Coral Bones

"It's like I was living a new life"

2011-09-03T06:52:00.002Z

Meltdown

2011-02-23T17:04:00.002Z

If [pressures on reefs are ]left unchecked, more than 90 percent of reefs will be threatened by 2030 and nearly all reefs will be at risk by 2050.

-- Reefs at Risk revisited.

Thomas Goreau says:

These are the usual underestimates by people who never saw the reefs when they were good, and only began monitoring after most of the corals were gone! 90% of coral reefs are ALREADY severely damaged, and ALL probably will be within another 5 years.

A steep path

2009-06-03T15:39:00.000Z

A combination of greenhouse gas mitigation and improved coral reef management will be required to avoid the degradation of the world’s coral reef ecosystems from frequent mass coral bleaching events. Actions that enhance reef resistance and reef resilience - including protection of bleaching-resistant reefs, reduction of other stressors, and possibly even more radical suggestions like “seeding” reefs with more temperature-tolerant species of Symbiodinium – may be necessary to help coral reef ecosystems endure through the committed warming over the next several decades. These management actions, while important, will alone prove to be insufficient to protect coral reefs through the latter half of the century. The difference between the future scenarios presented in this study demonstrates that protecting the world’s coral reefs from increasing thermal stress will require a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades.

-- from Coping with Commitment (PLOS) by Simon Donner.

GBR 'spectacular' recovery

2009-04-23T05:54:00.001Z

A "lucky combination" of rare circumstances has meant the GBR has been able to make a recovery from the 2006 bleaching event.

See: article, Climate Shifts and the paper: 'Doom and Boom'

Image: Envisat

'Conservation plan would keep islanders in exile'

2009-02-24T09:05:00.000Z

Fred Pearce reports on a controversy over Chagos.

Resilience

2009-01-04T22:03:00.009Z

A study that found a decline in calcification rates on the Great Barrier Reef (see Getting lumpy on the GBR) has recently received widespread media attention -- widespread, that is, compared to many stories that concern coral reefs.

Another recent story, reported by the BBC as Coral springs back from tsunami [1], would seem, at least for the non-specialist reader on first sight, to point in the opposite direction. But according Tom Goreau:

Indonesia has the highest rate of new coral settlement in the world, so areas that suffer only from physical devastation, and do not have high temperature, mud, or nutrients, do gradually get covered with corals. [It] takes...5-10 years or so in the best spots there, much longer elsewhere. But this is not resilience in the sense of resistance to stress, it is recovery via new recruitment, which is increasingly less frequent. It is like after the 1998 bleaching event in the Indian Ocean, when the [Big International NGOs] started touting reef "recovery" when they really only meant that the dying had stopped. The amount of new recruits in most of those places has been negligible to minor.

Footnote

[1] Indonesia's coral reefs return to life in The Australian.

GBR update

2009-01-02T07:40:00.000Z

Getting lumpy on the GBR at The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

Chagos islanders lose battle to return

2008-10-22T16:46:00.002Z

The story is here.

Urgency

2008-07-18T07:57:00.002Z

At Maribo (The fierce urgency of now), Simon Donner expresses disappointment at what he sees as a well intentioned but weak efforts at the ICRS to communicate the importance of conservation. There are some interesting comments in the thread (although mine may be 'over the top').

Sadé Council from Time writes to recommend a recent article, Coral Reefs Face Extinction, and photo gallery in that magazine.

ICRS

2008-07-08T06:52:00.004Z

News and reports from the International Coral Reef Symposium here. Highlights for 7 July included:

Presentation of a check [cheque] for US $1,100,000 (approx Euro 700,000, GBP 556,000) from the U.S. Federal government for coral reef research in the U.S.

Launch of The Status of Coral Reef Ecosystems of the United States Report

Forecasting Storm Mediated Changes in Reef Coral Assemblages (J. Madin, M. O’Donnell, S. Connolly)

Is 500 ppm Co2 and 2 C of Warming the 'Tipping Point' for Coral Reefs? If So, How Should We Respond? (O. Hoegh-Guldberg)

A blog here reports live from the symposium.

Reefs and responsibility

2008-06-24T07:27:00.000Z

...Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid...

-- James Hansen in a talk to the National Press Club, and briefing to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming, 23 June 2008.

...CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children. Humanity would be impoverished by ravages of continually shifting shorelines and intensification of regional climate extremes. Loss of countless species would leave a more desolate planet...

Grief in time

2008-06-03T07:35:00.018Z

A version of this review is to appear shortly on Chinadialogue.net

Caspar Henderson reviews
A Reef in Time - The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End
by J. E. N. Veron

Why care about the loss of biodiversity? A simple answer is that not doing so will be more expensive than doing so. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a report published in May of this year by the German government and the European Commission, suggests that current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by 7% by 2050, with the world’s poorest people affected the most. But even if this cautious estimate turns out to be right it is unlikely to tell the whole story.

To see why, consider the Great Barrier Reef on the northeast coast of Australia, the largest single structure on Earth made by living organisms. Tropical coral reefs reefs are the most diverse, beautiful and intricate assemblages of life in the oceans, arguably on the planet, hosting about a quarter of all ocean species in less than 0.1% of its area. They provide food and vital ecosystem services to hundreds of millions of people in more than 100 countries. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), the largest UNESCO World Heritage reef area on earth, forms the southern border of the global centre of reef biodiversity in Southeast Asia, and is the only extensive area of reef in within the territory of the rich industrialised country with the resources and expertise to protect it.

And one could not ask for a better guide to the GBR than J. E. N. Veron, the former Chief Scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. ‘Charlie’ Veron is author of the monumental three volume Corals of the World, and is credited with having identified one in four species of coral that are known today. This is the work of an outstanding scientific mind informed by close observation over more than forty years, and by love.

Since the book appeared Veron has explained why he wrote it on climateshifts.org, (the blog of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a lead author on a key paper on the future of the world’s coral reefs. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152509). Veron writes:

It may seem preposterous that the greatest coral reef in the world – the biggest structure made by life on Earth – could be seriously (I mean genuinely seriously) threatened by climate change. The question itself is probably already relegated in your mind to a ‘here-we-go-again’ catch-bag of greenie diatribe about the state of our planet. This view is understandable given that even a decade ago, there were many scientists who had not yet come to grips with the full implications of climate change.

Very likely you have a feeling that dire predictions about anything almost always turn out to be exaggerations. What you really think is: OK, where there’s smoke there’s fire, so there’s probably something in this to be worried about, somewhere. But, it won’t be as bad as those doom-sayers are predicting. When I started writing ‘A Reef in Time’, I knew that climate change was likely to have serious consequences for coral reefs, but even I was shocked to the core by what all the best science that existed was saying. In a long phase of personal anguish I turned to specialists in many different fields of science to find anything that might suggest a fault in my own conclusions. No luck. The bottom line remains: the GBR can indeed be utterly trashed in the lifetime of today’s children. That certainty is what motivates me to broadcast this message as clearly, as accurately and, yes, as loudly, as I can.

But this book does more than simply convey the central message that climate change – and in particular ocean acidification – threaten to destroy the GBR, and that action to avert this should be a top priority. It also does at least two other useful things. One, it provides a brilliantly clear and authoritative introduction to much of the history of life on earth via a focus on some of the most productive ecosystems in the seven tenths that is ocean. Two, it conveys the stupendous enormity of a mass extinction event which – unless somehow averted – is likely to be the biggest in sixty five million years (i.e. since the K-T). Only five extinctions on such a scale have occurred since multicellular life began more than five hundred million years ago.

The book is also fascinating in its detailed account of the GBR itself, including a plausible account of a 'stone age Utopia' in which aborginal peoples may have lived in caves under what, today (following a rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last glaciation about 11,500 years ago), are coral reefs. [Over the same time frame, Veron points out, limestone caves in southwestern France and northern Spain were decorated with beautiful paintings: Chauvet from 30,000 years ago, Lascaux from 17,000 years ago[1]).

So what hope for the future? The English novelist Ian McEwan has written recently of the strong undertow of apocalyptic thinking in the Christian and Muslim traditions, among others, and the real and present danger this presents to the global community. McEwan hopes that the spirit of curiosity and science may provide an antidote: ‘Where [environmental and other] calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot consider them as apocalyptic. They are minatory, they are calls to action.’ But he worries that the narrative of science and human reason has only a tenuous hold.

This has to change, and it can do so, if leading scientists such as Veron and many others continue to make the case for a future in which global concentrations of greenhouse gases are held to much lower levels than current trends indicate. It will also require millions and millions of individual and community decisions to engage in political, economic and cultural change. Australia and China, for example, will need to look again at ways they are generating prosperity in the short term by, for example, the massive extraction and combustion of coal (see, for example Good days: Australia prospers from China’s resource needs, Financial Times, 2 April 2008). Fine words from politicians do not scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Veron warns that by 2030 it will be too late. ‘We have to change’, he says, ‘I believe humans are good at change. But there is not an ounce of hope in a world that wants to procrastinate’.

Veron’s book ends a warning from the earth systems scientist James Lovelock made before the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, but which has an added poignancy after it:

The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some faction of a million people to their death. But this is nothing compared with what may soon happen; we are now abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago [i.e. the PETM] , and if does most of us, and our descendents, will die.

Caspar Henderson is writing The Book of Barely Imagined Beings – an exploration of the current extinction event and what comes next. He reviewed Coral by Steve Jones here.

Footnote 1: 'Humans have certainly occupied Australia for 45,000 plus or minus 9,000 years, and, based on current evidence, 53,000 to 60,000 years is the most probable time of original occupation. The oldest human remains, those of Mungo man [are] now the source of the oldest human DNA in the world'. -- Veron, page 178. The earliest known evidence for marine fishing, dating from 32,000 years ago, is from the Huon Peninsular of what is now New Guinea but would at that time have been joined to continental Australia by a land bridge (ibid 180).

Serendib

2008-03-23T22:32:00.001Z

Coral Bones emerges momentarily from hibernation to note Reef Ramblings on Arthur C. Clarke – Pioneer of Scuba Diving and Reef Exploration.

On hold

2008-01-02T16:11:00.000Z

There are unlikely to be more posts on Coral Bones, at least for a little while. (I do, however, continue to blog on a variety of topics at Grains of Sand.)

I'd like to express my admiration for some remarkable people I have encountered (virtually or in real life) over the last few years. They are engaged in urgent struggles for understanding, justice and the protection of natural wonders, and deserve more support.

There are many sources of information on the future of coral reefs on the web. Some of them are listed in the links section on the right hand side of this page. Happy 'International Year of the Reef'!

Death sentences

2007-12-13T22:40:00.000Z

In Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and sixteen other distinguished marine scientists call for... decisive action.

Photos: extant examples of reefs from the Great Barrier Reef that are used as analogs for the ecological structures anticipated under the paper's coral reef scenarios. Photos by O. Hoegh-Guldberg.

A post on Dot Earth, Carbon Dioxide Is Double Threat to Reefs, summarises non-technically.

P.S. 14 Dec: The Guardian reports this as Acidic seas may kill 98% of world's reefs by 2050.

Reefs and carbon sequestration

2007-12-08T23:18:00.000Z

On 7 Dec, the Jakarta Post reported Asia to push coral reef into Kyoto system:

Indonesia and five other countries within the Asia and Pacific regions announced Thursday they will propose a huge global contribution from their marine and coral reefs to absorb carbon, to be taken into account...within the protocol.

But leading marine scientists say there slim to no grounds for claiming reefs as carbon sinks. Stuart Campbell of the Wildlife Conservation Society wrote on Coral List (7 Dec):

today’s Jakarta Post...claim[s] that the reefs of the Coral Triangle....act as sink for around 245 million tons of carbon per year. My reading of the literature suggests that reefs both act as sinks and sources of atmospheric carbon - depending on their productivity rates and many other factors - this is a complex issue and a publication by Kinsey and Hopley (1991) suggests that globally coral reefs act as a sink for 111 million tons of carbon each year, "the equivalent of 2% of present (that was 1991) output of anthropogenic CO2". But there are many complicating fators including production rates of reefs and their effect on the reduction of pH, solubility of CO2 and its release to the atmosphere. Generally the literature I have read suggests that coral reefs contribute to the global greenhouse effect, but in a way that is part of the natural cycle of inorganic carbon in and out of the atmosphere. I'd be interested in any recent publications that provide updated information on this issue or anyone who knows where the estimate of 245 millions tons of CO2 for the Coral Triangle Region came from?

