to the surface where the killer whale gobbles it up. White sharks’ livers are oily and nutrient-rich, making an ideal meal, Towner explains. The footage gives an explanation for previous shark carcasses washed ashore that were missing livers, the team wrote in the study. 

This might actually be a relatively common phenomenon. Killer whales are the only known marine predator of great white sharks. In South Africa, Starboard, and partner-in-crime Port, have been reported preying on other shark species and have been linked to white shark deaths since around 2017, but this is the first time the showdown was seen in action. Before killer whales started hunting in Mossel Bay, white sharks were frequently seen—sometimes recorded every day by research surveys. The study authors collected drone and dive boat data before and after the predation events, and found that white sharks fled the area immediately after the attacks. Only a single white shark was seen in 45 days after the predations were reported. 

[Related: Great whites don’t hunt humans—they just have blind spots]

“Killer whales are highly intelligent and social animals,” marine mammal specialist and study co-author Simon Elwen said in a press release. They are known to learn and pick up behaviors or skills from each other in their unique cultural system. 

If the hunting practice spreads among killer whales over time, it might be tough to be a shark in South African waters. Orcas are already pushing great whites out of Gansbaai, a fishing town east of Cape Town that’s popular for shark tourism. Human-caused climate change and fishery activity have already been linked to the decline of shark populations, Towner explains. Orcas pose an additional pressure into the mix, motivating Towner and researchers to closely monitor shark and orca dynamics, and the potential influences it might have on South Africa’s ocean ecosystem. 

“While these interactions may be fascinating it is important to understand that white sharks face a whole host of threats in South Africa and now orcas are an additional threat to their already fragile populations,” Towner says. “This information will need to be considered in future studies and in management moving forward here in South Africa.”

The post Watch what can happen when killer whales tangle with great white sharks appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island was much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge.

“Pah!” Inglis presumably scoffed as he looked out across 22 kilometers of shimmering blue sea—because he went on to write in his 1832 book about the region that this was “an assertion too ridiculous to merit examination.” Another writer, Jean Poingdestre, around 150 years earlier, had been similarly unmoved by the tale. No one could have trod from Jersey to Normandy, he withered, “vnlesse it were before the Flood,” referring to the Old Testament cataclysm.

Yet, there had been a flood. A big one. Between roughly 15,000 and 5,000 years ago, massive flooding caused by melting glaciers raised sea levels around Europe. That flooding is what eventually turned Jersey into an island.

Rather than being a ridiculous claim not worthy of examination, perhaps the old story was true—a whisper from ancestors who really did walk through now-vanished lands. A whisper that has echoed across millennia.

That’s exactly what geologist Patrick Nunn and historian Margaret Cook at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have proposed in a recent paper.

In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.

“The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” says Nunn. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.”

Nunn has since gathered 32 groups of stories from Indigenous communities around the coast of Australia—a continent nearly as large as Europe—that seem to refer to geological changes along shorelines.

Take the legend of Garnguur, told by the Lardil people, also known as Kunhanaamendaa, in the Wellesley Islands, off northern Australia. It describes a seagull woman, Garnguur, who cut the islands off from the mainland by dragging a giant raft, or walpa, back and forth across a peninsula. In some versions of the story, this is punishment for her brother, Crane, who failed to look after her child when asked. Nunn and Cook argue that the narrative can be taken as a memory of how, no more than 10,000 years ago, melting glaciers caused the Wellesley Islands to be cut off from the mainland. Interestingly, there is a large underwater trench between two of the Wellesley Islands—perhaps a feature of the seabed that prompted the image of Garnguur plowing her raft into the earth, the researchers suggest in their paper.

Separately, other Indigenous groups in South Australia, such as the Ngarrindjeri and Ramindjeri, tell of a period when Kangaroo Island was once connected to the mainland. Some say it got cut off by a big storm, while others describe a line of partially submerged boulders that once allowed people to cross to the island.

For Jo Brendryen, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has studied the effects of deglaciation in Europe following the end of the last ice age, the idea that traditional oral histories preserve real accounts of sea level rise is perfectly plausible.

During the last ice age, he says, the sudden melting of ice sheets induced catastrophic events known as meltwater pulses, which caused sudden and extreme sea level rise. Along some coastlines in Europe, the ocean may have risen as much as 10 meters in just 200 years. At such a pace, it would have been noticeable to people across just a few human generations.

“These stories are anecdotes, but enough anecdotes makes for data,” Brendryen explains. “By systematically collecting these kinds of memories or stories, I think you can learn something.”

Beyond capturing historical events, geomyths offer a glimpse into the inner lives of those who were there, says Tim Burbery, an expert on geomyths at Marshall University in West Virginia, who was not involved in the research: “These are stories based in trauma, based in catastrophe.”

That, he suggests, is why it may have made sense for successive generations to pass on tales of geological upheaval. Ancient societies may have sought to broadcast their warning: beware, these things can happen!

“They would mythologize it,” Burbery adds. “They would use the language of legend, and within that there could be some real data.”

Today, many people report a sense of eco-anxiety because of climate change and its effects, including sea level rise. Nunn points out that our contemporary situation differs in some ways from ancient predicaments—there are many more humans on the planet and huge, densely populated coastal cities, for example. And unlike historical periods of deglaciation, we are today both the agents and victims of rapid environmental change. But vulnerability to climatic shifts allows us to feel an affinity toward our forebears. And the old stories still have things to teach us. As Nunn says, “the fact that our ancestors have survived those periods gives us hope that we can survive this.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

The post Collecting ancient geomyths could give scientists new insights on climate change appeared first on Popular Science.

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Batteries to store renewable energy and power electric vehicles are essential if countries, communities, and businesses hope to meet climate change and clean energy goals. But, these technologies require complicated-to-mine materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. And the demand for these minerals is only expected to increase—the market for battery cells is predicted to grow by more than 20 percent annually until 2030.

This increasing demand for batteries rustles up interest in seabed mineral extraction because the deep seafloor may contain enough minerals to support the transition to a low-carbon energy system.

However, deep-sea mining—the process of extracting minerals from the ocean below 200 meters—may destroy habitats and cause the loss of marine species. Is mineral extraction initiatives in shallow sea areas the key to meeting mineral demand sustainably? It’s unlikely, according to researchers.

Shallow-water mining isn’t necessarily a sustainable option

Shallow-water mining, defined as extracting materials at depths less than 200 meters deep under the water, is a contentious subject. Two factors are often considered it comes to the sustainability of deep-sea mining versus shallow-water mining: We have better knowledge of shallow-water ecosystems, and their biological communities have shorter recovery times, says Laura Kaikkonen, visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme.

Deep-sea ecosystems are incredibly understudied, and the lack of data makes predicting the long-term impacts of mining very difficult. In addition, deep-sea species are long-lived and reproduce less often than their shallow-water counterparts. Therefore their populations will take much longer to recover, she adds. However, a recent study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution argues that there are no thorough and impartial comparisons between the two. Consequently, the paper argues there are no justifications in favor of shallow-water mining.

“Despite ​claims about how shallow-water mining can be the environmentally and socially sustainable alternative to traditional mining, thus far there have not been any thorough evaluations of the impacts of different mining practices to back these claims,” says Kaikkonen, who was involved in the new study.

Shallow-water mining may save operational costs because it takes place closer to the shore, and dredging shallow seafloor minerals is often efficient. But, any mineral extraction from the seabed will result in several environmental changes, including disrupting shallow-water minerals and their massive role in the habitat of seafloor organisms. And when seafloor organisms hurt, those impacts can be felt all the way up the chain of marine life, Kaikkonen adds.

However, shallow-water ecosystems may be more tolerant of mining-related stressors like elevated turbidity, sediment burial, and noise levels, says Craig Smith, professor emeritus in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa who was not involved in the study. That’s because shallow-water ecosystems usually experience noise and disruption from the surface more often than their deep-sea counterparts due to human activity.

That said, no matter how minimal, the noise, vibrations, and other impacts of mining operations may be detrimental—especially since the effects added would be on top of the stressors that already exist from human activities, pollution, and the impacts of climate change, says Kaikkonen. She adds that we must evaluate whether the short-term benefit from seafloor minerals is worth the permanent damage to ecosystems.

Shallow-water mining is likely to cause heavy metal contamination of the marine environment, damaging different habitat types that may take decades to recover, says Andrew K. Sweetman, professor of deep-sea ecology at the Heriot-Watt University who was not involved in the study. 

A 2021 Environmental Science and Pollution Research study assessed water and fish samples from fourteen monitoring stations to determine heavy metal contamination in the Persian Gulf. The authors found high concentrations of heavy metals like copper, nickel, and lead in water samples from stations near petrochemical plants. They also discovered that fish populations dwelling near the seafloor were more contaminated than those living within the top five meters of the water column, making them hazardous to human health.

More research about the environmental impacts of shallow-water mining is needed

Before rushing to exploit new mineral resources, research and development should be targeted to improve the use of what we already have, says Kaikkonen.

According to a 2022 commentary in One Earth, seabed mining is often justified by the incorrect assumption that land-based metal reserves are rapidly depleting. But, this isn’t true—the identified resources of nickel and cobalt on land can meet global demand for decades. Therefore, it’s essential to embrace circular economy practices that reuse, repurpose, and recycle minerals as much as possible to avoid the expansion of mining into the ocean.

For instance, nickel has a high recycling efficiency, and about 68 percent of all nickel from consumer products is recycled. However, plenty of factors stand in the way of increased recycling of cobalt and lithium. This includes inefficient collection infrastructure, product design without thinking of second-life uses, and price fluctuations of raw materials.

Although some extractive activity might be necessary to move to a carbon-negative economy, it must be done properly—which means doing baseline and impact assessments, says Sweetman. Smith suggests proceeding very slowly with deep-sea and shallow-water mining, allowing only one operation to happen until the resulting intensity and extent of the disturbance to ecosystems is well-understood. It’s essential to close the significant knowledge gaps on the potential impacts of mining before seafloor mining is allowed to proceed at a large scale, he adds. 

Protecting large areas from mining may also preserve regional biodiversity and ecosystem services, says Smith. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body of 167 member states and the European Union, was formed to protect the marine environment by regulating mining operations in international seabed areas. But, the group has faced controversy given that they have granted at least 30 exploration contacts covering more than 1.3 million square kilometers of the deep seafloor, leading some environmental activists to argue that they prioritize the development of deep-sea mining over environmental protection.

Shallow-water mining activities should not be considered the silver bullet to resolving the growing global need for metals. Fully powering the world’s growing demand for electric vehicles and storage—even with all currently known mineral resources—is unrealistic, says Kaikkonen. For a future that is sustainable for human life and the ecosystems that will be affected by growing demand, shrinking energy use is just as important as finding new ways to power the world.

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This article was originally featured on Saveur.

Earlier this month, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program downgraded American lobster to its red list. According to the organization, which rates seafood based on criteria of sustainability and environmental impact, consumers should avoid red-listed seafood because its harvesting poses a threat to wildlife or the environment. In the case of American lobster, also known as Maine lobster, the at-risk wildlife is the North Atlantic right whale, among the world’s most endangered whale species (fewer than 350 remain). In Maine, the red designation—the latest in a series of setbacks to the industry—has taken locals from lobstermen to politicians by surprise, and they’re pushing back. 

The hazard that the lobster industry poses to right whales mostly stems from the design of the fixed-gear fishing equipment, which involves a buoy that connects to underwater traps or pots by vertical rope. Whales can get tangled in this rope, which, along with vessel strikes, is a leading cause of death for the animals. As bad luck would have it for the marine mammals, their habitat range overlaps with large commercial fisheries that use this type of fishing gear, including the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery (referring collectively to the thousands of commercial owner-operators catching lobster off the state’s coast).

According to Curt Brown, a commercial lobsterman and wholesale lobster company Ready Seafood’s marine biologist, the Maine fishery has overhauled many aspects of its harvesting practices to minimize risk to right whales. Improvements, some of which came as federal requirements, include installing weak links in the gear that would allow a tangled whale to break free, reducing the amount of rope in the water (which has eliminated more than 30,000 miles of line throughout the Gulf), and adding markers to their gear to help trace the location of any entanglement. “We believe strongly that we’ve done everything that we need to do and we’re still doing more. We’re doing our part,” says Mark Murrell, founder of seafood distributor Get Maine Lobster. By Brown’s estimate, these safety updates have collectively cost Maine lobstermen tens of millions of dollars—and he says their efforts have paid off.

However, a recent court decision indicates those efforts aren’t enough. In July, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the federal government violated the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act by neglecting to sufficiently protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from potentially fatal entanglements. The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, is also pushing for stronger right whale protections, last year initiating a seasonal ban on lobster fishing gear in a nearly 1,000 square-mile stretch off the coast of New England, among other new regulations. (The Maine Lobstering Union sued the federal government in response, but recently dropped part of the lawsuit). 

Maine’s lobstermen believe these setbacks to their livelihood place undue blame on them. “We continue to get pushed for something that we are not the cause of,” says Brown. “There have been zero documented mortalities of a right whale in Maine lobster gear ever, and there have been zero documented entanglements of a right whale in Maine lobster gear since 2004.” According to a 2021 data analysis published in the journal Oceanography, right whales are foraging less in the Gulf of Maine and increasingly shifting to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada. “Climate change and warming sea surface temperatures may be forcing right whales to spend more time farther north than they used to,” explains Jack Cheney, a researcher with the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and a sustainable seafood consultant. Maine fishermen, many of whom may not have even seen a right whale in years, “don’t understand why they’re getting penalized,” he says. “There’s no smoking gun.”

Still, that doesn’t mean the marine mammals are absent from Maine lobster management zones. Many North Atlantic right whale deaths can’t be attributed to any human activity in particular. According to a recent Seafood Watch press release, the majority of entanglements happen unseen and thus can’t be linked back to a specific location or type of gear. As a preventive measure, the program designated numerous fisheries using fixed-gear equipment in the habitat range of the whales as unsustainable. Multiple commercially caught species in addition to lobster were impacted, including black sea bass caught by pots in New England. Even though that fishery doesn’t operate during the times of year when right whales are typically in the area, Seafood Watch still downgraded the fishery’s fixed-gear harvesting method to red, Cheney explained. “They’re taking an extremely precautionary approach.”

But this approach “makes it appear that all of these fisheries are on equal footing,” Brown argues, pointing out that the Maine fishery has taken more steps toward sustainable fishing than many others along the eastern seaboard. Since the advisory team released its draft assessment in 2019, representatives from Maine, including Brown, have met with Seafood Watch assessors multiple times to present evidence of the specific measures the lobster industry has taken. “I think all the information we presented fell on deaf ears,” says Brown.

Cheney, too, was surprised that the entire Gulf of Maine received a blanket rating. “I don’t know why they couldn’t potentially rate specific areas along the Maine coast with different ratings,” he says, pointing out that Norway received 13 distinct ratings for farmed Atlantic salmon. 

Though Seafood Watch has issued controversial ratings before, red-listing the Maine fishery has impacted an iconic industry that not only is deeply associated with New England culture but also has a strong generational component and vocal stakeholders. (The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative has launched a petition urging Seafood Watch to reconsider its rating.) “They [Seafood Watch] just kind of dropped it on people,” says Cheney, pointing out that the industry wasn’t given time to adjust its practices before the red designation was issued. 

It’s uncertain if advance warning would have ultimately made a difference in the rating. One risk-reduction solution, which NOAA officially proposed in July, will likely take years to implement: a transition to “ropeless” fishing gear. This equipment, which the Center for Biological Diversity is urging the federal government to require for trap fisheries by 2026, involves various methods of deploying and retrieving traps without the need for vertical lines or other ropes in the water.

Because ropeless fishing gear would no longer be visible from the ocean surface, the entire industry would have to integrate into a new GPS-based system. “Ropeless gear would [almost] solve it all,” says Cheney, but he recognizes how drastic of a technological jump the conversion would entail. “It’s like having bicycles and being like, ‘Okay, everyone’s going to switch to Teslas.’” The shift would also alter the very framework of the industry. “People use their extra traps to mark their territory so people don’t fish there,” explains Cheney. “If you get rid of that system and have just ropeless gear, it’s going to kind of throw the whole culture into disarray.” Not to mention, all the new technology would be a heavy financial burden for the lobstermen to shoulder—and make it cost-prohibitive for many young would-be entrants to join the industry. “There’s not enough federal support for the industry to make a major shift like they’re calling for,” says Ethan Morgan, the general manager of seafood restaurant Portland Lobster Company.

One positive change Cheney hopes will result from Seafood Watch’s red rating is to generate investment around projects aimed at further improving the sustainability of Maine’s lobster-catching industry. “I do think ropeless gear can happen eventually,” Cheney says, but notes that more funding and research and development are necessary before state-wide adoption will be within reach. “You can’t just change an industry overnight,” adds Murrell, and in the meantime, “people have families to feed.”

What long-term economic impacts Seafood Watch’s designation could have on Maine’s lobster industry is still unclear. “Red listing plants the seed in people’s minds that Maine lobster is not sustainable,” says Brown. Some retailers and restaurants, including Whole Foods and Red Lobster, consider the ratings in their sourcing policies. Murrell, however, mentions that since Maine lobster was red-listed, he’s only received one email from a customer asking about the designation. But no direct sales impact so far doesn’t mean the industry won’t feel the pinch going forward. “It may carry over into where people decide they’re going to be vacationing next year,” says Morgan, pointing out that lobster season draws significant tourism to Maine.

Cheney emphasizes that there are valid arguments on both sides of the debate over whether the Maine fishery’s red rating is warranted. “It’s just such a complicated situation. I don’t think there’s any hard, fast, right answer,” he says. “Expecting people to know the solution is unfair and unrealistic. It’s so complicated—and unprecedented.”

“You have thousands of people out there on boats,” adds Morgan, “trying to do the right thing.”

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After pummeling the southeast coast of Florida at a maximum of 150 mph sustained winds, Hurricane Ian is working its way up the Atlantic and showing signs of a resurgence. The record-setting storm is set to reach South Carolina by this afternoon.

Ian first made landfall in Cuba on September 27, taking out the entire island’s power grid (which is still not fully restored). It then barreled over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering speed and power from the abnormally warm waters, and was upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane before it breached Florida on September 28. So far, 12 deaths have been reported in the state, and several parts of Lee County have been utterly demolished. The number of mortalities in the area could rise as emergency officials continue search and rescue.

From the Florida coast, Ian crossed over to the Atlantic seaboard, where it’s slowly been moving north as a tropical storm. Yesterday, the National Hurricane Center upgraded it to Category 1 again. It is next expected to make landfall between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, today around 2 p.m. Eastern.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean.]

“Life-threatening storm surge and hurricane conditions expected along the Carolina coast this afternoon. Flooding rains likely across the Carolinas and southern Virginia,” stated the National Hurricane Center in its most recent advisory. The governor of South Carolina has declared a state of emergency, but hasn’t issued a mandatory evacuation order or school closures.

While the impact this weekend should not be as devastating as that in south Florida (which experienced a rare “500-year” flood event), Carolinians should take shelter and prepare for potential disaster conditions. Precipitation from the hurricane’s remnants could be seen up the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as well.

[Related: Rare ‘triple dip’ La Niña predicted for 2022.]

Though Ian never reached Category 5 status, its rapid intensification over the Gulf of Mexico made it particularly nasty for Cuba and Florida. This is likely linked to warmer seas and moister air caused by climate change, Vox reported. A quiet hurricane season also left the region’s waters in prime state for feeding a massive system. “We haven’t had another storm yet this season to go through and cool off the Gulf through that mechanism. There’s this pristine Gulf of Mexico from a sea-surface temperature standpoint, and Hurricane Ian has been able to exploit that,” Paul Miller, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University, told Vox.

Ian might not be the last of the year’s major disasters: Hurricane season extends to the end of November in North America, and several weather forecasting agencies have predicted that there will be an above-average number of named storms. Not all will make landfall.

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Climate change is changing the chemistry of the Earth’s oceans. The heat from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is melting critical sea ice and causing ocean acidification, or a reduction in the pH of the ocean over an extended period of time.

Over the past 200 years, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units, a 30 percent increase in the ocean’s acidity. According to NOAA, seawater turns acidic when carbon dioxide (CO₂) dissolves into ocean water to form carbonic acid. This weak acid then breaks into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate ions. There is currently more CO₂ in the atmosphere due to human activities like burning fossil fuels, so there is more CO₂ dissolving into the world’s oceans. As the ocean continues to absorb more carbon dioxide, the pH decreases and the ocean becomes more acidic.

Ocean acidification hurts sea life, particularly clams, oysters, scallops, mussels, and other fish with skeletons and shells made up of calcium carbonate. NOAA has even found evidence that ocean acidification can dissolve the shells of some sea snails.

However, acidification doesn’t occur in the same way across the whole planet—it is happening in some areas more than others. A study published today in the journal Science finds that acidification in the western Arctic Ocean is happening at a rate three to four times higher than in other ocean basins.

“Once that is diluted, its ability to neutralize the carbon dioxide drops,” Wei-Jun Cai, an oceanographer, marine chemist, and author of this paper in an interview, tells Popular Science. “2008 was the first time we really saw this in the Arctic Ocean and I was really shocked that the CO₂ was so high in the surface water. Acidification can even make heavy metals in the water more toxic.”

They study suggests that the increase has been driven by the rapid loss of sea ice in the area, which has exposed the ocean water to the atmosphere where it can absorb more carbon dioxide. NASA estimates that the arctic is losing sea ice at a rate of 12.6 percent per decade do to global warming. According to Cai, in the 1980s and 1990s, carbon dioxide levels were lower in the Arctic Ocean and it was understood that ice melt was happening more in the Marginal Sea basin, and it advanced into other Arctic Ocean basins by 2007.

“You now have atmospheric contact in places where there wasn’t any,” Cai explains.

[Related: As oceans grow more acidic, they’re eating away at their protective floors.]

The team collected data from 47 Arctic research cruises from 1994 to 2020 to estimate changes in seawater pH. They additionally tested both the saturation state of the calcium carbonate and the mineral aragonite. These are both accurate measures of ocean acidification. Their results revealed a faster pace of acidification for the western Arctic and a surprising correlation of these two features with the regional decrease in sea ice over the past 26 years.

[Related: Inuit researchers are leading a scientific movement to understand life on the ice.]

The process could continue to intensify over the next few decades if sea ice continues to disappear from the western Arctic.

“This acidification will likely continue for the next two decades until all the ice melts. Other scientists have predicted that this will happen between 2030-2050,” Cai says. “Currently, the ice melt has slowed down compared to the year 2012 where we saw maximum melting, but we are not sure if it will continue to slow down. It could accelerate again.”

The next steps are to continue to dive deeper into this data to better understand acidification. Cai also added that this is a warning for lower latitude areas. The speed of ice melt in the Arctic can only get worse in other places.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid nearly 10 kilometers wide slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The impact lit vast stretches of the planet on fire. Soot and dust choked the Earth. As the world burned, temperatures in the ocean plummeted, and creatures that once ruled, including ammonites, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, died out—along with 80 percent of the other animal species on the planet.

In the void, new life flourished.

Within three million years, new fish species were thriving on a reef of coral-like algae and large tuberous clams just 500 kilometers from the asteroid’s crater. One day, one of these fish—with an elongated snout and a delicate, slender body—died. It sank to the sandy seafloor where, along with other animals, the imprint of its skeleton was compressed into limestone.

The ocean receded and, in the seventh century, Maya builders constructing temples in the city state of Palenque began quarrying fossil-studded rocks from the now-dry seabed. The petrified creatures came to inform Maya beliefs about a previous world destroyed by fires and floods. One slab imprinted with fish was brought into the palace, where it was painted and adorned with plaster. Palenque’s residents used other fossils, including megalodon teeth and stingray spines, as cutting tools or buried them with the dead.

But the skeleton of the long-snouted fish remained buried in the quarry.

When Palenque, like many Maya city states, collapsed in the 10th century, its temples and their fossils were abandoned and swallowed by the forest. They lay forgotten until Spanish colonists began studying the site in the 1800s. But it wasn’t until the 2000s that researchers examined the impressions in the limestone more closely.

The fish fossils found in Palenque were from species that had never been seen before. “It was just like a movie script,” says marine biologist David Bellwood at James Cook University in Australia, who was brought in to help identify the fossilized fishes. “We found them on the lids of tombs.”

But the more shocking discovery came after paleontologists traced the limestone back to the quarry from which it was originally unearthed.

There, after millennia buried in stone, the long-snouted fish finally saw light—and upended our understanding of fish evolution.

