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

A person might wear their heart on their sleeve, but cuttlefish seem to wear their thoughts right on their skin.

Horst Obenhaus, a neuroscientist working with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is studying how these unusual creatures communicate with color. In particular, he and his team now think the unique patterns cuttlefish show on their skin while they sleep might be a colorful reflection of their inner thoughts—and, maybe, even of their dreams.

Cuttlefish are cephalopods—cousins of octopuses and squid. They’re clever animals with complex brains. Previous research has shown cuttlefish have decent short- and long-term memory and are social animals that can learn from past experiences. Cuttlefish have passed the marshmallow test, a commonly used psychological gauge of self-restraint and long-term planning. And they even experience something that looks like REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep. This is the phase of sleep during which humans dream. Sleeping cuttlefish have been seen moving their eyes rapidly, twitching, and altering the patterns on their skin, suggesting they might be experiencing something similar.

Even in people, sleep is a mysterious process. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why we do it. But one explanation is that sleep helps convert daily experiences into long-term memories, reactivating experiences we had while awake so that brain structures like the cortex can extract useful information. This, scientists think, helps us consolidate experiences and learn new skills.

So, Obenhaus wondered: are cuttlefish doing the same thing?

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could pinpoint whether these animals reactivate experiences they’ve had during the day while they’re asleep?” he says.

Like other color-changing animals, including chameleons and some fish, cuttlefish change their hues using cells in their skin called chromatophores—“little sacs of pigment, surrounded by muscles,” says Sarah McAnulty, a squid biologist and founder of Skype a Scientist who was not involved with the research. A cuttlefish can flex these muscles to open the chromatophore, revealing the color inside.

Many other color-changing animals automatically change hue in response to changes in their environment or to their hormones. Cuttlefish, however, have incredible control over the color and patterning of their skin. A cuttlefish’s chromatophores are directly wired to the animal’s brain, McAnulty says. “So, they are changing color as quickly as they can think about it.”

In a way, this gives us a direct line to their inner worlds, says Obenhaus. “You just have to watch the skin and learn about what the brain does.”

To find out what cuttlefish’s dozing displays actually mean—if anything—Obenhaus’s team put pairs of dwarf cuttlefish together in tanks and then filmed them for several weeks. The scientists were looking to see if the cuttlefish’s slumbering skin patterns reflected their previous social encounters, similar to how people might revisit their social encounters in dreams.

So far, Obenhaus says, the team’s initial experiment found that while cuttlefish do show patterns on their skin as they’re sleeping, they don’t directly match the colorations the animals made when they were awake. However, some of the sleep-induced patterns did appear to be partial, more abstract versions of those the cuttlefish made during social interactions.

The question, says Obenhaus, is whether they can confirm an alignment between these strange patterns that occur during sleep and those that occur when the cuttlefish are awake.

That there’s any similarity at all between what cuttlefish and people do when they’re asleep, though, shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“Cephalopods diverged from us so long ago,” McAnulty says. “It’s really interesting to observe that other path of evolution that’s been moving alongside us but independently of us.”

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

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The sparkling blue water of Sarasota Bay, off Florida’s west coast, is a popular boating and fishing spot. The bay is also the year-round home for a population of wild bottlenose dolphins, whose daily lives scientists have been studying since the 1970s. Their research has shown that generations of dolphins have learned to approach people and their boats for an easy meal. That behavior can lead to social media–worthy interactions for people—but has dire consequences for the dolphins.

A recent study drawing on 28 years of data has confirmed the old adage: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The scientists found that dolphin mothers that interact with boaters have nearly twice as many babies as female dolphins that stay away. But those babies are nine times more likely to die before reaching adulthood. That high death rate poses a problem for the population as a whole.

It’s not just baby dolphins that die prematurely. “The number one cause of death and mortality in Sarasota Bay are those interactions associated with recreational fishing,” says Kylee DiMaggio, a marine biologist who led the study for the Chicago Zoological Society, which has run the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program since 1989.

In the United States, feeding dolphins is illegal under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, but it still happens often. “Even though we might not mean to, with just our presence, we’re conditioning animals to be around humans more,” DiMaggio says. That proximity increases a dolphin’s risk of being struck by a boat, entangled in a fishing line, or ensnared by a baited hook.

Dolphins are smart and social animals—and mooching has incentives. Getting fish from people instead of hunting could allow female dolphins to save time and energy that they can instead put toward reproduction. It makes sense that the dolphins snatching up bait, nabbing fish from a fisher’s line, and approaching boats for food can have more calves.

However, studies of other species around the world, such as green sea turtles in The Bahamas, show that animals that become reliant on human handouts stop foraging for food. This is true of Sarasota Bay’s dolphins, and it’s a preference that they pass on. DiMaggio says that dolphins from one lineage have been approaching boats for four generations. That behavior is even more dangerous for the youngsters—juvenile dolphins can be killed by boats or fishing gear as they try to stay close to their moms.

For these dolphin mothers, losing multiple babies in quick succession likely causes emotional distress, says DiMaggio. Over time, this stress on female dolphins and the deaths of so many calves could cause population numbers to fall.

“The way that we affect the lives of these animals in urban environments like Sarasota is really complicated,” says Andrew Read, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, who studies the effects of human activities on marine animal populations and was not involved in the study. He says dolphins in urban environments are even more likely to interact with people when their prey becomes scarce, such as during toxic red tides.

We can’t stop the dolphins from interacting with humans, DiMaggio says. But we can teach people to enjoy wild animals from a safe distance.

And for goodness’ sake, stop giving them food.

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

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Like jellyfish, fungi, sea worms, and fireflies, some species of sea cucumbers glow in the dark. A team of researchers from Nagoya University in Japan have found that 10 known deep-sea species are bioluminescent in their natural habitats. The findings are part of a new textbook called The World of Sea Cucumber published on November 10.

[Related: The deepest known ocean virus lives under 29,000 feet of water.]

There are roughly 1,200 species of sea cucumbers. These marine invertebrates are found in every ocean on Earth, but they are best represented in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. They generally live in shallow waters, but some species live at depths of thousands of feet deep. Most closely related to sea urchins, sea stars (aka starfish), sea lilies, and sand dollars, these bottom-dwellers range from as small as one inch long up to six feet. Some sea cucumbers are also known to shoot out a tangle of sticky, noodle-like goo from their butts when provoked. 

The new textbook takes readers deep underwater and discusses the bioluminescent properties of some of these sea cucumbers. According to NOAA, the light emitted by bioluminescent animals is produced by energy released from interior chemical reactions that are sometimes ejected from the organism. Its function is still a mystery, but it is generally used to ward off or evade predators, find food, or as a form of communication. 

The authors drew on previous sea cucumber research to highlight the differences between the shallow-dwelling and a bit more drab species and their brilliantly glowing deep-sea relatives. The book also shows the evolution of sea cucumbers from the Jurassic era roughly 180 million years ago up to the present day. 

To uncover the 10 bioluminescent sea cucumber species, the team deployed a remotely operated vehicle about 3,280 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, California. The vehicle was equipped with a very sensitive and an arm that was robotically controlled from the ship. Unlike the more uniform bioluminescence seen in specimens taken onto ships, the light was shining from the sea cucumber’s head to tail and then back up similar to a wave.  

According to the authors, the previously unknown luminosity in these 10 deep-sea species suggests that sea cucumbers are more diverse than scientists once believed. A member of the order Molpadia is included in this discovery, which was previously believed to be a non-luminescent order of animals. 

While these sea cucumbers dwell in some of Earth’s deepest parts, they are still not immune to the effects of overfishing and particularly the drilling and mining activities that threaten their ecosystem. 

[Related: This headless chicken is the deep-sea ‘monster’ of our dreams.]

“As deep-sea exploration and development continue, information on their biodiversity and ecology, such as this book, becomes important as it allows us to assess the impact of human activities on deep-sea ecosystems,” textbook co-author and Nagoya University biochemist Manabu Bessho-Uehara said in a statement. “Heavy metal pollution from the mud discarded during drilling operations and motor-derived noise disrupting sound communication are important problems, but the effects on organisms when bioluminescence signals are disturbed, such as when light is obscured by drilling mud, have not been examined. It is necessary to clarify the importance of bioluminescence on the deep-sea floor and find measures that will lead to sustainable development.”

Studying the flora and fauna living in these extreme locations can also provide valuable knowledge of all life on Earth. It can help us discover new viruses that thrive in hydrothermal vents and the factors at play in Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. 

“I believe that understanding deep-sea ecosystems and interactions among organisms will lead to a better understanding of life on Earth itself,” said Bessho-Uehara.

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Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.

“It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!”

For nearly 20 years, scientists have been cryopreserving corals—freezing them at temperatures as low as -196 °C for long-term storage. The goal has been to one day plant corals grown from cryopreserved samples on reefs plagued by bleaching and acidification. Yet, progress has been agonizingly slow. When Narida and her colleagues published a study earlier this year detailing how they successfully grew adult corals from cryopreserved larvae, it was a milestone for the field.