Tom Goreau responded:

The claim that coral reefs are a CO2 sink is completely incorrect. They are in fact a source of CO2 to the atmosphere even while they remove carbon from the ocean. This has been understood by carbonate chemists for a long time but we keep having to deal with this popular error over and over again.

Because the ocean is a pH buffered system in which electrical charge is conserved, for every atom of bicarbonate in seawater that is converted to carbonate and deposited as limestone one molecule of bicarbonate is converted to carbonic acid and then to CO2 to balance the charge. So in effect for each atom of carbon removed from the ocean into limestone, one atom is released as CO2 to the atmosphere.

On a geological time scale limestone deposition and volcanic emissions are the two major sources of atmospheric CO2 (since photosynthesis and respiration plus decomposition balance). Atmospheric CO2 in turn dissolves in fresh water, where it is the major acid once it ionizes, and is then neutralized by chemical weathering of limestone on land and of igneous and metamorphic rocks, being converted into bicarbonate which washes into the sea, resuming the cycle.

Half of all the limestone buried in the sea is buried in coral reefs (since most open oceanic production dissolves in the deep sea), but to put it into perspective, this natural source of CO2 is 50 times smaller than fossil fuel input, showing how seriously we have perturbed the natural carbon cycles.

The only way that reefs could be a CO2 sink would be if they were autotrophic ecosystems that buried most of the algae carbon before it could decompose. But in fact reef sediments have very low buried organic carbon content, because the organic carbon is almost entirely decomposed. In fact, reefs are not autotrophic at all, they are heterotrophic systems that rely on external organic carbon input from land and oceanic zooplankton. Whenever I have measured oxygen in a reef it has always been below saturation, except directly over dense shallow seagrass beds in full sunlight. Overall the reef organic carbon cycle is consuming oxygen and producing CO2, as well as the CO2 produced by limestone deposition.

Coral reefs are the first and worst victims of global warming, but they do not contribute to removing CO2 form the atmosphere at all. We must save them for their biodiversity, fisheries, shore protection, and tourism services, not because of false and misguided claims that they are carbon sinks.

Catch less to get richer

2007-12-07T09:58:00.000Z

Economics of Overexploitation Revisited shows in four disparate fisheries that dynamic maximum economic yield can exceed maximum sustained yield.

"This means that if you reduce the harvest now, you'll actually be better off", says co-author Quentin Grafton
(Catch cuts 'bring bigger profits').

The fisheries studied include long-lived and slow-growing orange roughy which live on seamounts rich in benthic life including cold water corals.

Ecotourism 'benefits nature and reduces poverty'

2007-12-06T10:03:00.000Z

I've been critical of ecotourism in the past, perhaps intemperately so. Conceding that "there is substantial evidence that well run eco-tourism projects can bring substantial benefits to a few poor communities", I have asserted:

too many poor people in the world are dependent on primary resources such as reefs and forests ever to be reached by eco-tourists. This great majority will not receive the benefit of eco-tourist dollars but will suffer the impact of the tourists’ pollution. Very often eco-tourism is a stalking horse mass tourism, which is hugely destructive of the environment in both the short and long run. (from Holidays on Death Row at Climatedenial.org)

Still, it is good to see further evidence that well run eco-tourism projects can benefit communities that depend on coral reefs. Nature's Investment Bank, a report from The Nature Conservancy draws on interviews with more than 1000 people in four recently protected marine zones in Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands. "In every case, the conservation schemes had boosted fish catches and helped create new jobs." The common factor in each case, say co-authors Craig Leisher, Peter van Beukering and Lea M. Scherl were:

the heavy involvement of the local community in the creation of the protection zone, the legal designation of "no catch" zones where fish could breed, and the policing of these zones by government agencies. In all four cases, action was taken after a collapse in fish populations through overfishing by outsiders.

But:

There has to be a sense of crisis before people are willing to change the status quo dramatically.

News reports here and here.

Under the sun

2007-11-29T21:09:00.000Z

Nothing new, as far as I can see, in the Reuters feature 'Indonesia's corals threatened by climate change'; yet another heads-up ahead of the negotiations in Bali.

'The Amazon of the Seas' for the Coral Triangle may be a new-ish marketing term. Conservation organisations like WWF and CI started using Wallacea a few years ago to describe the terrestrial biomes at the centre of this amazing area, but that name - after Alfred Russel Wallace - is more obscure and, perhaps, Euro-centric.

HMG and Chagos

2007-11-29T20:05:00.000Z

10 Downing Street has responded to a petition (noted on this blog here) asking the Prime Minister "to drop the [UK government's] appeal against the Chagos islanders' right to go home." It says:

[the former Foreign Secretary] decided to seek permission to appeal because our treaty obligations to the United States require the Territory be kept "for the defence needs" of both governments and our 2002 feasibility study came down heavily against the feasibility of resettlement.

The Court Of Appeal's judgment also raised issues of constitutional law of general public importance that, in her view, would adversely affect the effective governance of all British Overseas Territories. This would include confusion in the legal system applied in those Overseas Territories, and potential conflicts between local and English courts. For these reasons, the former Foreign Secretary thought it to be in the public interest that the effect of the Court of Appeal's judgment, even if correct, should be clarified.

Permission to appeal was granted by the House of Lords on condition that the Chagossians' costs were met by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Given the public interest the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband has accepted this condition. The Government expect the case to be heard by the House of Lords in 2008.

Tough love and resilience

2007-11-25T09:55:00.000Z

Tim McClanahan, a Senior Conservation Zoologist with Wildlife Conservation Society who is based in Kenya, circulates notice of a new paper making a case for some good news. Here is his non-technical summary:

The future of coral reefs is precarious and continues to look bleaker as more and more seas report bleaching and further losses of living cover on reefs due to pulses of warm water. This has sent coral reef scientists and managers searching for locations where corals thrive and that are cool and likely to stay cool as climate heats up in the coming decades. The hope is to insure that these cool spots will provide a refuge for corals and to give them the highest levels of protection, in order that at least some corals and living reefs survive climate change. Unfortunately, the number of such places are few and located in areas that often do not support flourishing coral reefs and their legendary biological diversity, resulting in a future that many informed marine biologists see as few scattered spots of uninspiring diversity in a sea of chalky reef skeletons. Not what they have come to expect from this underwater Eden.

But a recently published study documenting the change in coral reefs over the past 10 years in East Africa has considerably brightened this gloomy picture. The authors have identified another environment where high diversity corals may survive and possibly thrive. Ironically, these tropical seas are both warm and have among the fastest rising seawater temperatures, but what makes them different from many other reefs is that the temperature of the water is highly variable across seasons and years and this appears to give them the tough love that helps them survive the rare and deadly hot pulses that devastate their more pampered cousins. The study finds that these areas are often found around islands in the shadows of ocean currents where current speeds are slowed and where water temperatures fluctuate accordingly, but may also be found in subtropical locations that naturally fluctuate with seasons. This study and a companion study found that these reefs are among the most species diverse reefs, equally high in numbers of species to reefs found in environments with less seasonal and yearly fluctuations. This study shows that it is not just the high stability of tropical environments that creates high biological diversity but also fluctuations that prepare them for the unexpected and this may allow them to persist in what is becoming an increasingly hostile environment.

for further detail see: Effects of climate and seawater temperature variation on coral bleaching and mortality by T. R. McClanahan, M. Ateweberhan, C. Muhando, J. Maina, and S. M. Mohammed. Ecological Monographs, 74: 503- 525.

'On speaking before Al Gore'

2007-11-25T09:34:00.000Z

This came in yesterday from Tom Goreau, who is on his way to the Sustainable Mariculture Conference in Makassar before attending the Bali climate change conference as advisor to the delegations of Jamaica and the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre:

ON SPEAKING BEFORE AL GORE

Tom Goreau, President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
November 24 2007

On November 20 2007 I spoke before Al Gore at the Global Warming Conference organized by the Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands. “Before” in the temporal sense of being the speaker scheduled just prior to Al Gore, not before in the spatial sense of being physically in the same room. Al Gore arrived a minute before his speech and left seconds after. He briefly met the Prime Minister, the Minister of Environment, the Governor, their wives, and the deputy head of the World Tourism Organization, but none of the other speakers. (In the interests of full disclosure, I was the first person to show data conclusively establishing the link between global warming and large-scale coral bleaching, to Al Gore’s Senate Panel in 1990, which was vilified and then ignored, but which led directly to the International Coral Reef Initiative when he became Vice President in 1993. Both his name and mine come from an old French word for a little pig.)

Al Gore gave a nearly hour-long speech that was gracious, charming, and packed full of homilies that “the future was in our hands”, and that “young people should learn about the environment”. But it contained absolutely no specific information, analysis, or strategy about climate change whatsoever. It was a rote feel-good speech, lacking any visual props, typical of political and religious exhortations, to which he added an opening sentence about how beautiful the Turks and Caicos were and how he would be back (rousing applause), and an ending sentence for local color that the “Caribbean should unite in the face of climate change” (covered in the press worldwide), although no specific suggestions were offered. The only practical tactical response to climate change he made was that he hoped young people would lie down in front of trucks building new coal-fired power plants.

My 20 minute speech “before” Al Gore showed that the last time that global temperatures were 1 degree C above today’s levels 125,000 years ago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Bahamas, and Jamaica were swept by waves of a magnitude that we have never experienced, that sea levels were 25 feet higher, and that crocodiles and hippopotamuses lived in London, England.

It pointed out that since CO2 was one third lower then than it already is now, those conditions underestimate what will happen if we add absolutely no further CO2 to the atmosphere. It showed how and why IPCC projections seriously and systematically underestimate future climate change sensitivity, which the past climate record clearly shows, by failing to account for either the major positive feedback mechanisms or the full time scale of climate system responses.

It emphasized that adaptation is only a stopgap measure, but for long-term climate stability the CO2 already in the atmosphere must be reduced by at least a third, not allowed to rise further as it would if the Kyoto Protocol was enforced. It summarized the history of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and how the original draft prepared by the UN (which I had a hand in writing) was turned by governments into scientific nonsense, promotes carbon accounting fraud, rewards bogus carbon sinks and penalizes the real ones, was incapable of meeting its own goals to protect the most climatically sensitive ecosystems, and therefore is a death sentence for coral reefs and low lying island nations.

It demonstrated why coral reefs could take no further warming, how the global coral reef satellite sea surface temperature data base I developed had predicted coral bleaching accurately for decades, showed global trends that indicate much worse is imminent, and revealed for the first time that changes in ocean circulation are already underway worldwide and destroying fisheries from the bottom up. It showed photos of how we had kept coral reefs alive in places where they would have died from heat stroke by giving the corals 3-5 times faster growth rates and 16-50 times higher survival, how we restored coral reefs and fisheries in a few years in places in the Caribbean, Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia where they could not recover naturally, and how we turned beaches in the Maldives that were being severely eroded by sea level rise into growing ones.

It explained how CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere and stored in ways that greatly increased soil fertility by improving ancient, but until recently lost, methods of Amazonian Indians. It discussed the need for small island developing states to adopt new, proven, but currently unutilized technologies to tap tidal energy to prevent CO2 emissions and to recycle wastes and renewable biomass into clean water, fertilizer, and gaseous and liquid fuels. It argued the need to build large-scale ecosystem restoration into climate change treaties as critical to stabilizing climate, soil, water, fisheries, and biodiversity resources. It outlined tactics and strategy that Small Island States could pursue in the UN Climate Summit in Bali to turn it into a scientifically sound tool for effective action. It summarized many unexpected findings from our extensive survey of the health of Turks and Caicos reefs last year, and the implications for their management.