Researchers identified the fish as a flutemouth, a species whose descendants live on modern coral reefs. Dozens of other fossils pulled from the quarry included two other families of reef fishes: damselfish and grouper.

Bellwood and his colleagues show in a new study that these fossils represent the earliest known examples of reef fishes found anywhere on Earth. Today, we think of grouper, flutemouth, and damselfish as coral reef fishes. But these groups actually emerged in a world before modern coral, which wouldn’t arrive on the scene for another 29 million years.

Before this discovery, the oldest evidence of reef fishes was from about 50 million years ago: fossils pulled from what is now Monte Bolca in northern Italy. Based on the diversity represented in those Italian fossils, some scientists suspected that reef fishes likely emerged earlier—closer in time to the asteroid impact. But no fossils from that period had ever been found. The specimens from the Palenque quarry, which date from between 65 and 63 million years ago, help fill in that gap.

Although grouper, flutemouth, and damselfish are the only existing families represented in the Palenque fossils, Bellwood thinks most other reef fishes likely evolved around the same time. The study also suggests that reef fishes emerged in the western Atlantic Ocean, rather than the ancient Tethys Ocean, near present-day Italy, as scientists had thought.

“These fossil deposits are really important for understanding the history of coral reef fish,” says David Wainwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. Wainwright notes that this study likely isn’t the final word on the origins of reef fishes. “We probably will eventually find another fossil that’s even older,” he says—maybe even one from before the asteroid hit.

Bellwood, for his part, is excited about what may still lie hidden in the Palenque quarries. Future excavations could yield even more fossils that further unravel the history of coral reef ecosystems. “Theoretically, there could be all sorts of fossils in there,” he says. “It could just be a magical little location.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Humans have consumed meat all throughout history, but more recently, meat consumption has exploded. Global meat production reached about 375 million tons in 2018, more than triple the amount that the world produced fifty years ago. 

The production of animal-based foods carry heavy environmental impacts, using approximately 2422 cubic gigameters of water yearly. They also account for about 57 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from food production—almost twice the emissions from plant-based foods—not to mention that livestock grazing takes up about 26 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land.

Given its impact on climate change, many argue that it’s time to reduce red meat consumption and explore viable alternatives. For some meat lovers, seafood may be the ideal swap.

Seafood is a relatively low climate impact source of highly nutritious food. The authors of a new Nature study analyzed the GHG emissions associated with the production of various seafood like whitefish and crustaceans as well as their respective nutrient densities. They found that reducing the consumption of red meat and replacing it with certain seafood species may improve nutrition and reduce GHG emissions at the same time.

[Related: Eating sustainably may mean skipping the lobster for now.]

Seafood contains nutrients that other foods don’t have, or only in very low levels, such as iodine, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids, says Friederike Ziegler, study author and senior scientist at the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. In terms of nutrition and greenhouse gas emissions, those that performed best or had the lowest emissions per nutrient density were small pelagic species (like anchovies, mackerels, and herrings), bivalves like mussels and oysters, and salmonids, she adds.

Based on the study, large pelagics like yellowfin tuna also had high nutrient density scores, but they produced more emissions than small pelagics, bivalves, and salmonids. Meanwhile, most whitefish species—like the Atlantic cod—had fewer GHG emissions per edible product than large pelagics, but they weren’t as nutritious.

“Diet shift is a key strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Greg Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability who was not involved in the study. Shifting from beef to different seafood may lead to a large reduction in emissions, but sustainability is hardly ever that simple. 

A primary concern for switching from turf to surf is the sustainable production of each seafood species. This depends on various factors such as the source and production method as well as the feed for aquaculture, he adds.

In 1974, about 10 percent of fish stocks were being fished at biologically unsustainable levels, meaning they were being caught at a rate faster than the fish can recover its population. Since then, this percentage has tripled—rising to 31 percent in 2013 and 34 percent in 2020. Overfishing, the main driver of ocean wildlife population decline, can cause the loss of breeders, disruption of natural communities, and a massive depletion of many species, thereby harming ocean biodiversity.

“Many small pelagic fish stocks are currently overfished and they play a vital role in aquatic ecosystems,” says Keoleian. “These fish are also heavily fished for fishmeal used in aquaculture.  Many salmon stocks are also overfished and bivalves populations are declining due to climate change, so sustainability of production from increased demand could be a concern.”

There is potential to increase production and total consumption of small pelagic species by making use of underexploited species. Additionally, utilizing other species that typically end up in fishmeal and fish oil in aquafeeds could be beneficial, says Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

Salmon, on the other hand, is pretty much fully exploited. “Any hopes for increased hatchery production are dubious because there appears to be competition for food in the North Pacific ocean, so more hatcheries would not likely increase total production,” says Hilborn.

Policymakers play a major role in shaping sustainable seafood production. They affect the food system from different angles, ranging from dietary advice that influences people’s eating habits to fishing regulations or aquaculture licensing procedures that shape the sustainability and volume of production in fisheries and aquaculture, says Ziegler.

For example, the Keep Finfish Free Act of 2019 aimed to prohibit the issuance of permits to conduct finfish aquaculture in the US Exclusive Economic Zone, unless specifically authorized by Congress. The health and integrity of Alaska’s wild fish stock must be protected and properly managed, otherwise, industrial aquaculture operations may threaten the ecosystem with non-native and genetically modified fish species, according to Alaska Rep. Don Young who filed the legislation.

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

To increase seafood production without causing further environmental harm, all wild stocks must be managed sustainably, which means fishing within their biological limits and protecting the ecosystem they depend on, says Ziegler. This maximizes the harvest from capture fisheries.

Ensuring that the harvested fish biomass is used for food and not wasted along the supply chain would also make a difference. A lot of fish processing trimmings are used in feeds, even though it is fully possible to utilize more of these side streams to produce nutritious food or food ingredients, she adds.

Meanwhile, designating marine protection areas (MPA) can be effective in restoring ecosystems, says Keoleian. Labels informing consumers of sustainable seafood production may also influence consumers’ consumption, he adds. For instance, the Marine Stewardship Council certification is a way to show that a particular fishery meets established standards and best practices for sustainable fishing.

Overall, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint and eat red meat less frequently, try incorporating more sustainably-sourced seafood into your diet. Not only will you be helping the planet, but you’ll also benefit from having a more varied diet.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Nestled in the heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University emanates the aura of a sprawling cabinet of curiosities. Its neoclassical facade is covered in natural motifs—doorways flanked by ammonites, handrails that curl into ferns, bronze door handles shaped like ibis skulls. As the oldest natural science institution in the western hemisphere, the academy has accumulated a trove of remarkable specimens. Among the 19 million or so specimens housed here are plants procured on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, blue marlin reeled in by Ernest Hemingway, and America’s first mounted dinosaur skeleton.

Many of the academy’s most unassuming yet impactful treasures are filed away on its second floor, in an office space crowded with hulking cabinets and microscopes. Next to one of these microscopes, curator Marina Potapova pops open a notebook-sized plastic container brimming with glass slides. To the untrained eye, these unremarkable slides seem filthy—each looks like it’s been smudged by dirty fingers.

But as soon as Potapova slips one under a microscope lens, the slide’s contents dazzle. Dozens of diatoms—microscopic, single-celled algae encased in sturdy silica walls and found wherever there is water—are fixed to the slides in a myriad of shapes.

Some are elongated like baguettes or flattened into saucers while others hook together to resemble translucent centipedes. Others are barbed like harpoons or shaped like pudgy sea stars. Some even resemble ornate stained-glass windows. Under a microscope, a few drops of murky pond water become a kaleidoscope of diatom diversity.

The beauty of diatoms is impressive. But their ecological significance is staggering. Diatoms anchor marine food webs by feeding everything from minuscule zooplankton to mammoth filter feeders. (Case in point: scientists have deduced that the rise of whales some 30 million years ago mirrors a spike in diatom diversity.) Diatoms also have an outsized atmospheric impact. As one of the planet’s most prolific organisms, diatoms siphon harmful gases like carbon dioxide out of the air and produce massive stores of oxygen as they photosynthesize. It is estimated that roughly one-quarter of the air we breathe is created by diatoms.

More than four million specimens of these essential algae are plastered onto hundreds of thousands of slides and housed in the academy’s diatom herbarium. Only London’s Natural History Museum stores more slides of diatoms.

Although the academy’s diatoms no longer feed the planktonic masses or pump oxygen into the atmosphere, they do hold clues about how the aquatic world is changing. As their tough shells sink to the bottom of a body of water, they are stored in the sediment for millennia. When researchers use a sediment core to drill down into the muddy bottom of an estuary, they are collecting diatoms deposited over the eons.

In addition to being plentiful and hardy, diatoms are also a crucial barometer for a variety of environmental conditions. The existence of certain diatom species can help scientists pinpoint everything from industrial pollution to oxygen depletion. Potapova and her colleagues have recently used these water condition time capsules to gauge how accelerating sea level rise is endangering New Jersey’s coastal wetlands.

Thanks to a relative dearth of environmental monitoring, the historical decline of these crucial marshes—which hoard carbon, provide nursery grounds for fish, and buffer the coast from storms—has largely been obscured, making restoration efforts little more than guesswork.

However, the millions of diatoms stored at the academy are helping the researchers track the fall of the coastal wetlands as the ocean rises, which may help anticipate the coast’s future. “Diatoms are absolutely invaluable environmental archives,” Potapova says. “You can infer the future from what they tell you about the past.”

Considering the academy’s history, it is no wonder that the storied institution has become a hub for diatoms. With the advent of accessible microscopy in the 1850s, many of Philadelphia’s gentleman naturalists were captivated by the realm of minute microbes, eventually establishing the Microscopical Society of Philadelphia at the academy.

Because of their striking beauty, diatoms took the microscopical society by storm. To satiate their interest, many of these diatomists headed east to the New Jersey coastline to collect samples, which they mounted onto glass slides using a steady hand and a brush brimming with pig eyelashes. The hobbyists would then gather at the academy to show off their slides at gourmet luncheons.

The academy’s early members were clearly enthusiastic about diatoms, but most were amateurs and published little research on the myriad of specimens they collected. Organizing the mountains of slides compiled by each collector into a cohesive collection proved to be quite the task for Ruth Patrick when she arrived at the academy in 1933. The daughter of an amateur diatomist who received her first microscope at the age of seven, Patrick gravitated toward diatoms early in her childhood and eventually completed her PhD studying the microscopic organisms. Despite her scientific credentials, she was relegated to setting up microscopes and slides for the untrained hobbyists. It took her years to even gain membership in the male-dominated academy. But her persistence paid off, and in 1937 she became curator of the nascent diatom herbarium.

Patrick’s first goal was organizing the amalgamation of different collections into a unified and comprehensive source for taxonomic research. When she was not mounting and organizing slides, she was wading into nearby ponds and streams to collect new specimens in the field, where she gradually gained an appreciation for the ecological importance of diatoms.

This crystalized during a 1948 expedition to Pennsylvania’s Conestoga River—a body of water heavily polluted by sewage and industrial runoff. As her team collected samples from throughout the creek, she recognized patterns in the diatom composition. Some species’ densities exploded in areas contaminated with sewage, while others thrived in spots tainted with chemicals. Soon, Patrick became adept at using the existence of certain diatoms as a key for diagnosing pollution in lakes and rivers. This supported the idea that greater diatom diversity correlated with healthier freshwater ecosystems—an insight ecologists coined the Patrick Principle.

Patrick revolutionized the use of diatoms to monitor freshwater systems, but using them in coastal wetlands lagged behind. The brackish fusion of fresh and salt water in coastal zones such as estuaries creates habitats that are dynamic and complex with a mixture of inland and oceanic diatoms, according to Mihaela Enache, a research scientist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP).

However, in recent decades, the sea has dominated the once-dynamic coastal margin, propelling farther inland as sea levels rise. Over the last century, the sea level along New Jersey has risen by 0.45 meters, more than double the global average of 0.18 meters. By 2100, the sea could rise by over a meter.

This dramatic rise in sea level has proven disastrous for the patchwork of marshes along New Jersey’s coastline, several of which have already succumbed to the sea. However, the full extent of the loss of these wetlands is difficult to parse because environmental monitoring only dates back a few decades.

Without a sense of a wetland’s natural conditions, ecological restoration is daunting. Having that information is crucial, says Enache. “Without [it], you are in the dark.” Thankfully, some of this missing data is recorded in the academy’s cache of diatoms.

Like most coastal margins, New Jersey is familiar with sea level rise. During the Pleistocene, when New Jersey was blanketed by ice and home to mastodons, sea ice slurped up stores of seawater. Around 18,000 years ago, sea levels sank more than 130 meters below their current levels—extending the New Jersey coastline 110 kilometers farther into the Atlantic Ocean.

The end of the last ice age sparked a steady climb in sea levels. Retreating ice sheets caused parts of New Jersey to sink. This subsidence, combined with glacial melt, proved a potent mix for rapid sea level rise according to Jennifer Walker, a sea level researcher at Rutgers University.

In a study published last year, Walker turned to the past to put New Jersey’s current bout of sea level rise in context. “If we can understand how temperatures, atmosphere, and sea level changes are all interconnected in the past, that’s what we can use to project changes in the future.”

To gauge fluctuating sea levels over the past 2,000 years, her team examined the shells of single-celled protists called foraminifera that are finely calibrated to specific environmental conditions. This makes them a valuable proxy for reconstructing shifts in sea levels. By identifying the presence of certain foraminifera species throughout sediment cores collected from different spots along the Jersey shore, her team concluded that New Jersey’s coast is experiencing the fastest rise of sea level in 2,000 years.

The NJDEP hoped diatoms could serve as a similar tool for understanding how coastal marshes responded to the rising sea. Like foraminifera, each diatom species is extremely sensitive to environmental conditions. For example, species like the rolling pin–shaped Nitzschia microcephala thrive in nitrogen-rich environments, making their shells a common sign of nutrient pollution. Other species, like Diploneis smithii, whose segmented shell resembles a slender trilobite, prefer saline waters. Their existence inland is a good indication of past sea level intrusion and helps researchers deduce which marshes have been prone to flooding in the past.

To pinpoint where these microscopic indicators once existed, the NJDEP deployed a team of researchers into several marshes along the coastline, ranging from heavily polluted wetlands in the north to near-pristine tidal marshes in the south. At each site, they cored into the marsh muck, sampling as deep as two meters in certain spots. Enache compares this method to slicing into a stack of pancakes—as you cut deeper, you are essentially going back in time from the steaming pancake just off the griddle to the soggy pancake deposited at the bottom of the stack. As they dug deeper, the researchers were traveling back decades. In total, they collected nine cores from five wetlands.

The NJDEP then sent the sediment cores to Philadelphia, where Potapova and her master’s student Nina Desianti gauged the diatom diversity of New Jersey’s coastal wetlands through time. Desianti began processing the diatom specimens by soaking the sediment samples in strong acid to dissolve everything but the silica shell before adhering them to slides. The result was an environmental history of each of the five marshes mounted onto thousands of glass slides. Then, by using the specimens already cataloged at the academy, they played a microscopic game of who’s who. But even the sprawling diatom herbarium lacked all the answers—Desianti estimates that over one-third of the 900-odd species they collected from the wetlands are new to science.

The monumental effort yielded the tome Diatom Flora of the New Jersey Coastal Wetlands in 2019. To the uninitiated, it is an overwhelming mix of intimidating Latinized names and dramatic electron microscope photographs that portray the diatoms in all their infinitesimal glory. To Enache, it’s the key to decoding the decline of New Jersey’s wetlands. By punching the composition of diatom species and modern wetland conditions into modeling programs, Enache is able to illustrate what a wetland once looked like. “Diatom species are a very precious environmental archive because we can go back in time—when nobody could take measurements of nutrients, nobody could take measurements of pH—and actually use the diatom species to get complete numbers,” she says. These figures help her record the increase of everything from agricultural nutrients to industrial chemicals in New Jersey’s water all the way back to the mid-1600s, when Europeans arrived and began to dramatically alter the state.

But while diatoms offer a window into the decline of New Jersey’s marshes, they also offer a glimpse of environmental resiliency to Desianti. Just as the team used the salt tolerance of different diatoms to map past episodes of sea level rise, they could also use the microscopic algae to deduce how these marshes responded to saltwater intrusion.

When it comes to habitats, marshes are particularly dynamic. As the boggy barriers between land and sea, coastal marshes hoard sediment, building vertically to stay above the rising ocean. When sea level rise outpaces their accumulation of sediment, the marshes retreat inland by spilling into coastal forests. As the marsh’s briny water percolates into the groundwater, it kills the trees, creating what ecologists call “ghost forests” of desiccated tree husks.

While coastal marshes are naturally pliable, anthropogenic impacts have rendered them brittle. In New Jersey, dams strain out sediment, robbing the marsh of construction material, and retreating marshes butt up against paved roads and vacation homes. “Salt marshes have to compete with us in establishing habitat,” says Desianti, who now uses diatoms to track nutrient pollution for the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene. “As a result, these salt marshes are squeezed between sea level rise and human pressures.”

The diatoms Potapova and Desianti collected and identified will help the NJDEP not only understand how New Jersey’s coastal wetlands have responded to past bouts of sea level rise but also inform what can be done to restore these vibrant ecosystems.

The deeper you core into the pond muck, the more diverse the diatoms tend to be, which, as Ruth Patrick deduced decades ago, is the trademark of a healthy ecosystem. As you examine a core’s more recent chapters, this diatomic diversity often decreases as certain specialists, like salt-loving marine diatoms, dominate. Understanding where these saline-specializing species persist reveals which ecosystems have succumbed to sea level rise and where restoration efforts, like an influx of sediment, are needed the most.

Diatoms are not a cure for threats like sea level rise and pollution. Instead, they are a key to help combat them. They reveal what pristine habitats were once like long before anyone paid attention and illustrate what has gone awry over the centuries. To enact successful wetland restoration measures, it would be wise to consult these microscopic algae.

Which is why the diatom specimens Potapova and Desianti collected in New Jersey’s coastal marshes are being filed away alongside Patrick’s specimens in the diatom herbarium’s steel cabinets. Similarly to how they persist in sediment for millennia, the diatom specimens stored at the academy will offer invaluable data points for future researchers to make sense of pollution and shifting sea levels.

“The diatom herbarium is an invaluable resource for diatom research,” says Desianti. “I’m sure that in the future, even when I’m gone, people will still access this collection and continue to investigate environmental issues.” She is confident that within the tens of thousands of slides deposited in the recesses of the academy are environmental breakthroughs waiting to be decoded.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read the series and explore all our 150th anniversary coverage here.

In 1984, marine geologists finally got a long-anticipated glimpse of our planet unseen. After crunching satellite data for 18 months, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, William Haxby, revealed a stunning new panorama of the seafloor. It was the first time anyone spied a worldwide picture of what lay beneath the ocean in such detail—volcanoes, underwater mountains, fracture zones, and trenches. “Haxby’s maps of the world’s seafloors reveal a terrain as diverse as any found on the seven continents,” journalist and science writer Marcia Bartusiak reported for that year’s February issue of Popular Science, capturing the scientific community’s palpable excitement. At the time, the Martian landscape was more familiar. 

Nearly four decades later, the surfaces of distant planets are still better imaged than Earth’s ocean floor. While exponential advances in computer processing power, considerably expanded satellite imaging capabilities, and the development of autonomous (robotic) underwater vehicles capable of reaching even the deepest ocean trenches have advanced deep sea exploration, a high resolution map of the vast expanse of our own planet’s crust that lies hidden beneath a watery cloak remains incomplete. That may be changing, and none too soon with climate change bearing down. With ocean waters covering more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, having a clearer idea of the shape and composition of the sea floor will improve our ability to predict storm surge in hurricanes, forecast the path of tsunamis, calculate glacial melt, and monitor struggling marine habitats subject to commercial practices like fishery management and deep-sea drilling and mining.

“Seafloor mapping is critical to pretty much everything,” says Caitlin Adams, Operations Coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER), “from national security to blue economy [sustainable ocean] initiatives.” 

Ever since Russia’s Sputnik took to the sky in 1957, artificial satellite networks have employed electromagnetic waves like radar and Lidar to map terrestrial—and extraterrestrial—surfaces. But traditional radar works best on arid topography (like Mars, the Moon, and landmasses on Earth) because it can only penetrate a few meters into water, limiting the reach of eyes in the sky for waterlogged planets like our own. Since water mutes electromagnetic waves, there are only two ways to truly see beneath the sea without journeying down to the seafloor: sonar, or echo-sounding, and gravimetry, which detects gravitational anomalies caused by large objects. In both cases, direct measurement is required—the devices must be underwater (sonar) or at least close to the surface (gravity meter) to work, which means they can only be operated from the hull of a ship. Therein lies the rub. Mapping Earth’s 139 million square miles of seafloor could take as long as 1,000 years (estimates vary widely) for one ship continuously crisscrossing the ocean.  

Enter satellites. As Bartusiak explained in PopSci, the 1984 breakthrough came from a combination of a new satellite measurement technique known as gravity mapping, or satellite altimetry, and improved computer processing power, which enabled Haxby’s team at Lamont to produce their novel seafloor map in just a few years. 

Even without wind and waves, the surface of the Earth’s ocean is not like a fish tank: it would not be level. The ocean surface undulates, faintly following the ridges and rifts on the floor below. That’s because gravity’s sway over water becomes perceptible with masses as large as underwater volcanoes, underwater mountains (or seamounts), and trenches. Satellites equipped with sensitive altimeters, which measure sea surface height, can detect those subtle variations caused by seafloor topography. For instance, a 1,000-foot seamount will attract enough water to swell the ocean surface by as much as six inches. But since the ocean is a bit like a fluffy blanket, disguising all but rough contours, satellite-based gravity mapping has physical limitations. It can only detect large-scale objects, and then only approximates their shape. In 1984, exquisite detail in Haxby’s map meant that the smallest objects on the map were 20 miles across (about the size of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro). Anything smaller went undetected. While the precision of satellite altimetry has significantly improved in the ensuing decades, there’s only so much a blanket will reveal about what lies beneath. Today, the highest resolution satellite altimetry can achieve on its own is about 1 mile—or seven times the size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. In contrast, terrestrial maps made from satellite imaging can be as detailed as 50 cm per pixel, or an object the size of a fire hydrant. Only sonar devices, mounted on ships and underwater vehicles, have the ability to produce high resolution seafloor maps.

[Related: Meet the marine geologist mapping the deepest point on Earth]

In 1912, when the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, sonar had not been invented. The calamity inspired a flurry of echo-sounding innovation and in less than a decade sonar, which uses underwater sound projection to measure distances, became commonplace not only for maritime navigation and naval warfare but also seafloor mapping.

In 1957, Lamont researchers Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen published the first comprehensive seafloor map of any ocean when they released their sonar-based physiographic map of the North Atlantic. It was like a crude ultrasound of the Earth’s ocean.

By revealing the major topographical features of the seafloor, some for the first time, like the Rift Valley of the mid-oceanic ridge, the map seemed to affirm German scientist Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory, which had been dismissed when it was first proposed in 1912. By the late 1960s, and several sonar-based seafloor maps later, earth scientists had enough evidence to see that the planet’s surface had been fractured into sliding plates, just as Wegener proposed, drifting across the molten mantle below, crashing into one another, or slipping apart. Detailed maps of the seafloor held the key to plate tectonics. The consensus then, and now, was that more detail would reveal even more planetary secrets. 

“When we see smaller features,” says Shannon Hoy, Expedition Coordinator at NOAA OER, “we start to get more knowledge of the underlying geologic and oceanographic processes that are affecting our world.” For example, Hoy, who works with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), points to the “Million Mounds” deep-sea coral reef ecosystem, first mapped in the 2010s, that runs along the Atlantic seaboard from South Carolina to Florida. At a depth of 2,000 feet, the corals, which grow just a few meters high, live in the dark and are fed by the Gulf Stream. It is the largest known deep-sea coral reef. With some living corals as old as 700 hundred years, and thousands of years of coral skeletons at its base, Million Mounds has been likened to an old-growth forest, rich with marine life. “You wouldn’t have seen that with satellite data,” Hoy notes. 

Sonar technology has advanced considerably since the 1950s and 60s. Today, multibeam systems project fan-shaped sound waves that can reach ocean depths of more than 6 miles. At depths of 2–4 miles, which represents nearly 75 percent of the ocean, multibeam sonar mounted to a ship’s hull can scan up to 5-mile swaths of seafloor at a time, delivering resolutions between 600–1,200 feet (the deeper the sounding, the lower the resolution)—considerably better than satellite altimetry. In shallow coastal regions, it can achieve between 100–325 foot resolution. And when mounted to AUVs, which get close to the sea floor, 1-meter resolution becomes possible.