Coral cryopreservation is difficult in part because freezing and thawing wreak havoc on cells. As scientists lower the temperature, the water in the coral’s cells turns to ice, leaving them dehydrated and deflated. Reheating is just as delicate: if the coral is warmed too slowly, melting ice can refreeze and tear through the cells’ outer membranes. The result is a soggy mess, as the cells’ innards ooze out through jagged holes—picture a frozen strawberry becoming limp and shriveled as it thaws.

Through trial and error, though, cryobiologists have developed the techniques that helped Narida grow her hood coral to adulthood. To prevent ice damage, Narida says, she washes the animals in antifreeze first. Antifreeze can be toxic, but it also seeps into the larvae’s cells and pushes out the water, helping the coral survive the next step: being dunked in liquid nitrogen.

In 2018, researchers reported that they had managed to get a coral larva to survive freezing and thawing for the first time. The scientists had added gold nanoparticles to their antifreeze to help the corals warm evenly during reheating. However, the thawed larvae were unable to settle and develop into adults. Instead, they kept swimming until they died.

When Narida began her experiments with hood corals in 2021, she included gold in her antifreeze recipe and combined several different antifreeze chemicals to reduce the solution’s toxicity. To thaw the animals quickly and minimize damage, Narida used a high-powered laser designed for welding jewelry. Then, she carefully washed the antifreeze away with seawater, rehydrating the corals. In the end, a whopping 11 percent of larvae in the experiment survived thawing, then settled, and developed into adults.

Leandro Godoy, a coral cryobiologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, is impressed by how many larvae survived after settling. “It’s a huge step,” he says, considering that, in the wild, only about five percent of corals make it that far.

Narida’s oldest thawed coral has survived for nearly nine months and is still growing. But she has more work to do. The larvae that survive cryopreservation are exceptionally fragile and can experience side effects that slow their development. They need careful tending in the lab, like ICU patients after surgery, says Chiahsin Lin, a coral cryobiologist at Taiwan’s National Dong Hwa University and Narida’s coauthor on the study.

The challenge now is to boost the coral’s survival even more to make large-scale reef restoration from cryopreserved larvae practical, Godoy explains.

“We still need to improve,” says Narida. “But this is already a success story.”

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

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On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline six meters up out of the sea. Biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” says Waters.

For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do. “We got on a plane.”

A decade or so earlier, in the mid-2000s, Fraser was a student in Waters’s lab at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The pair were studying how the genetics of New Zealand bull kelp vary across the southern hemisphere when they noticed something very strange.

The kelp living along the coast of mainland New Zealand, Fraser says, was highly genetically diverse. But the kelp inhabiting the cold, subantarctic islands scattered across the Southern Ocean was all very similar. Because of the vast distance between these smaller islands, Fraser had expected the kelp populations to be quite different from one another. The lack of genetic diversity revealed two things: the islands’ kelp had all been wiped out and later recolonized, and the recolonizing kelp had come from a single source. From there, it didn’t take Fraser and Waters long to realize they were really looking at places where kelp had recovered after a massive ecological disturbance. But what kind of disturbance?

“Bull kelp doesn’t like ice,” says Fraser. As the scientists went on to show, encroaching ice had wiped out the islands’ kelp during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. But, Fraser says, New Zealand itself was far enough north to avoid the worst of the Ice Age’s grip, explaining why its kelp populations are so much older and more genetically diverse.

This was a valuable insight for paleoclimatologists. “It’s actually really hard for researchers to work out where the ice was in the last ice age,” says Waters. “They have to take cores from the ocean floor—it’s incredibly expensive. But here we had a completely new approach.” The study showed that sea ice had extended a lot farther north during that period than scientists previously thought.

By 2016, Fraser and Waters had proven that they could uncover signs of historical environmental upsets by looking at kelp genetic diversity. So when the Kaikōura earthquake struck New Zealand, wiping out numerous kelp beds, the pair leaped at the opportunity to watch the process play out in the present.

Seven years on, says Fraser, the recovery is still only just beginning. The uplifted parts of the coast are slowly being recolonized by small algae. In time, bull kelp will once again get a foothold. It could come from the next bay or the other side of the world.

Bull kelp colonization is a high-stakes game of first come, first served. At any one time, there are an estimated 70 million individual chunks of bull kelp riding the currents of the Southern Ocean. The fronds—and the tiny creatures that live on them—can end up almost anywhere.

David Schiel, a marine ecologist from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, says bull kelp is almost purpose-built for long-distance travel. “When it breaks off, it floats. It can stay active for months and still go through its reproductive cycles.”

Despite the constant traffic, genetic exchange between far-flung islands is far from fluid. “We always think if something can get from A to B, then there must be gene flow between the populations,” says Fraser. “But actually, there’s not necessarily any gene flow because the local inhabitants have a real advantage.”

If a floating piece of bull kelp reaches a shore already dense with algae, there is almost no way it can get established, Schiel says. Bull kelp has the best chance of getting a foothold if it washes up on a completely bare stretch of rock. Once there, it needs to mingle its sperm or eggs with those of a reproductively active member of the opposite sex. In other words, “it’s hard to get in there,” says Schiel, “and when they do, there are probably not a lot of competitors getting in.”

But, says Fraser, when an earthquake, marine heatwave, or other deadly catastrophe occurs, “suddenly there are no locals left to compete with the immigrants, so when a few arrive, all of their gametes have a really good chance of getting a foot in the door.”

Once these bull kelp colonists become established, they and their offspring can dominate the population for centuries or even millennia to come.

That kelp tends to colonize quickly and then hang on for the long haul showed Fraser and Waters that studying kelp genetic diversity might be an even better way to identify historical natural disasters than they thought.

Having spent nearly 20 years developing their technique, 2023 brought Fraser and Waters an opportunity to flip their process on its head and really prove its worth. On a coastal rock platform near Rārangi, a town on the northeast end of New Zealand’s South Island, the team stumbled on another pocket of odd kelp genetics. The kelp, they found, shared the genes of a population from 300 kilometers away. Something had clearly happened here.

Subsequent geological studies confirmed what the kelp suggested: around 2,000 years ago, the Rārangi platform had been thrust skyward in an earthquake.

“We wouldn’t have even looked at that region if it wasn’t for the genetics showing us something unusual,” says Waters. “And hey, presto, the geologists had another look, and the evidence was really clear.”

Bull kelp, scientists are coming to understand, holds a record of the southern hemisphere’s turbulent tectonic past. It offers a way to confirm known disasters and find hints of previously undocumented ones.

“We can now look into the past and find signatures of previous disturbances that weren’t known about,” says Waters. “There’s often a hidden history you can reveal using genetic approaches and thereby understand more about a region’s history.”

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

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North Carolina’s Outer Banks saw a busy sea turtle nesting season this year. The barrier islands stretching from Ocracoke Island north to the Virginia state saw 459 total nests between May and October, according to reporting from The Virginian-Pilot and three conservation groups in the state dedicated to sea turtle nesting.

[Related: This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea.]

There are six species of sea turtles native to the United States—green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley. All six species are protected by the Endangered Species Act and four of them are known to nest in North Carolina. Human activities are the biggest threats to sea turtle species around the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that their biggest threats are being caught in fishing gear, nesting and habitat loss, pollution and marine debris, boat strikes, climate change, and the direct harvest of sea turtles and eggs.

During the early to middle of the summer in the Outer Banks, female turtles return to the same beaches where they hatched to dig nests into the sand. They use their back flippers to dig a hole in the ground to deposit the eggs, and then cover it back up with sand. According to the National Park Service, the nesting process takes about one to three hours to complete. 

The tiny turtles hatch a few months later and follow the light of the moon to the ocean. However, their journey from their nests is quite hazardous, as they can be misdirected by artificial lights from homes and streets, crushed by human activity, or eaten by predators on their way to the ocean. 

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, this year tied with 2022 as the second-busiest nesting season on record with 379 reported nests. The area covers more than 70 miles and stretches from Ocracoke Island north to Nags Head. The National Park Service says that the first nest was found on May 12 and the most recent was seen on October 29. The nests comprised 324 loggerhead turtles, 51 green turtles, three Kemp’s ridleys, and one leatherback. The leatherback nest was the first one seen on Hatteras National Seashore in 11 years.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the northern end of Hatteras island reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2009. The refuge covers about 13 miles and saw 43 sea turtle nests this year. By species, 37 nests belonged to loggerhead turtles and six were green turtle nests, according to data from the Sea Turtle Nest Monitoring System.

The nonprofit Network for Endangered Sea Turtles (NEST) also reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2015. Vice President Susan Silbernagel said 30 nests belong to loggerhead turtles and seven were green turtle nests. The all-volunteer organization covers about 50 miles from Nags Head up to Virginia. 

[Related: Safely share the beach with endangered sea turtles this summer.]

To better protect the endangered turtles, volunteers and scientists have been regularly monitoring the region’s beaches since 1997. Staff members and volunteers at Cape Hatteras will establish a buffer zone around the nests for added protection. 

“We could not manage and monitor sea turtle nesting without the help of over 50 dedicated volunteers that assist with monitoring of our nests and reporting and responding to sea turtle strandings,” Michelle Tongue told The Virginian-Pilot. Tongue is the deputy chief of resource management and science for the National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group. 