Later, many people kindly told me that they learned more from my speech than all the rest put together. The Turks and Caicos Government paid Al Gore [what is reported to be a six figure sum] for his celebrity photo-op advice. They paid me precisely nothing. The publicity was directly proportional to the money paid. Gored again!

The handwriting is now undeniably on the wall, in both planetary and personal senses. Without unimaginably radical changes in the next weeks, right after the UN Climate Change Summit in Bali I’ll be forced to quit my quixotic endeavours, and take a job asking the public if their hamburger is to go and if they want ketchup on their fries.

Tsunami damage report

2007-11-16T17:15:00.000Z

At the time, there was much comment in the media, not all of it well-informed, about the impact of the Sumatra-Andaman tsunami of 26 December 2004 on coral reefs across the Indian Ocean. Andrew Baird notifies that an edition of the Atoll Research Bulletin devoted to this issue, no. 544, is now available on line.

In one of the papers, Baird and colleagues report on findings in Aceh. They write:

the initial damage to corals, while occasionally spectacular, was surprisingly limited and trivial when compared to pre-existing damage most probably caused by destructive fishing practices.

Hope in Buton

2007-11-16T16:42:00.000Z

John French, whose recent work also includes revolutionary undergarments, has drawn an introduction to a seaweed farming project in Buton, Indonesia supported by Oxfam which, it's hoped, may help local people whose reefs are at risk to generate income.

YouTunicate

2007-11-15T17:28:00.000Z

Project Sea Camel is posting a series of underwarer classes about corals and other marine organisms on YouTube here.

Soft corals 'melt due to global warming'

2007-11-13T08:32:00.000Z

It's too late. We have now actually missed the boat in finding some key pharmaceuticals. There is a huge gap in our knowledge of soft corals in the reef environment, and with the rate of extinction, we have lost certain species forever.

-- says Hudi Benayahu of Tel Aviv University.

'Life'

2007-11-08T10:51:00.000Z

John Bohannon's lively account of the Genoa Festival of Science (Celebrating Food, Feces, and 3 Billion Years of Evolution) links to Beginnings, an excerpt from Life with photography by Frans Lanting, music by Philip Glass and video by Alexander V. Nichols.

I think the excerpt is beautiful and worth watching. It covers the development and emergence of single and then multi-cellular life forms in the sea, but does not of course pretend to be comprehensive, and makes some poetic short cuts. It includes marvellous images of stromatolites, probably the first reef builders, and modern corals, which differ significantly from their ancient ancestors, and modern jellyfish which look, at least superficially, like those of the Middle Cambrian (500 Million Years Ago, Jellyfish Left Their Mark in Fine Sea Sediments).

Flush

2007-11-05T10:15:00.000Z

Carl Hiaassen writes that "One of South Florida's dirtiest secrets is the daily dumping of a half-billion gallons of sewage into the Atlantic Ocean":

Among reputable marine scientists there is little debate. Sewage contains higher levels of nitrogen, ammonia and other contaminants that are widely believed to promote algae blooms and disease in coral communities.

As coral formations die off, fish, lobsters and sea turtles lose critical habitat.

Your average second-grader has no difficulty understanding that polluting the ocean has unhealthy consequences, but [the politicians] are slow learners.

[Hat tip to GCRA]

Happy 55th!

2007-11-01T16:10:00.000Z

To Ivy-Mike and the thermonuclear age.

The fireball was over 3 miles (5 km) wide, and the mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 57,000 feet (17.0 km) in less than 90 seconds. One minute later it had reached 108,000 feet (33.0 km), before stabilizing at 120,000 feet (37.0 km) with the top eventually spreading out to a diameter of 100 miles (161 km) with a stem 20 miles (32 km) wide.

The blast created a crater 6,240 feet (1.9 km) in diameter and 164 feet (50 m) deep where Elugelab had once been; the blast and water waves from the explosion (some waves up to twenty feet high) stripped the test islands clean of vegetation, as observed by a helicopter survey within 60 minutes after the test, by which time the mushroom cloud and steam had been blown away. Irradiated coral debris fell upon ships stationed 30 miles (48 km) from the blast, and the immediate area around the atoll was heavily contaminated for some time.

Before:
After:

Chagos petition

2007-11-01T15:35:00.000Z

Ian Orr asks British citizens to sign a petition on the number 10 website calling on the Prime Minister "to drop an appeal against the Chagos islanders' right to go home". You have to be a British citizen to sign.

Orr also asks people to urge their media contacts to give publicity to a letter from an All-Party group of UK MPs, MEPs and members of the House of Lords which "should appear in a UK daily paper on 2 November". Once published, the final text will be on the website of the UK Chagos Support Association. (A draft text is attached as a comment at the bottom of this post. "It shows that the Prime Minister's fine words in his recent speech 'On Liberty' ring hollow when compared with the treatment over the years of the Chagossians". )

"Chagossians deserve support", says Orr. " To see their faces, go to an excellent site for photos of the exiled Chagossian community in Mauritius by the photographer Phuc Quach."

The Chagos Islands have some of the finest coral reefs in the Indian Ocean...and one of the largest U.S. military airfields in the region.

'Parrotfish to aid reef repair'

2007-11-01T10:03:00.000Z

...say Peter Mumby and colleagues (BBC, Nature)

Marine methuselahs

2007-10-29T16:00:00.000Z

Andrew Baker notes a BBC report about the discovery of 'Ming the Clam' an Icelandic bivalve thought to be 405 to 410 years old and the 'oldest known animal'. He tells Coral Bones:

"Although this is an impressive lifespan for such an unassuming mollusc, many corals are probably much older. Off the island of Ta'u in American Samoa, in approximately 13m (40ft) of water, lives an enormous helmet-shaped coral at least 7m (22ft) high and 12m (37ft) in diameter. This coral, a colonial invertebrate in the scleractinian genus Porites, consists of at least 100 million polyps and is likely to be at least 600 years old. It may well be much older, given the fact that it began life in relatively deep water and therefore may have grown more slowly during its first few centuries. In fact, it's not inconceivable that it dates back as far as the fall of the Roman Empire or the birth of Christ. Chuck Birkeland and others at the University of Hawaii have studied this coral for some time, and have identified it as a candidate for the title of "world's largest coral".

The photo shows this coral, which I believe is affectionately nicknamed 'Big Momma', next to a diver for scale. Note that a large tumor-like growth is visible on the side of the colony (which the diver is inspecting), indicating that methuselahs like this coral may show cancerous signs of their age.

Not only is this coral almost certainly older than Ming the Clam, but it is also still alive (unlike Ming). If we can protect this coral, and others like it, from the combined effects of climate change, overfishing, nutrient pollution and disease - stressors which, combined, ravage reefs worldwide - there is every reason to expect it might continue living for centuries to come.

Although colonial invertebrates like this coral might not fit the standard idea of (solitary) 'animals', they nevertheless qualify for the longevity title, particularly considering the fact that all of the coral's polyps are genetically identical to one another (minus some somatic mutations along the way). Indeed, there is every reason to expect that this enormous coral is the same genetic individual that first settled as a planktonic larva on this distant reef over a thousand years ago."

500 million years of moon gazing

2007-10-20T11:49:00.000Z

The discovery suggests that the basic mechanisms for responding to light were in place

at the origins of multicellularity in animals.

-- Reported in the New York Times as Sexy Corals Keep ‘Eye’ on Moon, Scientists Say.

At loggerheads

2007-10-19T09:46:00.000Z

Peter Aldhous reports:

In March 2006, the entire Hawaiian swordfish fishery was shut down for the season - 120 boats consigned to port after their hooks snagged their 17th loggerhead turtle of the year. Now it turns out that a dozen Mexican fishermen, sailing six tiny boats with outboard motors, posed an even greater threat, drowning 700 loggerheads in a year.

...researchers calculate that in 2005 the gill nets killed at least 299 turtles and the long lines more than 680. That is catastrophic, as the US National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the loss of just a few dozen large juveniles per year would "appreciably increase" the population's risk of extinction.

Under a project called GloBAL researchers are looking to see if similar disasters are unfolding elsewhere. But in Mexico, at least, there is some good news. [Hoyt] Peckham [of the University of California, Santa Cruz] and his colleagues worked hard to stress the value of conservation - even bringing over fishermen from Japan, who told their Mexican colleagues of crashing turtle populations on the nesting beaches.

Last month, the long-line fleet agreed to use alternative fishing gear. "That was the most powerful conservation action I'll probably be able to make in my career," Peckham says.

This story is tragic, with a dash of hope. The direct relevance to coral reef protection may be limited but here are three possible links:

1) There may be lessons for more sustainable small-scale fisheries directly affecting reefs;

2) Some of the seven sea turtle species play a direct role in the ecology of coral reefs. I understand that green turtles, for example, are important herbivores on reefs. Other species may play a role indirectly through their consumption of seagrass and other organisms. Healthy reefs produce sand in which, ultimately, many but by no means all turtles nest; and

3) Mexico's Pacific coast is not entirely devoid of hard coral, as there is Cabo Pulmo. A whole eco-region conservation approach could better protect both coral and turtle.

Why care? David Rains Wallace quotes John Steinbeck: "There is some quality in man than makes him people the ocean with monsters...An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep".

Without its known wonders the ocean would be a desolate waking.

Reef shark/coral reef movie

2007-10-17T19:13:00.000Z

David McGuire circulates a note about Sharks: Stewards of the Reef, a film about shark/reef interactions, finning and threats to coral reefs (with reference to analysis by Bascompte et al published in PNAS in 2005).

[The film has been out for some months, but this note is prompted by a short exchange on Coral-List.]

Ocean acidification blog

2007-10-13T19:18:00.000Z

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg praises a blog on ocean acidification by Jean-Pierre Gattuso.

I'm embarassed to say I wasn't previously aware of this blog, and am happy to discover it. But with titles like Dynamics of dimethylsulphoniopropionate and dimethylsulphide under different CO2 concentrations during a mesocosm experiment, some of the posts may take a little chewing before digesting.

Easy finger food to whet your appetite is provided by Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker, and my earlier piece in New Scientist.

Al Gore and coral reefs

2007-10-12T14:52:00.000Z

A UK high court judge has criticised Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for innacuracies, including the statement that "coral reef bleaching events are due to global warming".

In New Scientist's enviroment blog Catherine Brahic reminds us that:

[According to] the IPCC [2007 Fourth Asssessment] report, if the temperature were to rise by 1 °C to 3 °C, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adopt or acclimatise, but that separating the impacts of climate change-related stresses from other stresses, such as over-fishing and polluting, is difficult.

The IPCC states that most corals will bleach if temperatures rise by more than 1 °C over what they were in the 1980s and 1990s (Table SPM-1 in IPCC's WGI ). Temperatures over the past 50 years have warmed by 0.13°C per decade (p 5 of WGI summary for policy makers).

Many scientists agree that limiting warming to 2°C above 1900 temperatures will need CO2 emissions to be cut by more than half from their 2006 levels by 2050. So unless drastic, world-wide policy measures are agreed, increased coral bleaching looks pretty likely.

Bleaching is caused by other factors as well, namely disease. There is some evidence warming will also increase the incidence of disease.

Other factors that can cause bleaching include a sudden influx of large amounts of fresh water. This happened, for example, to coastal reefs in Jamaica after exceptionally heavy rainfall associated with a hurricane some years back. The link has, I think, been quite well understood for years.

Understanding of the role of diseases in coral mortality, and the interaction of disease with other factors, including warming, has been developing over a number of years (see, for example this article from back in 1997) and has a long way to go. Among those publishing in the field are James Cervino and colleagues, and Drew Harvell and colleagues. But I doubt any knowledgeable scientist would deny that Al Gore's statement captures an essential truth and a central concern, if not the whole truth plus footnotes.

I'll hazard that most scientists in the field would say that, pace the IPCC, the chances of coral reefs acclimatising and thriving under a temperature rise of more than 2 °C during the 21st century are about as great as my acclimatising to having a tonne of concrete dropped on my head (which may be a good idea for other reasons).