In 2017, the United Nations held its inaugural Ocean Conference and declared the 2020s the Ocean Decade, challenging the world’s countries and companies to reverse the decline of the ocean. Among the global initiative’s 10 challenges is to “create a digital representation of the ocean.” At the time the UN made its announcement, only 6 percent of Earth’s ocean floor had been mapped and digitized using modern sonar. But a fresh initiative was announced at the conference to map the Earth’s entire seafloor by the end of this decade: Seabed 2030, a collaborative project sponsored by the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or GEBCO, and the Nippon Foundation of Japan. By June 2022, Seabed 2030 reported that 23.4 percent of the ocean had been mapped using modern sonar—almost quadrupling the coverage since 2017. Seabed 2030 collects sounding data from any ship willing to share, like NOAA’s research vessel Okeanos Explorer, which has enabled the map to be filled in so rapidly. 

“Going from 20 to 23 percent in the past year sounds insignificant,” notes Adams, citing the 2021 percent-complete figure. “But it’s more than the size of Europe. Every year, we’re chipping away at it.” But these mapping efforts will need all the ships they can get to cut the centuries estimated to canvas the whole ocean down to the eight years left in the decade. 

[Related: Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is building a network of ocean floor research stations]

“We don’t, as a project, have the resources to go out and do it ourselves,” says Jamie McMichael-Phillips, project director of Seabed 2030. “We do have the resources to take what people give us and put it on a map.” McMichael-Phillips credits Seabed 2030 with providing the inspiration that “encourages companies, industry, government, philanthropists, and scientists to go out and map the ocean.” Seabed 2030 will even supply recreational boaters who have sonar capability with a special device that captures the data from soundings, enabling them to participate. 

McMichael-Phillips agrees with Hoy that the detail provided by sonar mapping, the gold standard for visualizing the seafloor, offers far more insight into our world than satellite altimetry ever could. He cites several examples, like the 2022 discovery by ocean mappers of one of the world’s largest coral reefs off the coast of Tahiti. The 2-mile-long reef was found at a depth known as the ocean’s dimly lit Twilight Zone, between 100–200 feet.

Still, GEBCO’s publicly available map—a jumble of thin lines representing sonar coverage—has a long way to go. While McMichael-Phillips doesn’t anticipate any technological breakthroughs with sonar or satellite that would expedite seafloor mapping, he does see help coming from uncrewed surface vessels, or USVs, like NOAA’s SailDrone. Having people aboard a vessel, he notes, is one of its most limiting factors, not only weighing it down but also requiring frequent stops for supplies and to avoid hazardous conditions. “I’m a former Royal Navy hydrographic surveyor. I spent a lot of time operating in the Southern Ocean in some pretty hostile conditions,” says McMichael-Phillips. “So by going down the uncrewed route, you remove that limitation.” 

Hoy wouldn’t say whether she thought the Seabed 2030 project would meet its goal. “Ships are relatively small,” she notes, “and the ocean is very big.” But she credits Seabed 2030 with encouraging unprecedented data sharing and collaboration between organizations, creating momentum that will make a worldwide map achievable. 

Whether 2030 is realistic, the 2020s may prove to be the decade that the richest and strangest image yet of Earth’s missing and unfamiliar contours will come together, like the slow reveal of a distant alien world beamed across a murky ether. “A direct measurement map of our complete ocean,” says Hoy, “is going to really change the face of what we know.”

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Weighing in up to 330,000 pounds and 110 feet long, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is bigger than even the largest dinosaurs, despite subsisting on a tiny organism called krill (in huge quantities). They’re the largest animal on Earth currently, and one of the largest animals to have ever lived on our planet in all of history. Still, the magnificent creatures have been on the endangered species list since 1970. They remain at risk due to vessel strikes, risk of entanglement, and a steep decline in their main food source, krill, which can be linked back to ocean acidification and climate change.

In an effort to protect a unique population of these endangered gentle giants from the threat of vessel strikes, the largest shipping and logistics conglomerate in the world, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), has rerouted their shipping lanes near the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The blue whales here aren’t migratory and have distinct vocalizations. The vessels will now travel about 15 nautical miles (roughly 17 miles) to the south of the previous shipping route.

“MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company has taken a major step to help protect blue whales and other cetaceans living and feeding in the waters off the coast of Sri Lanka by modifying navigation guidance in line with the advice of scientists and other key actors in the maritime sector,” MSC said in a statement provided to Insider.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

The move comes in response to a request from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and OceanCare. According to the IFAW, Sri Lankan blue whales are in these waters year round. Current international shipping lanes off Dondra Head bring vessels right through the area with the most whales and whale watching activity.

“By ensuring these small changes, MSC is making a significant difference for these endangered whales. Whales often die as a result of collisions and this population is at risk. Ship strikes are both a conservation and a welfare problem, and even one whale death is one too many,” said Sharon Livermore, Director of Marine Conservation at IFAW, in a press release.

This voluntary rerouting from MSC does not impact other shipping carriers in the area (like Hapag-Lloyd or Maersk), but environmental advocates hope that this could lead to a chain reaction of permanent changes to the official shipping lane that would impact all container ships. According to the IFWA, research shows that adjusting the shipping lane would reduce the risk of a ship striking a whale by 95 percent.

“Re-routeing is the key hope to turn the tide for blue whales off Sri Lanka. It also demonstrates to the Sri Lankan government that now is the time to take appropriate action and move the shipping lane out of blue whale habitat for all merchant vessels,” said Nicolas Entrup, Director International Relations at OceanCare, in a press release.

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

While commercial whaling is banned worldwide, blue whales were on the brink of extinction as recently as the 1960s. The ban on whaling helped the population rebound, but populations are still lower than pre-whaling numbers. It’s estimated that there may have been about 200,000 to 300,000 whales in the Southern Hemisphere before commercial whaling, compared to 2,300 in 1998. Populations are rising at about 7 percent per year.

Vessel strikes are a major issue for a number of whale species, not just blue whales. The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is especially suffering—NOAA Fisheries has documented four lethal (death and serious injury) right whale vessel strike events in US waters over the past two and a half years.

There are fewer than 350 right whales in the wild and they are not reproducing fast enough to maintain their numbers. In July, NOAA Fisheries announced proposed changes to vessel speed rules to, “further reduce the likelihood of mortalities and serious injuries to endangered right whales from vessel collisions.” The proposed changes would broaden the spatial boundaries and timing of seasonal speed restriction areas along the eastern coast of the United states and expand the mandatory speed restrictions of 10 knots or less to include most vessels 35–65 feet in length.

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It’s lobster season right now in New England, but this year it might be more of an event for endangered whales than for foodies.

The North Atlantic right whale (NARW) has been migrating over 1,000 miles from Florida to calve and Canada to feed for thousands of years. Razor toothed predators like great white sharks or orca attacks haven’t been their biggest threat over all that time. Instead, it’s been human activity from commercial whaling (now banned), vessel strikes, and certain types of fishing. There are currently fewer than 340 NARWs remaining and the population has dwindled by 28 percent over the past 10 years.

In an effort to try and save these whales, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sustainability guide Seafood Watch has placed American lobster caught by pot and gillnet on a “red list” of seafood to avoid due to the threat lobstering poses to this critically endangered cetacean. Some other red listed seafood include European anchovies, wild-caught cod from both the US and abroad, and Atlantic rock crab.

In a press release, Seafood Watch stated that it reviewed all available data on the issue and gathered input from scientific, government, industry, and conservation experts and through a public comment period. “After reviewing all available scientific data, as well as existing legal requirements and regulations, Seafood Watch determined that current Canadian and US management measures do not go far enough to mitigate entanglement risks and promote recovery of the North Atlantic right whale. As a result, Seafood Watch assigned a red rating to those fisheries using pots, traps, and gillnets.

[Related: Post-pandemic seafood could be more sustainable. Here’s how tech is driving the change.]

Seafood Watch also cited a US court decision from June which determined that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) violated the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act by “failing to quickly reduce impacts to the North Atlantic right whale.”

In addition to being struck by ships, entanglement in fishing gear used to catch crab, lobster, and other species is hurting NARW populations. According to NOAA, their migration route is littered with more than 1 million vertical lines from pots and traps, 622,000 of which in US waters. The ropes from fishing gear can become embedded in a whale’s skin, weighing it down and preventing it from swimming or feeding properly. In 2020, there were 53 large whale entanglements confirmed in the US and more than 80 percent of NARWs have been entangled in fishing gear at least once.

The Maine lobster industry is worth an estimated $752 million and this new designation has raised concern from the state and fishing industry. “Seafood Watch is misleading consumers and businesses with this designation,” said Governor Janet Mills in a press release. “Generations of Maine lobstermen have worked hard to protect the sustainability of the lobster fishery, and they have taken unprecedented steps to protect right whales—efforts that the Federal government and now Seafood Watch have failed to recognize. No right whale death has been attributed to Maine gear, and there has not been a right whale entanglement attributed to Maine lobster gear in eighteen years.”

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, executive director of the Maine Lobsterman’s Association said, “Lobster is one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world due to the effective stewardship practices handed down through generations of lobstermen. These include strict protections for both the lobster resource and right whales.” The association has been involved in protections since the late-1990’s.

Some conservationists and scientists praised the decision. “For every North Atlantic right whale calf that is born, three right whales are estimated to die,” senior scientist and Veterinarian in the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Michael Moore tells PopSci. “Thus, recovery of the species will require not only minimal mortality but also increased reproductive health.”

“The Seafood Watch listing has significant potential benefit,” Moore adds, “even in areas where whale densities are relatively low.”

But this doesn’t mean customers have to give up their lobster-filled favorite foods. “Consumers should seek low risk of entanglement for their trap caught seafood,” he says, “such as areas only open to on-demand fishing (aka Ropeless), where entanglement risk is minimized, while still enabling trap fishing.”

The post Eating sustainably may mean skipping the lobster for now appeared first on Popular Science.

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One of the last places you want to be hungry out on the open ocean is the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Being home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one factor. A gyre is a large system of rotating currents ocean currents. There are five of major ocean gyres, where the ocean churns up eddies (smaller and more temporary loops of swirling water), whirlpools, and deep ocean currents. Even without trash islands, gyres are typically nutrient poor (ie not a lot of snacks), yet help sustain some of the ocean’s top predator fish.

The reason may lie in some of the gyre’s eddies. A study published yesterday in the journal Nature finds that marine predators (tunas, billfishes, and sharks, for example) get together in rotating ocean eddies that spin clockwise and are anticyclonic, or rotating around the center of a high pressure in the reverse direction of a cyclone. The study suggests that the predators are moving with these temporary loops of water as they travel throughout the open ocean and foraging on the biomass (or life) that is within the eddies.

“We discovered that anticyclonic eddies—rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere—were associated with increased pelagic predator catch compared with eddies rotating counter-clockwise and regions outside eddies,” said Martin Arostegui, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) postdoctoral scholar and paper lead-author, in a press release. “Increased predator abundance in these eddies is probably driven by predator selection for habitats hosting better feeding opportunities.”

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

The team from WHOI and the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (UW APL) focused on more than two decades of commercial fishery and satellite data from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, as well as an mix of predators from varying ocean depths, regions, and physiologies (both cold and warm-blooded animals). They investigated predator catch patterns within and around the eddies, concluding that the swirling loops of ocean water influence the ecosystems of the open ocean at all levels of the food chain.

The data suggests a fundamental relationship between opportunities for predators for forage and the underlying physics of the ocean.

“The idea that these eddies contain more food means they’re serving as mobile hotspots in the ocean desert that predators encounter, target and stay in to feed,” added Arostegui.

[Related: “With new tags, researchers can track sharks into the inky depths of the ocean’s Twilight Zone.”]

Understanding how eddies influence the dining behavior of open ocean predators in these food-scarce areas of the deep ocean can better inform species, fisheries, and ecosystem management. It can also help policymakers regulate harvesting and fishing for deep ocean plants and animals without negatively affecting dependent predators or the ocean’s ability to store carbon and regulate the climate.

“The ocean benefits predators, which then benefit humans as a food source,” said Arostegui. “Harvesting the food that our food eats, is something we need to understand in order to ensure the methods are sustainable for both the prey and the predators that rely on them. That is critical to ensuring both ocean health and human wellbeing as we continue to rely on these animals for food.”

The post Where food is scarce, ocean predators find snacks in swirling eddies appeared first on Popular Science.

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A 58-year-old woman from Pennsylvania was killed by a bull shark yesterday while snorkeling in The Bahamas, according to local authorities. The yet to be identified woman and her family were passengers onboard Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.

According to Royal Bahamas Police spokeswoman Chief Superintendent Chrislyn Skippings, the family was at a popular snorkeling spot near Green Cay off of the coast of Nassau in the northern Bahamas. She added that the family witnessed the attack and identified the shark involved in the incident as a bull shark. Police also say that the tour company and woman’s family were involved in the rescue.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Royal Caribbean International said that the injured woman died after arriving at a local hospital for treatment. The company also added that they are helping the loved ones and that the family was participating in an independent shore excursion in Nassau.

[Related: Everything you need to know about shark bites.]

The beach where the incident occurred has subsequently been closed and the investigation is ongoing.

Shark attacks on humans are still exceedingly rare. The odds of a fatal shark attack remain less than 1 in 4 million. By that same metric, the risk of death from the flu, drowning, and fireworks are all greater than being killed by a shark.

According to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File, last year there were there were 73 confirmed unprovoked attacks (defined as incidents which occurred in the shark’s natural habitat without human provocation) globally, nine of which were fatal. The Bahamas is home to the majority of shark attacks in the Caribbean. Two attacks were reported in 2019, with one of them fatal. The fatal incident involved a Southern California woman who was attacked by three sharks near Rose Island, located just a half mile from where yesterday’s attacked occurred.

[Related: You should never have to fight off a shark—but here’s how to do it (just in case).]

While it is still unclear why sharks attack humans, most scientists agree that it is a case of mistaken identity, where the shark believes that a human is a seal or fish. The Shark Attack File lists white, tiger, and bull sharks as the shark attack “Big Three,” due to their proximity to areas where humans like enter the ocean, sheer size .and teeth designed to shear rather than hold. This makes them incredibly capable of inflicting serious injuries to a victim.

In an interview with Popular Science in July, John Chisholm, an associated scientist at the New England Aquarium who studies great white sharks, recommended taking precautions when entering the ocean. “If you’re going into the ocean, if you’re going into a wilderness area, you have to be proactive,” he says. “Before you go to the beach, you check the weather and traffic. Take a moment to check Sharktivity and with the local lifeguards [for shark sightings], too.” Experts also recommend swimming in groups, removing jewelry which might flash like a fish and attract younger sharks, and avoiding swimming by that sharks like to eat (seals, schools of fish, etc.).

The post In a rare, fatal shark attack, tourist killed in the Bahamas appeared first on Popular Science.

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For decades, our oceans have been filling up with trash. The North Pacific Garbage Patch, also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has accumulated approximately 80,000 tons of plastic waste—and that estimate continues to climb. Most of the litter in the ocean is delivered by rivers that carry waste and human pollution from land to sea. But the origins of floating debris in offshore patches haven’t been fully understood. A  recent study published in Scientific Reports has identified one important source of the trash: the fishing industry. 

Between 75 to 86 percent of the plastics floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from offshore fishing and aquaculture activities, according to an analysis of the trash collected by nonprofit project the Ocean Cleanup. Major industrialized fishing nations, including Japan, China, South Korea, the US, Taiwan, and Canada, were the main contributors of the fishing waste. “These findings highlight the contribution of industrial fishing nations to this global issue,” says Laurent Lebreton, lead study author and head of research at the Ocean Cleanup. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region twice the size of Texas between the West Coast of North America and Japan, is one of several vortexes in the ocean where waste accumulates. Created by spinning currents, or gyres, each vortex churns and crushes plastics into tiny undegradable bits that are tricky for cleanup efforts to scoop up. Plankton nets are used to collect these microplastics, often no more than 5 millimeters in size, says Lebreton. “But it is currently impossible to retrace an accurate origin for this pollution,” he says. 

[Related: The great Pacific garbage patch is even trashier than we thought]

Since 2018, the Ocean Cleanup has been working to remove less common larger debris, which can sometimes be identified. The team’s approach uses vessels that pull a long U-shaped barrier through the water, guiding the larger plastics into the catch system. “This provided us with a unique opportunity to study larger plastic objects that were not the focus of previous research efforts,” says Lebreton. 

In a 2019 mission, the system pulled up more than 6,000 plastic objects that were larger than 5 centimeters (the threshold for large debris). While a third of the haul was unidentifiable, the research team sorted fish boxes, oyster spacers, and eel traps. This fishing and aquaculture gear was the second most common type of hard plastic collected, making up 26 percent. 

Like the rest of the sectors of our economy, fisheries adopted plastics for its light weight and cheap manufacturing costs. Those plastics can persist for decades.

“We found a fishing buoy dating from the 60s and a crate from the 70s, so this must have been building over time,” Lebreton says, noting that the fishing industry has only expanded since the last century. “More than half the ocean surface is now being fished, increasing the chance of fishing gear being lost, discarded, or abandoned in the ocean.”   

[Related: Humans created an extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic]

Generally, the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been increasing in concentration and in size, according to a 2020 study by the organization. “This would suggest the situation is worsening, which is expected at this stage with an exponential increase in plastic production over the last two decades,” Lebreton says. “This is why it is important to study and identify this pollution so that future inputs can be mitigated.”

The Ocean Cleanup project has an ambitious goal to remove 90 percent of marine plastic waste by 2040. Since last year, the team’s upgraded system plucked over 100,000 kilograms of floating plastics from the ocean; however, marine biologists have expressed skepticism about the efficiency of such cleanup efforts and raised serious concerns these techniques could harm wildlife. Lebreton says that the nonprofit’s efforts should not be a permanent solution: “We want to go out of business eventually.” The best way to decrease plastic waste in these waters is to stop it at the source, he says—cleanup technologies can help pin down the cause and origin of pollution to inform regulation and management. This could include regulating the gear fishing vessels use or how the ships manage their waste, Lebreton says. 

“I trust making this pollution visible [through cleanup efforts] has a significant impact on awareness and also the general understanding of the issue,” he says. “Documenting floating plastic pollution should play a role in the design of mitigation strategies. General public awareness can help in pushing legislation.”

Images and captions from the Ocean Cleanup.

The post A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit appeared first on Popular Science.

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Since they were first recorded by Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1859, scientists have observed how greenhouse gases (GHG) like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide and act like a giant blanket around the Earth. Like a greenhouse does for plants, these gasses trap heat and warm the planet. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory measured the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at an astounding 421 parts per million, a range not seen on Earth in millions of years.

This drastic change to the chemistry in the atmosphere has lead to major consequences to our land and seas and it will only worsen as the climate continues to change. A study published on August 22 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at their current rate, nearly 90 percent of all marine species could face extinction by the end of this century. The most impacted groups would be the ocean’s top predators (particularly tuna and shark, since they are hunted by humans for food), areas with large amounts of biodiversity, and coastal fisheries of low-income nations, according to the study.

The international team of researchers created a new scorecard called the Climate Risk Index for Biodiversity (CRIB). They used it to examine about 25,000 species of marine life, including animals, plants, protozoa, and bacteria.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

“We created a ‘climate scorecard’ for each species and ecosystem that tells us which will be winners or losers under climate change,” says Daniel Boyce, the study’s lead author and a research associate at Dalhousie University, in a press release. “It allows us to understand when, where and how they will be affected, as well as how reducing emissions can mitigate climate risk.”

In a blog post for CarbonBrief, Boyce explains that the framework uses data from analyzing how a species’ innate characteristics like body size and temperature tolerance interact with past, present, and future climate conditions. They evaluated climate risk under two different scenarios: one where emissions continue to be high and another where emissions are sharply reduced in accord with the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius).

According to the study, under the worst-case emissions scenario, 87 percent of marine species would be under high or critical climate risk, species were at risk across 85 percent of their distribution on average, and climate risk was heightened in coastal ecosystems and closer to the equator, disproportionally threatening tropical biodiversity hotspots and fisheries

However, if GHG emissions are curbed, there is an opportunity to course correct and prevent this mass extinction from happening. Reducing GHG emissions would limit the risk for virtually all species on Earth and help minimize disruption to 98.2 percent of the fisheries and ecosystems in the study.

[Related: These Hawaiian corals could hold the secret to surviving warming waters.]

“The benefits of emission mitigation for reducing climate risk are very clear,” said co-author Boris Worm in a press release. “Mitigation provides the most straightforward path to avoiding the worst climate impacts on oceans and people, setting the stage for global recovery under improved management and conservation.”

On August 16th, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $369 billion to fund energy and climate projects with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent in 2030. While climate experts have called a major step in curbing GHG emissions, the legislation also comes soon after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate emissions at power plants. in West Virginia v. EPA.

“The reality is that climate change is already impacting the oceans, and even with effective climate mitigation, they will continue to change,” Boyce and co-author Derek Tittensor wrote in CarbonBrief. “Therefore, adapting to a warming climate is crucial to building resilience for both ocean species and people.”

The post For marine life to survive, we must cut carbon emissions appeared first on Popular Science.

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Reefs are commonly sought-after diving spots thanks to the vibrant corals and abundant marine life that offer incredible underwater experiences for keen vacationers, especially whenever summer rolls around. Traveling for scuba diving activities, also known as dive tourism, is a lucrative business that can boost the local economies of small island countries like Fiji and Maldives, contributing to about 20 to 50 percent of their gross domestic product and at least 30 percent of employment. Every year, the industry generates an estimated global total of more than $36 billion.

Although the economic contribution of dive tourism is notable, it’s just as important to acknowledge how the industry can contribute to the degradation and loss of marine life. Fortunately, there are several ways for recreational divers and policymakers to minimize scuba’s environmental impact.

Dive tourism may harm marine life

The negative effects of dive tourism can be separated into two categories: the direct effect of recreational diving, and the equally serious and perhaps greater effects of building and maintaining tourist infrastructure, says Howard Lasker, research professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Geology.

Divers can directly alter underwater ecosystems if they damage the reef when they stand on, hold, or accidentally kick corals. About 88 percent of divers make harmful contact with the reef at least once during a dive. “Even careful divers may accidentally kick the reef while diving, and even if that is a rare event, it adds up when hundreds of divers visit an area each day,” says Lasker.

Building dive resorts has a significant impact as well. According to Lasker, sediment from coastal development may be released onto the reef, affecting the survival and growth of marine species. In extreme cases, debris can bury reefs altogether. Increases in pollution and solid waste are to be expected, too. Sewage and garbage are sources of nutrient-rich runoff, and the excess nutrients may imbalance an entire marine ecosystem. Lastly, resorts that use herbicides and pesticides to maintain their grounds can harm corals, resulting in bleaching. All of these impacts are magnified when workers immigrate to the resort site, requiring additional infrastructure, says Lasker.

[Related: Fish poop might help fight coral reef bleaching]

The carbon emissions from flights are also a considerable impact of dive tourism. “Scuba divers often travel to far-flung destinations to see the best the underwater world has to offer,” says Lauren Aston, long-time diver and content and community manager for Girls that Scuba. In 2020, about 2.1 percent of human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions came from the global aviation industry.

Minimize the impact of your diving holiday

To make your sustainable diving holiday even greener, choose a local destination where you can travel by ferry or bus to avoid the carbon emissions of air travel. If you’re taking a long-haul flight, at least make it a longer trip to make your stay more worthwhile, says Aston.

When selecting an overseas destination, choose countries with policies to conserve their reef resources, such as Antigua and Barbuda and Belize. You should also check if the local government restricts anchoring on reefs or seagrass beds, a practice that damages corals and plants, says Lasker. Take the time to know about the dive resort or center as well. “If they’re encouraging conservation courses, offering clean-up dives, providing reef-safe sunscreen on board, or are vocal about reducing plastic use, you’re onto a winner,” says Aston.

Check their background and look out for credentials such as Green Fins or PADI’s Green Star Award, which means the dive resort or center has environmentally friendly practices and meets certain standards of sustainable diving, says Aston. A 2016 study published in Environmental Management found that dive operators who highly complied with Green Fins’ standards had much lower reef contact rates than those of operators with low levels of compliance. 

Make sure to pack reef-safe sunscreen and personal care products without toxic chemicals that damage coral reefs and threaten their resilience to climate change. There is evidence that chemical sunscreens can harm corals, and hundreds of divers and snorkelers all in the same area will have a significant impact, says Lasker. In Hawaii, it’s prohibited to sell sunscreens containing oxybenzone, octinoxate, avobenzone, and octocrylene because they disrupt the life cycles of corals and other marine life. The island nation Palau also imposed a country-wide ban on the sale or import of sunscreens containing certain reef-toxic chemicals.