Sea turtles spend the vast majority of their lives in the ocean and are among the largest reptiles in the world. Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles weigh about 75 to 100 pounds, while leatherbacks can weigh about 2,000 pounds. Sea turtles are set apart from their pond or land-dwelling relatives by their flippers. Instead of these appendages, land and pond turtles have feet with claws. 

Continued monitoring and vigilance during the 2024 nesting season will hopefully increase survival rates for these endangered reptiles.

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If you’ve ever spent time on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, there is a solid chance you stumbled across a slimy mass of stinky, sulfurous-smelling seaweed. The specific marine plant in question during those gross encounters is likely sargassum—while helpful for absorbing CO2, sargassum is also incredibly invasive, and can wreak havoc on both shoreline and ocean ecosystems. Cleanup efforts can cost tens of thousands of dollars while disrupting both tourist and fishing industries, but a recent aquatic robot project is showing immense promise in alleviating sargassum stress. In fact, AlgaRay’s recent successes have even earned it a spot on Time’s Best Inventions of 2023.

Co-designed by Seaweed Generation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to utilizing the versatile plant to help mitigate and remove carbon emissions, an AlgaRay prototype is currently patrolling off the coasts of Antigua. There, the roughly 9-foot-wide robot scoops up clumps of sargassum until its storage capacity is filled, at which point the autonomous bot dives 200m below the surface.

[Related: Rocks may be able to release carbon dioxide as well as store it.]

At this depth, the air pockets that make sargassum leaves so buoyant are so compressed by the water pressure that it simply can’t float anymore. Once released by AlgaRay, the seaweed then sinks to the ocean floor. According to a new writeup by Seaweed Generation’s partners at the University of Exeter, the robot can repeat this process between four and six times every hour. And thanks to a combination of solar panels, lithium batteries, and navigational tools connected to Starlink’s satellite internet constellation, AlgaRay will “ultimately be able to work almost non-stop,” reports the University of Exeter.

Of course, ocean ecosystems are complex and delicate balancing acts at any depth. AlgaRay’s designers are well aware of this, and assure its potential additional ocean floor CO2 deposits won’t be carried out recklessly. Additionally, they note sargassum blooms—exacerbated by human ecological disruption—are already causing major issues across the world.

“Sargassum inundations… cause environmental, social and economic disruption across the Caribbean, Central US and West African regions,” Seaweed Generation CEO Paddy Estridge and Chief of Staff Blythe Taylor, explain on the organization’s website. “Massive influxes of seaweed wash ashore and rot, releasing not just the absorbed CO2 but hydrogen sulfide gasses, decimating fragile coastal ecosystems including mangroves and seagrass meadows and killing countless marine animals.”

[Related: The US is investing more than $1 billion in carbon capture, but big oil is still involved.]

Estridge and Taylor write that humans “need to tread carefully” when it comes to depositing biomass within the deep ocean to ensure there are no “negative impacts or implications on the surrounding environment and organisms.” At the same time, researchers already know sargassum naturally dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Still, “we can’t assume either a positive or negative impact to sinking sargassum, so a cautious pathway and detailed monitoring has been built into our approach,” Estridge and Taylor write. “The scale of our operations are such that we can measure any change to the ocean environment on the surface, mid or deep ocean. Right now, and for the next few years our operations are literally a drop in the ocean (or a teaspoon of Sargassum per m2).”

As the name might imply, the AlgaRay is inspired by manta rays, which glide through ocean waters while using their mouths to filter and eat algae. In time, future iterations of the robot could even rival manta rays’ massive sizes. A nearly 33-foot-wide version is in the works to collect upwards of 16 metric tons of seaweed at a time—equal to around two metric tons of CO2. With careful monitoring of deep sea repositories, fleets of AlgaRay robots could soon offer an efficient, creative means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]  has been very clear that we need to be able to remove (not offset, remove) 10 billion [metric tons] of carbon a year from the atmosphere by 2050 to have a hope of avoiding utter catastrophe for all people and all earth life,” write Estridge and Taylor. Knowing this, AlgaRay bots may be a key ally for helping meet that goal. If nothing else, perhaps some beaches will be a little less overrun with rotting seaweed every year. 

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

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

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

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There’s no better indicator of the health of the oceans than the amount of phytoplankton that resides in them. That’s not only because this microalgae produces at least 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe, but also because it’s the start of the marine food chain, determining what other creatures live and thrive in any given area.

The changing seasons and the climate crisis may play a big role in the presence of phytoplankton over time, so it’s of the utmost importance for researchers to know what levels look like in oceans around the world. Sailors, boaters, and interested sea-faring travelers can help track and study this microorganism by using one simple tool: the Secchi disk. You can contribute to important citizen science by building one and taking it with you the next time you head to the ocean.

What is a Secchi disk?

A Secchi disk is an impressively low-tech piece of scientific equipment invented in 1865 by Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi to measure water transparency and turbidity. In deep-water ocean environments, these factors are determined by biological material like phytoplankton, explains Verena Meraldi, chief scientist for HX Hurtigruten Expeditions, a cruise line that invites passengers to participate in scientific data collection.

The tool itself is usually a round piece of white plastic with a diameter of 30 centimeters (about 12 inches), that is attached to the end of a tape measure or line marked at 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) and 1-meter intervals (a little more than 1 yard). 

We’ll explain in more detail below, but using a Secchi disk is easy: just lower the disk on a line into the water and record the depth at which you lose sight of the contraption. This measurement is called Secchi depth. Deeper measurements mean there’s less phytoplankton in the water, whereas shallow measurements indicate an abundance of the microalgae and therefore, a healthier environment.

Once you have a reading, you can log your findings in the Secchi app (available for iPhone and Android). The platform is part of the Secchi Disk Study citizen science program launched in 2013 by marine biologist Richard Kirby after a controversial 2010 report published in Nature that claimed phytoplankton levels had declined 40 percent between 1950 and 2008. Kirby’s initiative collects data to track the presence of this crucial microalgae worldwide.

Researchers have long collected data on phytoplankton by measuring ocean surface color using satellites. But this information is not enough, so this is where citizen scientists come in.  

“You need some means of determining in situ measurements, and the simplest way to do that is to measure the clarity of the water with a Secchi disk,” Kirby explains.

How to make a Secchi disk

There are two kinds of Secchi disks: the ones made to measure clarity in freshwater are painted in black and white, and are smaller than the white-only Secchi disks designed for the ocean. To participate in Kirby’s study, you’ll need the latter.

You can order a Secchi disk online, but you can also make your own, as they are easy to make and much cheaper, too.

[Related: How to become a citizen scientist]

Please note that some of the measurements in this project are in metric units. This is important because the Secchi Disk Study measures depth in centimeters, so the data you provide must be measured accordingly.   

Stats

• Time: 30 to 60 minutes
• Cost: about $8
• Difficulty: easy 

Materials

• 12-by-12-inch piece of wood, plastic, or styrofoam board, ⅛-inch or ¼-inch thick
• 50 meters (165 feet) of sturdy light-colored cord
• 2-pound fishing weight (or anything heavy enough to pull the disk down)
• (Optional) 4-inch eyebolt
• (Optional) 2 washers
• (Optional) 2 hex nuts
• (Optional) 50-meter (165-foot) fiberglass surveyors tape
• (Optional) White matte paint
• (Optional) Carabiner

Tools

• Heavy-duty scissors, box cutter, or saw
• Measuring tape
• 2 permanent markers of contrasting colors
• Drill
• Ruler

1. Cut a disk with a 30-centimeter diameter. You can craft your Secchi disk from just about any material, including metal or wood, though plastic is most common as it’s often easier to cut to size. A trimmed 5-gallon paint bucket lid, a thick signboard, or even a cutting board will work well. Just make sure that whatever material you choose won’t break easily and end up polluting the waters you’re trying to study and protect. 

2. (Optional) Paint your disk matte white. If the material you chose is already matte white, you can skip this step. If it’s not, paint your disk with matte-finish white paint and let it completely dry. You can use whatever you have at hand—just keep in mind that you may need more than one coat to get the required opacity.

3. Drill a small hole in the center of the disk. Use a ruler to find the center and drill a hole that’s just a bit bigger than the width of your cord.

5. Securely attach the weight to the bottom side of the disk. The weight can be a 2-pound fishing weight, repurposed link of mooring chain, or anything else that will help the disk sink. 

• Pro tip: “Be creative—you just need a lump of heavy metal,” Kirby says.

6. Mark your line. Once everything is knotted securely, use a permanent marker to draw lines on the cord at 20-centimeter intervals. Use the contrasting color to make marks at 1-meter intervals.

How to use a Secchi disk

Once you have your disk, head for the ocean. Make sure it’s at least partly sunny and that you embark ideally between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., as the angle of the sun will affect light penetration. Don’t set sail unless you’re accustomed to being on a boat, wearing proper safety equipment (like a life jacket), and know how to swim.

If you’re not comfortable on the water or don’t have a way to leave shore, no data is uninteresting, Kirby says. That means you can still join in and if you can only take readings once from a jetty or pier near shore where you live, you can still join in. Although the instructions below require a boat, you should be able to adapt them to wherever you are.

To pick a good reading location, Kirby says to find a spot at least 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) from shore where you can’t see the ocean floor, so around 25 meters deep (82 feet) deep. This depth and distance from shore will help reduce the amount of tannins and sediment obscuring visibility that could alter the measurement. 