[As Spencer Weart tells Andy Revkin, “The I.P.C.C. was set up to be the lowest common denominator, to weed out anything anyone could disagree with. It was deliberately created, largely under the influence of Reagan administration, because governments didn’t want a bunch of self-appointed scientists from academies and so on out there. It’s no accident that it’s the Intergovernmentalpanel. Even the Saudi government has to agree. That means that when the I.P.C.C. says you’re in trouble, you’re really in trouble.”]

Perhaps Nobel laureate Gore could nuance a future statement along these lines: "Manmade global warming plays a significant and growing role in the bleaching and death of coral reefs, with devastating effects for some of the richest and most wonderful life on Earth and the human communities that depend on them. On present trends this is likely to get much worse. There are a lot of other ways in which humans damage coral reefs and these need to be managed too."

Pipe dream

2007-10-04T11:19:00.000Z

This blog is behind the curve in noting James Lovelock and Chris Rapley's letter to Nature, Ocean pipes could help the Earth to cure itself (see, for example, the BBC story here).

Responses from serious scientists and others seem to have been divided. For example, the felicitously named Quirin Schiermeier at Nature News (Mixing the oceans proposed to reduce global warming, 26 Sep, subscription only) reports a split of views on the likely net effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations:

"The concept is flawed," says Scott Doney, a marine chemist at [the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]. He says it neglects the fact that deeper waters with high nutrients also generally contain a lot of dissolved inorganic carbon, including dissolved CO2. Bringing these waters to the lower pressures of the surface would result in the CO2 bubbling out into the air. So contrary to the desired effect, the scheme could result in a net 'outgassing' of CO2, he warns. "There is no technological fix for this problem," he says.

Others say such a project would have no net effect on CO2 in the atmosphere. "At every meeting I've been to, when they have talked about this idea for surface ocean CO2 removal, the point has been made that you would bring up nutrients and inorganic carbon in the same ratio as you remove as biomass," says Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at WHOI. And there are potentially many harmful impacts on sea life, he says.

In a BBC video report, Lovelock suggests that the pipes might specifically benefit coral reefs by bringing up cool water to save them. In the same clip John Shepherd, who is one of the most eminent oceanographers in the UK, says the idea may be dangerous, but he is not quoted on specifics, and I have not yet seen in any media an analysis by coral reef specialists of what they think the effects could be. Perhaps they don't think it is worth commenting on (Ove?).

One marine scientist I have talked to says:

This whole crazy scheme is proposed by people with no understanding of marine ecosystems or carbon cycles. Upwelling deep water just causes eutrophication and the algae will kill any coral reefs. Besides almost all the carbon taken up by algae is eaten, or rots, returning the CO2. Almost none is permanently buried, which is the only number that counts. This is the most inefficient possible method of carbon sequestration unless you turn the whole deep sea anoxic and kill all the fish.

P.S. 5 Oct: Oliver Morton hoists some comments from Professor Peter Williams into Nature's climate blog, including:

Even if the engineering problems could be solved, and the system made cost effective, both of which seem very doubtful, the proposal would have the reverse effect of that claimed.

Exploding heart

2007-10-03T20:04:00.000Z

A campaign to jumpstart better protection of the Florida manatee.

Carnival of the Blue V

2007-10-01T08:57:00.000Z

Shifting Baselines ("A Cure for Ocean Amnesia") has a roundup of best ocean blogging in September at Carnival of the Blue V.

'Oceans in Peril'

2007-09-18T22:01:00.000Z

Worldwatch has just published Oceans in Peril: Protecting Marine Biodiversity:

Marine reserves are essential to protect the biodiversity that maintains ecosystem integrity, say the report's authors [...who...] call for a radical change in fisheries management from a single-species approach to one that is ecosystem based and also includes the use of precautionary measures to tackle pollution and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that are changing the temperature and chemistry of the oceans.

'Plunder or protect'

2007-09-17T18:15:00.000Z

WWF Australia is calling for the entire Coral Sea region to be declared a marine protected area. The campaigners are using economics-based arguments:

The resident population of sharks at Osprey Reef, the main dive site in the Coral Sea, is 40 animals, making each shark worth over $250,000 per year. When you compare this figure to $62.50 - the asking price for shark catch by local fisheries, it is more than evident Australian reef sharks are more valuable alive than dead.

News reports include this, this and this.

The death of birth

2007-09-12T16:18:00.000Z

[Gorillas and orangutans] are perhaps the most charismatic creatures on this year's Red List, but the fact they are in trouble has been known for some years. Perhaps more surprising are some of the new additions.

"This is the first time we've assessed corals, and it's a bit worrying because some of them moved straight from being not assessed to being possibly extinct," said Jean-Christophe Vie, deputy head of IUCN's species programme.

"We know that some species were there in years gone by, but now when we do the assessment they are not there. And corals are like the trees in the forest; they build the ecosystem for fish and other animals."

IUCN is now embarking on a complete assessment of coral species, and expects to find that about 30% to 40% are threatened.

-- from Gorillas head race to extinction by Richard Black.

Banggai cardinalfish and humphead parrotfish: two of the reef-dependent species that have been Red-Listed.

IUCN's assessment is that "climate change is important for many Red List species; but it is not the only threat, and not the most important threat".

[See also Nasty, brutish and very long.]

All the way down

2007-09-10T11:18:00.000Z

The magnitude of present and future impacts of anthropogenic climate change on coral reefs is debated. But until recently most people seem to have assumed that it would not affect ecosystems on deep sea thermal vents at all.

But now Jon Copley of the University of Southampton and colleagues are challenging this assumption. "If climate change were to alter patterns of life in surface waters, our work suggests that these changes could potentially be communicated to the ocean floor", he says.

See No place for life to hide and Deep sea vents no climate haven.

A deep sea frogfish contemplates the news.

Barrier reef as campaign icon

2007-09-06T15:58:00.000Z

The campaign group Avaaz is promoting a petition ahead of the APEC meeting in Sydney, Australia in support of binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions rather than voluntary aspirational goals. Avaaz say around 400,000 people have already signed. They ask more to do so here.

On 7 September Avaaz and an Australian group called GetUp are launching a 144-square metre floating canvas "target" at Bondi Beach where it will be taken out to sea by surfers.

[On 8 September] swimmers will float this banner over the Great Barrier Reef -- which current predictions suggest will be killed off by climate change before 2030. Thousands of people from every continent have joined in by uploading climate target pictures of their own.

[Elsewhere, Jemery Leggett tells those who may not already know, and reminds those who do, that even some of the more progressive politicians in Australia and Canada support and are supported by the coal industry.]

Revenge of the nerdles

2007-09-02T10:44:00.000Z

...it’s hard to imagine an alien archaeologist finding poetry in the remote Pacific atolls awash in virtually unbiodegradable plastic bottles, bags and Q-tip shafts, or in the quadrillions of nurdles, microscopic plastic bits in the oceans — they currently outweigh all the plankton by a factor of six — that would continue to cycle uncorrupted through the guts of sea creatures until an enterprising microbe evolved to break them down.

-- from Jennifer Schuessler's review of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

'Symbiont-switching: too optimistic'

2007-08-30T15:52:00.000Z

Responding to Andrew Baker ('Inoculation: not a cure-all but worth trying') and others, Tom Goreau writes:

I completely agree with Andy Baker that we need to try all we can and hope it works. But I don't share his optimism because almost all corals are really much fussier than he seems to acknowledge about the very precise strain of zooxanthellae they will take up, expel the rest, and don't seem to have much rapid ability to adapt. That has been known for a very long time from the work of Bob Trench and his students. [See also a] recently published great paper by Tamar Goulet. One could be left with only a handful of very unusual corals if Andy is right.

My own view for about 20 years is that it has long been clear from field observations (going back more than 20 years) that susceptibility and resistance to bleaching have genetic components. We therefore need intensive genetic research into understanding exactly which genes and proteins are involved in both thermal stress susceptibility and resistance, and the effects of inducing or repressing their activity. This takes a state of the art laboratory and committed team. The next step is to grow all the variants one can with all the zooxanthellae one can get them to hold on to and all the genetically engineered corals and zooxanthellae in which the variants of the key genes and enzymes are expressed. This needs a huge state-of-the-art coral growing facility.

What is also needed, and which only we can do, is to grow them all on Biorock at faster growth rates, see how they respond to severe bleaching, select the survivors, see how their genes and protein expression may be different, propagate them, and see how they respond to the next bleaching event, etc.

Note: Andrew Baker and Andrienne Romanski commented on Goulet's paper in Multiple symbiotic partnerships are common in scleractinian corals, but not in octocorals (April 2007).

'The living are losing color'

2007-08-29T19:23:00.000Z

At Maribo, sharp-eyed Simon Donner records the sighting of a rare species: a poem about coral bleaching. The Fever by Kimiko Hahn is in The New Yorker, of all places. I'm not sure what to make of the penultimate verse (if that's the right word for it).

As far as I know, climate change has made it as a topic to what they used to call "high art" such as opera only in the last year or two (unless that's what Götterdämmerung was really about all along!). The Water Diviner's Tale, for example, was premiered at the Proms, a summer series of mostly classical music in London, on 27 August (see here - scroll down). And last autumn may have been the first appearance of the anthropocene at the opera: in a work for mp3 player called And while London burns (my review is here). Can a cantata about vanishing corals be far behind?

Froth

2007-08-29T07:20:00.000Z

Nothing to do with coral reefs, I think, but Deep Sea News picks up on what may or may not be a classic silly season story in Attack of the giant sea foam. "Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed", says the source.

John Bruno on the decline of coral reef ecosystems

2007-08-28T18:23:00.000Z

in a substantial piece at Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's climateshifts.org

ICRS 11

2007-08-28T16:04:00.000Z

The 'Olympics' of coral reef science is not so far away. Registration and Call for Abstracts is now open. More information here.

Take that, suckers!

2007-08-27T08:11:00.001Z

Tom Goreau has submitted the following letter to Science regarding attempts to 'vacuum' algae killing coral in Hawaii (noted on Coral Bones at Believe it or not):

"Call the Hose Brigade!" (Random samples, 10 August, p. 729) describes an effort to remove a massive nuisance algae bloom killing corals in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, by sucking it up with huge barge-mounted vacuum cleaners. Unfortunately this will give only temporary results and will fail in the long run unless the nutrient excess that fuels the rapid growth is removed. Kaneohe Bay is a classic example of coral reef eutrophication: benthic algal blooms caused by point discharges of sewage killed the reef in the 1970s, and died back when the outfall was removed, allowing the reef to gradually recover (1). With continued suburbanization of the watershed, uncontrolled non-point nutrient discharges to the bay from golf courses, lawn fertilizers, and road runoff have again raised the nutrient concentrations (2,3) above the thresholds for nuisance algae (4-6). Besides the temporary success in Kaneohe Bay, there are very few examples of algae being successfully removed. In one bay in Jamaica where all the land-based nutrients were diverted, nuisance algae that were choking the reef began to die back in weeks, and only a few dying clumps off weedy algae remained two months later (7). If algae are starved of nutrients, they die very quickly, and will not return unless nutrient thresholds are again exceeded. But no amount of sucking them off will work when they grow right back because they are overfertilized. It is the suckers paying for this well intentioned, but ultimately futile effort, who will be hosed unless the underlying causes of eutrophication are removed.
______
1. A Banner, Proc. 2nd Int. Coral Reef Symp., 2, 685 (1974)
2. E Laws, C. Allen, Pac. Sci., 50, 194-210 (1996)
3. S. Larned, J. Stimson, Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser., 145, 95-108 (1996)
4. P. Bell, Wat. Res., 26, 553-568 (1992)
5. B. Lapointe, N. Littler, D. Littler, Proc. 7th Int. Coral Reef Symp., 1, 323-334 (1992)
6. T. Goreau, K. Thacker, Proc. Carib. Water & Wastewater Assoc., 3, 98-116 (1994)
7. T. Goreau, UN Expert Meeting on Waste Management in Small Island Developing States, 1-28 (2003)

Reject-ski

2007-08-21T20:59:00.000Z

Ian Popple, at Beautiful Oceans Blog, makes some good observations starting with why jet-skis make great artificial reefs.