[Related: These Hawaiian corals could hold the secret to surviving warming waters]

When you’re underwater, stay well above the coral so that even accidental touches do not occur, says Lasker. To reduce unintentional reef contacts, policymakers can create safeguards, like requiring divers to maintain a certain distance from the seabed at all times. Such policies would require effective enforcement measures to ensure compliance and lasting behavioral change. 

“Don’t touch or stand on the reef, don’t take any items such as shells, and especially don’t touch any of the reef’s inhabitants,” says Aston. As the famous phrase goes, tourists must “take only pictures and leave only bubbles” because we are merely guests in the underwater environment, she adds.

In the long run, the most important action you can do to protect the coral reefs and marine life is to reduce your overall carbon footprint. “One of the primary reasons coral reefs are in such dire circumstances is global warming due to human CO2 production,” says Lasker. “Minimizing your carbon footprint before, during, and after your trip is critical to the future of reefs and many other ecosystems.”

The post A diver’s guide to a more sustainable scuba adventure appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best Overall		ThinkSport SPF 50		SEE IT	A high SPF and water resistance, with none of the chemicals, combine with recyclable and sustainable packaging to go the extra mile in being Earth-friendly.
Best Spray		Blue Lizard Mineral Active Spray		SEE IT	A minimal white residue and a smart bottle feature to remind you to reapply makes this the spray on to put on.
Best budget		SunBum Sport Sunscreen		SEE IT	You get more sunscreen in the standard bottle and less visible residue out of it as this non-mineral-based formula rubs on clear.

When it comes to being out in the sun, wearing sunscreen is non-negotiable—and if you care about the oceans, you’ll want to reach for reef-safe sunscreen. Damaging UV rays fall into two categories: UVA and UVB rays, both of which can cause skin damage, like early aging or burning, and can eventually contribute to skin cancer. But many sunscreen brands have a problem: they include chemicals that are bad for the oceans and the planet. Fortunately, in the last few years, a host of new reef-safe (also called reef-friendly) sunscreens have become available to consumers. These ocean-safe sunblocks are accessible, affordable, and work just as well as traditional chemical-based sunscreens when used correctly. We rounded up nine of the best reef-safe sunscreens on the market to ensure you’re protecting your skin and keeping the oceans oxybenzone-free. 

• Best overall: ThinkSport SPF 50
• Best spray: Blue Lizard Mineral Active Spray
• Best high-SPF: Bare Republic SPF 100
• Best set: Coola Kit with carrying case
• Best for acne-prone skin: Nécessaire: The Sunscreen
• Best solid sunscreen: All Good SPF 50 Stick
• Best tinted: Josie Maran Argan Daily Moisturizer
• Best SPF lip balm: Rubber Ducky Mineral Lip Balm
• Best budget: SunBum Sport Sunscreen

How we chose the best reef-safe sunscreens

I focus on outdoor travel and adventure, so I’m familiar with techniques to be a more sustainable and earth-friendly traveler. But perhaps more importantly, I have very pale skin and am an avid scuba diver, having dived on everything from Caribbean reefs to deep-water shipwrecks in Indonesia. I’ve been using reef-safe sunscreen for years, from budget brands from box stores to more expensive options bought at resort gift shops in a hurry. 

In addition to my personal experience with reef-safe sunscreens, I looked at dermatologist recommendations and online reviews from other buyers of various ages, colors, genders, and skin conditions. I looked at the active ingredients for each sunscreen and researched how harmful they are to marine ecosystems, comparing different definitions and standards of what “reef-safe” means around the world. I also spoke with multiple reef and marine experts to get their insight on the best methods for keeping reefs healthy while still protecting your skin. 

Things to consider when shopping for the best reef-safe sunscreens

Knowing what to consider when buying reef-safe sunscreens can be overwhelming, especially considering the various recommendations on what chemicals to avoid and understanding the differences between different blends and active ingredients—so we’ve narrowed down what to focus on to make shopping a bit easier. 

Decide what reef-safe means to you

When buying a reef-safe sunscreen, the most important thing to consider is what standard of “reef-safe” you’re going to use. Unfortunately, there is no global or federal standard for what constitutes a reef-safe sunscreen. Hawaii’s congressional Rep. Ed Case introduced the Reef Safe Act of 2021, which would direct the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to come up with technical specifications for what the reef-safe label means. However, as of now, environmentally safe sunscreen means different things to different brands. 

Hawaii was the first state to ban the two main harmful chemicals (oxybenzone and octinoxate), but other organizations like Save The Reef suggest that you should also rule out sunscreens with chemicals like octocrylene and homosalate. 

Expect a thicker application

Sunscreens without those four chemicals will be mineral based. Mineral-based ocean-safe sunscreens (also called physical sunscreens) tend to be thicker and leave a thin white layer on your skin if not fully rubbed in because they act as a physical blocker, stopping the UV rays from touching your skin. Chemical-based sunscreens that meet Hawaii’s sunscreen standards likely will have some questionable ingredients but they’ll be easier to spread and less likely to leave a white filmy layer. Chemical sunscreens work by converting UV rays into something less harmful via a chemical reaction. 

Pay attention to the instructions

Because of how mineral sunscreens work, it’s very important to keep a layer of it on your skin at all times, whether you can see it or not. As such, you’ll need to pay close attention to the sunscreen’s application instructions, most of which will advise applying no less frequently than once every two hours. You’ll also need to use a slightly thicker application (brands like ThinkSport advise 1 ounce to cover an average adult). You’ll need to rub it in more and should wait at least 30 minutes or so before going in the water after application.

Protection level

Each sunscreen has a sun protection factor (commonly written as “SPF”), which indicates the level of protection it offers. For instance, it would take roughly 50 times as long to get a sunburn while wearing an SPF 50 product as it would with no protection at all. Of course, even the highest SPF options still require proper application and reapplication for them to work as intended. 

The best reef-safe sunscreens of 2023: Reviews & Recommendations

Best overall: ThinkSport SPF 50

THINK

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: A high SPF and water resistance make this a great buy for swimmers who always forget to reapply, and the recyclable and sustainable packaging go the extra mile in being Earth-friendly.

Specs

• SPF: 50 
• Available formulas:  3-ounce cream, baby cream, or kids’ cream
• Active ingredient: Non-nano (small) zinc oxide
• Size: 6 oz

Pros

• Water-resistant for 80 mins 
• Biodegradable/recyclable packaging 
• Good for sensitive skin
• Vegan 

Cons

• Thick consistency
• A little expensive compared to chemical brands  

When it comes to the best reef-safe sunscreens, it can feel a bit like splitting hairs since so many are very similar. Most have a zinc-oxide base, are on the thicker side, and work in the same way (by physically blocking your skin from UV rays). So it’s impressive that ThinkSport manages to stand out among the similar competition. 

Not only does this blend offer a high level of protection (an SPF of 50 allows half as many rays to hit your skin as an SPF 30), but it’s also good for sensitive skin. The formula is vegan, mostly organic, and has none of the more than 180 chemicals that could hurt the environment. It meets not only Hawaii reef-safe standards but also the much stricter standards laid out by nonprofits and areas with stricter bans, like the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

ThinkSport doesn’t stop at removing potentially harmful chemicals from its products, however. It also uses recyclable packaging and makes annual contributions to various like-minded nonprofit organizations. It’s a little pricey compared to a box-store sunscreen spray, so opt for the cream version to make it last as long as possible.

Best spray: Blue Lizard Mineral Active Sunscreen Spray

BLUE LIZARD

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: A spray-on reef-safe sunscreen with a minimal white residue and a smart bottle feature to remind you to reapply. 

Specs

• SPF: 50
• Available formulas: Lotion, spray 
• Primary ingredients: Zinc oxide
• Size: 5 oz

Pros 

• Non-drying 
• Easy application
• Less of a white residue 
• Added oils to soothe skin 

Cons

• Scent is subjective 
• Bottle won’t last as long as a cream/lotion

A major complaint with reef-safe sunscreens is that their mineral-based ingredients tend to leave a white residue on one’s skin. Fortunately, this reef-safe spray sunscreen avoids that pitfall. While it does appear white as soon as it’s sprayed, the thinner layer means it quickly turns clear without any significant rubbing. 

Blue Lizard—a sunscreen brand based in Australia, where the UV rays are some of the strongest on the planet—gives all their bottles and sprays another interesting feature. The bottle caps turn blue when exposed to UV rays, a feature intended to serve as a reminder. If you notice the change in color, reapply your sunscreen. Blue Lizard also skips the usual chemicals used for aerosol sprays, opting to use air pressure for the spray functionality rather than CO2.

Best high-SPF: Bare Republic SPF 100

Bare Republic

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: An ultra-high SPF means your skin stays protected for longer, and the chemical-based formula helps avoid the white residue that comes with mineral blends.

Specs

• SPF: 100 
• Available formulas: spray, lotion, face-specific lotion
• Primary ingredients:  Avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, octocrylene
• Size: 5 oz

Pros 

• High SPF
• Vegan, not tested on animals 
• No white residue 

Cons 

• Some users report a fruity scent 
• Contains ingredients on some non-reef-safe lists

If you’re taking skin protection seriously, you’ll want to take every step you can to protect yourself, which includes using the highest SPF you can find. SPF isn’t a measurement, exactly—it’s an estimate of how many times longer it’ll take you to get burned when you’re wearing it versus not wearing it. So, in theory, it’ll take you 100 times longer to burn if you’ve properly applied this SPF. (Of course, a proper application still means reapplying as needed.)

Aside from offering SPF 100 protection, this coral- and eco-friendly sunscreen also has a natural scent (from the fruit-based ingredients) that’s generally subtle and pleasant. This sunscreen is compliant with Hawaii Act 104, banning the sale of sunscreens with oxybenzone and octinoxate, but it does contain octocrylene, which may have a damaging effect on reefs. 

Best set: Coola Kit with carrying case

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Why it made the cut: A travel-ready set with a face sunscreen, a lip balm, a body spray, and a post-sun serum to soothe skin, all tucked into a small secure case. 

Specs

• SPF: 30
• Available formulas: n/a
• Primary ingredients:  Avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene
• Size:
  • Classic Body Sunscreen Spray: 2 oz 
  • Classic Face Sunscreen Lotion: .85 oz 
  • Lip Balm: .15 oz
  • After Sun Lotion: 2 oz

Pros 

• Includes extra products to protect skin 
• Comes with travel bag 
• Lightweight, easy on pores 

Cons

• Meets only Hawaii reef-safe standards (contains octocrylene) 

If you’re looking for a small reef-safe sunscreen set that meets TSA standards, you’ll want to consider using Coola products, which are among buyers who prefer plant-based products. The kit comes with four travel-sized products: an organic face sunscreen, an after-sun lotion to calm redness and overexposure, a small SPF spray, and a non-tinted hydrating lip balm. 

All four products are vegan and meet Hawaii’s reef-safe standards. The three SPF products are hydrating and light so they won’t leave you feeling oily or sticky. The after-sun lotion has antioxidants and anti-inflammatory ingredients. It’s ideal for use in the evenings to calm any redness you do notice, ensuring your face feels hydrated and even again the next morning. 

The kit is great for travel and the sizes are all well below the TSA carry-on maximums. The only downside is that while the products lack oxybenzone and octinoxate, they do contain octocrylene, which some organizations also have on their harmful ingredients lists. While the actual SPF product uses primarily organic and natural products that won’t irritate the skin (such as fruit oils and plankton extract), it’s the first two products that truly ensure against acne. Use the facial cleanser once you’re out of the sun to remove all irritants from your pores, and use the skin serum before going to bed to soothe any dryness or redness from being in the sun. It comes with a carrying case for travel.

Best for acne-prone skin: Nécessaire: The Sunscreen

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Why it made the cut: This is the best reef-safe sunscreen for faces to protect your skin and even reduce wrinkles, but it won’t clog pores or get overly greasy.

Specs 

• SPF: 30
• Other available formulas: None
• Primary ingredients: Non-nano zinc, hyaluronic acid, and niacinamide
• Size: 1.7 ounces

Pros 

• Includes hyaluronic acid to reduce wrinkles 
• Meets very high environmental standards
• Unlikely to clog pores 
• Climate-neutral company 
• Easy-use pump applicator 

Cons 

• Expensive 

Necassaire: The Sunscreen has quite the list of adjectives to justify the higher-than-average price for a reef-safe sunscreen for face protection. It’s hypoallergenic, non-comedogenic (won’t block pores), free of ingredients like phthalates and formaldehyde, and meets Sephora’s very high standards for being considered “Clean + Planet Positive.” It doesn’t include any of the ingredients on the Protect our Reefs banned list, but this face sunscreen does have natural additives like Vitamin B3 to help strengthen skin and algae, which add collagen and helps fight dry skin. 

Ingredients aside, this reef-safe face sunscreen has a leak-proof pump applicator and can be used as a standalone product or blended with a liquid foundation. Because it’s a mineral sunscreen it does leave a bit of a very thin white layer, but most buyers report that it’s minimal and easy to get rid of with just a little extra rubbing. 

Best solid sunscreen: All Good Sport Sunscreen Stick

All Good Makes Everything Better

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Why it made the cut: An easy-to-carry solid sunscreen that won’t melt with extra ingredients to prevent drying. 

Specs

• SPF: 50 
• Available formulas: Butter, lotion
• Primary ingredients: Non-nano zinc oxide 
• Size: 2.75 ounces

Pros 

• Easy to carry 
• No scent 
• Additional coconut oil and jojoba oil to prevent dryness

Cons 

• Rolls on thick 

Sometimes, you don’t want to risk carrying a bottle of sunscreen around in your bag or luggage—it’s never a happy surprise when you reach into your backpack to find the cap was loose on your sunblock. So if you need to carry just a small amount of sunscreen with you, consider packing the AllGood SPF stick, which offers AllGood’s highly rated SPF stick. Though it’s less than 3 ounces, it seems to last a while and is quite easy to carry even when paddleboarding or mountain biking. 

One of the best things about this particular reef-safe sunscreen stick is that it’s nearly melt-proof, provided you don’t leave it exposed in direct sunlight. Because it’s a stick it does go on a bit thicker, so be prepared to massage it into your skin if you want to avoid the white layer common with mineral-based sunscreens. 

Best tinted: Josie Maran Argan Daily Moisturizer

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Why it made the cut: A light, hydrating SPF formula with reef-safe ingredients and extra soothing oils to help prevent dryness in the sun, plus a bit of extra glow for your cheeks. 

Specs 

• SPF: 47
• Available formulas: N/a, though there’s a body butter (without a tint)
• Primary ingredients: Zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, Argan oil, SunBoost ATB
• Size: 2 oz

Pros 

• Adds subtle brightness/warmth
• Includes soothing/healing ingredients 
• High SPF

Cons 

• Pricey
• Looks best with warm undertones

If you’re used to wearing a BB cream or tinted moisturizer with sunscreen at the beach, consider swapping that out for this ocean-friendly tinted option instead. It’s similar to a moisturizing BB cream, except that its sun-protective ingredients won’t harm coral. It’s a great option for buyers who aren’t quite ready to leave their usual makeup products at home in tropical areas but also don’t want those harmful chemicals to contribute to coral bleaching and ocean decline. 

The Argan Daily Moisturizer Tinted Protect + Perfect is SPF 47. It’s also free of synthetic fragrances and formaldehyde, and has antioxidants like argan oil and green tea—so it helps protect sensitive skin from getting dried out and wind burned in the sun. It’s a “one shade fits all” product, offering a warm glow for women and men regardless of skin color. 

Best SPF lip balm: Rubber Ducky Mineral Lip Balm

Rubber Ducky

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Why it made the cut: With an SPF rating of 30 and all-natural ingredients safe by both Hawaii reef standards and narrower environmental standards, this is a highly rated, affordable lip balm to keep in your beach bag. 

Specs 

• SPF: 30
• Available formulas: Only as a balm
• Primary ingredients:  Zinc Oxide 
• Size: .15 oz (pack of three or four)

Pros 

• Higher SPF than most lip balms
• Water-resistant 
• Added beeswax and shea butter 
• Pleasant scent, no taste
• Great price

Cons 

• Application less smooth than with chemical lip balms 

It’s not unusual to find lip balms with SPF properties, but most options only offer SPF 15. It’s harder to find one with an SPF as high as 30—and even more unusual to find one that uses reef-sage ingredients to create that level of sun protection. It’s petroleum-based, so it glides on like a “regular” lip balm, rather than having the thicker application associated with some reef-safe sunscreens. It’s also water-resistant, so you won’t wash it off if you apply and then drink water (or order a tropical cocktail) a minute later. In fact, that’s why the brand is called “Rubber Ducky.” Its water resistance makes water roll off your skin (or lips, in this case) like water off a duck’s back.

As with many mineral-based sunscreens, it does leave a bit of a white tint. So you may want to rub it in a bit after each application. It doesn’t need to be your daily SPF lip balm (though you should have some kind of SPF lip balm every day), but it’s a good buy to throw in your beach bag or carry-on luggage if you’re finally taking that coastal trip you’ve been planning. 

Best budget: SunBum Original SPF 30

Sun Bum

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Why it made the cut: The standard bottle is two ounces larger than most sunscreens, and the non-mineral-based formula rubs on clear without the usually white cast from zinc oxide. 

Specs

• SPF: 30 
• Available formulas: Spray, face lotion, solid stick, lip balm 
• Primary ingredients: Avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, octocrylene
• Size: 8 ounce

Pros 

• Affordable
• Good for sensitive skin (non-oily)
• Hypoallergenic 
• No white filmy layer 

Cons 

• Contains some questionable ingredients  

If budget is your biggest concern when it comes to buying a reef-safe sunscreen, SunBum’s original blend may be a good choice. It’s the best reef-safe sunscreen value that meets Hawaii’s current reef-safe standards by being free of octinoxate and oxybenzone, but it does contain a few other chemicals some environmental groups say to avoid. However, it’s certainly at least better than using traditional sunscreens. And it’s hard to beat the value. The 8-ounce bottle is usually priced around $15, which works out to about $1.90 per ounce. Compare that to smaller 5-ounce bottles priced closer to $19 and it’s a clear saving.  

If you’d like to go the extra mile and buy a SunBum product without chemicals like homosalate or octisalate, opt for items from the SunBum mineral-based line. There are lotions in SPFs of 30 and 50, plus a spray and lip balm, all free of any questionably damaging ingredients. Of course, it’s a bit pricier per ounce; a 3-ounce bottle is usually priced at around $15. 

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best reef-safe sunscreens

Ultimately, unless you’re in a place with legislation limiting certain sunscreens, the choice to use reef-safe sunscreen or not is up to the buyer. While there are some downsides to most reef-safe sunscreens—primarily that they cost a bit more and can leave a white layer if not rubbed in thoroughly—they’re also the far more ecologically responsible choice. As long as the slightly increased cost isn’t a factor, most buyers should consider working one or two of the best reef-safe sunscreens into their summer routine, especially when they’re spending time near tropical shorelines. 

The post Best reef-safe sunscreens of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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When Dawn Wright plummeted to the bottom of the world in a nearly indestructible chamber, the sable abyss of the ocean reminded her of the vast darkness of space. Deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Wright dove to a point on the Earth few humans have ever dared to lay eyes on. Her mission: to map a slice of the mysterious Mariana Trench. 

“These are places that are extremely hostile, that are not where humans are made to inhabit,” says Wright, a marine geologist and the chief scientist of Esri, a mapping-software company based in Redlands, California. “But we now have the technology to explore these spaces.”

[Related: Inside Five Deeps’ record-setting quest to reach the bottom of each ocean]

In July, Wright made history as she became the first Black woman to descend more than 35,000 feet down to Challenger Deep, a region of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean and the deepest known point on the planet. Marine scientists like Wright have spent decades trying to chart its dark, strange depths, with varying degrees of success. Yet the quest to conquer Earth’s watery void has the potential to unveil secrets about our own planet’s well-being, and shed light on the secrets of other worlds. That’s why Wright chose to embark into the ocean’s uncharted universe. Every new discovery found during the mission to Challenger Deep will contribute to the Seabed 2030 project, a United Nations initiative that aims to produce a publicly available map of the entire world’s ocean floor by the year 2030. 

“It’s like a postage stamp or a piece of a puzzle,” Wright says. “The puzzle is not complete until all of the pieces are found and put into place.” 

Discovered in 1875 by the HMS Challenger, Challenger Deep lies on the southern end of Mariana Trench. The curved shape of this ocean canyon is considered a structural marvel: The entirety of the trench is located in a place where the Pacific tectonic plate subducts, or bends and sinks below the Philippine plate. The recent mission narrowed in on a relatively unexplored area of Challenger Deep called the Western Pool. Its geology, which has seldom been scouted compared to other areas of the trench, was surveyed to discern how its structure differs from the rest of the seascape.

Journey into the dark

The expedition was arranged and piloted by Victor Vescovo, a former US Naval commander and founder of the private undersea technology company Caladan Oceanic. Wright and Vescovo boarded the deep submergence vehicle Limiting Factor, a commercial submersible with a compact titanium personnel sphere just big enough to comfortably seat two adults. 

The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is about 16,000 pounds per square inch, about the equivalent of 25 jumbo jets flying at full weight capacity, Wright says. Typical submersibles usually descend very slowly to reach their objective, but because it would take too long to reach their destination far beneath the surface at a normal pace, Limiting Factor descended rather quickly, at a rate of about one to three knots, or one to three nautical miles per hour. That’s equivalent to an elevator dropping down about 100 to 300 feet per minute in a residential building. (In other words, it’s a pretty smooth ride.) Trunk pumps churn water into an empty chamber above its titanium hatch, and as the water constantly pushes the air out, the submarine descends into darkness. But it isn’t an uncontrolled fall: Thrusters on each side of the craft allow the pilot to move in any direction needed to scour the seafloor. 

Once below, the submersible used sonar to take grayscale topographical images of the area. Normal sonar instruments don’t operate well more than four miles deep, which until about 330 feet deep, is still considered the surface ocean. But Wright, who was responsible for operating the tool as the mission specialist, says the side-scan sonar system they utilized was specifically designed for their submarine. Compared to ordinary sonar, side-scan sonar uses two beams of sound to create a higher resolution picture of its surroundings, unlike the singular cone-shaped beam of sound a typical sonar uses. Earlier this year, the same system was used to discover the sunken USS Destroyer Escort Samuel B. Roberts, the deepest shipwreck ever found and properly identified. Wright’s expedition was the first to operate the system at full-ocean depth, or as deep as humans have ever gone. 

Down in Western Pool, the craft, along with a small lander, spent hours shooting video of the cavern, taking water samples, and even made observations of local biology like jellyfish, shrimp-like crustaceans known as amphipods, as well as plant-like colonies of animals called hydroids. During this micro-survey, Wright was able to create detailed contour maps of the area that will eventually be used to help scientists understand our planet’s health.

The sea, the sky, and beyond

Today, less than 25 percent of the ocean has been surveyed to modern standards, meaning with the most up to date ocean-scanning technologies. Having such a definitive, data-intensive map helps scientists learn more about how climate change is affecting Earth’s marine bodies. “Extremes in our weather all over the world are being moderated by the ocean,” Wright says. 

[Related: How a two-person sub and a repurposed Navy ship discovered the deepest shipwreck yet]

The sea absorbs about 25 percent of all the world’s carbon dioxide—and without these essential carbon sinks climate scientists say global warming would be infinitely worse. That’s why the health of the ocean—especially its furthest reaches—are important indicators of irreversible global damage, like climate change. 

“The more than we know about these deep places, the more that we’ll know the details of how these processes are indeed cycling,” Wright says.  

From space, it’s easy to see that Earth is primarily a water planet. Data gleaned from the deep ocean is helping scientists explore alien oceans and other Earth-like environments on nearby planets. For instance, Lia Siegelman, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego says that using the laws of the ocean to study the physics of other worlds offers a unique perspective to understanding our place in the cosmos. For example, using imagery captured by NASA’s Juno mission, Siegelman recently discovered how Jupiter’s polar energy system resembles cyclones on Earth.

“By linking two geophysical bodies, you can ask questions about our planet,“ she says. “This universality of things is something that I find very rewarding and fascinating.” As space and ocean technologies continue to develop in the future, Siegelman hopes to one day have the opportunity to use her knowledge to study and compare the ocean habitats of distant icy moons, like Europa or Callisto. Finding connections to faraway oceans in our solar system and galaxies beyond could also help researchers better understand the intricacies of our universe. “It’s a great time to be an oceanographer when you could probably, hopefully soon, look at the ocean circulation on other planets or other moons,” Siegelman says.