Take off your sunglasses if you’re wearing them, and drop your clean disk into the water on the shady side of your boat. Keeping a firm grip on your measuring tape or rope, slowly let out the line. If you think it might slip from your fingers, tie it off to a secure surface for extra peace of mind. Watch carefully as your disk descends, and make sure it sinks vertically. If it doesn’t, the sinking weight might be off-balance or the current may be too strong, in which case you may have to make some adjustments and try again later.

Stop when you can no longer make out the disk beneath the surface. Raise and lower the disk a few times to pinpoint exactly the point where you lose sight of it. This will help you get the most accurate reading and make sure your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. When you’re ready, record your Secchi depth by looking at your measuring tape at the point where it touches the water, or counting the submerged interval markers. You’ll need the average measurement when you use the app. Finish by opening the Secchi app at the drop site—follow the prompts and instructions to record your GPS location and enter your data.

You can repeat this procedure anytime you’re on the ocean. In fact, if you visit far-flung destinations or regularly return to the same spot, all the better: repeated readings from various times of the day, different seasons, and from hard-to-reach locales are extremely valuable for helping scientists understand how phytoplankton levels change over time and around the world.

The Secchi Disk Study has published two research papers on phytoplankton, with more in the works. That’s thanks to citizen science contributions: cruise passengers, avid sailors, recreational kayakers, and anyone who even occasionally takes to open water and wants to contribute to important and quantifiable environmental science. You can add yourself to that list now too.

The post You can help measure the ocean’s health with this homemade gadget appeared first on Popular Science.

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Officials from the US Coast Guard confirmed on Tuesday that a salvage mission successfully recovered the remaining debris from the OceanGate Titan submersible. The 22-foot-long vessel suffered an implosion en route to the Titanic almost four months ago. Five passengers died during the privately funded, $250,000-per-seat voyage intended to glimpse the historic tragedy’s remains, including OceanGate’s CEO and Titan pilot, Stockton Rush.

According to the Coast Guard’s October 10 press release, salvage efforts were underway via an agreement with the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage & Diving following initial recovery missions approximately 1,600-feet away from the Titanic wreckage. Searchers discovered and raised the remaining debris on October 4, then transferred them to an unnamed US port for further analysis and cataloging. The US Coast Guard also confirmed “additional presumed human remains” were “carefully recovered” from inside the debris, and have been sent for medical professional analysis.

[Related: OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’.]

OceanGate’s surface vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible approximately 105 minutes into its nearly 2.5 mile descent to the Titanic on June 18. Frantic, internationally coordinated search and rescue efforts scoured over 10,000 square surface miles of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the North Atlantic ocean floor. On June 22, OceanGate and US Coast Guard representatives confirmed its teams located remains indicative of a “catastrophic implosion” not far from the voyage’s intended destination.

Submersible experts had warned of such “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design for years, and repeatedly raised concerns about OceanGate’s disregard of standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to the company obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry experts, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the submersible’s “experimental” approach they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

“Your [safety standard] representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” reads a portion of the 2018 letter.

Although salvage efforts have concluded, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) plans to continue conducting evidence analysis alongside witness interviews “ahead of a public hearing regarding this tragedy.” A date for the hearing has not yet been announced, although as The Washington Post notes, the Coast Guard could recommend new deep-sea submersible regulations, as well as criminal charges to pursue.

OceanGate announced it suspended “all commercial and expedition operations” on July 6.

The post What the US Coast Guard found on their last OceanGate Titan salvage mission appeared first on Popular Science.

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A new marine snail that would make the late great Jimmy Buffet proud has been discovered in the Florida Keys. The lemon-colored snail is named Cayo margarita after the Spanish word for “small, low island” and the tropical drink Buffet sings about in one of his biggest hits. The new and real resident of the fictional Margaritaville is described in a study published October 9 in the journal PeerJ.

[Related: This cone snail’s deadly venom could hold the key to better pain meds.]

Marine smells are distantly related to the land-dwelling gastropods in gardens around the world. The margarita snails come from a group nicknamed worm snails, since they spend many of their lives living in one place. Worm snails also do not have a protective covering found in other snails called an operculum. This body part allows the snails to retreat further inside their shell and keep their bodies moist.

“Worm snails are just so different from pretty much any other regular snail,” study co-author Rüdiger Bieler tells PopSci. “These guys are sitting in the middle of the coral reef where everybody is out trying to eat them. And they’ve given up that protection and just advertise with their bright colors.”

Bieler is a marine biologist and curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago who has spent 40 years studying the Western Atlantic’s invertebrates. Even after decades studying the region, these worm snails were hiding in plain sight during dive trips, largely because these snails are kind of the ultimate introverts.

Once juvenile worm snails find a spot to hunker down and they cement their shell to a hard surface never really move again. “Their shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus,” Bieler explains. 

Bieler and the rest of the international team of researchers came across the lemon-yellow snails in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and a similar lime-colored snail in Belize. Within the same species of snails, it is possible to get many different colors. There can also be color variations in a single population or even cluster of snails. Bieler believes that they may do this to confuse some of the coral reef fish that can see color so that they do not have a clear target. Some may use their hue as a warning color.  

The team initially believed that the lime-green and lemon-yellow snails were different species, but DNA sequencing revealed just how unique they are. This new yellow species belongs to the same family of marine snails as the invasive snail nicknamed the “Spider-Man” snail. This same team found these snails in 2017 on the Vandenberg shipwreck off the Florida Keys.

[Related: Invasive snails are chomping through Florida, and no one can stop them.]

The snails in this new Cayo genus also share a key trait in common with another worm snail genus called Thylacodes. The species Thylacodes bermudensis is found near Bermuda, and while only distantly related to their Floridaian and Belizean cousins, they have small colored heads and mucus that pop out of tubular shells. This might work as a deterrent to keep corals, anemones, and other reef fish from getting too close. The mucus has some nasty metabolites in it which might explain why these snails risk exposing their heads. 

The study and the new snails described in it help illuminate the stunning biodiversity of the world’s coral reefs, which are under serious threat due to climate change and the record warm ocean temperatures this summer. 

“These little snails are kind of beacons for biodiversity that need to be protected because many of them are dying out before we even get a chance to study them,” says Biler. 

It is also an important lesson in always looking right under your nose for discovery.

“I’ve been doing this for decades. We still find new species and previously unknown morphologies right under our feet,” says Biler. “This [discovery] was at snorkeling depth and in one of the most heavily touristed areas in the United States. When you look closely, there are still new things.”

The post New neon-yellow snail from the Florida Keys gets a happy hour-ready name appeared first on Popular Science.

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

Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels to consume fluids like water or honey; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in their many pores. And as scientists around the world are beginning to show, sponges’ cavity-filled forms mean they could provide a solution to one of our era’s biggest scourges: microplastic pollution.

In August, researchers in China published a study describing their development of a synthetic sponge that makes short work of microscopic plastic debris. In tests, the researchers show that when a specially prepared plastic-filled solution is pushed through one of their sponges, the sponge can remove both microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics from the liquid. These particles typically become trapped in the sponge’s many pores. Though the sponges’ effectiveness varied in experiments, in part depending on the concentration of plastic and the acidity and saltiness of the liquid, optimal conditions allowed the researchers to remove as much as 90 percent of the microplastics. They tried it in everything from tap water and seawater to—why not—soup from a local takeaway.

The plastic-gobbling sponges are made mostly from starch and gelatin. Looking a bit like large white marshmallows, the biodegradable sponges are so light that balancing one atop a flower leaves the plant’s petals upright and unyielding, which the researchers suggest ought to make them cheap and easy to transport. Inside, the sponges’ structure appears less like lots of tiny bubble-like cavities and more like a jagged surface.

According to Guoqing Wang, a materials chemist at Ocean University of China and coauthor on the paper, the sponge formula is adjustable. By tweaking the temperature when the two compounds are mixed, he says, the sponges can be made more or less porous. This affects the size of particles collected—highly porous sponges have lots of very small pores, which is good for catching very tiny particles.

The sponges, if ever produced at an industrial scale, Wang says, could be used in wastewater treatment plants to filter microplastics out of the water or in food production facilities to decontaminate water.

It would also be possible to use microplastic-trapping sponges like this in washing machines, suggests Christian Adlhart, a chemist at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland who has also experimented with creating sponge filters for collecting microplastics. Some microplastics enter waterways after being shed by synthetic fabrics when they are swirled around in the wash. “You could place such a sponge inside the drum,” says Adlhart. “I think it would absorb a large fraction of the fibers.”

Sponges like this work thanks to a duo of mechanisms, he adds. If water is actively driven through one, for example as it is squeezed and released, microplastic particles get trapped inside the sponge’s pores like collecting marbles in buckets. But even when the sponge is simply floating in still water, electrostatic interactions mean that some plastic particles will cling to it.

There are hiccups to the sponge’s potential adoption, though. One, says Adlhart, is that starch and gelatin are important to the food industry, meaning that there could be competition for the key ingredients in the future. However, similar sponges can be made with different materials. The version that Adlhart and his colleagues developed, for instance, uses chitosan—a sugar derived from the shells of crustaceans—to provide the sponge’s structure. Chitosan isn’t widely used commercially, says Adlhart, so it wouldn’t face the same competition.