'Inoculation: not a cure-all but worth trying'

2007-08-16T08:48:00.000Z

This blog has hosted a short exchange about 'inoculation' as a way of trying to save coral reefs (posts 1 and 2 are here and here). Here is Andrew Baker's answer to critics:

As I wrote previously, I believe that attempts to boost the natural abundance of heat resistant symbionts by “inoculation” (for want of a better word, this is not a very good one as it comes with a lot of unintended meaning) would indeed be useful and worthwhile if we selectively target the oldest and largest colonies on selected reefs. In some circles this is indeed viewed as naïve, either because prospective algae won’t establish symbioses with these corals (Ove [Hoegh-Guldberg]’s view), or these symbionts will never propagate across reefs to make much of a difference (Charles [Shepard]s’ view). Both of these are valid concerns. I myself avoided this line of research for several years as it’s a bit of a “Go to Jail” card for those of us in the research community (“Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect £200”). Ove and Charles comments bear witness to that concern, and I am sure their viewpoints are not unique.

However, in my view, the main justifications for attempting inoculation are that: (1) some of the most important reef builders are already known to be able to host these symbionts (which addresses Ove’s worries regarding “evolutionary switching”); and (2) one doesn’t need to affect entire reefs to potentially make a detectable difference (Charles’ concern), especially if large and/or old colonies are targeted. If we lose these colonies it may take hundreds of years to replace them, so it stands to reason we might want to take extraordinary steps to keep them alive. This might not be a strategy that we can use to save the world’s coral reefs from climate change. However, it might help us keep more corals alive, and preserve reef function in the near-term, while we figure out what other options become available to us (I agree with Charles’ pragmatic view that we never know what the future holds in store).

In the Caribbean, for example, large colonies of the important reef-building star coral Montastraea faveolata are naturally capable of hosting (heat tolerant) Symbiodinium in clade D. The problem is that relatively few of them contain sufficient numbers of these symbionts to prevent mortality in the event of bleaching episode. I have suggested that large scale bleaching and mortality events result in shifts on reefs to favor more Symbiodinium D, and this ends up making these reefs more resistant to future bleaching events. Many mechanisms can account for these shifts in symbionts. However, the problem is that, regardless of mechanism, these shifts are only significant when the bleaching is severe enough to cause dramatic mortality.

These reefs seem to have to pass through the eye of a (hot) needle for their constituent corals to end up being more thermally resistant, and many of them simply don’t make it. I am suggesting that we should attempt to boost the natural abundance of heat tolerant symbionts so that these shifts can be made with less accompanying mortality. Ove and Charles are both correct in identifying problems that will prevent this action from being some kind of miraculous cure-all. It won’t be. However, we should not ignore the fact that an ability to improve the survivorship of corals during a bleaching event is nevertheless an improvement on where we stand now. Currently, we understand the basic cellular physiology of bleaching, but are still unable to make a difference when thermal anomalies pass through and cause widespread bleaching. This is not very satisfactory when all is said and done.

I believe that an attempt to boost the natural abundance of heat resistant symbionts to encourage species-by-species “survivorship networks” on reefs, although ambitious, controversial and high-risk, nevertheless has considerable value as a research activity. This is not just because it might actually work (and increase coral survivorship on critical reefs), but also because the need to demonstrate a willingness to act (to mitigate and alleviate the effects of climate change), as opposed to the need to observe (to predict and understand them) has never been greater. I agree with Ove that blind optimism is no recipe for success. However, reasonable scientific gambles that have half a dozen reasons why they might work are still work attempting, even if there are twice as many reasons they won’t work. It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if, faced with the greatest environmental challenge in history, we excluded activities that might improve survival trajectories because we decided they wouldn’t work in advance of actually trying them.

Thanks to all those who commented.

'Inoculation: naive'

2007-08-15T10:57:00.000Z

Responding to a comment on inoculation by Andrew Baker, Charles Shepard says:

Inoculation of corals with more heat resistant strains has been talked about for years, and indeed has happened in some experimental aquaria. But what people overlook, in my view, is that there is a bit of a difference between seeing whether it can happen (experimentally) and getting that strain to become dominant over, say, the Seychelles archipelago! [To call it] 'naive' is exactly correct, I am afraid. At least, it is naive for now - if you read science fiction of 50 years ago you will see that we should never say never...

But even if such manipulation is possible one day, my worry is that the decline we see now is too rapid for us to reasonably put much store in some technique which may or may not be developed in 10-20 years time. If we look at the temperature curves, then we don't have more than a couple of decades.

...[Where] Baker [says] that 'we should explore whether there are are any actions we can take [to boost the natural adaptive capacity of corals to survive environmental changes]'... then yes, that I do agree with. Certainly we should explore. Urgently in fact.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg says:

The biology of symbiosis would suggest that inoculating corals with new strains of zooxanthellae would be a futile waste of money - symbioses don't form easily (analysis suggests switching occurs on a hundred to thousand year time frame). I would wager that even taking the zooxanthellae from the same species in a much warmer sea (assuming that zooxanthellae were the heart of the thermal tolerance and not the coral/zooxanthellae combination!) and trying to inoculate them into colonies of the same species in a colder but rapidly warming sea would simply result in a lack of uptake by the coral. I am afraid focusing solely on ecology without an appreciation of limits of physiology leads people down pathways that essentially involve a lot of wishful thinking.

Not invented here

2007-08-14T07:06:00.000Z

A press release from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the creation of what it calls "the world's first artificial coral reef".

The claim is ludicrous, given the long experience with artificial coral reefs in many parts of the world. Still, the project looks quite interesting.

RIP Wolf Hilbertz

2007-08-11T13:43:00.000Z

Wolf Hilbertz, a good friend of the planet and to many of us, died at about 2:37 this morning, German time. I will remember him for many reasons, including this account from his first journey to Saya de Malha:

We encountered a unique meteorological phenomenon on the North Bank: the sea was flatter than a mirror, a cloudless night sky, and the stars were so brilliantly reflected by the sea surface that one was deceived in thinking one saw the sky there. The horizon had shifted and all the gods were enjoying themselves. This clearly was a once-in-a-lifetime and profound experience. Tom [Goreau] can make the scientific explanation available to you.

Tom Goreau writes:

I'm heartbroken to hear this tragic news. You can be sure that we will do all we can to ensure that the legacy of his pioneering work in the oceans will never be forgotten.

As Wolf would say, "Ja!, Prinzip Hoffnung [the principle of hope]!"

Frequent hurricanes 'decimate sea turtle beaches'

2007-08-11T09:01:00.000Z

Increasingly frequent and ferocious hurricanes, fuelled by warming oceans, could pose a threat to sea turtles by destroying their nests.

-- from a news report on research by Kyle Van Houten and Oron Bass, and by David Pike here.

Rich and strange

2007-08-10T11:43:00.000Z

Go to Rick MacPherson's Carvival of the Blue III for a roundup of the rich and fascinating variety of recent posts about ocean conservation from many quarters of ye watery globe. One from Coral Bones slipped in there. Surely shome mishtake.

'Inoculate' coral to save the tough ones?

2007-08-09T15:25:00.000Z

Commenting on Regional Decline of Coral Cover in the Indo-Pacific (noted on Coral Bones here), Andrew Baker says:

This is an important study that shows that reefs in the Pacific have surprisingly similar levels of coral cover despite being very different in terms of their environment, physical oceanography and level of human impact. It also reveals considerable variability in coral cover from year to year, while also making the case that Indo-Pacific reefs were considerably impacted by the 1970s.

I find it interesting that the impacts of mass bleaching events (such as the 1997-98 El Nino) are quite difficult to detect given the dramatic year-to-year variation in coral cover preceding these events. Instead of suffering dramatic and obvious reductions in coral cover as a result of bleaching, reefs affected by mass bleaching appear to lose their year-to-year variability instead, as if they are being inexorably squashed towards some future minimum level. Instead of the usual, exuberant, boom-and-bust cycles of coral cover you might expect on healthy reefs, we are instead witnessing the whittling away of reefs to their most tenacious component species.

The fact that year-to-year variability in coral cover seems to have disappeared over the last decade might indicate that we are losing the more susceptible coral species from reefs, and we are instead being left with more resistant, hardy species that are able to withstand the relatively poor environmental conditions we are leaving them with. These surviving corals are likely to include varieties that are more resistant to coral bleaching (as documented by Baker et al., Nature 2004).

We should do more to try and understand what makes corals resistant to bleaching, and explore whether there are any actions we can take to boost the natural adaptive capacity of corals to survive environmental changes. This might include attempts to inoculate the largest and oldest colonies on reefs with reserves of heat tolerant symbiotic algae (that are usually lost from corals during bleaching events) that might help them survive bleaching events, and so help perpetuate the essential framework upon which reefs depend.

However, one has to wonder at what point does one draw the line in this decline and ask "When is a reef not a reef"? That is an unanswered question that I fear will become a research focus in coming years.

'Going faster than rainforests'

2007-08-08T06:10:00.000Z

Some media reports of a paper by John Bruno and Elizabeth Selig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have not been clear about their estimate of the rate of coral loss, quoting either 1 or 2% per year. Bruno and Selig found that:

Estimated yearly coral cover loss based on annually pooled survey data [on 2,667 Indo-Pacific coral reefs between 1968 and 2004] was approximately 1% over the last twenty years and 2% between 1997 and 2003 (or 3,168 square kilometres per year). The annual loss based on repeated measures regression analysis of a subset of reefs that were monitored for multiple years from 1997 to 2004 was 0.72 %.

They conclude that coral cover declined decades earlier than previously assumed, even on some of the Pacific's most intensely managed reefs. "These results", they note in the kind of language that characterises dispassionate scientific papers, "have significant implications for policy makers and resource managers as they search for successful models to reverse coral loss".

-- Regional Decline of Coral Cover in the Indo-Pacific: Timing, Extent, and Subregional Comparisons. News reports here, here, here etc.

Hot and bothered Okinawa

2007-08-06T08:26:00.000Z

As Ove Hoegh-Guldberg notes, on 5 August Yomiuri Shimbun reported mass coral bleaching in Okinawa: 'Should the water temperature stay high in August, it is feared that more coral will be destroyed than ever before – surpassing the case that occurred in 1998, when about 40 percent of the coral around Ishigaki island died'.

Islanders adopt their own coral reef rules, Japan Times 2 August, sketches a community-based conservation intiative on Ishigaki island, stresses threats to coral from poorly planned development, but lacks detail.

[P.S. 10 August: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg gathers together further information on the scale of this event, which extends to at least the northern Philippines and Korea as well as southern Japan]

Deep doo-doo

2007-08-02T10:26:00.000Z

This morning it was reported that the Russians have planted a flag 4,200m (14,000ft) below the North Pole (see also The Arctic is Russian and my post Winners and losers from climate change). It's another reminder of the scale of what's happening in the deep seas, some of which is well summarised in Cindy Lee Van Dover's review of The Silent Deep by Tony Koslow (in Science 20 July 2007) extracted here:

Our dilemma is squarely before us in Koslow's chapter on climate change and the deep sea. As the climate warms, deepwater circulation patterns change, increased carbon dioxide levels acidify the ocean, patterns of primary productivity at the surface reorganize, and methane-hydrate deposits shift to new equilibrium states. There is little doubt that these and other climate-induced changes will affect deep-ocean life, but the manners in which effects will be expressed are nearly impossible to predict or to document because we have scant understanding of how deep-sea ecosystems operate in the first place. While we have all but abandoned the view that deep-sea organisms are exquisitely adapted to a stable and unvarying environment, we have only a modest understanding of physiological tolerances of organisms and ecological responses of populations and ecosystems to changes in basic parameters like temperature, oxygen content, pH, current regimes, and food supply.