But back home, the vast ocean remains one of the most important habitats to be explored. Wright hopes her journey into Earth’s maw motivates others to follow in her footsteps, and beyond. “They can look to me as someone who has paved the way for them.” 

The post Meet the marine geologist mapping the deepest point on Earth appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the Mediterranean Sea, a prototype whale detection system can use the clicks of a sperm whale to pinpoint its location in three-dimensional space with an accuracy of 30 to 40 meters—only a body length or two for these 16-meter-long whales. In tests using both artificial pings and the sounds emanating from real sperm whales, researchers showed that the system can provide enough notice for a nearby ship to change direction or slow down when a whale is in its path.

The system was developed by a team of biological and computational researchers based in Greece. Led by Emmanuel Skarsoulis, research director of Greece’s Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas, the team has dubbed their new tool the System for the Avoidance of Ship-Strikes with Endangered Whales (SAvEWhales). The name is a reflection of the researchers’ hope that, if implemented, their system could cut down on the leading cause of mortality for endangered sperm whales in the Mediterranean—ship strikes.

[ Related: “Boat noise is driving humpback whale moms into deep, dangerous water” ]

SAvEWhales’ design is fairly simple. Near the Hellenic Trench, a five-kilometer-deep underwater canyon south of Crete, Greece, Skarsoulis’s team moored three buoys in a triangle one to two kilometers apart. Dangling from each buoy on a 100-meter line was a hydrophone to detect underwater sound.

These three hydrophones picked up each time a nearby sperm whale clicked, which they do to locate prey. Skarsoulis and his colleagues developed a computer program to compare how long it took the sound to arrive at each hydrophone, giving them a way to triangulate the whale’s position. But SAvEWhales’ secret weapon means it can do far more than just locate a whale on a grid.

While using boat-towed hydrophones to listen to sperm whales in previous work, one member of the team, Alexandros Frantzis, noticed that each sperm whale click he heard seemed to repeat, like a ghostly echo of itself. It wasn’t until Frantzis, the research director of the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute in Greece, discussed the problem with Skarsoulis that they found an explanation: the second click was the sperm whale’s call bouncing off the surface of the ocean.

By harnessing these reflections, the scientists built their algorithm to calculate the depth of the clicking whale. The deeper a whale is when it clicks, the longer the gap will be between when the original click and the reflection arrive at the hydrophone. Using the information from both clicks, the SAvEWhales system can detect a whale at up to 900 meters depth within 10 kilometers of the buoys. And by running the same calculations each time a whale clicks nearby, the scientists can actively track whales as they swim. In the future, they could even use this system to warn ships that a whale is about to surface nearby and potentially avert a collision.

Experts see SAvEWhales as a useful addition to a growing field of passive whale-monitoring systems. Christopher Clark, a bioacoustician at Cornell University in New York, who led the effort to establish the Boston Harbor buoy network that automatically detects the calls of endangered North Atlantic right whales, applauds the novelty of getting near-real-time information that ships could use on the spot. He also emphasizes that observations of sperm whales are few and far between in the Mediterranean, adding value to the system.

Despite its promise, it may be some time before SAvEWhales, or something like it, can be in permanent use. So far, the system has only undergone a two-year pilot test, and Skarsoulis and his colleagues have already identified a few obstacles to expanding it to a full-time monitoring system. These include analytical challenges, such as the difficulty of differentiating individual whales when a group is traveling together. There are also logistical barriers involved in maintaining an at-sea system, which faces constant wear and tear from salt, sun, and storms. In fact, fishermen who happened to be nearby watched the first two SAvEWhales buoys that were deployed disappear underwater, dragged down by strong currents during a hurricane. Skarsoulis hopes that one day the system could be a permanent cabled observatory.

There are also limits, however, on how broadly applicable such a system could be. The surface reflection analysis that makes SAvEWhales so powerful can’t be used for whales that communicate through song rather than clicks, such as fin whales, which are also endangered in the Mediterranean.

There’s one last obstacle that is unique to current times. After the project’s initial prototype period, Skarsoulis, on February 23, submitted a proposal to the Greek Ministry for Environment and Energy to operate a single buoy off Crete so that his team could monitor how many sperm whales passed through the area. The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off an international energy crisis.

It’s “important to note it was the Ministry for Environment and Energy,” Skarsoulis emphasizes, wryly suggesting that enthusiasm for detecting whales might get in the way of oil exploration. He has not heard back about his proposal since.

Yet such monitoring is urgently needed in the Mediterranean Sea, says Nino Pierantonio, a whale researcher with the Tethys Research Institute in Milan, Italy. Ship strikes are responsible for more than half of all sperm whale deaths in the area. Additionally, because Mediterranean sperm whales are genetically distinct from those in the North Atlantic, this population is especially vulnerable.

Pierantonio notes that the risk is particularly high around the Hellenic Trench, a place rich in marine life and a sperm whale hotspot. The area is favored by groups of sperm whale mothers with calves, which spend much more time at the surface.

Pierantonio says other efforts to reduce ship strikes, such as requiring boats to slow down in whale hotspots and shifting shipping lanes, will also be essential tools in protecting the Mediterranean’s endangered sperm whales. “When rerouting and reducing speed is not an option, we need another way to alert vessels of the presence of whales,” he adds.

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When it comes to bright and exotic sealife, places like the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, or Australia may come to mind with their rich, diverse, and colorful creatures. But one particularly stunning and rare creature has made a surprising new home—off the coast of the United Kingdom.

A volunteer diver named Allen Murray was recently exploring an area near the uninhibited rock island of Melledgean in the Isles of Scilly when he discovered the kaleidoscopic sea slug called Babakina anadoni. 

The animal is tiny: It only reaches about two centimeters in size. But what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in vibrancy–it’s a brilliant shade of purple, covered with sensory organs and other structures in shades of bright yellow, pink, and blue.

This is unusual territory for an exotically patterned slug. The isles, located 28 miles off the coast of historic county Cornwall, are home to wildlife such as puffins, Atlantic Gray Seals, dolphins, and ocean sunfish, but this is the first time a specimen of Babakina anadoni has been found in the UK. The creature was first discovered off the coast of Northern Spain in 1979, and has since been found only a handful of times off the shores of Spain, France, and Portugal, as well as in the Bahamas and Brazil. 

“It’s one of the prettiest sea slugs I’ve seen and, given it’s less than half the size of your little finger, it’s amazing Allen spotted it at all,” Matt Slater, Marine Conservation Officer at Cornwall Wildlife Trust and coordinator of the Seasearch program for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly said in a release. “There’s still so much out there that we don’t know about our marine environment. Records like this from our Seasearch divers are vital in helping us understand and better protect our seas.”

[Related: The process sea slugs use to regrow severed body parts is surprisingly common]

The multicolored beauties are part of the nudibranch family, which includes 2,000 or so varieties of sea slug that thrive at the bottom of shallow, tropical waters. These creatures have no shells, sport dramatic hues on their skin, and can vary in size from a quarter of an inch to 12 inches long. 

Worldwide, there are only three other known species of Babakina, which have been spotted in the Indo-Pacific region and the coasts of New Zealand and California. What the typically warm-water dwelling slug is doing in cooler British waters is still up for interpretation, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a sea creature has recently been found farther north than usual. 

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It’s nearly impossible to know how extinct animals behaved; there’s no Jurassic Park where we can watch them hunt or mate or evade predators. But a developing technique is giving researchers a physiological cipher to decrypt the behavior of extinct species by reconstructing and analyzing extinct animals’ proteins. This molecular necromancy can help them understand traits that don’t preserve in the fossil record.   

In the most recent example of this technique in action, scientists led by Sarah Dungan, who completed the work while a graduate student at the University of Toronto (U of T) in Ontario, have revived the visual pigments from some of cetaceans’ earliest ancestors. The work has given Dungan and her colleagues a new look into how proto-cetaceans would have lived in the immediate aftermath of a crucial evolutionary juncture: the time roughly 55 to 35 million years ago when the animals that eventually became whales and dolphins abandoned their terrestrial lifestyles to return to the sea. 

Dungan’s fascination with whale evolution began when she was eight. As a kid, she loved spending time in the water and learning about marine biology. Her dad told her in passing that the ancestors of modern whales once lived on land. The notion that an animal could transform from living entirely out of water to not being able to live outside it stuck with her. Learning about the evolutionary transition modern whales took—from ocean to land and back again—“totally blew me away,” she says. “The paper is the end of a story that started when I was really young.” 

In 2003, researchers at U of T pioneered a technique to assemble extinct animals’ ancient visual proteins. They’ve applied the technique across the animal kingdom, learning more about how extinct species saw the world. But studying extinct cetaceans is especially interesting because the land-to-ocean transition transformed the animals’ visual realms.  

In this study, the researchers compared rhodopsin, the visual pigment responsible for dim-light vision, from the animals that bookended the land-to-ocean transition. They focused on the first cetacean, which lived 35 million years ago and probably swam using powerful muscles in its tail, and the first whippomorph (one of a group of animals that includes cetaceans and hippos), which lived 55 million years ago. 

Scientists haven’t discovered the fossils for the two extinct species yet. For that matter, they can’t even say precisely what species they are. But Dungan’s technique can infer ancient protein sequences even without this information. The approach follows the evolutionary breadcrumbs left in modern animals’ proteins to figure out what the ancient forms would have looked like, even without the bones of the species themselves. By comparing the presumed proteins of the first whippomorph and the first cetacean, the scientists can glean the subtle differences in their vision. These differences in vision could reflect differences in the animals’ behaviors. 

“There’s only so much you can learn from fossil evidence,” Dungan says. “But the eye is a window between the organism and its environment.”

Using an evolutionary tree and the known rhodopsin structures from modern cetaceans, Dungan and her team built a model to predict the ancient animals’ variants. They manufactured the visual pigments in the lab by genetically modifying cultured mammalian cells and tested the light they are most sensitive to. The scientists found that compared with the ancient whippomorph, the extinct cetacean was likely more sensitive to blue wavelengths of light. Blue light penetrates deeper into water than red, so modern deep-sea denizens, including fishes and cetaceans, have blue-sensitive vision. The finding suggests the extinct cetacean was comfortable in the deep sea.

The scientists also found that the ancient cetaceans’ version of rhodopsin adapts quickly to the dark. Modern cetaceans’ eyes quickly adjust to dim light, helping them move between the bright surface where they breathe and the dark depths where they feed. This finding is “what really sealed the deal,” Dungan says. 

Based on their findings, the scientists think early cetaceans probably dove to the ocean’s twilight zone, between 200 and 1,000 meters. Eyesight was vital during dives. Ancient cetaceans couldn’t echolocate like dolphins, so they relied more heavily on vision. 

The finding is surprising, says Lorian Schweikert, a neuroecologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who wasn’t involved in the study. She thought the first cetaceans would have stayed near the surface. “Started from the bottom now we’re here,” she jokes, alluding to Drake’s hit song. 

Schweikert says that studying eye physiology is a reliable way to infer an animal’s ecology because visual proteins don’t change much over time. The rare changes almost always correlate with environmental shifts. 

The most important conclusion of Dungan and her colleagues’ work, says Schweikert, is that it further clarifies the order in which cetaceans’ extreme diving behaviors evolved. The rhodopsin research builds on earlier work that painted a similar picture. In a previous study, researchers reconstructed ancient myoglobin and showed that early cetaceans “supercharged” their muscles’ oxygen supply while they held their breath—further evidence that they were capable divers. Another study, this time on ancient penguins, showed that when the birds had their own transition to marine life, their hemoglobin evolved mechanisms to more efficiently manage oxygen. 

Dungan and her colleagues are now channeling their molecular Ouija board to resurrect rhodopsin from the earliest mammals, bats, and archosaurs. This will help them understand how nocturnality, burrowing, and flight evolved. 

The approach is “just really fun,” Schweikert says. “You’re trying to look into the past to understand how these animals evolved. I love that we can look at vision to solve some of these problems.”

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This summer has seen a historic number of shark sightings and encounters along US coasts. Especially at beaches on Long Island, New York, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where several shark bites prompted beach closures, there are growing concerns of threatening predators filling up the waters. 

“I’ve always thought ‘shark-infested waters’ is a funny term because sharks live in the ocean—really, it’s people-infested,” says Carlee Jackson, a shark researcher and the director of communications for Minorities in Shark Sciences. “Just because they scare us doesn’t mean that they’re not important for the ecosystem.”

Indeed, based on experts’ best guesses as to why people are seeing (or occasionally being attacked by) sharks more frequently, there’s no need to panic. In fact, it’s probably a sign that coastal biomes in the US are healthy. The increase in shark sightings, biologists think, is due to growing populations, more folks in the water, and better technology for both experts and the public to see and track the marine creatures. With efforts that began decades ago to protect sharks now paying off, it’s on humans to understand how to stay safe in the ocean.

[Related: New tags can track sharks into the inky depths of the ocean’s Twilight Zone]

Unprovoked great white shark attacks in particular are still incredibly rare—so much that driving to the beach is riskier than running into sharks there. And while the number of shark bites did increase in the US last year (73 in 2021, compared to 52 in 2020), only one person died—fewer than the 11 killed by lightning strikes in the same year. 

Data around sightings is a little hazier because people often mistake various other swimming creatures, like seals and different shark species, for great whites, which are the most dangerous. Not because they’re more aggressive, but because even a small bite from them can do a lot of damage.

“The only way sharks can figure out what something is is by biting it,” Jackson explains. Once the shark realizes you’re a human, not a seal or fish, they almost always will move on. 

John Chisholm, an adjunct scientist at the New England Aquarium, sees firsthand just how often people’s fear or excitement messes with their ability to judge what is and isn’t a great while. Part of his work is verifying public submissions to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s tracking app, Sharktivity. With the app, people can report sightings along the Massachusetts coast, receive notifications of confirmed sightings near beaches, and check recorded locations of tagged great white sharks. 

“Most of the reports are not actually sharks,” says Chisholm. “But it’s kind of a good thing, because it means people are paying attention. And we still have to err on the side of caution, because we know the sharks are out there.”

Misidentifications by citizen scientists aside, researchers are fairly confident that great white populations are increasing, at least in US waters. Populations of the species around North America have grown steadily in the past three decades, thanks to federal and state laws preventing people from killing them or catching them accidentally, and protecting their prey (seals in most cases). Still, great whites in most other parts of the world are struggling. 

[Related: Sharks are learning to love coastal cities]

Chris Lowe, the director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, also points to better technology as key to improved scientific and popular understanding of sharks’ numbers. The widespread use of GoPros, phone cameras, and drones have been useful tools for biologists, and have made it easier for more beachgoers to capture and disseminate videos, photos, and shark alerts. 

Climate change could be behind the increase in shark sightings and encounters, too, according to Lowe and other researchers. Warmer temperatures are forcing more people to hit the ocean to escape the heat, increasing the odds that someone will bump into a shark cruising the shallows. “Millions of people are using SoCal beaches alone,” Lowe explains. “And the more people there are in the water, the greater the probability of an encounter.”

Shark researchers like Lowe don’t know exactly how healthy the great white population is right now, because there isn’t good data on their numbers before they were overfished in the 1970s and ’80s. For the same reason, they’re not sure when the species’s population will stop increasing. But it’s a heartening example of successful conservation interventions that could be applied to other shark species and populations around the world. “Sharks have been around for around 450 million years, before trees existed,” says Jackson. If humans aren’t killing them or their prey, she says, “It’s amazing how resilient they are.”

On the flip side, like cougars, wolves, and other large predators that people brush up against, sharks basically never kill and eat humans for prey. But since accidents can happen, Chisholm and other shark experts recommend taking precautions when entering salt water, just like you would for a hike in bear country. Taking steps to avoid the cartilage-filled predators, and appropriate responses if you do bump into them, have been shown to vastly improve your chances of walking (or swimming) away from surprise encounters unharmed. 

[Related: You should never have to fight off a shark—but here’s how to do it (just in case)]

“If you’re going into the ocean, if you’re going into a wilderness area, you have to be proactive,” Chisholm says. “Before you go to the beach, you check the weather and traffic. Take a moment to check Sharktivity and with the local lifeguards [for shark sightings], too.” Staying in groups further decreases the odds of a violent encounter, and removing jewelry, which might flash like a fish that younger sharks prey on, is also a good idea.

Most importantly, pay attention to your surroundings when you’re in the water. Don’t just steer clear of fins—also look out for anything sharks actually do want to eat, like fish schools, seals, and bait. There are more sharks and humans in the water than there used to be, but there should also be plenty of room for both to coexist.

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The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials.

Vos and his colleagues’ chief concern was pathogenic bacteria. To understand the extent to which plastic can be colonized by potentially deadly bacteria, the scientists injected wax moth larvae with the biofilm. After a week, four percent of the larvae died. But four weeks later, after Vos and his team had let the plastics stew in the ocean for a bit longer, they repeated the test. This time, 65 percent of the wax moths died.

The scientists analyzed the biofilm: the plastics were covered in bacteria, including some known to make us sick. They found pathogenic bacteria responsible for causing urinary tract, skin, and stomach infections, pneumonia, and other illnesses. To make matters worse, these bacteria were also carrying a wide range of genes for antimicrobial resistance. “Plastics that you find in the water are rapidly colonized by bacteria, including pathogens,” says Vos. “And it doesn’t really matter what plastic it is.”

It’s not just bacteria that are hitching a ride on plastics. Biofilms on marine plastics can also harbor parasites, viruses, and toxic algae. With marine plastic pollution so ubiquitous—it’s been found everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to Arctic beaches—scientists are concerned that plastics are transporting these human pathogens around the oceans.

But whether plastics are bearing pathogen populations dense enough to actually be dangerous and whether they are carrying them to new areas are difficult questions to answer.

There are good reasons to believe that plastics are accumulating and spreading pathogens around the world. Linda Amaral-Zettler, a microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term plastisphere for the novel ecosystem plastics create, says plastic is different from other hard surfaces one often finds in the ocean—such as logs, shells, and rocks—because plastic is durable, long-lived, and a lot of it floats. “That gives it mobility,” she says.

Plastics can travel long distances. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for example, many identifiably Japanese objects washed up on the west coast of North America. This litter, says Amaral Zettler, has “the potential to transport anything attached to it.”

Recent laboratory work also shows that some typically terrestrial disease-causing parasites can survive in seawater and infect marine mammals. Karen Shapiro, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis, showed that these protozoan parasites—specifically, Toxoplasma gondii, Cryptosporidium parvum, and Giardia enterica—can attach to microplastics in seawater. This could be altering where, when, and how these parasites accumulate in the ocean.

“If they are hitching a ride on plastics that happen to be in the same sewer outlet, or river, or overland runoff from a storm drain, then they will end up where the plastic ends up,” Shapiro explains. That could be in shellfish on the seafloor, or floating on currents in the middle of the ocean.

The next step, Shapiro explains, is to look for a similar association between parasites and plastics outside the lab.

That microplastic pollution appears to be a breeding ground for pathogens raises, for Vos, a long-term concern as well—that plastics might be promoting the spread of antibiotic resistance. Bacteria can exchange genes, and since the bacteria are in close contact on the surface of tiny microplastics, the level of horizontal gene transfer between them is high, he says. Plastics can also put bacteria in close contact with pesticides and other pollutants, which also stick to biofilms. This encourages the development of antimicrobial resistance.

“We don’t know that much about it,” Vos says, “but there’s potentially interesting ways in which bacteria can experience stronger selection [for antimicrobial resistance] on plastics, but also have more opportunity to exchange genes that could confer resistance.”

As well as posing potential risks to human health, plastic-borne pathogens could threaten marine ecosystems and food supply chains, Amaral-Zettler says. Millions of people rely on seafood as a source of protein, and there are many pathogens that infect the fish and shellfish we eat. It might be possible, Amaral-Zettler says, for microplastics to spread diseases between different aquaculture and fishing areas.

Even though we don’t fully understand the risks, these studies are yet another good argument for limiting plastic pollution, Vos says. “There can’t be anything positive about plastics with pathogens floating around.”

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This summer, a baby killer whale is swimming with a local pod in the Salish Sea (the inland marine waters along Washington state and British Columbia) for the first time since 2011. The newest little whale’s birth into the K-pod, one of three family groups that make up the southern resident killer whales, is cause for celebration in a population that’s been struggling for decades.

But the calf isn’t enough on her own to ease the worries of researchers and conservation groups about the southern resident killer whales, as the genetically distinct sub-group of the species in those waterways is called. For one thing, the initial year will be the most difficult for the calf to survive. And health markers like stress hormone levels and body weight across the orca population suggest successful births are increasingly a rarity.

“[The new calf] is so miraculous,” Deborah Giles, the Science and Research Director for the Washington-based  group Wild Orca, says. “But we know from past decades these females were able to give birth every three years, and that’s just not the case now.”

[Related: Drones revealed the intricate social lives of these killer whales]

In 2017, Giles’ team found that 69 percent of southern resident female whales’ pregnancies haven’t been brought to term in recent years. Chronically stressed and undernourished, this killer whale population has shrunk from 89 individuals when they were federally listed as endangered in 2005 to only 74 today.

The killer whales face the same range of threats they did 17 years ago: noise and potential collision with boats, chemical pollutants, and a lack of prey. Of all those, most worrying to researchers today is the shortage of the orca’s main food source, Chinook salmon. 

These killer whales co-evolved with the Chinook, which are also an endangered species. They can and do eat other types of fish, but the Salish Sea’s largest, fattiest fish has always made up the majority of their diet. 

As the number and size of salmon returning to spawn in Washington and British Columbia’s rivers have dwindled over the years thanks to overfishing, rising water temperatures, dam obstructions, and habitat destruction, among other things, the killer whales have struggled to find enough prey to survive.

“They’re starving all the time because there’s just not enough fish out there,” says Giles.

Another recent study of the southern resident killer whales by researchers at the University of British Columbia identified the same issue. Comparing salmon availability over the decades to what they know of the whale’s movements and health, they determined that for six of the last 40 years, the marine mammals weren’t getting enough to eat. 

That means that any effort to protect the endangered southern resident killer whales will have to involve protecting the endangered Chinook salmon. “The single most promising effort toward promoting a positive trajectory for southern resident killer whale recovery are salmon and river restoration initiatives throughout the whales’ entire range,” says Shari Tarantino, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Orca Conservancy.

[Related: The secret to saving salmon is lodged in their ears]

The state put new regulations in place for this summer requiring whale watching boats keep a nautical half mile away from the orcas, following news that a number of them were pregnant, but potentially unhealthy. While these additional restrictions should benefit the whales, Giles from Wild Orca says they won’t do enough on their own to help them recover long-term. “We have spent a lot of time looking at vessel effects to limit the impact of vessels on these animals. Now, we need to be looking at policies focusing on fisheries management,” she says. 

Tarantino, from the Orca Conservancy, agrees. “While we support mitigation efforts, the emergency regulations in Washington State continue to fall short on what the southern resident killer whale population needs,” she adds. 

And it’s about more than just the orcas. Killer whales are at the top of the food chain, and, as Tarantino points out, “When an apex predator is failing, it means the entire ecosystem beneath it is also failing, which ultimately will affect the human population.”

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It’s relatively well known that most fully functioning corals one finds dotting colorful coral reefs are a symbiosis between a coral (the animal itself) and the microscopic algae that dwell within it. This duo forms the physical foundation of coral reefs, where one-fourth of Earth’s marine species reside. But what is much less well known is how corals get their algal partners.

Spawning corals begin their lives flying solo as free-living larvae without algal partners. They’ll eventually acquire their algae from the environment. But where do those algae come from? Scientists aren’t really sure.

Adrienne Correa, a marine biologist at Rice University in Texas, has devoted her career to studying corals and their symbionts, and she has an idea about the source of at least some of corals’ symbionts: fish poop.

In recent research, Correa and her team showed that the feces of coral-eating fish are loaded with algae species that can establish symbiotic relationships with corals. The scientists have yet to fully connect the dots, however, and show that either adult or larval corals pick up symbionts from fish feces. But the fact that sea anemones, a closely related organism, get their algae this way gives the idea a boost.

Correa and her team hope to prove the connection in experiments they’ll begin later this year at the Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research site in French Polynesia. For Correa, answering the question of where corals’ symbionts come from is urgent given climate change.

Warming oceans are stressing corals. Under heat stress, corals bleach, expelling their algae. Bleaching can be fatal for corals. With mass bleaching events growing more common and threatening entire reefs, Correa wonders whether coral-eating fish hold the key to coral resilience.