Adlhart says his sponge design, which involves spinning together a matrix of chitosan nanofibers, was inspired by the filter-feeding activity of oysters, which trap particles in their gills as they pump seawater through them.

Chitosan, starch, and gelatin are all biodegradable. However, the process developed by Wang and his colleagues to make their sponge uses formaldehyde, a highly toxic compound, and there were traces of this in the sponges themselves. Wang says they’re working to come up with an alternative so that they can make a completely environmentally friendly sponge.

Anett Georgi, a chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany who wasn’t involved in the research, says that when it comes to cleaning up microplastic pollution in the ocean, the key is to stem the flow. We should start, she says, by targeting wastewater treatment plants that don’t yet employ technologies that already exist—such as filters made with sand or activated carbon—to remove plastic.

That’s something that could be realized quickly, says Georgi: “We don’t have to wait for crazy material.” But for smaller-scale applications, such as removing microplastics from household water supplies, the new sponge filters could be useful, Georgi suggests.

What’s still lacking, says Alice Horton at the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre, is proof that any of these newer sponge-based technologies can be cost effective and successful in removing microplastics from water at a large scale. But one thing she is confident about is that efforts to remove microplastics after they have already reached the ocean are probably doomed to fail.

“I don’t think there is anything we can do on a large enough scale that will have any impact,” she says of that. “We have to stop it getting there in the first place.”

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

The post Oyster-inspired sponges can scoop up nearly invisible nanoplastics in the ocean appeared first on Popular Science.

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

To see a great white shark breach the waves, its powerful jaws clasping a shock-struck seal, is to see the very pinnacle of predatory prowess. Or so we thought. Several years ago, in South Africa, the world was reminded that even great white sharks have something to fear: killer whales.

Long before they started chomping on yachts, killer whales were making headlines for a rash of attacks on South African great white sharks. The killings were as gruesome as they were impressive. The killer whales were showing a deliberate sense of culinary preference, consuming the sharks’ oily, nutrient-rich livers but leaving the rest of the shark to sink or wash up on a nearby beach.

From the initial news of the attacks, the situation only got weirder. Great white sharks started disappearing from some of their best-known habitat around South Africa’s False Bay and Gansbaai regions, in the country’s southwest.

“The decline of white sharks was so dramatic, so fast, so unheard of that lots of theories began to circulate,” says Michelle Jewell, an ecologist at Michigan State University Museum. In the absence of explanation, pet theories abounded. Some proposed that overfishing of the sharks’ prey to feed Australia’s fish and chips market led to the shark’s declines. Other activists misinterpreted that idea and went on to campaign against what they thought was the recent inclusion of great white shark meat as a surprise ingredient in Australian fish and chips. That idea was, fortunately, thoroughly debunked.

Others thought the disappearance was directly caused by the killer whales. Perhaps they were killing all the sharks?

“Any time you see large population declines in local areas, it’s cause for conservation concern,” says Heather Bowlby, a shark expert with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “In a place where animals used to be seen very regularly, and suddenly they’re not there anymore, some were concerned that they all died.”

Now, though, scientists finally know what happened. In a recent paper, Bowlby and her colleagues show that the sharks’ disappearance was, actually, caused by the killer whales. But the sharks aren’t dead. They just moved. Across South Africa, the scientists found, the white shark population has taken a pronounced eastward shift.

To Jewell, who wasn’t involved in the research, this makes sense. “We know that predators have a huge influence on the movement and habitat use of their prey, so this isn’t really surprising,” she says. “The issue is that lots of people weren’t used to thinking of great white sharks as prey.”

Alison Kock, a marine biologist with South African National Parks and a coauthor of the study, says they cracked the mystery after reports started flowing in from sites farther east that white sharks were showing up unexpectedly. “As False Bay and Gansbaai had major declines, other places reported huge increases in white shark populations,” she says. “Too rapid to be related to reproduction, since they don’t reproduce that fast.”

“It had to be redistribution,” she says, adding: “The white sharks moved east.” Places like Algoa Bay and the KwaZulu-Natal coastline had seen great white sharks before but not anywhere near this many.

In the white sharks’ absence, South Africa’s west coast is changing. New species like bronze whalers and sevengill sharks have moved into False Bay. For the tour operators who ran shark dives in the area, however, the shift has been difficult. Some have survived by switching to offering kelp forest dives—driven in part by the popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher. Many, though, have gone under.

But what of the great white sharks’ new home farther east? No one quite knows how these regions are adapting to a sudden influx of apex predators, but scientists expect some significant ecological changes. They’re also warning of the potential for increased shark bites, since people living in the white shark’s new homes are not as used to shark-human interactions.

We may never know exactly how many white sharks died in killer whale attacks. The prized, presumably tasty, livers targeted by the killer whales help white sharks float, which means many dead white sharks may have sunk uncounted. Overall, though, Kock is glad to see the mystery solved.

“This has been very worrying for me, and it was good to see evidence that they hadn’t all died,” says Kock. “But it’s still unbelievable to me that I can go to [False Bay’s] Seal Island and not see any white sharks. It’s something I never expected, and I miss them a lot.”

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

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

For clownfish, life begins with an adventure. In 2003’s Finding Nemo, young Nemo takes a dizzying journey from coral reef to captivity and back again. In real life, it’s a different kind of quest: soon after hatching, tiny translucent clownfish larvae swim for 10 to 15 days, traveling up to 35 kilometers through open ocean. It’s the biggest trip they’ll ever take. After this brief excursion, young clownfish develop their iconic orange and white coloring and settle down on an anemone, where they dwell for the rest of their days.

But recent research suggests that climate change could disrupt this delicate life stage. In laboratory experiments, graduate student Billy Moore at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and colleagues found that clownfish larvae raised in water 3 °C warmer than normal zoom through early development. After 18 days, fish raised at 31 °C instead of 28 °C had bodies 16 percent longer, on average. The fish raised in warmer water also grew complete fins and pelvic fin spines—a key stage of clownfish development—two days faster than the fish raised under cooler conditions.

Timothy Ravasi, study coauthor and marine scientist at OIST, says that faster growth in a warming world could become a problem for wild clownfish. If climate change causes clownfish larvae to develop too quickly, they might arrive on an anemone when there’s not enough food to go around. Or fish that grow faster might not swim as far—if they settle close to home and mate with nearby fish, clownfish genetic diversity could suffer.

But the fish’s quicker growth could have benefits. Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the study, suggests that faster maturing clownfish larvae may spend less time in the open ocean where they are vulnerable to predators.

Either way, clownfish are a prime choice for studying the consequences of climate change because, unlike many coral reef fishes, they are easy to breed in captivity. This gives researchers the chance to study their entire life cycle up close, and probe questions about how warming water might affect wild fish at each stage of their development. Plus, Ravasi jokes, “everyone loves Nemo.”

The clownfish that Moore raised in warmer water also had faster metabolisms, which the scientists determined by measuring how much oxygen the clownfish consumed in a tiny swim tunnel. This squares with previous research on older clownfish, as well as Ravasi’s not-yet-published research on juvenile grouper.

The researchers based the warmer temperature in their study on the projection of future climate change if carbon dioxide emissions double by the year 2100. Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 3 °C increase in average ocean temperatures by 2100 under that scenario, temperature spikes are already common during ocean heatwaves. This year, ocean temperatures have broken records around the world, with the North Atlantic more than 1 °C warmer than normal, on average. Some spots are seeing even higher temperatures, like the 10 °C jump near coastal Newfoundland in July.

“The temperature is going to increase, marine heatwaves are going to increase, so we do need to understand how these fish will respond,” says Moore.

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

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The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but humans have only visited and mapped 5 percent of them. They remain one of the greatest, deepest mysteries close to home. With the help of scientists and photographers, however, we’re uncovering more wildlife and more about the flows and balances in oceans day by day. While we might never know everything that unfolds beneath the great blue waves, we can always keep our curiosities and appetites alive.

The post Sea the beauty of the world’s oceans with these 12 award-worthy photos appeared first on Popular Science.

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The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world. 

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory]

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Longer and more intense periods of El Niño and La Niña mean that the risks of extreme weather—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, drought—are heightened for most countries lying in the Pacific or flanking it. For example, El Niño pulls warm water farther east, so if tropical cycles (storms that tend to move westward) develop, they’ll have more time and distance to cover until they reach land. “While they’re traveling in the ocean, these tropical cyclones are energized by the heat and moisture from the ocean,” says Cai. By the time they reach countries to the west like North Korea, South Korea, Japan, or China, they could be more catastrophic than the tropical storms those places experience today.

Since “global warming is already making extreme events more extreme” like intensifying storms and weather patterns, Cai says, it’s a “double whammy.” 

But even the less dramatic effects of ENSO could still amount to damage. The fluctuations in ocean temperatures that ENSO brings, for example, can be dramatic and too quick for marine life like corals to adapt, says John Burns, a marine and data scientist at the University of Hawaii. “All that can exacerbate coral bleaching,” which has already been documented in Hawaiian reefs. 