We wonder at the strange animals captured in deep-sea trawls, revel in the unsuspected diversity of life dwelling in the cold muds of the seafloor, and celebrate the beauty of deepsea hot springs and cold-water coral reefs. Dramatic deep-sea discoveries unfold year after year, but Koslow reminds us that this "pristine" ocean wilderness is being trampled by the insidious "human footprint across the deep sea": the seabed suffers a nightmarish legacy of tens of thousands of merchant ships sunk and rotting on the seabed, hundreds of thousands of tons of military ordnance scuttled in deep water, millions of curies of radioactive waste and 17 nuclear reactors dumped at depth with no attempt at containment, and residual DDT and PCBs accumulating in deep-sea food chains...

...We are on the cusp of engaging in commercial activities that have the potential of exerting substantial impacts on the quality of deep-ocean ecosystems; there is only a brief window of opportunity for setting policy in place before habitats are compromised. Such policy, internationally sponsored and international in scope, can be holistic and precautionary, rather than a reaction to environmental catastrophe. A forward-thinking approach has immense advantage over negotiating and implementing policy after financial capital is invested, wilderness resources consumed, and habitats destroyed. Koslow provides us with a report on the current status of the ocean depths. Now is the time to chart a path toward rational conservation strategies and sustainable resource uses that acknowledge and accommodate the many gaps in our understanding of the deep ocean.

[For a little context on the Russian mood, see William Pfaff on Putin.]

Believe it or not

2007-08-01T13:15:00.000Z

"Super Suckers" Slurp Invasive Algae Off Hawaiian Reefs (National Geographic).

Carib dog days

2007-07-31T21:35:00.000Z

On 16 July Mark Eakin, Coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch, noted Potential for Bleaching Growing around Florida, Cuba and Bahamas. On 30 July he wrote that Bleaching has begun in the Florida Keys.

Are marine and coral scientists too reticent?

2007-07-27T11:59:00.000Z

'Reticent' is just about the last word I'd associate with most of the scientists I have been privileged to talk to. But, like the joke about the economist asked how his wife was, compared to what (or who)?

The matter comes to mind with the re-publication this week, under the title Huge Sea Level Rises Are Coming Unless We Act Now, of an article by James Hansen that has been going around in various ways since March (see, for example, here) and/or May (Scientific reticence and sea level rise). Hansen argues that some scientists have been excessively cautious, and advances a more alarming scenario about sea level rise than, for example, Stefan Ramstorf at RealClimate.

Back in April I blogged about the relatively rosey (reticent?) forecasts for coral reefs in the final draft of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). This said that coral [reefs] might be able to cope with a temperature rise of up to 3°C in a few decades, whereas the scientific consensus was that the actual threshold (OK, set of multiple thresholds interacting with other factors) is likely to be significantly lower.

It looked to me like a case of excessive reticence. But the feeling at the time seemed to be that even if the headline was not as scarey as many people thought it should be, the Report itself made the likely gravity of the situation clear enough...if you could be bothered with the details. As our man Simon Donner restates in the comments section at the foot of his most recent post:

I could forgive the loose wording in the SPM if it were not for the 3°C limit. I was one of the reviewers of the coral reef sections of the WGII report, from which the SPM was drawn, and I don't recall any specific mention of 3°C, nor any literature sources to specifically support it.

Nevertheless, as I've argued before, rather than get caught up in the geopolitics of the IPCC summary for policymakers, we should celebrate the fact that the full reports have cobbled together and thoroughly reviewed all the science on these issues. I don't think governments could effectively use this bit of SPM language to "promote" a different agenda, because there are too many people watching, and ready to hold their government's feet to the fire.

To which my first reaction is, good points. I hope you're right.

But my second reaction is, well some guys play with hard balls (and, indeed, bats), and the SPM opens a door for those who would push a general idea of "corals could be fine with a 3°C rise" that is not atuned to what the science actually indicates, whatever the consensus and/or debate within the scientific community itself and the best efforts of conservationists and some other enlightened actors.

Perhaps I worry unduly. In any case, if sea level goes up by 5 or 6 metres in a hundred years even fewer people will spend their time thinking about coral reefs. And ocean acidification could do for them next century if not this one. It is indeed all relative.

Status of the Great Barrier Reef

2007-07-25T12:08:00.000Z

Hugh Sweatman of the Australian Institute of Marine Science announces that the first large-scale survey of the status of nearshore reefs of the Great Barrier Reef is now available on line. "You will be pleasantly surprised to find the news is not all bad", he says. The summary and the report are here.

The wood, the trees, the choir invisible

2007-07-24T08:37:00.000Z

In a note on Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's recent commentary, Charles Sheppard restates with clarity the difference between species extinction and ecological extinction:

I think the media (and some simple scientists it seems!) can’t grasp the difference between species extinction (as in Dodo, Sabre-Tooth Tiger etc) and ecological extinction (as in the system is too broken to work any more). One remaining oak tree in a clear-felled mud-scape is not species extinction of the oak, but the forest doesn't do foresty things any more.

I have recently returned (again) from a very heat stressed region of the coral reef world - Arabian/Persian Gulf - and dived for many hours on once rich reefs. I saw a live coral at intervals of perhaps 20 or 50 metres apart, the rest being dead. That is zero coral cover to the nearest whole number, but it is still not species-extinct. You would need to measure cover to about 0.0001% to register a positive number there. But then, to how many decimal places do we need to measure ‘dead’? Answer: to many, if you are looking to confirm species extinction, but none at all if you want to determine whether you still have a reef.

They don't have reefs any more in the sites I worked, but they do have the odd coral still. The reefs, are as dead as Monty Python’s parrot: eroding, not accreting, bio-deficient, not biodiverse, unproductive not productive, just plain dead, to use a shorthand...

For an earlier comment by Charles Sheppard on Coral Bones see here, and on the dead parrot analogy see here.

'Wrong, wrong and wrong'

2007-07-23T16:25:00.000Z

In his new(ish) blog, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg rebuts Peter Ridd's claim that coral reefs will do just fine with climate change.

The post also references an earlier rebuttal from Madeleine van Oppen of a story that appeared in The Australian (noted here on Coral Bones), 'misrepresenting' work at AIMS.

Oppen et al 'see a small increase in tolerance (1-1.5°C) by shuffling symbionts that the coral already has a symbiosis with. That is, it is a small shift that does not give them protection against the elevated sea temperatures of today (during bleaching events, 2-3°C) or the future (3-5°C)'.

British disease

2007-07-21T08:08:00.000Z

Diseases increasingly affect tropical corals and this is the first record of disease affecting cold-water corals.

-- Jason Hall-Spencer, quoted in Warmer waters threaten pink coral [original paper here].

The Micropolitan

2007-07-19T08:14:00.000Z

Peter Etnoyer of Deep Sea News praises the Micropolitan Museum. And praise be indeed to this wonderful project, brainchild of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter (Wim van Egmond et al)!

Etnoyer also praises The Other 95% from Kevin Zelnio, who has made thoughtful comments on this blog.

Larva of a brittlestar, copyright Wim van Egmond

Seachange

2007-07-16T17:40:00.001Z

In a debate about art and politics, Peter Sellars quoted what he said was Jean-Luc Goddard’s definition of an image: ‘two or more distinct realities made to touch each other’.

This brings to mind a stream running through Wildwood by the late Roger Deakin (to whom the recent conference Passionate Natures was dedicated).

Deakin sometimes wrote as if the woodlands were seas and coral reefs. The metaphor might creak in clumsier hands, but the two had grown together in Deakin’s mind so that its expression seems entirely natural. Some examples from the first few pages:

Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything.

…Lying in bed in the shepherd’s hut is an out of body experience in which you are suspended six feet above the bottom of a wooden boat, gazing into its wooden hull and along the line of its keel. Everything is upside down, of course, but it is such another world in there that anything is possible. You gaze out of the open door at the wake of bubbling cow-parsley and the green depths of a hedge in May. Lift your face to a porthole and you can survey the green waters of Cowpasture Meadow coming up to meet you as you voyage across doldrums of Sargasso buttercups in lazy pools, or navigate towards the beacon of a solitary green-winged orchid.

…A fragment of the Newlands oak stands on the windowsill…I have stood in its ruins and do not doubt the measurement [forty-four feet eight inches in girth] or Alan Mitchell’s estimate that it was 750 years old when it fell. Now it is no more than a stubborn atoll of dead wood…

…In the upper wood, Rosemary leads us down narrow paths through the dense blue seabed [of bluebells] to a 500 year old oak...

[Sellars also suggested the world may be entering a new century of perpetual war. For artists (showpeople?) like him, he said, the aim should be to help ‘create conditions in which thought is possible’ – with this as a contribution.]

Shark lady on Belize reef

2007-07-15T21:19:00.000Z

Some types of coral -- such as staghorn, with its long, spindly branches -- are making a comeback at Glover's Reef. Scientists don't exactly know why, except that they are increasingly finding that some species are more resilient than others.

-- from Yes, the water's warm...too warm by Juliet Eilperin.

New under the sun?

2007-07-13T13:48:00.000Z

Coral geneticists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science say [they have] the first evidence that many corals store several types of algae, which can improve their capacity to cope with warmer water temperatures.

--from New genetic approaches unveil cryptic microbial algae in reef coral on the AIMS site, reported in The Australian as Barrier Reef 'can adapt' to warmer times (sic).

Seabed mining in PNG

2007-07-11T14:42:00.000Z

The Sea Turtle Restoration Project says (3 July) villagers from Bababag Island in Papua New Guinea are demanding a stop to deep sea mining in the Pacific. PNG is said to be a "testing ground for the controversial practice of seabed mining".

Back on 18 May Jochen Halfar and Rodney M. Fujita wrote (Danger of Deep-Sea Mining Science 18 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5827, p. 987):

There has been little progress toward creation of environmental regulatory systems specific to deep-sea mining by governments with jurisdiction over massive sulfide deposits. Some of these governments have a poor track record of mine oversight and regulation on land, so prospects appear poor for sound regulation of underwater mining. It is time to implement scientific, technological, and legal measures to minimize negative environmental impacts (including discouraging deep-sea mining activities near sensitive habitats) and to set up mechanisms to recover costs of regulation and enforcement from this nascent industry. Large capital investments and generation of revenues by underwater mining operations are likely to make regulation after onset of commercial operations even more difficult once deep-sea mining becomes a reality.

Teaching a cryptoendolith to talk

2007-07-03T08:33:00.000Z

Of the late Imre Friedmann, an extreme microbiologist, it is reported:

as a student of seaweed, he had the “outlandish” idea that he might find single-celled versions of seaweed in the desert; and he did indeed find, under the limestone surface of the Negev, a greenish layer like a copper compound that turned out to be algae, alive...Friedmann himself always felt a peculiar tenderness for his cryptoendoliths: “always hungry, always too cold, in this grey zone”. “In human terms”, he said, “you could compare them to the most miserably living generations of pariahs in India. They are born, they live, and they die in the gutter.”

Long before corals the first reef building organisms were probably stromatolites. I'd guess Friedmann had an interest in these too. Certainly his work showed that dissection isn't necessarily murder, and that Roger Caillois, author of The Writing of Stones, was right to say research and poetry can go together: "I want the irrational to be continuously overdetermined, like the structure of coral; it must combine into one single system everything that until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of reason that is still incomplete" (credit to Marina Warner for bringing this to attention in her contribution to the Passionate Natures panel Landscape and Story).

Friedmann spent 17 seasons in Antarctica and also studied a lake in the Licancabur volcano in the Andes (pictured below). At around 6,014 metres this is amongst the highest and the least explored lakes on Earth, making it a "unique analog to ancient Martian lakes" where Friedman thought life on Earth may have originated.
Photo credit Andrew N. Hock, Dr. Greg Kovacs

Hurricanes 'may save coral reefs'

2007-07-03T06:20:00.000Z

Derek Manzello, at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and colleagues have shown that hurricanes cool temperatures and may assist coral recovery. Manzello documented the relationship between hurricanes and sea surface temperatures in the Florida Keys archipelago since 1988 and found that, on average, a hurricane will cool sea temperatures by 1.5°C for 10 days. "In relation to coral bleaching, that amount of cooling is pretty significant" -- New Scientist, 2 July

Wind, sun, tide

2007-06-29T08:00:00.000Z

Craeg Bennett notes a report from UPI that Cypress Semiconductor Corp. is donating six 90-watt solar panels to power MIT's First-Step Coral Reef Rehabilitation project.