During bleaching events, individual corals react differently. Some, even within the same species, recover faster—partly because their algal symbionts differ from those of hard-hit corals. Though many corals only establish relationships with one type of algae, others, like the major reef-building species in the genus Acropora, can bond with several different algae species. Some algal symbionts make Acropora corals more heat tolerant than others. Because of this variability, the role of fish as symbiont dispersers could be important in dictating how a coral reef recovers.

While some coral-eating fish species also eat other things, some fishes, such as oval butterflyfish, ornate butterflyfish, and broom filefish, only eat corals—and these so-called obligate coral eaters prefer to eat healthy, unbleached corals. By eating the more resilient algae from unbleached corals, those fishes might help spread heat-resistant symbionts around the reef. In other cases, fishes might benefit corals that harbor only one species of symbiont algae by dispersing their particular partner around the reef.

If Correa’s upcoming experiments support her hypothesis, some fish populations might prove essential for helping to disperse the right kinds of algae for reefs to remain resilient in warming waters. “We can think about whether there are particular fish that we would want to farm and release on reefs,” Correa says.

Tamar Liberman Goulet, a coral biologist at the University of Mississippi who was not involved in the research, thinks Correa’s idea has merit. But she cautions that there are limitations on how big of a role fish feces could play. Fish tend to stick to their reef, Goulet says, and as such, would likely only disperse corals’ symbionts over a limited area.

“A coral reef is in some ways like an island, even though it is in the sea,” Goulet says. “Many coral reef fish and other organisms are confined to the reef that they are at.” If there is a physical barrier between reefs, such as a sandbar, Goulet says, fish will not swim past that barrier. Fish that do leave “risk getting preyed upon because the reef provides protection.”

Ultimately, fish spreading algae through their feces will not alone be enough to combat the most severe bleaching events, says Correa. “Coral-eating fish out on the reef on their own cannot fix it. There are too many stressors and the stressors are too severe.” Ultimately, environmental degradation and climate change will need to be addressed directly to fully protect coral reefs.

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Around the world, seagrass is in decline. But University of Florida biogeochemist Patrick Inglett and his colleagues have hit on an unexpected key to spurring the effectiveness of recovery efforts: crystallized human urine.

Around the world, ecologists are racing to protect failing seagrass ecosystems by replanting those that have been damaged or wiped out. But replanted seagrass meadows often grow slowly and struggle to survive, especially in the nutrient-poor sands of Florida where Inglett helms restoration projects. Seagrass-hungry wildlife like manatees and pinfish only make matters more difficult. These grazers’ big appetites can prevent seagrass from fully establishing. To compensate, seagrass restorers use synthetic fertilizers to jumpstart growth.

But the glut of nutrients a fertilizer brings yields its own problems: as fertilizer dissolves, it feeds algae that can shade growing seagrass. Then, when the algae have used up the nutrients, they die and decompose, robbing the water of oxygen that fledgling seagrass needs. But in a recent study, Inglett and his colleagues have shown that struvite, a compound formed from human wastewater, is an effective solution to this complex dilemma.

Struvite crystals form from wastewater sludge in low-oxygen environments. High in ammonium, magnesium, and phosphorus, the crystals are rich in nutrients and, importantly, slow to dissolve—slower even than synthetic slow-release fertilizer, says Inglett.

In their lab, Inglett and his team filled large aquariums with shoal grass, a common seagrass in the southern United States. Supplementing the seagrass’s growth with either struvite or synthetic fertilizer, the scientists found that after 60 days the tanks with struvite had about five times more seagrass shoots than those treated with fertilizer. Struvite-treated tanks also had fewer nutrients dissolved into the water, representing less pollution. After nine months, the seagrass grown with struvite was larger than its conventionally fertilized counterparts, even when the struvite was applied at a lower concentration.

The long-term benefits of a slow-release fertilizer may be even greater still, says Inglett. Unlike conventional fertilizers, which provide a single pulse of nutrients, struvite will continue to nourish seagrass over time.

Frank Shaughnessy, a marine ecologist emeritus at Humboldt State University in California who was not a part of the study, says struvite had a hugely positive effect on the seagrass. “It looks like a really great technique for that system.” He also notes, however, that struvite might not be helpful in the cloudier and more temperate environments of the northeast Pacific or Chesapeake Bay where, unlike in Florida, seagrass growth is limited by light rather than nutrients.

Inglett sees supply as the main limiting factor in the adoption of struvite as a fertilizer. Although struvite has long been a waste product, only recently have some water treatment plants begun purposefully extracting the crystal to sell as an organic fertilizer. In parts of Europe, recycling struvite is encouraged as a way to reduce wastewater pollution and to reduce agricultural dependence on mined phosphorus.

In most of the world, struvite “is not as available as it is in Europe,” Inglett says. “But eventually I’m assuming it could catch on.”

If it does, struvite could turn human waste into a fuel for reviving struggling ecosystems.

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Have you ever looked at a seal and thought, Is that the same seal I saw yesterday? Well, there could soon be an app for that based on new seal facial recognition technology. Known as SealNet, this seal face-finding system was developed by a team of undergraduate students from Colgate University in New York.

Taking inspiration from other technology adapted for recognizing primates and bears, Krista Ingram, a biologist at Colgate University, led the students in developing software that uses deep learning and a convolutional neural network to tell one seal face from another. SealNet is tailored to identify the harbor seal, a species with a penchant for posing on coasts in haulouts.

The team had to train their software to identify seal faces. “I give it a photograph, it finds the face, [and] clips it to a standard size,” says Ingram. But then she and her students would manually identify the nose, the mouth, and the center of the eyes.

For the project, team members snapped more than 2,000 pictures of seals around Casco Bay, Maine, during a two-year period. They tested the software using 406 different seals and found that SealNet could correctly identify the seals’ faces 85 percent of the time. The team has since expanded its database to include around 1,500 seal faces. As the number of seals logged in the database goes up, so too should the accuracy of the identification, Ingram says.

As with all tech, however, SealNet is not infallible. The software saw seal faces in other body parts, vegetation, and even rocks. In one case, Ingram and her students did a double take at the uncanny resemblance between a rock and a seal face. “[The rock] did look like a seal face,” Ingram says. “The darker parts were about the same distance as the eyes … so you can understand why the software found a face.” Consequently, she says it’s always best to manually check that seal faces identified by the software belong to a real seal.

Like a weary seal hauling itself onto a beach for an involuntary photo shoot, the question of why this is all necessary raises itself. Ingram believes SealNet could be a useful, noninvasive tool for researchers.

Of the world’s pinnipeds—a group that includes seals, walruses, and sea lions—harbor seals are considered the most widely dispersed. Yet knowledge gaps do exist. Other techniques to track seals, such as tagging and aerial monitoring, have their limitations and can be highly invasive or expensive.

Ingram points to site fidelity as an aspect of seal behavior that SealNet could shed more light on. The team’s trials indicated that some harbor seals return to the same haulout sites year after year. Other seals, however, such as two animals the team nicknamed Clove and Petal, appeared at two different sites together. Increasing scientists’ understanding of how seals move around could strengthen arguments for protecting specific areas, says Anders Galatius, an ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved in the project.

Galatius, who is responsible for monitoring Denmark’s seal populations, says the software “shows a lot of promise.” If the identification rates are improved, it could be paired with another photo identification method that identifies seals by distinctive markings on their pelage, he says.

In the future, after further testing, Ingram hopes to develop an app based on SealNet. The app, she says, could possibly allow citizen scientists to contribute to logging seal faces. The program could also be adapted for other pinnipeds and possibly even for cetaceans.

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It’s hard to think of beachgoing season without our minds jumping to sharks. The predators tap our curiosity, fill movie theaters, and (whether it’s founded or not) stir fear of attacks. Our mere presence, new research hints, may be influencing their behavior in ways we didn’t predict. A study published earlier this month in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series has shown that cities may be drawing sharks closer to our shorelines. 

Researchers at the University of Miami and collaborators tracked the movement of three species—great hammerheads, bull sharks, and nurse sharks—in and around Florida’s Biscayne Bay between 2015 and 2019. Stressors on the region, including pollution from power plants and boat traffic, led the team to assume that the ocean predators would shy from the area, especially during periods when crowds descended. But the human presence may be having the opposite effect. 

Terrestrial creatures like black bears, bobcats, and coyotes tend to shy from cities—especially during the day—and the authors assumed sharks would be no different. “Few studies have investigated the movements of ocean predators in relation to urbanization, but since other studies have shown that land predators are urban avoiders, we expected sharks to be too,” said Neil Hammerschlag, lead author and director of the University of Miami Shark Research and Conservation Program, in a statement. 

Based on acoustic trackers the team placed on 36 great hammerheads, 24 bull sharks, and 27 nurse sharks, the scientists saw that the species were actually “urban adapters”—a.k.a., ones that prefer to hang out in and around cities now. Of the tagged animals, 14 hammerheads, 13 bulls, and 25 nurses were seen hanging out in the Miami area close to shore. The greatest density of sightings was in the northern end of the bay closer to hotspots like South Beach and the Seaquarium. 

[Related: Why we can’t stop searching for the megalodon]

A trio of causes may be contributing to this unexpected result. First, the sharks might be attracted to nutrient runoff from canal outflows and sewer discharge into the Biscayne Bay. Second, they could be scavenging for grub: Fishers tend to discard carcasses when they return to marinas, luring hungry predators in the process. Refuse and fish parts tossed by staff at the Seaquarium have anecdotally been known to draw in snacking sharks.

The authors also note that a range of other factors—including salinity, depth, nutrient density, and oxygenation—also influence where sharks like to hang out. 

It’s important to remember, though, that this behavioral change is worse for the sharks than it is for people. 

Shark attacks are rarer than Hollywood would have us believe. The predators kill only about five people a year, and, in 2020, sharks non-fatally nibbled on 57 people. Surfers, swimmers, and divers experienced the majority of unprovoked attacks; the highest geographical concentration in the US, however, was in fact Florida, with 16 incidents. 

[Related: How to fight off a shark]

Meanwhile, for marine life, swimming closer to urban areas has its own risks. Sharks searching for food closer to marinas and population centers often end up in spots with crummier water quality and pollutants. The Biscayne Bay is particularly bad in those regards. A 2021 analysis through the city of Miami found that water samples from high-traffic areas were as much 66 percent below acceptable contamination levels for recreational use at the time. 

Still, the study authors note that their tracking does help isolate areas where swimmers may be at greater risk for shark encounters. The data traced a greater density of sharks hanging out at the northern end of the bay, a zone where swimmers have been bitten in the past. Understanding how our own activities might invite those ruins is an important facet to prevention—and in teaching us how to share the shore with wildlife. 

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COVID-19 lockdowns are no longer preventing vacationers from traveling the globe this summer, which has caused a jump in travel among Americans and elsewhere. More interest in travel, however, means renewed excitement for cruises. Carnival Cruise Line and other top cruise ship companies have been breaking records for ticket sales this year. But a water-bound vacation isn’t just a concern for infectious disease—these ships are having a massive effect on the climate.

Cruise ships are incredibly large—among the largest ships in the world—and it takes a lot of fuel to keep them moving. They’re often over three football fields long and can feature pools, ice skating rinks, basketball courts and more. A ship can burn up to 250 tons of fuel in a single day. Studies have shown one cruise ship produces roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as 12,000 cars. They’re also poorly regulated.

Even without the risks of COVID, all that fuel can still lead to breathing in unhealthy levels of pollution. Researchers have found the air quality on cruise ships to be extremely poor due to the pollution these ships generate. The conditions are generally equivalent to living in a heavily polluted city.

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, tells Popular Science that the type of fuel cruise ships burn contributes to their many harmful environmental effects. “They generally use bunker fuel, which is the dirtiest type of fuel. Bunker fuel puts out lots of black carbon, sulfates and other chemicals,” Jacobson says. “Black carbon is the second leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide.”

[Related: The world’s largest hybrid ship will set sail in 2024.]

Bunker fuel is a thick, tar-like fuel that’s high in sulfur. It comes from leftovers of the refining process and is used for large ships. Black carbon is often referred to as soot, and it is produced by burning this fuel and by wildfires. The EPA claims it is linked to “cardiovascular disease, cancer, and even birth defects.” Jacobson says black carbon is often burned by ships that travel near the Arctic and Antarctic, and the pollutant lands on sea ice and snow—in turn melting them faster. It can also get into clouds and help evaporate them more quickly, which causes further warming because clouds help reflect sunlight.

The particulates from burning bunker fuel often get cleared out of the air through precipitation, thus eventually polluting the ocean, Jacobson says.  

What’s the solution? Cruise ships could just be banned, of course, but Jacobson says there’s a pretty simple technological solution. Like with cars, it’s a matter of transitioning these ships to clean energy. He says ships can be transitioned to batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.

Batteries are more energy efficient for small to medium-sized ships that aren’t going long distances. But for journeys longer than a few dozen miles, hydrogen fuel cells are necessary because the weight of the batteries starts affecting efficiency levels. 

“For a long distance, you probably need fuel cells. That’s usually the case,” Jacobson says. “Otherwise you’re just spending a lot of energy carrying around more and more batteries. Hydrogen is a very light fuel.”

Some ferries are already being transitioned to battery power. A battery-powered ferry in Denmark just set the record for the longest trip on a single charge by traveling 50 nautical miles. That ferry is less than 200 feet long. Norway unveiled the world’s largest battery-powered ferry last year, and it’s over 400 feet long. The world’s largest hybrid ferry will start transporting passengers between Britain and France in the next few years.
Cruise ships are thought of as luxurious and built for fun, but they’re taking a major toll on the environment. Transitioning them to clean energy is the only solution to this problem if they’re going to continue to exist. A Norwegian company called Hurtigruten has already developed hybrid cruise ships, so perhaps change is on the way. Jacobson says it will just be a matter of convincing the cruise lines to invest in making that change.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The sky was moonless and overcast, leaving no stars to steer by. Alone at the helm in the middle of the Arabian Sea, somewhere between Oman and India, I could see nothing in the ink-black night save for our ship’s dimly lit compass rolling on its gimbal mount as we heaved and swayed through three-meter seas. But half an hour into my shift, the sails above me began to glow, as if the moon had risen. But there was no moon, nor any stars or other ships. The light, it seemed, was coming from below and growing in intensity. Soon the entire ocean was glow-stick green, but muted, as if the light were shining through a sea of milk.

It was August 2010, and I’d been sailing for over two months by then, volunteering with the NGO the Biosphere Foundation to deliver the Mir, a 35-meter ketch they’d recently acquired in Malta, back to their home port in Singapore. During the voyage, I’d grown accustomed to the usual “sea sparkle” caused by dinoflagellates that ignite when the water is agitated, causing ribbons of light to twist off the Mir’s bow. But this was not that. This was the whole of the ocean, as far as I could see, glowing a uniform, opaque green. Despite the compass still wheeling in its mount, the light in the water created an optical illusion, making the sea appear perfectly calm, as if we were gliding through phosphorescent skies rather than roiling seas.

I woke the rest of the crew, and for over four hours we remained engulfed in this sea of green light, wonderstruck, with no idea what it was we were witnessing. Finally, a razor-sharp line appeared ahead of us where the lambent sea ended and blackness began. Crossing it, we left behind that numinous phantom world and re-entered a familiar one, though we could still see the gauzy green glow to our stern for another hour before it disappeared. It wasn’t until we arrived at port 10 days later that we would learn the name for the eerie phenomenon that had surrounded us: a milky sea.

For centuries, sailors have been describing milky seas, rare occurrences where enormous expanses of the ocean light up uniformly at night, at times stretching for tens of thousands of square kilometers, or more. W. E. Kingman, captain of the clipper Shooting Star, had this to say upon witnessing one in 1854: “The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.”

A milky sea even made an appearance in Moby-Dick, where Melville describes a mariner sailing through a “shrouded phantom of the whitened waters” that were as “horrible to him as a real ghost.”

Neither our small crew, nor Melville or Kingman, knew what caused the seas to glow. In 2010, our crew had the benefit of living in a world far better charted by science than it had been in the 1800s, which may explain why Kingman and Melville’s mariner responded with god-struck terror, while we gawked in wonder, knowing that no matter how otherworldly this phenomenon may appear, it was clearly of this world.

Bioluminescence—the emission of light by a living organism—is common on our planet, and nowhere more so than in the oceans. Bioluminescent fish, tunicates, dinoflagellates, crustaceans, mollusks, jellyfish, and bacteria glow and flash across our seas at night. But milky seas, despite being so vast, are anything but common, and are thought to be caused by one of the smallest organisms in the ocean.

Every observation of a milky sea throughout history has been a chance encounter, as mine was, and only once did a vessel with any scientific research capabilities happen upon one, when the USS Wilkes steamed through a milky sea for three consecutive nights off the island of Socotra, Yemen, in 1985. Onboard the Wilkes was the late marine biologist David Lapota, who was working for the navy at the time studying bioluminescence. Lapota and his team of researchers sampled the water and discovered a profusion of the bioluminescent bacterium Vibrio harveyi—a common, well-dispersed species known to luminesce—attached to bits of algae, leading them to hypothesize that legions of this bacterium and potentially other bioluminescent bacterial species as well, are the cause of milky seas. This research, conducted nearly 40 years ago, remains the only time a milky sea was ever studied in the field.

Assuming scientists are correct that milky seas are caused by bacteria, a question remains: why? Unlike many organisms that evolved bioluminescence as a means to escape predation, bioluminescent bacteria want to be eaten—the inside of a fish’s gut provides a more reliable home than floating freely in the open ocean. But a lone bacterium is likely too small to get the attention of a fish on its own, so for their microscopic bioluminescence to express on a macroscale, they require strength in numbers. To work together, each bacterium releases a chemical signal to sense if other bacteria are nearby, and only once they’ve recognized a sufficient number—scientists hypothesize that it takes a population of somewhere between 10 and 100 million bacteria per milliliter of water—will they begin to luminesce. This is a process called quorum sensing, and it may explain why milky seas form.

In areas of upwelling, such as the northwest Indian Ocean, where an abundance of nutrient-rich, decaying organic material—such as bits of decomposed crabs or even specks of long-dead whales—is pushed up to the surface from the depths, bacteria will find plenty to colonize. When these rich waters become isolated due to currents, or when distinct masses of water with differing salinities or temperatures meet and form physical fronts, they can prevent mixing, which in turn can result in a sort of concentrated stew—what scientists have dubbed “the natural flask hypothesis.” In this scenario, through quorum sensing, these bacteria set off a chemical glow that can become the largest display of bioluminescence on the planet.

This idea of a natural flask may help to explain why, when our boat first sailed into a milky sea, the light was diluted and nearly imperceptible, but when we exited it hours later, we crossed a distinct boundary. On one side of that particular event, the glowing and non-glowing waters were mixing, while on the other side, due to some sort of oceanic front, a wall-like barrier was being maintained between the specialized—and little understood—conditions that allow milky seas to form and those conditions that do not. This is but one of many things scientists hope to better understand by further studying milky seas in the field, which, thanks to a new generation of satellite technology, may soon be possible.

Steve Miller, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, has been part of a small group of scientists leading the effort to demystify milky seas for nearly 20 years, searching for them from the unlikeliest of places: Fort Collins, Colorado. He’s the first person to discover a milky sea from his office chair.

Miller contacted me shortly after I wrote a blog post about our experience sailing through a milky sea, excitedly informing me that our ship’s crew are among the few known people alive today to have ever witnessed one. Our brief correspondence left me feeling like a minor celebrity.

Miller first became interested in milky seas in 2004 while attending an American Meteorological Society conference. There, Miller and his colleagues considered whether it might be possible to observe any type of marine bioluminescence from space. It was assumed that any small-scale bioluminescence, such as sea sparkle, produces far too weak a light signal to be seen from so far away. But Miller, intrigued by the idea of studying the sea from space, did some research when he returned home and was struck to discover dozens of surprisingly consistent accounts of so-called milky seas given by mariners throughout the centuries. An atmospheric scientist by training, Miller wondered if he could use historical satellite data to locate one of these events. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for: a detailed account of a milky sea seen by the crew of the SS Lima off the coast of Somalia on January 25, 1995. The account listed the exact coordinates and time when the boat had entered the luminous event. Using the heading and speed from the ship’s log, Miller was able to extrapolate the position of the Lima at the time the crew claimed to have exited the glowing waters six hours later. He plotted the points, the date, and the times on the image, and zoomed in on the grainy black-and-white photo. “It was all black,” he tells me.

Undeterred, Miller decided to scale the image down some more, searching through the noise of a photograph taken from over 800 kilometers away. Suddenly, a small structure appeared in the center of his computer screen that he at first mistook for a fingerprint smudge, but when he moved the image around, the smudge moved along with it. He zoomed in some more and a comma shape appeared in the waters off the Horn of Africa. When he once again overlaid the ship’s coordinates, they lined right up with the comma’s boundaries. “That’s when we realized we had something,” he says. The shape, larger than the state of Connecticut, was over 15,000 square kilometers of glowing bacteria.

“I’ve been hooked on that ever since,” says Miller, “because I realized I’d just seen a ghost.” Milky seas were more a part of novels and folklore than of scientific knowledge, he explains, but here they had the first-ever space-borne confirmation of a milky sea.

Since that initial discovery, a new generation of satellite technology has greatly improved Miller’s hunt for milky seas. Two satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership and the Joint Polar Satellite System—were launched in 2011 and 2017, respectively. These modern satellites, though not intended to search for milky seas, are equipped with specialized day/night band instruments that, at their extreme low end of sensitivity, can pick up something as dim as bioluminescence from space. Miller and his team have been combing through the imagery provided by these satellites ever since, having greatest success in the two areas of the globe where historical ship sightings of milky seas have been most prevalent: the northwest Indian Ocean, where 70 percent of all milky seas have been reported, and the waters surrounding Java, where 17 percent of sightings have occurred. In the past decade, Miller and his team have successfully identified a dozen milky seas via satellite imagery, the most significant of which was a 2019 event off the coast of Java spanning over 100,000 square kilometers—roughly the size of Iceland—which glowed continuously for at least 45 nights.

Now that Miller and his team have confirmed that milky seas can last for weeks at a time, it opens up the possibility of deploying a research vessel to study one while it’s still glowing. Only then do they hope to be able to answer some of the many questions scientists still have about milky seas, including one of Miller’s favorites: how deep does the bioluminescence go down in the water column? Is it merely a surface slick of bacteria, as some scientists posit, or is it meters thick, or more? Considering scientists believe it takes upward of 100 million bacteria per cubic centimeter of water to begin glowing, the answer to this question could change the estimated number of bacteria involved in a milky sea by billions of trillions, or possibly even trillions of trillions.

When I first learned of Miller’s breakthrough research, part of me felt protective of the mystique of milky seas. Why must we humans insist on explaining everything? But as I learned more about what scientists believe might cause milky seas—about upwelling and natural flasks; about quorum sensing and the intentional, communal light made by trillions of bacteria—I realized that finding answers doesn’t necessarily correlate with diluting the wonder of such an event. If anything, it makes it that much more incredible.

Without understanding the world around us, we are all Captain Kingman, terrified by the sight of something we don’t recognize. Instead, we can be in awe of reality itself, knowing that whenever one question is answered, we’ve simply learned enough to ask a thousand more.

The post We’re getting closer to understanding why the sea sometimes glows appeared first on Popular Science.

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When more than one type of pollution gets wrapped up in the same space, the result can be pretty darn yucky—not to mention dangerous. And the gobs scientists discovered recently on the beaches of the typically picturesque Canary Islands certainly fits the bill.

Plastitar—or a combination of microplastics and tar balls—is a pollution conglomerate discovered two years ago by researchers based across the Canary Islands. In recently published research, they described how they found the icky substance on half of the rocks investigated on Tenerife’s Playa Grande as well as areas of El Hierro and Lanzarote in the Atlantic island chain. 

The formations, which look like big squishy black balls littered with colorful plastic sprinkles, result when oil spills washing up on shore. The oil from a spill eventually becomes a tar ball which sticks to the rocky Canary Island shores. That goo captures plastic and debris from waves of ocean almost like “Play-Doh,” lead author Javier Hernández Borges told the Guardian. After time passes, those itty pieces of plastic are permanently wedged in the hardened tar’s crevices. 