And because creatures and systems are so intrinsically interconnected, this has resounding implications for a number of species and industries. Burns has created technologies that can reconstruct water habitats, and he’s used those models to study the implications of coral loss. “We’ve actually mathematically connected how these habitats influence the abundance of reef fish,” he says, “which are one of the primary sources of protein for the global economy, especially in Southeast Asia.” So not only will climate change and ENSO harm fish and fisheries, but that could also have ripple effects on tourism, as well as the local and global economies. 

In a recent report in the journal Science, climate researchers from Dartmouth College estimated that extreme El Niño events from 1982 and 1997 alone cost the global economy about $4 trillion to $6 trillion, respectively, in the following years. The authors also estimated that this current El Niño period could rack up $3 trillion in losses over the next five years. The damages aren’t just limited to buildings and infrastructure, Cai says: They include social pillars people may not even consider, like jobs, farmland, food stocks, and individual health. As a result, some countries and organizations are taking a proactive approach against El Niño. Peru, for instance, is dedicating more than $1 billion to prevent and contain the carnage it might bring.

[Related: The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems]

But there is time to bring ENSO and the Pacific Ocean back into balance, bit by bit. While it can be useful at times to consider these global changes on a large scale, it’s important to “recognize that solutions will be very locally based,” says Burns. Even if we project the overall trends, he explains, understanding how specific habitats will be affected and what solutions are feasible requires local and native wisdom and knowledge. 

“It’s a shame if we get dismayed by these larger-scale changes and come to a conclusion of ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” Burns says. “It’s definitely not that simple … and we need strategies that are place-based to protect these systems.”

The post When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows appeared first on Popular Science.

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

For commercial fishers, losing gear is part of doing business. Fishing lines and nets break and wear out over time or have to be cut loose when gear snags on the seafloor. By one estimate, at least 50,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and traps disappear into the water globally each year. In California alone, as many as 14,000 crab traps are lost or discarded each season. Most of this material is plastic, and lots of it is still partially functional, meaning it can go on catching and killing marine life for centuries—a process known as ghost fishing.

For several years, scientists, fishers, and conservations have been eyeing a not-so-novel solution: biodegradable fishing gear. Made of things like microalgae fibers or biodegradable polyesters, this equipment can be broken down by aquatic microorganisms. Yet while these environmentally friendly nets offer benefits, recent field trials conducted largely in Norway and South Korea show that biodegradable nets catch significantly fewer fish than synthetic ones.

Benjamin Drakeford, a marine resource economist at the University of Portsmouth in England, puts it bluntly: “Biodegradable gear right now is not very good.”

In Atlantic cod fisheries, for instance, nylon nets catch as much as 25 percent more fish than biodegradable alternatives. One team of scientists attributed such shortfalls to biodegradable materials’ tendency to be more elastic and stretchy, potentially allowing fish to wiggle free.

But Drakeford and his colleagues wanted to look at the bigger picture: if biodegradable nets and traps reduce fishers’ catches—but they also lessen the environmental damage from lost and discarded gear—is that a financial hit worth taking? After all, fishers have a vested interest in keeping fish populations healthy. The scientists analyzed prior studies of biodegradable fishing gear’s effectiveness, then interviewed 29 fishers, boat owners, and representatives from fishing industry groups in England about their expenses, profits, and other financial details.

In conclusion, Drakeford and his colleagues write in a recent paper, an industry shift to biodegradable nets would not lessen the impacts of ghost fishing enough to offset fishers’ reduced catches. Biodegradable nets would leave more fish in the water and reduce rates of ghost fishing, helping fishers with future catches. But to make up for the reduced landings, fishers would need financial incentives.

But, the scientists say, if biodegradable gear can be improved, the benefits “over traditional fishing gear would grow exponentially.”

One big problem, the scientists reason, is that a certain degree of ghost fishing is currently locked in: the gear is already lost. Even if fishers everywhere replace their gear, the decrease in ghost fishing—and resultant bump in fish stocks—wouldn’t happen for years. So rather than improving their catch by cutting down on ghost fishing, fishers would be trading environmental sustainability for a lower catch without seeing much of an immediate benefit.

Brandon Kuczenski, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved in the work, suggests this lack of cost-effectiveness could be overcome with government subsidies.

Drakeford and his team’s analysis comes amid mounting concern over marine plastic pollution, which is pouring into the world’s oceans at alarming rates and is liable to haunt marine ecosystems essentially forever. Large pieces of plastic can choke and strangle marine life, while tiny micro- and nanoplastics—the inevitable result of plastic breaking down—can have more insidious impacts.

Geoff Shester, a campaign director for the conservation organization Oceana, says that while he endorses efforts to develop biodegradable gear, he thinks it would be easier and faster to implement a penalty and reward system to incentivize fishers to not lose or litter gear in the first place. Such a system, he says, would require registering and tracking all commercial fishing equipment.

“If you put out fishing gear, you should have to demonstrate that you’re getting it back,” he says. Right now, he adds, there is no penalty for fishers who lose their gear other than having to buy new gear. He thinks such a system could be more effective in reducing waste.

There is another option, too: holding net manufacturers financially accountable for plastic gear pollution and the costs to fishers of shifting to biodegradable gear. This concept, known as extended producer responsibility, is briefly discussed in Drakeford’s paper.

For his part, Drakeford believes biodegradable nets’ lower efficiency is a speed bump on the road to widescale adoption. He thinks the gear will follow the path of electric vehicles—getting better and better and better. In just a decade, he points out, the range of electric vehicles has doubled several times.

Drakeford sees some irony in the fact that switching to biodegradable gear is, in concept at least, not so much a leap forward as it is a step back.

“In the past, we used biodegradable materials to make crab pots and fishing nets and such,” he says. “We know the answer to this—we just need to go back to what we used to do.”

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

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The jury may still be out on plant-based meat alternatives’ economic and environmental viability, but experts largely agree that the seafood industry in its current form is untenable. Overfishing presents countless ecological problems, including plastic pollution and the potential for a wholesale collapse of marine biodiversity. Researchers have been experimenting with seafood alternatives for years, but one company is finally ready to bring its offering to market—and it represents a major moment within the industry.

Austrian-based food-tech startup Revo Foods announced this week that its 3D-printed vegan fish filet “inspired by salmon” is heading to European grocery store shelves—a first for 3D-printed food. According to the company’s September 12 press release, the arrival of “The Filet” represents a pivotal moment in sustainable food, with 3D-printed consumables ready to scale at industrial volumes. Revo Foods’ Filet is likely to be just the first of many other such 3D-printed edible products to soon hit the market.

[Related: Scientists cooked up a 3D printed cheesecake.]

“Despite dramatic losses of coral reefs and increasing levels of toxins and micro plastic contaminating fish, consumer demand for seafood has paradoxically skyrocketed in recent decades,” the company announcement explains. “One promising solution to provide consumers with sustainable alternatives that do not contribute to overfishing is vegan seafood. The key to success of these products lies in recreating an authentic taste that appeals to [consumers].”

The Filet relies on mycoprotein made from nutrition-heavy filamentous fungi, and naturally offers a meat-like texture. Only another 12 ingredients compose Revo’s Filet, such as pea proteins, plant oils, and algae extracts. With its high protein and Omega-3 contents, eating a Revo Filet is still very much like eating regular salmon—of course, without all the standard industrial issues. And thanks to its plant-based ingredients, the Filet also boasts a three-week shelf life, a sizable boost from regular salmon products.

“With the milestone of industrial-scale 3D food printing, we are entering a creative food revolution, an era where food is being crafted exactly according to the customer’s needs,” Revo Foods CEO Robin Simsa said via this week’s announcement.

While Revo’s products are currently only available for European markets, the company says it is actively working to expand its availability “across the globe,” with Simsa telling PopSci the company hopes to enter US markets around 2025. Until then, hungry stateside diners will have to settle for the Revo Salmon dancehall theme song… yes, it’s a real thing.

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Climate change is often in the form of extremes in weather like sweltering heat domes, devastating inland flooding or record breaking wildfire seasons, which puts lives and livelihoods at risk for humans. However, the world’s animals who are on the front lines of an ever changing planet experience these changes a little differently. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

“When we see climate change in the news, we often think of big storms or major weather events but animals are vulnerable to the smallest changes,” wildlife filmmaker and host Bertie Gregory tells PopSci. 

In the new series “Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory,” viewers can get a look into these subtleties and changes. In one episode, the team is searching a dive spot in Indonesia for the elusive devil ray, when a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish approaches.

“Avoiding their stingers was like playing a video game! We were told that huge jellyfish plumes like that were becoming a more regular sight in these tropical waters, which is not a good sign,” Gregory says. 

When Gregory checked the dive thermometer, it read 87.8 degrees Fahrenheit, in water that should have been about 82 degrees. A few degrees might not always sound like much, but has an outsized impact on animals.  “Jellyfish are thought to tolerate climate change better than other species, hence their huge numbers on that day. For us, it meant no other signs of life,” says Gregory.

[Related: Maine’s puffins show another year of remarkable resiliency.]

The series spans the planet and uses high-tech drones and cameras that Gregory calls a “game changer” for wildlife filmmaking. The tech allows the filmmakers to catch a glimpse of the outer lives of animals and even some of their more inner workings.