Barely-Imagined Beings

2007-06-26T13:47:00.000Z

C R McClain of Deep Sea News happens to flag up a short movie of deep sea creatures from Les Watling and NOAA Ocean Explorer. It includes a marvel called Iridogorgia (50 seconds into the clip). Don't let the name put you off: Iridogorgia is at least as strange as anything in Dr Seuss and much more beautiful. This is well worth a watch (but lose the New Age jazz sound track!).

Last weekend's Cambridge convivium Passionate Natures was rich indeed, with some brilliant contributors including Richard Mabey, Jules Pretty, Jeremy Purseglove, Marina Warner, Patrick Wright etc. More power to the convenors! My 0.002 eco-cents of speechifying came in five parts: The Undiscovered Country; Crossing a Threshold; Making a Place in the Imagination; Destruction; and Memory and Hope. It was pretty informal, but I may polish it for publication.

One point to mention here. I am framing part of the Coral Bones project as a Book of Barely-Imagined Beings. With a nod to Jorge Luis Borges, it links fragments of philosophy, science, history, politics, anthropology, poetry and other things through stories about sea creatures. All the creatures really exist but many are so strange that they are almost beyond imagining; many, perhaps most, face destruction by humans because we can hardly imagine what that means.

“All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to the inhabitant of the land and all of its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet”.

So wrote Henry David Thoreau, a guiding voice for Passionate Natures. But the convivium opened on a darker note with a reference to Edward Hoagland's Endgame: Meditations on a diminishing world, which is said to contain the coinage "tsunamic" in reference to the human impact on the biosphere. (I haven't been able to access Hoagland's essay, but my 0.001 eco-cents worth is that I may have got some of the way there in early 2005 with Tsunami coming for us all). Hope dies last, of course, and there is always a chance that enthusiastic gloomsters are wrong: the end of coral reefs in human experience over the next few centuries or thousands of years, for instance, is not necessarily a slam dunk while some are brave and resourceful enough to act effectively.

(A Benthoctopus sp. investigating ALVIN's port manipulator arm: "Those inside the sub were surprised by the octopod's inquisitive behavior". Image by Bruce Strickrott, Expedition to the Deep Slope)

'Protect Bastimentos Island'

2007-06-21T09:54:00.000Z

The Center for Biological Diversity has launched a campaign to protect Panama's Red Frog Beach and Bastimentos Island:

Bastimentos Island...shines as an ecological and cultural gem rich with coral reefs, dense tropical rainforests and indigenous communities. Among the diverse wildlife species of Bastimentos are night monkeys, three-toed sloths, numerous tropical bird and fish species as well as two distinct color variants of the strawberry poison dart frog -- the namesake of the fabled Red Frog Beach. The island [is] also critical breeding habitat for endangered leatherback, green and hawksbill turtles.

However, because of a massive, U.S.-fueled luxury-development boom, Bastimentos Island's sensitive marine and terrestrial habitats are under siege due to the construction of...a high-end tourist resort.

Red Frog Beach Club, an American-based development corporation, is currently constructing phase one of its development plan...And the company is seeking approval from ANAM, Panama's national environmental agency, to begin construction on phase two of its massive, proposed residential resort, which would include up to 800 additional living units, luxury hotel facilities, and a large marina. Such extensive development would profoundly affect Bastimentos' delicate rainforest, beach and coral-reef habitats and jeopardize the cultural heritage of the island's indigenous peoples, who have consistently voiced their opposition to the Red Frog Beach Club project through direct protests and petitions.

CBD's take action page is here, with more on "what's at stake" here.

'Countries reverse decision to protect red corals'

2007-06-16T10:42:00.000Z

Seaweb has the story here:

...The unusual reversal, which took place after the conference was scheduled to have ended, means the trade in red corals will be allowed to continue unchecked, threatening the species’ survival. There was significant support for the listing from the United States (the largest red coral importer in the world), the European Union (a major exporter), Mexico, the CITES Secretariat, as well as numerous NGOs, including SeaWeb, TRAFFIC, WWF and the Pew Institute for Ocean Science.

Opponents to the [protection measures included] Japan, a major red coral trading nation, and industry group ASSOCORAL...

Ecology and the imagination

2007-06-11T15:47:00.000Z

I am taking part in Passionate Natures: Ecology and the Imagination, a conference open to all in Cambridge from 22-24 June. There are some awesome, near legendary people speaking over the three days.

The panel I will join, just before lunch on the Saturday (so people may still be awake), will focus on 'wildness'. The chair and convenor is the tremendous Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places: A Wonder-Voyage (forthcoming, 2007). The other panelists are Jay Griffiths, whose recent book Wild: An Elemental Journey is reviewed in several places including here and here (and extracted here), and Gareth Browning, a partner in Wild Ennerdale. Please join us if you can!

What to say about coral reefs? I will probably build on some remarks in this review of Steve Jones's recent book, together with a not-yet-published review of Julia Whitty's The Fragile Edge. If there's time and it seems the right thing to do I will also explore some hard political and scientific issues that can shape imagination, and vica versa. I may post a paper based on those remarks on this site, but please come to the conference. Meanwhile, some science and some art:

This...is a very impressive animal. It has eyes larger than a blue whale's, a sharp slicing beak as big as a rockmelon and a tongue covered in sharp teeth. Its eight arms and two longer feeding tentacles are armed with toothed suckers and sharp hooks. It swims with muscular fins and a big funnel for jet propulsion, and the undersides of its eyes have rows of lights like truck running lights.

-- from Monster warning to protect oceans by Mark Norman, curator of molluscs at Museum Victoria, Australia.

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him well
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

-- from Alfred Tennyson's The Kraken, quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in El libro de los seres imaginarios.

'Our Ocean Future: The Glass Half Empty'

2007-06-08T18:43:00.000Z

I will assume that mankind is basically evil, the ocean is doomed, and society as we know it will eventually crush itself under the weight of its own befuddled obesity. I don't really believe people are evil so much as apathetic but the result is the same...

--cheerful thoughts for World Ocean Day from Craig R McClain

'Caribbean Corals in Danger of Extinction'

2007-06-07T10:57:00.000Z

A 7 June press released from Conservation International and IUCN says a new (sic) study shows that Caribbean coral species "are dying off, indicating dramatic shifts in the ecological balance under the sea":

The study found that 10 percent of the Caribbean’s 62 reef-building corals were under threat, including staghorn and elkhorn corals. These used to be the most prominent species but are now candidates to be listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species...

The study, which analyzed data on Western Tropical Atlantic corals, seagrasses, mangroves and algae, is "the first in a series of Global Marine Species Assessments (GMSA) of key marine primary-producers on a global scale"

...Next to corals, mangroves appear to be the hardest hit. Mangrove cover in the region has declined by 42% over the past 25 years, with two of the eight mangrove species now considered Vulnerable to extinction and two more in Near Threatened status...

...The scientists noted that some healthy Caribbean coral reefs still exist in well-managed marine protected areas such as Bonaire Marine Park in the Netherlands Antilles. Direct human impacts are reduced in these areas allowing most corals to thrive; however, thermal stress from global warming affects all corals in the Caribbean and must be reversed if these refuges of Caribbean beauty are to survive...

“The Caribbean tourism industry relies heavily on the beauty and health of its sea life,” said Dr. Kent Carpenter, GMSA Director. “Concentrated marine conservation and a global effort to halt man-induced climate change are necessary to preserve this vital economic engine in the region.”

At the time of writing, the press release is not posted in the relevant sections of the web sites of CI or IUCN. Photos are posted here.

[P.S. 10 June Not everyone is convinced that corals are wll protected in Bonaire. See comment attached to this post]

From the edges

2007-06-03T09:38:00.000Z

The Many Strong Voices alliance says 'societies of the Arctic and Small Island Developing States [in the tropics] are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in similar ways.' It aims to bring the two regions together 'to take collaborative and strategic actions on climate change mitigation and adaptation.'

They met in Belize from 28 -30 May to agree a five year action plan, including a 'push for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change' and a 'plan to inform and warn the world of the dramatic effects of climate change in their regions':

'Together, we have identified common problems as a consequence of climate change, and our communities are suffering,' said Taito Nakalevu, Climate Change Officer with the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, based in Samoa. 'We insist that those countries that are causing the problems have a responsibility to those whose lives are being affected.'

Eating the world

2007-05-29T18:13:00.001Z

We keep them alive in cages until the customer makes an order. Then we hammer them unconscious, cut their throats and drain the blood. It is a slow death. We then boil them to remove the scales. We cut the meat into small pieces and use it to make a number of dishes, including braised meat and soup. Usually the customers take the blood home with them afterwards.

The restauranteur was talking about a Pangolin in this report about a ship found floating of the coast of China with 5,000 rare animals on board destined for stomachs on the mainland.

Westerners sometimes enjoy hearing about what we consider shocking consumption practices in China and elsewhere in East Asia. One of my favourite examples (not from China) is the baby bears whose feet, still attached to the living bears, are lowered into hot cooking oil because baby bear feet fritters taste better that way - or so it's reported.

'We' like to think we are better than 'them'. And, when it comes to stripping coral reefs of food in a way that maximises damage the Live reef fish trade does indeed mainly go through Hong Kong. (see also the animal welfare section on chinadialogue.net)

But one can turn the argument around. Western consumption preferences may be different, but they are not necessarily less horrible or damaging to the planet.

How to break out of this? Start with a diagnosis. Avner Offer argues that affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being (thanks to Chris Goodall for pointing to this). Offer, however, offers little by way of prescription.

The fundamental challenge is probably one of values. Of course, even if that is correct it doesn't answer the question.

'The god thou servest is thine own appetite.' -- The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

'There are numberless people who, in order to gratify one of their appetites, would destroy the whole Universe.' -- Leonardo da Vinci (notebooks)

Whales

2007-05-26T11:24:00.000Z

27 May, just ahead of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, is Big Blue March day for whales, with events in Argentina, Australia, Germany, Mexico, the U.S and elsewhere.

Protection of East African reef fisheries

2007-05-23T09:36:00.000Z

The Wildlife Conservation Society and partners report from Kenya:

Fishing is predicted to eliminate many of the ocean's fish stocks in the next few decades. To better manage fish and avoid the predicted fisheries collapse managers are frequently being asked to permanently close areas to fishing. These can be unpopular unless it is known whether or not closures will work and the amount of time that it takes for fish stocks to recover. Most investigations of closures are a single snapshot in time shortly after the closure and, although most investigations have found increases in fish, these studies produce few insights into the time it takes for fish to fully recover.

Tim McClanahan and colleagues were able to overcome this problem by studying four closures in Kenya's coral reef fisheries that were closed at different times in order to produce a nearly continuous recovery for over 37 years. They found that the numbers of species of fish increased up to 10 years after the closure and then remained unchanged, while the fishable stock reached its peak only after 25 years. Some species of fish did not, however, fully recover even after 37 years without fishing. Their findings suggest that recovery from fishing can be quite slow and that permanent closures may be the only way to insure that there are some areas representative of an unexploited ocean and to maintain fisheries stocks.

Towards Pristine Biomass: Reef Fish Recovery in Coral Reef Marine Protected Areas in Kenya is published in Ecological Applications Vol 17 No. 4, June 2007. For more papers by Tim McClanahan see here.

Chagos families win legal battle

2007-05-23T09:25:00.000Z

Families expelled from the Chagos Islands by the British have won their legal battle for the right to return home at the Court of Appeal -- BBC online.

'Stranger than any imagination could conceive'

2007-05-22T22:46:00.000Z

Craig M. Young of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology is reported as writing in The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss that the diversity of life in the abyss “may exceed that of the Amazon Rain Forest and the Great Barrier Reef combined".