Plastitar is only one recently discovered way that marine plastic debris has accrued  into more permanent formations. Plastiglomerates, for example, are types of stone that are made of natural debris and material held together by molten plastic. They were first discovered in Long Beach, California, in 2006. More than 200 samples have since been collected, frequently from Hawaii. Pyroplastics, on the other hand, are made when synthetic  plastics are burned—and they easily escape detection because they so closely resemble pebbles or rock fragments. Plasticrusts are the eerie effect of melted plastic that covers rocky surfaces, more or less becoming a geological marker of our  plastic-loving period. Finally, anthropoquinas are sedimentary rocks that have become cemented with human trash like bottle caps, earrings, and plastic fragments.

[Related: Microplastics are everywhere. Here’s what that means for our health.]

The effect of plastic on human health is still a bit of a mystery—but we now know that microplastics are pretty much everywhere. They can be found in the air, drinking water, food, and even human blood. Some potential risks of microplastic exposure are metabolic disturbances, neurotoxicity, and increased cancer risk. The pollution can delay how aquatic life grows and cause it to act abnormally. 

It’s much clearer that oil spills and tar can severely hurt wildlife, by physically harming animals or leaving chemicals and pollution on habitats and breeding grounds for years. This makes plastitar a scary combo. 

The combination of tar and plastic materials is a “a double threat to the marine ecosystem with unknown environmental consequences,” the study authors write. Because marine organisms eat plastics , plastitar might cause “intestinal blockage, internal injuries, oxidative stress and damage, inflammatory responses, among other important issues.”they warn. .

Not to mention how hot these balls of tar can get. Standing on asphalt on a summer day can immediately make your temperature soar, and having a similar dark material line the coasts could have disastrous consequences, Hernández Borges notes in an interview with Wired.

Meanwhile, the world is producing twice as much plastic as it was two decades ago and four times as much as 30 years ago. Only 9 percent of plastic waste properly gets recycled. Around 3 million tons of microplastics are released each year into the environment, along with over 5 million tons of larger chunks of plastic that may eventually break down into microplastics. We even know now that there is a global plastic cycle that mimics natural cycles like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

The post Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches appeared first on Popular Science.

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This gallery was originally published in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences, and media partner of the BigPicture Photography Competition.

In a time when biodiversity is taking hits from all sides, whether it be climate change, human development, or pestilence, the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition both celebrates wildlife and brings the many issues it faces to the fore. This year’s winners and finalists span everything from the “insect apocalypse” to predator-people conflicts to fascinating mating behaviors. Here are our favorites from the judges’ savvy choices (we’ll never turn down the chance to share a good bee orgy). —PopSci editors

[Related: 7 animal mating rituals that make horseshoe crab orgies look tame]

Aquatic Life Finalist (above)

Three days before the full moon last July, photographer Tony Wu dove into a bay off the coast of Kagoshima, Japan, in search of a starry goby (Asterropteryx semipunctata)—a golf-tee-sized fish with bright, pin-prick dots scattered across its dark skin. He had been hoping to photograph the pretty, star-studded fish for weeks, and he expected to spend his whole dive focused on that task. But shortly after he spotted his first goby, Wu got sidetracked by a different stellar scene: A Leach’s sea star (Leiaster leachi) raised itself up onto the tips of its arms and began to spawn, shooting a Milky Way of sperm into the surrounding seawater.

Like many marine invertebrates, starfish reproduce by broadcast spawning—releasing large quantities of sperm and eggs into the water column within a short period of time. To maximize the chances of fertilization for these gametes, they synchronize their efforts with neighboring members of their species, using temperature, light, and lunar cycle cues to guide their timing.

Wu watched this particular starfish spawn for at least an hour. “At some point, I realized that the animal was not sending out gametes willy-nilly,” he says. “It timed its release of sperm for certain moments, perhaps as a reaction to current flow and strength.” As its gametes drifted off into the distance, he reflected on the experience of sharing such an intimate moment with a faceless, spineless creature. “I hope that capturing a dramatic scene depicting this species’ timeless quest for immortality can provide a way for others to see what I see—that we are all the same, despite our outward differences.”

Grand Prize Winner

On a warm spring morning in South Texas, a female cactus bee (Diadasia rinconis) emerged from her small, cylindrical nest in the ground, rising like ash from a chimney. Almost instantly, she was swarmed by dozens of patrolling males, their tawny bodies forming a buzzing, roiling “mating ball” as they vied for a chance to copulate with her. After a tumultuous 20 seconds or so, the ball of bees dissipated, and the female flew off—a single, victorious male holding tight to her back.

Because they make individual nests rather than living in a collective hive, cactus bees are considered solitary. However, the designation is somewhat misleading; the bees nest in close proximity to one another, and their mating aggregations can number in the thousands—a spectacular, highly charged sight for any lucky human observers. “Mating in the bee balls often takes place on extremely hot, bare ground,” says entomologist Avery Russell from Missouri State University, “so the grappling males might risk cooking themselves [to mate].” They also face stiff competition. “The sex ratio in this species is often wildly lopsided, with single females emerging occasionally, dozens of patrolling males finding her in seconds, and potentially thousands of males flying overhead,” he adds.

Mating aggregations only last for a little more than a week, so photographer Karine Aigner was fortunate to capture this particular mating ball. While rarely noticed or documented by humans, these native bees play a critical role as pollinators, especially for prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) cacti, a critical source of sustenance for many species in the dry American Southwest.

Terrestrial Life Finalist

In the pre-dawn hours of a cold winter morning in the French Alps, photographer Jose Grandío lay still in the snow, waiting for a stoat (Mustela erminea) to emerge from its burrow. He had spent the past few days waiting in the same manner, without payoff, but his patience was about to be rewarded. Shortly after the sun rose, the stoat climbed out into the pale, winter light and proceeded to put on a spectacular show. “He seemed to be playing with the fresh snow that had just fallen, making sudden jumps and crawling through the snow,” recalls Grandío.

Scientists have witnessed stoats engaging in similar displays on many occasions, and they refer to the behavior as dancing, although their opinions are divided about what motivates the leaps and twists. Sometimes, the dances are performed in front of a rabbit or large bird in a seeming attempt to confuse or distract potential prey—a strategy that has proven effective in a number of documented interactions. At other times, as was the case in the display Grandío photographed, there is no prey animal in sight, and the dance seems simply to be an expression of exuberance. A third hypothesis is that the dances are actually an involuntary response to a parasitic infection, since stoats are known to be hosts for cranial parasitic worms. Whatever the interpretation of the behavior, one thing scientists have learned is that when associated with an attack on a large prey species, these displays reduce the risk of injury to the stoat—likely because they provide an element of surprise. Such a benefit could eventually reinforce the behavior, whether it was originally intentional or not.

In this particular case, the stoat leapt and danced for about half an hour before returning to his den for the rest of the day. While the impetus for his energetic display is unclear, Grandío can’t help thinking it was “something like a game for him,” a joyful response to the pleasure of pristine snow.

Human/Nature Finalist

Two creatures face off through a woven-wire fence: one predator the other prey; one wild, the other, essentially, manufactured for our use. The moment is a manifestation of two worlds colliding, with no clear indication of which will prevail. Such images, of the natural world intersecting with one so heavily impacted by humans, have become a near obsession for Mexico-based photographer Fernando Constantino Martínez Belmar. And few places in the world present as many opportunities to capture the conflict first-hand as Martínez Belmar’s native Yucatán Peninsula, home to both the elusive jaguar (Panthera onca) and one of Mexico’s fastest-growing tourist hotspots, the “Maya Riviera.”

The largest predators in the neotropics, jaguars require a significant amount of space in order to find sufficient prey—the average home range of a male jaguar spans some 100 square kilometers (38 square miles). Inevitably, as human populations have expanded into the jaguar’s habitat, the species’ distribution has shrunk by more than half. Scientists are now working to identify conservation strategies and priorities to best support the remaining population. In Mexico, one of the most important regions of focus is the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula, which is home to nearly half of the country’s 4,000 – 5,000 jaguars. Here, the cats are thriving in two protected areas: Yum Balam on the northern tip of the peninsula and Sian Ka’an some 225 kilometers (140 miles) to the south. Between the two reserves sit Cancún, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum.

Until recently, scientists had little hope that a viable ecological corridor could exist between the two protected areas, given the heavily developed land that links them. However, a radio tracking study published earlier this year suggests that jaguars are not only using this corridor—they are establishing home ranges along its route. While the cats prefer forested or secondary growth areas over profusely disturbed habitat, they are capable of capitalizing on opportunities presented by human development. One male, for instance, centered his home range on a landfill, where he found a plentiful source of prey in the form of feral dogs and other animals that scavenged at the site. It’s not an ideal scenario, but the resilience demonstrated by these individuals provides hope that with thoughtful planning around future development in the area, the Yucatán Peninsula’s jaguars can continue to thrive.

Art of Nature Winner

When photographer Pål Hermansen walked outside one brisk March morning in Ski, Norway and looked back at his house, he was dismayed. One of the outdoor lights had been left on all night, and within its bright shell, he saw the dark stains of dozens of insects, drawn to their death by the accidental beacon. As he cleaned out the fixture, Hermansen was inspired to photograph the collection of insects, hoping to shine a light on “the hidden creatures that are a foundation for our lives—creatures that we easily ignore.”

Insects are the most diverse group of organisms on Earth—scientists estimate that up to 30 million species currently exist. They are also staggeringly abundant, comprising more than half of the biomass of all animals on the planet. However, while insects still far outnumber other groups of animals, their populations have plummeted in recent decades. A 2019 paper analyzing the status and causes of these declines used the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” to summarize the crisis; climate change, deforestation, agricultural conversion, urbanization, pollution, and introduced species have all taken a toll on the planet’s insects.

While too often viewed as pests, insects perform a number of valuable functions for humans, including crop pollination, soil aeration, nutrient recycling, and disease control. They are also a critical food source for a wide variety of other species, many of which we also rely upon. As insect numbers dwindle, the potential for significant ecological and economic consequences grows. But a deeper public understanding of the decline and its ramifications may help to turn the trend around. The artfully arranged contents of Hermansen’s unintentional light trap serve as a reminder of both the plight—and the value—of these oft-unheralded inhabitants of our planet.

Aquatic Life Finalist

Each year, from August to early October, Atlantic goliath groupers (Epinephelus itajara) gather off the east coast of Florida to spawn. On dark nights when the moon is new, refrigerator-sized males produce low-frequency booming sounds by contracting their swim bladders, calling other groupers to congregate around shipwrecks or rocky reefs. Fifty years ago, more than 100 fish might answer the call. But by 1990, the slow-moving species had been fished almost to extinction, and mating aggregations were often reduced to just a handful of fish. That year, goliath groupers were protected under both federal and state fishing bans, and the population slowly began to recover. While Florida’s mating aggregations have not yet attained the numbers local fishermen recall from the 1970s, it’s now common to see 20 to 40 groupers together during the breeding season.

Photographer and coral reef ecologist Tom Shlesinger has witnessed this spectacle many times in recent years, but swimming with these 800-pound gentle giants never gets old. During one dive last September, he watched, captivated, as a large male swam calmly through a huge, swirling school of round scads (Decapterus punctatus). “It looked like he was swimming through a tunnel of fish,” Shlesinger recalls, “and I immediately knew this was the perfect moment to capture a unique perspective.”

Shlesinger cherished the experience, partly because he knows the species is once again in jeopardy. In March, despite heavy opposition from scientists who study the species, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted to reopen recreational fishing for goliath groupers beginning in 2023. Under the new plan, up to 200 permits will be sold each year for between $150 and $500, each of which will allow for the harvest of an adult grouper.

Goliath grouper experts Felicia Coleman and Chris Koenig from Florida State University have produced a litany of reasons why the decision is ill-advised, not least of which is that the population isn’t currently as stable as it might seem. While the number of juvenile groupers has increased in recent years, the number of breeding adults has actually declined, likely due to poaching and habitat degradation. Moreover, from an economic perspective, goliath groupers are worth much more alive than dead. As the mating aggregations have grown, a thriving ecotourism business has sprung up around them, generating revenue that far exceeds the price of the fishing permits. Additionally, goliath groupers prey on species that would otherwise eat juvenile lobsters; healthy populations of the fish have been linked to more robust lobster harvests.

“Opening the fishery for this iconic species under the current circumstances seems quite shortsighted,” Shlesinger laments. There is hope, though, in what scientists have learned since 1990—that if measures are adopted to protect the species, it is capable of recovering.

Winged Life Winner

Photographer Sitaram May used to think of wildlife photography as something he did while traveling. But when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, he started to pay more attention to the wildlife in his own backyard. “One night, sitting on my balcony, I was looking out at a custard apple tree, and bats were coming frequently to eat the fruits,” he recalls. “The whole world was cursing bats, but I decided to observe them.” May spent three weeks watching the fruit bats, eventually learning to predict their behavior and identify gaps in the tree canopy where they were likely to make an entrance. At one such opening, he managed to capture this shot, perfectly framing the bat within a ring of lush, green foliage.

India is home to 12 species of fruit bats, all of which play a critical role in seed dispersal and forest regeneration. Because they are significantly larger than their Neotropical relatives, Indian fruit bats feed on a much wider range of flowers and fruits—from small eucalyptus flowers to large mangos and guavas—and are often responsible for the dispersal of old-growth and canopy tree species. A recent survey of their feeding habits revealed that the three most common species alone aid in the pollination and seed dispersal of more than 114 species of plants, many of which are economically, ecologically, and medicinally valuable.

While May developed a deep appreciation for fruit bats during his backyard observation sessions, the animals are often regarded as pests. Despite their ecological importance, 10 of the 12 species are classified as vermin under India’s Wildlife Protection Act and can be indiscriminately killed. Relatively little is known about fruit bat population levels in India, but surveys conducted by ecologist Shahroukh Mistry suggest that most species are dramatically declining. In the past, the animals lived in large colonies that often numbered in the thousands; today the average colony size is 500 or fewer. Additionally, more than 70 percent of the roosts Mistry visited faced some sort of threat, including deforestation and other human disturbances. To continue performing their valuable pollination and seed-dispersal roles in India, fruit bats need stronger protection—something a number of local conservation organizations are now lobbying the government to enact. 

Human/Nature Winner

While traveling in Romania’s Carpathian region several years ago, photographer Bence Máté came across a horrific scene. At a spawning site for common frogs (Rana temporaria), hundreds of frogs (and several toads) lay dead in the water, some still grasping partners, their hind legs notably missing. Poachers had plucked the amphibians from the pool as they attempted to breed, cut off their back legs to feed the frog-leg trade, and thrown them back into the water to die a lingering death among their spawn. “It was the cruelty that shocked me most,” says Máté, “but also the harm caused to local populations.”

Every year, millions of frogs are traded around the world as a source of food. The trade is fueled not just by the collection of wild animals on a local scale, as Máté witnessed in Romania, but also by industrial commercial farming in China and other countries. While poaching can imperil local populations, commercial farming actually poses an even greater threat to amphibians around the world. “Mass farming and international trade to supply the frog-leg industry are spreading deadly diseases and contributing to the current amphibian extinction crisis,” says herpetologist and wildlife trade expert Jonathan Kolby. “Two types of pathogens in particular, amphibian chytrid fungus and ranavirus, are being spread far and wide by the trade in frog legs and have already driven dozens of population declines and extinctions.”

If frog legs are to stay on the menu for humans, improved welfare and disease control measures are urgently needed to better protect amphibians globally.

The post 8 award-winning photos of nature’s stranger things appeared first on Popular Science.

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Stationed inside a cavernous wooden building in San Diego, California, mere strides from the Pacific surf, the world’s first ocean-atmosphere simulator rumbled to life. With the flick of a switch and a rush of sounds, meter-high waves began to flow through a 120-foot-long tank rigged up to an array of sensors, lights, and computers.

The Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator, or SOARS, mimics the interaction of water, weather, salinity, chemistry and microbial marine life at the sea surface in a laboratory setting. Designed by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, this miniature biome can generate sizable waves, create hurricane-force winds, control air and water temperature to replicate polar and tropical conditions, and churn up phytoplankton blooms with a wide array of species. Additionally, SOARS allows researchers to test variables like greenhouse gasses and other air pollutants for studies on future climate scenarios. 

With the potential to match and reproduce the physics, biology, and chemistry across the seven seas, as well as across time itself, the simulator aims to serve as a catalyst for interdisciplinary, ocean-related exploration, the team behind it says. More specifically, it has the potential to deepen our understanding of the interactions between the sea and atmosphere—a layer that plays an outsized role in the planet’s functions. 

The SIO Hydraulics Laboratory, which houses SOARS, was built in 1964 for precisely this kind of large experimental apparatus. Throughout the decades, it has stored a variety of wave channels and basins, flow tanks, and a more simplistic wind channel. As equipment ages and is decommissioned, the university cedes the space to more advanced instruments, such as the new simulator. 

“SOARS is totally unique and a first of its kind,” says Dale Stokes, Scripps oceanographer and co-principal investigator of SOARS. “There are other wave channels or wind tunnels around, but nothing with the full environmental control and complexity that SOARS has … as well as its capability to replicate the sea surface anywhere on the planet.” 

[Related: Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is building a network of ocean floor research stations]

The machine, which took five years to complete, was primarily funded by a $2.8-million grant from The National Science Foundation and constructed by the wind tunnel manufacturing company Aerolab. Paul Vasilescu, vice president at Aerolab and principal engineer for SOARS, has seldom been so impressed by one of his inventions.

“We started with a clean slate entirely developing this from scratch as far as the overall design,” says Vasilescu. “It’s definitely exciting to be able to come up with this machine and to really enable the type of research that [Scripps is] going to be able to use it for.” 

The 36,000-gallon saltwater tank is filled straight from San Diego’s La Jolla Cove. It features a large paddle that generates waves on command, and is illuminated by both adjustable skylights and vivid bulbs that simulate natural light hitting the ocean’s surface. 

When it comes to marine ecosystems, what happens on the surface of the water is just as important as what happens below it. Studying the air-sea boundary, where the atmosphere and ocean intersect, was the main motive in crafting the simulator. As one of the most chemically and physically dynamic environments in the world, the air-sea boundary is essential to life in the oceans—and everywhere else. 

“It is a special place, an intricate dance between water and air,” says Grant Deane, Scripps oceanographer and co-principal investigator of SOARS. “Because the air-sea boundary covers 71 percent of Earth, what happens there is tied up into the fate of the planet. Roughly 90 percent of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gasses and one-third of all carbon dioxide that is released across the planet goes through the boundary into the ocean. It has a very, very important impact on weather and climate. ”

As water and other particles evaporate from the air-sea boundary, they condense to control the formation of clouds or vapor. This water then cycles back to the ground through precipitation, sustaining plants, microbes, animals, and humans. 

Previously, marine biologists and other scientists would conduct their research on the air-sea boundary on ships and complex computers. But studying subtle chemical and physical dynamics on the water’s surface at the mercy of Mother Nature can be very difficult—not to mention expensive. While the SOARS team says the simulator is not meant to be a replacement for oceangoing exploration, it can act as a bridge between the lab and the wild elements. 

Timothy Bertram, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Wisconsin, is one of many scientists who are eager to both see SOARS in action and contribute to its upcoming investigation of the sea-air boundary.

“Environmental boundaries are some of the most fascinating areas for research, as mass and energy is exchanged between compartments of the Earth system,” says Bertram. “However, studying processes at these interfaces is notoriously hard to do in a systematic and controlled way. SOARS will generate interest in a wide number of fields and permit cross-disciplinary studies that are often hard to orchestrate.”

One of the biggest opportunities the simulator offers is a deep dive on what’s happening at the poles. In Arctic regions, the air-sea boundary includes ice sheets, which rely on both oceanic and atmospheric stability. With SOARS’s more frigid settings, researchers will be able to study the interactions between melting ice and sea level rise, as well as the transfer of microorganisms from the water to the air. Groups interested in studying the Antarctic Ocean can also switch the machine into polar mode, dropping the saltwater temperature to 34 degrees Fahrenheit and wind temperature to -2 degrees Fahrenheit. 

“We can turn the knobs and use it like a time machine,” says Stokes. “We can make it simulate conditions that we had in the recent past or we can, say, dial up the CO₂ levels and look at what will happen to these microorganisms in the future.”

By providing access to the simulator to chemists, biologists, oceanographers, and more, Scripps is hoping that SOARS will serve not only as an innovative research facility, but as an inspirational melting pot for the future of science.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

Within the next few weeks, Deane, Stokes and Vasilescu will work with outside researchers and labs to configure the machine for a diverse range of experiments. The simulator is already slated to get a wind-power upgrade to better mimic hurricanes and tropical storms. This could lead to improving building codes for structures in the real world to help them withstand extreme weather events that are becoming more prevalent over time. 

“While there is no other thing like SOARS on the planet, we are really hoping that other countries will want to build one of their own,” says Deane. “The ocean is a very complex system, and it doesn’t care whether we divide ourselves into these different parts or fields. We can do a lot of work with [our simulator], but we can do even more if this effort is reproduced and collaborative.” 

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Shrouded in darkness on a south Florida beach, I crouched about 20 feet behind a loggerhead sea turtle, waiting. I watched in silence, eyes straining in the weak red light of my headlamp, as she deposited one soft, ping-pong-ball-sized egg after another onto a quickly growing pile. I was witnessing the perilous propagation of an endangered species—a rare and spectacular sight.

And perilous might be an understatement: once hatchlings emerge from the sand, only 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 will actually make it to the Gulf Stream where they feast on algae, seaweed, and jellyfish as they grow into adults. Of the millions of eggs laid each year along Florida coasts, only several hundred turtles are likely to make it to sexual maturity.

That’s because the hatchlings that make it to the water without getting picked off by sea birds or led astray by distracting lights on the beach may succumb to boating or fishing accidents or trash and pollution in waterways. Given all those risks, it’s important to offer sea turtles the best chance of survival from the get-go, and you can start by protecting nests and hatchlings on North America’s beaches this summer.

When is sea turtle nesting season?

The time of year that sea turtles nest, lay eggs, and hatch depends on the species and where in North America you are. Loggerheads and green sea turtle nests are abundant in Florida, but loggerheads also crawl ashore from Alabama to North Carolina. Similarly, green turtles will lay eggs in Hawaii, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Kemp’s ridley sea turtle—a critically endangered species—is more likely to be found in Texas and Mexico. Leatherbacks primarily nest in Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean, while hawksbill sea turtles mainly reproduce in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

For most species, April to October are active times for nesting and hatching—almost perfectly coinciding with prime beach-going season. Take the loggerhead, for example: When a female is ready to nest, she slowly heaves her 300-pound body up the beach until she feels dry sand under her chin, sometimes going far beyond the high tide line. She then digs a 2-foot deep hole with her back flippers, lays an average of 120 eggs, refills the hole with sand, and heads back to the water. The whole process might take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, depending on the species, and female turtles will do it every two weeks, for an average total of four to six nests.

But if a turtle spots you on her way up the beach or while digging, she may stop and retreat to the ocean. That’s a problem, because if she tries and fails more than a couple of times to build a nest, she’ll give up and deposit her clutch of eggs in the ocean where they won’t hatch. And because sea turtle species are endangered, some critically, every nest is crucial for their recovery, says Mary Kay Skoruppa, US Fish and Wildlife Service sea turtle coordinator for the Texas coast, speaking specifically of the Kemp’s ridley.

Turn your lights off

While most adult sea turtles avoid bright light instinctually, hatchlings are attracted to artificial light, explains Amber Kuehn, a marine biologist in charge of South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island Sea Turtle Patrol. When baby turtles emerge, they know to look for the moon reflecting off the ocean, lighting their way to the water. But if there’s a bright porch light or lantern nearby, they’ll scurry toward it instead, resulting in almost certain death.

At a beachfront property, turn the outside lights off at night and use dark-sky-approved fixtures that are downward-facing and shielded on the beach side of the house, fitted with warm-colored bulbs. Interior light shouldn’t be pouring onto the beach, either, explains Kuehn, so consider tinting your windows or using light-blocking curtains or blinds. In many places, including Hilton Head, there are even municipal codes detailing turtle-protection directives.

Sandcastles and holes, for example, can trap turtles or block their paths to and from the water. It only takes a hole a few inches deep to ensnare a hatchling, likely killing it. So whether you’re building or digging, make sure to level the sand before you leave.

It should go without saying, but don’t leave any trash on the beach, either, no matter how small. Plastic straws are notorious for the risks they pose to sea turtles, but plastic bags, fishing line, candy wrappers, and really any type of garbage can endanger them as a tangling or choking hazard.

If your pup is accompanying you to the beach, keep it on a leash, especially at night. Dogs can easily injure sea turtles or scare them away from a nesting area.

In Texas, the Kemp’s ridley nests during the day, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier to see: after a female fills in her nest, her back will be covered with camouflaging sand.