“We also used a military grade thermal imaging camera to film elephants at night in the depth of the jungle in the Central African Republic—it uses heat to “see” in the dark and elephant ears look incredible as you can see all their veins!” says Gregory.

The series also captures just how difficult it is for terrestrial animals like the pumas of Patagonia and marine mammals like Antarctica’s orca whales to get a solid meal and how climate change continues to threaten vital food sources. 

An episode features a group of Antarctic orcas known as the B1s during what Gregory says was the warmest Antarctic trip he has ever experienced. These killer whales are known for a unique strategy to hunt seals resting on the ice that might remind some orca enthusiasts of the hydroplaning killer whales near Argentina’s Valdés peninsula who thrust their 8,000 to 16,000 pound bodies up onto the beach to catch seals. 

Instead of using surf, sand, and rocks like their Argentinian cousins, these Antarctic killer whales work together as a team to create waves that wash the seals into the water. 

“We witnessed and filmed the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. There are thought to be just 100 of these unique killer whales in existence, and during filming it was clear they were struggling to ‘wave wash’ seals from ice because there wasn’t much ice,” says Gregory.

[Related: Orcas are attacking boats. But is it revenge or trauma?]

The whales had to constantly adapt their strategy just to get a single seal, sometimes risking an escape from their prey in order to teach the younger whales strategies to carry on to the next generation. 

These constant struggles offer up sobering reminders of the macro and micro ways that the planet is changing and making life more difficult for almost every living thing.. Over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The  United Nations agreed upon a biodiversity treaty at the end of 2022 pledging to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only about 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

The same location in Indonesia where Gregory and his team encountered the stingy jellyfish swarm is home to the Misool Marine Reserve. Despite climate change’s constant challenges, the area is a conservation success story thanks to community-led initiatives to protect the area from overfishing by implementing specific parts where fishing is allowed.

“Now, Misool is one of the few places on earth where biodiversity is increasing. What they’ve managed to do could be a blueprint for how we can protect oceans around the world and proof that if given the chance, nature can make an amazing comeback,” says Gregory. “It’s good news for wildlife and good news for people.”

“Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory” premieres September 13 on Disney+.

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Researchers at MIT have designed a new underwater communication system that employs 70-year-old technology while also requiring one-millionth the energy needed for existing arrays. Not only that, but the team’s design allows for transmissions that can travel 15 times farther than current devices.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago—underwater communication with a million times lower power—is now practical and realistic,” Fadel Adib, director of MIT Media Lab’s Signal Kinetics group and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in a September 6 announcement. “There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment.”

The key to their long-range, efficient Van Atta Acoustic Backscatter (VAB) can be found within the system’s name. As The Register explains, Van Atta arrays, first designed over seven decades ago, are composed of connected nodes capable of both triangulating and reflecting signals back towards their source instead of simply reflecting them outwards in all directions. This makes them not only more efficient, but capable of making much farther transmissions.

[Related: Why the EU wants to build an underwater cable in the Black Sea.]

Backscattering, meanwhile, refers to what occurs when signals such as sound waves reflect back to their point of origin. The phenomenon underpins technology such as ultrasounds, as well as mapping sea floors. Configure Van Attay arrays to boost backscattering capabilities, and you get the MIT team’s new VAB technology.

“We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks,” Adib said, via MIT’s announcement. “For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality.”

With additional refinement and experimentation, researchers hope their VAB will soon be able to “map the pulse of the ocean,” reports Interesting Engineering. According to one of the team’s forthcoming studies, installing underwater VAB networks could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling, as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.

“Our design introduces multiple innovations across the networking stack, which enable it to overcome unique challenges that arise from the electro-mechanical properties of underwater backscatter and the challenging nature of low-power underwater acoustic channels,” reads a portion of one of their studies’ abstracts. “By realizing hundreds of meters of range in underwater backscatter, [we present] the first practical system capable of coastal monitoring applications.”

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On January 15, 2022, the drowned caldera under the South Pacific isles of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Haʻapai in Tonga blew up. The volcanic eruption shot gas and ash 36 miles up into Earth’s mesosphere, higher than the plume from any other volcano on record. The most powerful explosion observed on Earth in modern history unleashed a tsunami that reached Peru and a sonic boom heard as far as Alaska.

New research shows that when the huge volume of volcanic ash, dust, glass fell back into the water, it reshaped the seafloor in a dramatic fashion. For the first time, scientists have reconstructed what might have happened beneath the Pacific’s violently strewn waves. According to a paper published in Science today, all that material flowed underwater for dozens of miles.

“These processes have never been observed before,” says study author Isobel Yeo, a marine volcanologist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre.

About 45 miles from the volcano, the eruption cut off a seafloor fiber-optic cable. For Tongans and rescuers, the broken cable was a major inconvenience that severely disrupted the islands’ internet. For scientists, the abrupt severance of internet traffic provided a timestamp of when something touched the cable: around an hour and a half after the eruption.

The cut also alerted scientists to the fact that the eruption had disrupted the seafloor, which isn’t easy to spot. “We can’t see it from satellites,” says Yeo. “We actually have to go there and do a survey.” So in the months after the eruption, Yeo and her fellow researchers set out to fish clues from the surrounding waters and piece them back together.

A Tongan charter boat owner named Branko Sugar had caught the initial eruption with a mobile phone camera, giving an exact time when volcanic ejecta began to fall into the water. Several months later, the boat RV Tangaroa sailed from New Zealand to survey the seafloor and collect volcanic flow samples. Unlike in much of the ocean, the seafloor around Tonga had already been mapped, allowing scientists to corroborate changes to the topography. 

[Related: The centuries-long quest to map the seafloor’s hidden secrets]

The scene researchers reconstructed, had it unfolded above ground, might fit neatly into Roland Emmerich disaster film. The volcano moved as much matter in a few hours as the world’s rivers delivered into the oceans in a whole year. These truly immense flows traveled more than 60 miles from their origin, carving out gullies as tall as skyscrapers.

When the volcano blew, it spewed out immense quantities of rock, ash, glass, and gas that fell back to earth. This is bog-standard for such eruptions, and it typically produces the fast-moving pyroclastic flows that menace anything in their path. But over Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, that falling mass had nowhere to go but out to sea.

“It’s that Goldilocks spot of dropping huge amounts of really dense material straight down into the ocean, onto a really steep slope, eroding extra material,” says Michael Clare, a marine geologist at the National Oceanographic Centre and another author. “It bogs up, it becomes more dense, and it just really goes.”

Scientists estimated the material fanned out from Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai at 75 miles per hour—as fast as, or faster than, the speed limit of most U.S. interstate highways. If correct, that’s 50 percent faster than any other underwater flow recorded on the planet. That rushing earth gushed back up underwater slopes as tall as mountains.

“It’s like seeing a snow avalanche, thinking you’re safe on the mountain next to it, and this thing just comes straight up against you,” says Clare.

These underwater flows, according to the researchers, had never been observed before. But understanding volcanic impacts on the seafloor is about more than scientific curiosity. In the last two centuries, we’ve laid vital infrastructure below the water: first for telegraph cables, then telephone lines, and now optical fibers that carry the internet.

Trying to prepare a single cable for an eruption of this scale is like trying to prepare for being struck by a train—it can’t really be done. Instead, a surer way to protect communications is to lay more cables, ensuring that one disaster won’t break all connectivity.

[Related: Mixing volcanic ash with meteorites may have jump-started life on Earth]

In many parts of the globe, that’s already the case. Fishing accidents break cables all the time, without much lasting effect. If, for instance, the world experienced a repeat of the 1929 earthquake-induced landslide that cut off cables off Newfoundland, we probably wouldn’t notice too much: There are plenty of other routes for internet traffic to run between Europe and North America.

As a global map of seafloor cables shows, though, that isn’t true everywhere. In Tonga in 2022, a single severed cable all but entirely cut the archipelago off from the internet. Many other islands, especially in the developing world, are similarly vulnerable.

And those cables are of great value to geologists, too. “Without having the cables, we’d probably still be in the dark and wouldn’t know these sorts of events happen on the scale that they do,” says Clare.

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

In late 2013, a mass of warm water now known as the Blob appeared in the northeast Pacific—a massive marine heatwave that cooked coastal ecosystems from Alaska to California. Later, bolstered by an El Niño, the vast and potent heatwave wreaked havoc on marine ecosystems: thousands of seabirds died, while blooms of harmful algae poisoned marine mammals and shellfish. The suddenly warmed water also brought an influx of new animals to the northeast Pacific: ocean sunfish appeared in Alaska, while yellow-bellied sea snakes popped up in Southern California.

By 2017, the Blob had waned and many of these more tropical species had retreated. Yet not all. Some of the species that colonized new habitats during the heatwave have stuck around. And now, says Joshua Smith, a marine ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California who documented in new research how the Blob triggered a range of subtle yet persistent shifts in the spread of marine species, “I’m starting to sort of question whether those communities will ever look the way they did.”

Historically, it’s common enough that a handful of individuals from warm-water species will make their way north during warmer years, but there wouldn’t be enough of them to sustain a long-term population, says Jenn Caselle, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of the new paper. But because the Blob was so intense and lasted so long, sizable populations made the move into these normally cooler habitats—populations that were potentially large enough to establish more permanent footholds.