That may be. I will only add for now that from the little I have learned a good part of that diversity is benthic and includes cold water corals living as deep as six thousand metres down. Stephen Cairns offered me a glimpse of this extraordinary world, stranger than Mars, when I sought him out in February last year deep in the stacks of the Smithsonian, thanks to an introduction from Tom Goreau.

Focussing on the Southern Ocean, Angelika Brandt of ANDEEP, which sampled 6348 metres down and discovered 585 new species of crustacean, is reported as saying "The number of species out there are certainly unknowable".

P.S. 23 May: J Murray Roberts writes: "Reef framework forming corals like Lophelia are pretty sparse around Antarctica but there are records in the Subantarctic. Cairns published a monograph on this in 1982 (Biology of the Antarctic Seas XI, Antarctic Research Series, Volume 34, Paper 1)".

New book on coral reefs

2007-05-22T13:52:00.000Z

There Are Many Souls Embodied in Water: Tales From the Coral World by Julia Whitty should be worth attention, judging (not least) by some of her articles for Mother Jones such as The Fate of the Ocean, The Thirteenth Tipping Point and Gone.

(In the first of these three I have so far spotted only what I believe to be one error. Whitty writes that "[the world's] shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States". But the right figure is probably between one quarter and one fifth. Emissions from shipping are probably in the region in the range 600 to 800m MtCO2, or 4 to 5% of the global total, whereas some estimates put US emissions at more than 20% of the current annual total and nearly 28% of emissions since 1750 [James E. Hansen]).

Things that go GBRMPA in the night

2007-05-20T22:00:00.001Z

Sometimes this blog grinds slowly but gets there in the end. Glad, then, to note this speech by the member for Kingsford Smith on the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Amendment Bill 2007:

(...)A Natural Heritage List without the Great Barrier Reef is like a cricket hall of fame without Sir Donald Bradman—but that is precisely what we have...

...The bill replaces the Great Barrier Reef Consultative Committee with a non-statutory advisory board and removes the requirement for specific representation from the Queensland Government or the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders...

"Blast" - fighting back in the Philippines

2007-05-12T09:25:00.000Z

From a press release from INECE, forwarded by Stuart Green of Reef Check :

BBC World presents "Blast", an Earth Report documentary that chronicles the ongoing battle between blast fishers in the Philippines and the brave individuals risking their lives to stop them.

Using homemade explosives to kill fish may provide an easy answer for poverty-stricken fishermen, but the rich biodiversity of the Visayan Sea, as well as future sources of food for the people of the Philippines, are quickly being depleted because of their use.

In 2004, after recognizing that declaring blast fishing illegal was not enough to deter fishermen, concerned conservationist and local government official Jo Jo de la Victoria teamed up with INECE member and fellow Filipino Tony Oposa to form the Visayan Sea Squadron. Their mission was to patrol the Visayan sea for blast fishermen and to educate Filipinos
on the importance of sustainable fishing practices.

The success of the Visayan Sea Squadron in protecting the sea angered many in the fishing community. In April of 2006, involvement in the blast fishing project proved fatal for Jo Jo. He was shot and killed by a hired assassin.

"Jo Jo de la Victoria's murder shocked and saddened all of us," said Durwood Zaelke, Director of the INECE Secretariat. "But his heroism, and Tony Oposa's, as evident through this poignant film, continue to inspire those around the world fighting similar battles."

Blast will be broadcast on 19 and 20 May. See the BBC World web site for regional schedules.

In February this year I visited with Tony Oposa and others doing extraordinary work to reverse the tide of destruction and, as described here, witnessed a spectacular operation to nail some of the bad guys. Coral Bones will continue to follow this story of real 21st century heroes.

New links

2007-05-10T09:36:00.000Z

I've been asked to add ICRI and International Year of the Reef 2008 to the list of links on this blog, and am pleased do to so.

Endless forms

2007-05-09T18:48:00.000Z

It’s been said at several places on this blog (and of course more fully elsewhere) that coral reefs are in big trouble, and that one of the best hopes for protecting them is to more fully recognise and realise the benefits (ecosystem and economic services) they offer to rapidly expanding humanity.

But there are other aspects to consider, including non-instrumental ones such as ethics (a right to existence, perhaps?) and aesthetics (sheer beauty).

[Despite the title, this post is not about the output of the Department for Administrative Affairs, or similar bodies]

The challenge of finding a common language for right action with regard to marine ecosystems is huge, as it is in many other areas of human activity. It may or may not be surmountable. Whatever the outcome, steps in the right direction may include more exchanges and discussion about beauty.

As a starting point, priests and poets, geneticists and imams, sadhus and auditors, brigadiers, bus drivers and physicists will mostly agree that coral reefs and the life that goes with them are ‘pretty cool’. But that doesn't take us very far.

Pre-agricultural, indigenous and traditional cultures that may have had a non-instrumental relationship with ‘nature’ have largely been destroyed (assuming they ever really existed). Whatever legacy they may or may not hand on (I guess that languages such as Pirahã have and had no word for abstracts like 'beauty', or need of them), it is unlikely ever to be enough in a world of six and half going on nine billion people. We also need all that science and modern social and political networks, at their best, can bring to the party.

And a key question is value. Could aesthetic appreciation of what science reveals, informed and deepened by reflection, do for the natural world what Friedrich Schiller hoped the arts would do for daily affairs: that they would ‘elevate the moral character of people by first touching their souls with beauty’? Could a 'sea ethic' be a corollary of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic?

The political catastrophes of Schiller’s time and since show that enlightenment optimism should come with a pinch of salt. But that doesn't mean abandoning it. Projects like The Encyclopedia of Life, inspired by E O Wilson and others, may help point the way.

There are many kinds of beauty on a reef. One is the sheer profusion of form and at the same time the echoing of some (but not all) forms and functions found elsewhere and at different scales in space and time. So (simplifying a bit too far) some corals look like trees and offer habitats in a similar way. Swimming over them can be like gliding over a great canopy in miniature. And two resonances – one from deep time and one from myth – may be examples. First, in the Ediacarians of the pre-Cambrian:

[these were] made in a completely different way from other animals: they were fractal. Each frond was built up from smaller, identical fronds, and each of these was composed of yet smaller fronds, and so on, down to the smallest scale visible.

Second from a South Asian story as retold in The Night Life of Trees:

The Peepul tree is the home of the Creator, worshipped by Hindus and forest people alike. They come from afar to pour water on the trunk in prayer. The Peepul tree is so perfect that even against the sky it seems to have the same shape as its own leaf. The detail is the same as the whole.

The links made with these two examples may be stretched. The point is to find connections and common language open to both imagination and reason so that, collectively and singly, we can pay more attention.

The snail in this picture climbed the fence outside the study window while I was writing. We humans will need to be more long-sighted than this humble mollusc, and we have less time.

[P.S. 11 May As noted on Grains of Sand, Paul Klemperer asks some useful questions, including 'Is it morally correct to value our great-grandchildren one-tenth as much as ourselves?' and 'Is human welfare the only criterion anyway?']

Hot and sick

2007-05-08T07:56:00.000Z

Coral disease outbreaks have struck the healthiest sections of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where for the first time researchers have conclusively linked disease severity and ocean temperature. Close living quarters among coral may make it easy for infection to spread, researchers have found.

"With this study, speculation about the impacts of global warming on the spread of infectious diseases among susceptible marine species has been brought to an end," [says] Don Rice, director of the [US] National Science Foundation Chemical Oceanography Program...

These findings may not seem new to everybody, but look to be based on original and thorough work. The conclusion of the study, Thermal Stress and Coral Cover as Drivers of Coral Disease Outbreaks by John F. Bruno et al. (PLoS Biology, 8 May), notes:

Warm temperature anomalies and coral cover are clearly important drivers of [the emergent disease] white syndrome on the GBR. No previous study has demonstrated a link between ocean temperature and coral disease dynamics, especially at regional spatial scales.

[see also Putting the Heat on Coral by Phil Berardelli]

An impoverished place

2007-05-07T07:09:00.000Z

A World Without Corals? by Richard Stone (News Focus, Science, 4 May) covers most of the bases on reporting of this issue, with an update on what some are saying the effects of acidification, and who is listening (analysis of events to date last year has been previously reported in several places including here and here):

IPCC scenarios of global emissions and ocean circulation indicate that by midcentury, atmospheric CO2 levels could reach more than 500 parts per million, and near the end of the century they could be above 800 ppm. The latter figure would decrease surface water pH by roughly 0.4 units, slashing carbonate ion concentration by half, paleocoral expert C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch, testified last month at a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ocean pH would be "lower than it has been for more than 20 million years," he said. And that does not factor in possible acidification from carbon-sequestration schemes now being considered.

Some coral species facing their acid test may become shape shifters to avoid extinction. New findings indicate that corals can survive acidic conditions in a sea anemone-like form and resume skeleton-building when returned to normal marine conditions (Science, 30 March, p. 1811). However, by pH 7.9, says [Ken] Caldeira [of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Palo Alto, California], "there would be a good chance reefs would be gone."

The potential for an acid-induced coral cataclysm has cast a pall on the tight-knit community of reef specialists. "The reality of coral reefs is very dark, and it is very easy for people to judge coral reef scientists as pessimists," says [Camilo] Mora [of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada]. "We're becoming alarmist," adds [Alan] Strong [senior consultant to NOAA's Coral Reef Watch] --for good reason, he insists. "How are reefs going to handle acidification? It's not like sewage or runoff, where you may be able to just turn off the spigot."

Among other key assertions as reported: 1) it [may be] "too early to make really definitive doom-and-gloom statements" (Pandolfi); and 2) "the threat of millions of people losing their livelihoods must be factored into policy planning" (Hoegh-Guldberg):

[John] Pandolfi [of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia], however, argues that it's "too early to make really definitive doom-and-gloom statements."

No one disputes that urgent action on greenhouse gas emissions is essential. "We could still have vibrant reefs in 50 years time," ...says [Terence Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia]. But these will not be the reefs we know today. "They will be dominated by a different suite of species," says Hughes, who notes that the shakedown is already under way.

More likely, steps to rein in emissions will be too little, too late--and the world will have to brace for the loss of reefs. In Southeast Asia, says [Ove] Hoegh-Guldberg [director of the Centre for Marine Studies at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia], the threat of millions of people losing their livelihoods must be factored into policy planning. Coastal dwellings throughout the tropics will have to be strengthened against higher waves. Then there is the intangible, aesthetic deprivation if coral reefs wither and wink out. "Without their sheer beauty," Hughes says, "the world would be an impoverished place."

Good news from the Pacific?

2007-05-05T07:45:00.000Z

A quarter of the world's oceans will be protected from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South Pacific nations have agreed. The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that suffocate marine life.

Bottom-trawling is responsible for some deep-sea reefs losing more than 95% of their coral, BBC News, 5 May. The 4 May press release from Renaca, Chile says:

"New Zealand [is] responsible for some 90% of the high seas bottom trawling in the area [which is the last and largest pristine deep-sea marine environment on earth]...Only the Russian Federation stated its opposition to the measures but, as of this year, has no bottom trawl vessels operating in the region".

Restoration

2007-05-01T07:06:00.000Z

Today's New York Times carries an article by Cornelia Dean on some efforts at coral restoration in Florida by Ken Nedimyer recently supported by the Nature Conservancy (Coral Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn? - and also a short movie). It refers in passing to World Bank/Global Environmental Facility work on Long-term efficacy and cost-effectiveness of coral reef restoration interventions.

Nedimyer's work looks to be modest and not informed by experience of organisations such as the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

Hot coral action in cold UK waters

2007-04-30T13:47:00.000Z

This morning Today (BBC Radio 4) reported on spawning by pink sea fans at the London aquarium. Rachel Jones said this was the first time this has been observed in captivity, while Steve Jones (whose recent book is reviewed here) refered to limited success with replanting of Red Coral in the Mediterranean, and was sceptical that much could be done to slow global extinction. The 'listen again' snippet is here.