What to do if you spot a turtle nesting

If you happen to be nearby when a sea turtle is making her way up the beach, it’s important not to give her a reason to abandon her mission. So keep your distance—50 feet is a good rule of thumb for pedestrians; 100 feet for motorized vehicles, according to Skoruppa. You should also lower your voice, and absolutely do not block her path whether she’s headed out of or into the water.

“Enjoy the moment and consider yourself blessed,” Skoruppa says. “It’s a magnificent thing to witness.”

Once the turtle is gone, mark the nest site by laying pieces of driftwood or other beach debris in a large circle around the area so biologists can find the nest during patrol. Just don’t disturb the nest itself once the animal has departed. Not only could you hurt the eggs inside, but it’s a federal offense.

Finally, call a local agency to alert them to the nest’s location. Most beaches will have signs with contact information, but if not, a good bet is to ring your state’s wildlife agency or the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

We hope you have a safe, enjoyable visit to the beach this season, but make sure the species who rely on it do, too.

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Memories shape who we are—and who we will become. Our past helps us figure out what to do in increasingly stressful or confusing situations, and the more experience we have the better equipped we are to make the next move. 

But people and other living things aren’t the only things with memory. Oceans, in a way, remember too. Ocean memory, a relatively new term, has hit the headlines recently as new research out this month in Science has demonstrated how the ocean is “losing its memory.” How that loss, which occurs thanks to human caused climate change, will alter the future is still up in the air.

Here’s what you need to know about the concept, and what its loss could mean for the future of the oceans and the planet. 

What is ocean memory?

While ocean memory might have a nice ring to it, a more technical term would be the “persistence of ocean temperature,” says Daisy Hui Shi, a postdoctoral researcher at California’s Farallon Institute and an author of the new report.  Because oceans have a tremendous ability to absorb heat, temperatures change slower than the air or the atmosphere. You may have experienced that personally if you’ve dived into the ocean on a hot day only to be surprised by brutally chilly waters. 

A property called “heat capacity” is the reason this exists. Basically, the ocean has a much larger heat capacity than land, which means it takes a whole lot more work to get the oceans to heat up. You can see how ocean temps trail terrestrial ones seasonally as well as over longer periods of time. 

[Related: Deep-sea internet cables could help sense distant earthquake rumbles.]

In fact, in 2019 researchers found that the deep Pacific Ocean still lags centuries behind the rest of the ocean in terms of temperature—for example, the deepest parts of the ocean were still reacting to the entry into the Little Ice Age, which happened several hundred years ago. Basically, while some parts of the ocean are seeing changes due to the warming of the planet, the deepest corners still “remember” a much cooler era and could even potentially be cooling still. 

This memory, or the persistence of the temperature in the ocean, is crucial because it acts as a source of predictability for the entire climate system, including oceans, land, and the atmosphere. The memory of the ocean, the researchers find, is largely controlled by the ocean’s top layer. This layer is where the ocean interfaces with the atmosphere. Because the seawater is so close to the air, the wind is able to mix it up, creating roughly  uniform salinity and temperature for tens of meters deep (sometimes reaching over 500 meters deep in the winter in subpolar regions). 

The deeper mixed layers have a high heat content, which means they have a higher level of “thermal inertia.” There, the water even more slowly changes to match the temperature of its surroundings. This acts as a cushion—protecting the deepest, most “memory” intensive parts of the ocean from changes that might disrupt it.

But with climate change, this cushion-like level could be shrinking. And without it, storing those long-term climatic memories is harder and less predictable.

What could happen to ocean memory with climate change?

As the planet heats up, this mixed level is disappearing. “The layer is becoming shallower and shallower as a response to the warming because the ocean becomes more stable,” Shi says. When the mixed layer becomes less mixed, it’s an indication that the zone has become shallower. A shallower mixed zone leads to overall reduction of the memory globally, she adds. 

[Related: The world now has a fifth ocean.]

Shi and the other authors looked at models to determine year-to-year changes in ocean memory. What they found was that the ocean appeared to have some sort of “amnesia.” The persistence of the ocean temperature year by year, in essence, is becoming more unpredictable. By the end of the 21st century, the authors predict that ocean memory will decrease throughout most of the world, and even completely vanish  in some areas. The most pronounced changes are expected around the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and waters near Southeast Asia, according to the paper.

Of course, other factors may be at play with reduced memory, like “ocean currents and changes in the energy exchange between the atmosphere and ocean,” co-author Robert Jnglin Wills, a research scientist at University of Washington in Seattle said in a release. Still, the “shoaling of the mixed layer depth and resulting memory decline happens in all regions of the globe, and this makes it an important factor to consider for future climate predictions,” he adds. 

What reduced memory could mean is increasingly unpredictable events, like ocean heat waves. While marine heat waves can sometimes be predicted up to a year ahead of the event actually happening, a shrunken memory can reduce researchers’  ability to predict what the ocean is going to look like. This could also have implications for fisheries, since so much of the industry relies on predicting the future status of the ocean. And, of course, the ocean affects weather, temperature, and precipitation on land, which could make for even more unpredictability.

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2021 was a record-breaking year for signs of the climate crisis, according to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization. 

The WMO just released its latest State of the Global Climate 2021 report on Wednesday, which evaluates humanity’s global impact on climate across six domains: atmosphere, land, ocean, Earth’s frozen water called the cryosphere, extreme events, and risks and solutions. Four indicators of global warming—greenhouse gases, sea level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification—set new records last year. 

Concentrations of carbon dioxide reached a new global high in 2020, at 413.2 parts per million, or 149 percent of the pre-industrial level. And data shows these levels continued to increase in 2021 and early 2022. Global mean sea level has been rising on average 4.5 millimeters per year, and in 2021 sea levels rose to the highest they’ve been in modern history. Warmth and heat have been penetrating deeper regions of the oceans, and the ocean’s pH levels are unprecedentedly low, meaning seawater is more acidic than ever. 

The agency also writes in the report that the past seven years were the warmest on record. This is in spite of La Niña in 2021, which typically has a cooling effect in the Pacific. 

[Related: Climate change is blowing our predictions out of the water, says the IPCC]

“Today’s State of the Climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption. Fossil fuels are a dead end—environmentally and economically,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the UN, told The Guardian. “The only sustainable future is a renewable one. The good news is that the lifeline is right in front of us. Wind and solar are readily available and, in most cases, cheaper than coal and other fossil fuels. If we act together, the renewable energy transformation can be the peace project of the 21st century.”

The world is currently not on track to reach the Paris Agreement’s targets of 1.5 to 2°C of warming. The worsening state of the global climate also means that we urgently need to invest in better systems to detect and predict extreme weather events. 

“It’s been shown by several reports that one of the most powerful ways to adapt to climate change is to invest in early warning services,” WMO’s Secretary General Petteri Taalas said in a video statement. “By having better early warning services we can avoid both economic losses and human losses.”

The WMO report was written to complement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. Both documents will be used in the upcoming negotiations during COP27, the United Nations climate change conference, which will take place in Egypt in November. 

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This article was originally featured on Outdoor Life.

Three environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit due to the high number of manatee deaths last year. The lawsuit focuses on the poor water quality in Florida, and alleges that the EPA isn’t following or enforcing water-quality standards set in 2009. It pushes for the EPS to re-engage talks about the Indian River Lagoon with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The lagoon sees a high number of manatee deaths in the state.

“This failure harms manatees, green sea turtles, loggerhead sea turtles, smalltooth sawfish and other ESA-listed species that depend on the health of the ecosystem of the Indian River Lagoon, thereby decreasing plaintiffs’ members’ opportunities to observe and enjoy them in their natural habitats,” the lawsuit states, according to CL Tampa Bay. Two of the three plaintiffs, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife, are anti-hunting organizations. The third plaintiff is the Save the Manatee Club.

This new lawsuit is the second brought by the groups to federal court. In February of this year, a suit contends the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Endangered Species Act by not taking final action on a 2008 petition to revise a critical habitat designation for manatees.

The lawsuits aren’t the only recent news out of Florida regarding water quality. The state will invest $30 million to save manatees and improve water quality thanks to a budget passed in March. Governor Ron DeSantis announced his support for the funding on May 2 to save the state’s well-known marine animal, saying this was a “record investment in manatee care and protection.” While the state already had money going towards this cause, this new budget will increase that by $17 million. 

“This historic funding will support important restoration efforts across the state to benefit our manatees and Florida’s natural environment,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “My administration will continue working to find new and innovative ways to support our native species, like the manatee, so that the generations to come can experience Florida’s natural resources.”

This budget will split the $30 million in the following ways. Twenty million will go to enhance and expand the network of manatee acute care facilities, restore access to springs and provide habitat restoration in key areas. It will also expand manatee recovery efforts and implement pilot projects. 

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will receive $5.3 million to expand manatee mortality and response efforts. Manatee acute care facilities and research, rescue, and conservation activities will get $4.7 million, while $160,000 will go to increasing aerial surveys in the state. 

“Today’s announcement is continued evidence of the Governor and Legislature’s commitment to water quality in our state, which is essential to the health of our environment, our economy, and our fish and wildlife,” said DEP Secretary Shawn Hamilton.

The situation with manatees in the state of Florida is dire. As of April 22, at least 527 manatees died so far this year. Last year the total number of manatees that died was 1,101, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. That is the highest since the state started keeping records.

At the heart of the problem is the state’s water crisis. With the state adding millions of residents over the last two generations, landscape-level development skyrocketed. 

This drained much of the swampland to transform it into areas for oranges, sugarcane, and cattle. Kissimmee River was straightened so it would run faster. A dike raised the water level of Lake Okeechobee to support the drainage and development of residential property in the south. Much of Orlando was paved over and coastlines were built up with high-rise condos. 

Additionally, St. Lucie Canal brought barges and fishing boats across the state. It also dumped billions of gallons of freshwater into Indian River Lagoon which dramatically transformed the ecosystem and led to the situation the state has now, where algal blooms cause manatees and other wildlife to dye out. 

Algal blooms in key areas wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Those blooms leave manatees and other animals in the waters without enough seagrass to eat year-round. Algal blooms are a major problem in all 50 states, according to the EPA. These blooms can produce dangerous toxins, create dead zones in the water, and dramatically impact water quality overall. This funding will certainly help the programs working to save manatees, but it will also help marine ecosystems across the state. 

Sea grass also diminished across waterways in Florida. This important plant species is part of the healthy ecosystem in Florida’s waterways, but with the influx of fresh water, the grass can’t grow. This has a ripple effect on the fish species in those waters, which threatens an $8-billion-a-year sportfishing economy in the state. That might seem like a lot, but sportfishing is going up against numerous state interests and industries, including the sugar cane industry. So, while manatees might be at the epicenter of these lawsuits and funding, the whole state’s water quality is at stake here.

“The state is focusing on short and long-term science-based strategies to improve water quality, including expanded monitoring and investment in long-term water quality improvement projects to reduce the amount of nutrients going into our waterways,” said Hamilton. “With the historic levels of support under this administration, we have unprecedented resources to address challenging water quality concerns throughout the state.”

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Small patches of tropical reefs that endure despite punishing marine heat waves could hold clues to protecting the world’s corals, a new analysis suggests.

Scientists took aerial surveys of Hawaiian reefs before and after a major heat wave in 2019, and found that corals at certain sites fared better than their neighbors. These so-called refugia lost up to 40 percent fewer corals despite facing similar temperatures. A number of variables may explain their success, including distance from human settlements, the researchers reported on May 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’re trying to understand where those [refugia] are and why they’re there,” says Greg Asner, a coauthor of the study and director of the Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science in Hilo, Hawaii. “From a conservation point of view, these are tiny points of light, like little arks of biodiversity that are already in the ocean that need protection.”

Climate change has made heat waves more common in the sea. Prolonged exposure to these toasty conditions poses a serious threat to corals. When the surrounding water becomes too warm, the stressed-out corals undergo bleaching: The beneficial microscopic algae that  dwell within the corals are expelled, leaving them a ghostly white color. If the heat wave continues long enough, the corals will ultimately die. 

To better understand why some corals are more resilient than others, Asner and his collaborators tracked coral mortality over 21,773 hectares (84 square miles) of reefs surrounding six Hawaiian Islands. The researchers flew over the reefs in January 2019, six months before a marine heat wave descended on the archipelago. The team then repeated the survey in January 2020 to find out how the corals had weathered the disturbance. 

The researchers used a technique called imaging spectroscopy to analyze the molecular composition of the corals, which allowed them to distinguish living corals from deceased ones. The proteins, chlorophyll, and carbon compounds measured in living corals and their algal denizens are distinctive, Asner says. Once the coral dies, it becomes covered by macroalgae, which have a molecular composition more akin to terrestrial plants. 

Most previous studies have focused on bleached corals, Asner says. However, not all of these ailing corals will perish. “The thing we really need is to know where the corals are dying, not just getting sick, so that we can start to formulate conservation and management planning around those who die and those who survive,” he says.

After the heat wave, the reefs Asner and his team mapped lost an average of 26.1 percent of their live corals, covering about 6.3 percent of the seafloor. The waters surrounding the islands of Lanai, Hawaii, and Kahoolawe, which were hit particularly hard by the marine heat wave, lost the greatest proportion of live corals. 

However, the researchers also found that reefs with more abundant coral cover before the heat wave withstood the event better than reefs with sparser coral cover. These zones might be acting as long-term refugia during heat waves, the team wrote. There were several dozen havens that ranged in size from a few acres to several hundred acres, Asner says.

“The good scenarios were mostly in the undeveloped areas with very little pollution and sedimentation or runoff,” he says. These corals were likely healthier when the heat wave struck than those in reefs near residential and agricultural areas. 

“Wastewater treatment in Hawaii is really bad,” Asner says. “We have a lot of human effluent—poop and pee—going into the ocean in certain areas.” Stemming the flow of human waste, pesticides, and other pollutants will be crucial to fortify corals that don’t live in sheltered refugia, he says. 

Additionally, some refugia were located near natural underwater springs fed by cool, fresh groundwater. “In areas where that [freshwater] leaked out, corals did better during the heat wave because it’s like a little thermal blanket,” Asner says. However, he adds, more research is needed on how important these “little protectors” are, and how well they will stand up to increasingly intense marine heat waves in the future.

Even within the refugia, not all corals survived. “There were clearly winners and losers,” Asner says. Some species, such as cauliflower coral, are more vulnerable to rising temperatures than others. And some corals have genetic traits that make them hardier than other members of their species. Tracking which corals within a refugium survive heat waves can give conservationists valuable information for coral breeding and reef restoration efforts, the researchers concluded.

[Related: Coral reefs are dying, but it’s not too late to save them]

Another important next step is to identify refugia in reefs beyond the Hawaiian Islands. How corals in a given area react to rising temperatures will depend on their local oceanic environment, which species are present, and what kinds of pollution and other stressors the reef is facing. Asner and his team hope to begin measuring coral mortality using satellites next summer.

“We’re going to get the global coverage done in this decade, or even in the first half of this decade, but right now I don’t want people to think that Hawaii represents the entire planet,” he says.

The new results echo some patterns that scientists have noted in previous aerial surveys of the Great Barrier Reef, says Terry Hughes, a marine biologist at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville. 

“We also showed that heat exposure…explains why some places lose more corals than others,” Hughes said in an email. “More corals die where the water is hottest the longest, in each bleaching event.” 

His team additionally found that some coral species died at higher rates than others, although these disparities shrank under more extreme conditions. “The winner-loser spectrum is most prominent when bleaching is comparatively mild,” Hughes said. “Even the so-called winners have high losses if the temperatures are high enough.”

Hughes and his colleagues have also tracked coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef after repeated heat waves. Parts of the northern reef escaped bleaching in 1998 and 2002. “Then the north fried in the third mass bleaching event in 2016, and has since bleached again in 2017, 2020 and 2022,” Hughes said. “To identify a refuge, you need to look at its responses to heat stress in multiple bleaching events, to see if that location consistently escapes with little or no damage.”

He cautions that it remains to be seen how the newly-discovered refugia in Hawaii will handle future disruptions.

“It’s premature to regard a location with comparatively smaller losses in one year as a refuge,” Hughes said. “The world is full of former coral reef refuges—places that were comparatively lucky in one bleaching event, only to be hammered in a subsequent one.”

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About 20 miles offshore from Martha’s Vineyard, a yellow robotic buoy is bobbing in place on the water. Like most data-collection buoys, this moored robot is eavesdropping on the world under the waves. But unlike most buoys, which function like floating weather stations, this one from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is listening for whales in the area in real-time. Just this week, it detected the presence of a sei whale and a fin whale. 

That buoy is one out of the many robots deployed by WHOI off of the East Coast and West Coast of the US. These buoys are autonomous platforms tuned into the melodies of a range of different whales: sei whales, fin whales, blue whales, humpback whales, but most notably, right whales, which are critically endangered. 

Right whales play a vital role in the ocean food web. Like other filter feeders, they eat zooplankton and tiny crustaceans, then recycle and redistribute nutrients like iron back into the ocean as they poop. Whales also act as valuable carbon stores, and when they die and sink, their corpses transform into pop-up habitats for critters on the ocean floor. But right whale numbers have been dwindling again since around 2010, despite a slight uptick in population in the early 2000s after commercial whaling laws were revised in the late 1900s. Currently, it’s estimated that there are only 360 of the animals left. The most common causes of right whale deaths are entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes, though it’s suspected that climate change may also become a threat. Other human activities in the ocean that can affect their behaviors include loud, unusual noises such as construction or sonar. 

However, some scientists think that using sea-faring robots to detect the presence of whales could help humans navigate more carefully around them. In March, WHOI announced that it was collaborating with a French shipping company to figure out how to incorporate information from the robots into their business operations.

Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist at WHOI whose lab operates these buoys, along with robotic gliders that can move across the sea to scope out where whales are, says that they’re also working with wind energy companies, NOAA, the US Navy, state agencies, and Canadian researchers on ways to use these tools to reduce the risk of harms to the animals. 

On the West Coast, these buoys help monitor the activity of these large marine mammals as part of the Whale Safe system that maps whale and ship movement off the coast of California.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

How the robots work

Researchers from WHOI are currently employing 7 buoys and 4 gliders to help with this issue. Both the buoys and the gliders share the same basic instruments and software. More specifically, the software is one written by Baumgartner for identifying whale sounds and creating “pitch tracks” that get sent to researchers in his lab. 

The software is conceptually simple and is best explained with an analogy. “Imagine you’re sitting down and you’re playing something on the piano and there’s a magic box on the piano that listens to what you’re playing and spits out the back sheet music of everything you’ve played,” Baumgartner says. “You can take that sheet music to a musician and the musician can read the notes on the sheet music and say you were playing ‘Mary had a Little Lamb.’ The musician didn’t have to hear what you were playing. They just have to read the notes.” 

This system works similarly. In essence, it identifies sounds and creates compact representations of sound from a spectrogram, or “pitch tracks,” which are analogous to notes on a piece of sheet music. Then, it compares those to pitch tracks within an existing library of whale calls. The robots will forward the audio clips that contain whale sounds, according to their analysis, to a dedicated server ashore. The human analysts back at the lab listen to these clips and make the final call on if whales were detected or not as well as put in notes about the features of sound and the species that made it. 

“A lot of whale sounds are distinctive by species. North Atlantic right whales will make different sounds than a fin whale,” Baumgartner says. “The pitch tracks for each of the species are distinctive.”

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification]

The hardware components of the listening system include a computer inside each glider and buoy and an underwater microphone. These robots also have particle motion sensors that can help them get a bearing on which direction the sound is coming from. The computers send the data back to the lab through an iridium satellite system. After coming off the satellite, it goes through processing, and gets put on a central website that displays it publicly. The data is also shared with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The Slocom glider can run for three to four months on a lithium-ion battery, and the buoy runs on a stack of alkaline batteries that last for a year. The moored buoy was designed at the WHOI to be very quiet so the onboard instruments can listen to ocean sounds effectively. 

Both the buoys and the gliders are capable of two-way communication. The gliders make a “phone call home” every two hours to a computer in Baumgartner’s lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It sends not only pitch track data but all kinds of information about how the glider is doing, where it is, and where it thinks it’s going. The researchers can tell it to go somewhere different, or troubleshoot issues that come up onboard.

“The reason we chose different platforms to put this technology in is because sometimes you want to monitor over a relatively small area for a long period of time. Buoys are great for that,” says Baumgartner. “Autonomous vehicles are good if you want to do a much larger area.” 

As it exists today, both robots act like the flashing lights in front of an elementary school that caution cars to slow down. But Baumgartner and his team hopes that these robots could one day tell any ships or possibly fishermen to be careful when whales are around either through email, text, an alert app, government software, or perhaps some other form of communication. 

Near real-time detection

Baumgartner has been studying whales and ocean acoustics for over a decade. Back in 2005, he and his collaborators were deploying gliders with passive acoustic monitoring abilities. But soon, they realized that while collecting sounds and analyzing them months later was good for science, it wasn’t useful for conservation or management. That’s when they started shifting the system to do more real-time detections. Since 2012, they’ve cycled through two versions of the ocean-faring robots, but the software has stayed more or less the same. 

[Related: Why ocean researchers want to create a global library of undersea sounds]

In the US, NOAA has set up a program called slow zones that creates a box around areas where whales have been detected visually or acoustically. It asks mariners going through to slow down to ten knots or less or avoid the area altogether. “This program has been up for about two years. And we’ve had a lot of slow zones over the East Coast over the past winter, triggered because of our buoys and gliders,” Baumgartner says. “We know that when ships go slower, they’re less likely to hit and kill whales.”

Canada, on the other hand, has been closing off areas to fishing and imposing mandatory speed limits when whales are present. 

Without this system, the way to spot traveling whales is to survey the ocean from a plane, drone, or a ship. These methods are useful for getting a visual reading on the whales, and you can tell from photos if they’re entangled, injured, sick, or dead. But flying instruments are often hampered by weather and wind conditions. With imaging, if there are too many white caps on the ocean, it would be impossible to make out a whale. The robots, especially the moored buoy, meanwhile, can listen all the time. But only when and if whales are calling in the area.

Although this technology is helpful, especially for mitigating risks in areas where right whales aren’t very common, it can’t solve this problem alone. “These systems are just a constant reminder. But it’s not enough to let people know that they’re there. Continuing to advocate for stronger protections for right whales based on this information is really important,” says Baumgartner. “There are lots of other solutions that we need to be paying attention to.” 

Robots alone will not save the whales

Canada’s mandatory speed restrictions imposed in areas where whales are present is what Baumgartner says is the more effective approach. “That voluntary-versus-mandatory [distinction] is really important because compliance with mandatory ship speed restrictions is actually quite good. The compliance with voluntary slow downs is quite bad,” he says. 

Additionally, Baumgartner and his team are thinking about marine industries can apply the information the robots supply. One problem they’re still trying to solve is who to get this information to. Because when a ship wants to come on shore, it needs to be on time to unload, have longshoremen scheduled to be in place, and have truckers ready to receive the containers. “That’s a business problem that the captain will not solve alone. Who do you provide this information to?” says Baumgartner. “Do you provide it to the captain, do you provide it to the pilots, the company, schedulers and business planners, or to the people who arrange logistics on shore at the port, the Coast Guard so they can notify ships?” Their project with the French shipping company, CMA CGM Group, is aimed at finding an answer to that question. 

Meanwhile, offshore wind companies, which fund the operations of some of Baumgartner’s buoys, are also interested in seeing if the robots can inform construction schedules, and advise best practices for ships going back and forth to maintain wind farms.

[Related: These free-floating robots can monitor the health of our oceans]

The robots are not a holistic solution for all industries operating near whales at sea. For example, they might not be practical for preventing right whales from getting entangled in fishing gear in the US. Fisheries operate differently in Canada compared to in the US. “They fish [in Canada] with a lot less gear. They have seasons where guys fish and when the season’s over they have to gather up all the gear and go home,” he adds. “The American fishery is not like that at all, it’s a year-round fishery, so guys just don’t have the equipment to gather up their gear and bring it home.” 

In addition to robots for whales, Baumgartner and others are looking into ways that both scientists and manufacturers can innovate ropeless fishing to make it cheaper and easier for fishermen to incorporate into their businesses. That way they can still fish even when whales are there, and regulatory bodies won’t have to close off entire areas because a whale was detected nearby. 

“We’re not going to stop shipping, we’re not going to stop fishing. We have to find a way for these industries to be sustainable, to not have the impact that they’re having on the ocean today and on the animals that live in it,” Baumgartner says. “One of the potential ways to mitigate these risks that we pose to the animals is to change industrial practices when we know whales are around.” 

The post Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission appeared first on Popular Science.

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