Señorita fish, for example—a bright-orange wrasse that showed up in huge numbers in central California during the heatwave—are still there, Smith says. Ocean whitefish, while historically common around Southern California’s Channel Islands, are now dominant, Caselle says, while California sheephead, a bulbous red-and-black fish, are now also much more abundant near Santa Barbara.

These changes in coastal communities, Caselle says, can have knock-on effects on how these ecosystems function. Sometimes, when one species is extirpated from a community—like a predatory fish that keeps a population of smaller fish in check or a seaweed species that provides a home for invertebrates—the ecosystem loses some kind of important function. But if that lost species is replaced by a new species that does the same thing, that new species could provide some resilience to the ecosystem, Caselle says, even if the community doesn’t look the same as it always did.

People can also adjust to new ecological realities, she says, pointing to fishers’ recently acquired fondness for the now-abundant ocean whitefish.

The Blob was one of the most intense marine heatwaves in recorded history, so it makes sense that it had a big effect on marine ecosystems. But big marine heatwaves have affected the northeast Pacific every year since 2019, including this year. Meanwhile, the current El Niño is further heating the northeast Pacific, and climate change means marine heatwaves will likely continue to be even more frequent.

As oceans continue to warm and the heatwave hits keep coming, William Cheung, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the new research, says fish populations could be in trouble. In his own research, Cheung previously showed how warming and marine heatwaves will stress fish populations in the northeast Pacific. Usually, he says, fish populations can bounce back after a heatwave. But if heatwaves start occurring more frequently, populations will have less time to replenish themselves.

These changes are unlikely to go unnoticed. “The place where humans interact with the ocean the most is right at the coast. It’s where most of the biodiversity lives, and it’s where a lot of the productivity is,” Caselle says. “As these systems change, it can affect our everyday lives.”

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

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Preserving coral reef ecosystems is absolutely vital to ensuring a stable, healthy ocean environment. Sadly, ongoing climate crises continue wreaking havoc on experts’ efforts to avert the worst effects of die-offs and coral bleaching. With new advancements, however, one potential solution could involve cryopreservation–collecting and containing coral samples at temperatures as low as -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to a recent study in Nature Communications, a team at Texas A&M University has developed a novel cryopreservation technique called “isochoric vitrification.” First, fragments of coral are actually strategically bleached in a lab using a combination of menthol and light. Then, coral fragments’ temperatures are quickly lowered to -196 degrees Celsius, or nearly -321 degrees Fahrenheit inside special aluminum containers. But despite the low temperatures, the coral is cooled without immediate injury.

Although any kind of bleaching often removes symbiotic algae crucial to coral photosynthesis, not doing so ahead of isochoric vitrification results in the formation of deadly ice pockets. By removing the algae ahead of vitrification, however, fragments could be preserved in a “glassy state” via submerging the coral in a chemical solution in aluminum containers cooled using liquid nitrogen. Later, the coral could be revived by slowly warming samples with the reintroduction of filtered seawater.

[Related: Mass coral reef bleaching in Florida as ocean temperatures hit 100 degrees.]

“It’s this collaborative marriage of fundamental thermodynamic advancements and fundamental advancements in coral biology and husbandry that have enabled our breakthrough success in whole coral cryopreservation,” Matthew Powell-Palm, the project’s lead author and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, explains in a statement.

Although the team notes that coral cryopreservation has already been used in the past, the methods require collecting samples during coral reproduction cycles. Such breeding periods only occur a few days a year, often in difficult-to-reach areas. In contrast, isochoric vitrification allows researchers to harvest and preserve coral regardless of time of year. What’s more, the new method is vastly simpler than alternative cryopreservation techniques.

“Compared to other emergent vitrification techniques—which frequently require lasers, electromagnetic implements or other high-tech laboratory equipment—our isochoric vitrification approach… requires no moving parts or electronics, and the protocol can be implemented by a field technician with no background in thermodynamics,” Powell-Palm continues in their statement. “This is essential to the practicality of any conservation technique because when this is deployed in real marine field stations, the high-tech lab infrastructure common to many laboratories will not be available.”

“From a purely technological perspective, the technique is simple, rugged and ready for the field,” Powell-Palm explained via the announcement.

After honing their new technique, researchers tested the isochoric vitrification process on coral fragments at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Currently, coral samples’ post-thaw lifespans post-thaw only lasted less than 24 hours, but the team believes reducing the procedure’s overall stress effects will extend the method’s viability.

“Coral reefs are essential to the baseline health of our oceans, and cryo-conservation of endangered coral species can help to ensure that these invaluable and marvelous organisms do not go extinct,” wrote Powell-Palm.

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The Earth’s South Pole is at a climate change crossroads, with Antarctica’s quickly melting ice and expected consistent ocean heat waves. Now, one of its signature species is in trouble. A study published August 24 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment found that some Emperor penguin colonies saw an unprecedented breeding failure in a region of the continent that experienced a total loss of sea ice in 2022.

[Related: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels 16 feet by 2500.]

Four out of five Emperor penguin colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea on the western side Antarctica did not see any chicks survive to successfully fledge in the spring of 2022. Emperor penguin chicks typically fledge at four months old, when they’ve developed their first set of waterproof feathers. 

All of the colonies in this study have been discovered in the last 14 years using satellite imagery, and there has only been one previous instance of breeding failure among these penguin populations. 

“We have seen the occasional colony have bad sea ice and early break up, but this most unusual thing in this study is that a whole region has had extremely poor sea ice,” Peter Fretwell, a remote sensing expert and environmental scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the study, tells PopSci. 

Similarly, the Halley Bay penguin colony, which was not included in this study and lives in a different part of Antarctica, failed to raise any chicks between 2016 and 2019. That failure was also attributed to sea ice loss. 

From April to January, Emperor penguins depend on stable sea ice that is firmly attached to the shore or ‘land-fast’ ice. Once they arrive at their chosen breeding site, penguins will lay eggs during the Antarctic winter (May to June) in the ice. Eggs will hatch after 65 days, but the chicks do not fledge until December to January during Antarctic summer. 

“This year the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea did not form until late June–when the birds should already be on their eggs. It may be that in future this region could be one of the first to become unsuitable breeding habitat,” says Fretwell.

Between 2018 and 2022, 30 percent of the 62 known Emperor penguin colonies living in Antarctica were affected by partial or total sea ice loss. The British Antarctic Survey said that it is difficult to immediately link specific extreme seasons to climate change, but a longer-term drop in sea ice extent is expected based on current climate models.  

[Related: The march of the penguins has a new star: an autonomous robot.]

By early December 2022, the Antarctic sea ice matched the previous all-time low set in 2021. The central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea region saw the worst of it, with 100 percent sea ice loss.

“Right now, in August 2023, the sea ice extent in Antarctica is still far below all previous records for this time of year,” Caroline Holmes, a British Antarctic Survey polar climate scientist who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. “In this period where oceans are freezing up, we’re seeing areas that are still, remarkably, largely ice-free.”

Previously, Emperor penguins have responded to this sea ice loss by moving to a more stable site the next year. However, this strategy won’t work if the loss of sea ice habitat extends to an entire region. 

These populations have also not been subject to large scale hunting or overfishing and other direct interactions with humans, and climate change is considered to be the only major influence on their long-term population changes. More recent efforts to predict Emperor penguin population changes paint a bleak picture, showing that if the present rate of warming persists, more than 90 percent of colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of this century.

Daniel P. Zitterbart, a physicist by training and an Emperor penguin remote sensing expert from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the study called it a very important and timely investigation. 

“The sad part is we had all been expecting this, but we expected this later. It happened for so many colonies in just one year, just because of changing weather patterns,” Zitterbart tells PopSci. “Peter points out that this is likely due to La Niña and change in wind patterns, but the study can show us how increased extremes can have an immediate impact on those colonies that are further up north.”

As their habitat is expected to shrink over the next century, scientists are unsure if the areas that they are moving to will have enough resources to host all of the penguins coming in. Studies like this one continue to ring the alarm that Antarctica and its wildlife remain vulnerable to extremes.

“Hopefully, this is a one year thing for now and with the weather pattern changing back to El Niño, the sea ice in this location this year and next year will grow back to what it normally is,” says Zitterbart. “But we all know that this year we had the first 6.4 Sigma event, which means that the sea ice in Antarctica is very low.”

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Ocean temperatures are surging worldwide largely due to human-made climate change and natural El Niño driven patterns. The rise is wreaking havoc on the planet’s coral reefs, however a study published August 22 in the journal Nature Communications found that the coral reefs in one part of the Pacific Ocean can likely adjust to some rises in temperature. This adaptation has the potential to reduce future coral bleaching as the climate continues to change. 

[Related: The heroic effort to save Florida’s coral reef from a historic heatwave.]

“We know that coral reefs can increase their overall thermal tolerance over time by acclimatization, genetic adaptation or shifts in community structure, however we know very little about the rates at which this is occurring,” study co-author and Newcastle University coral reef ecologist James Guest said in a statement. 

The rate at which coral reefs can naturally increase thermal tolerance, and if it can match pace with warming, is largely unknown. So the team started their work by investigating historic mass bleaching events that have occurred since the late 1980s in a remote Pacific coral reef system. 

They focused on a reef system Palau, an island country in the western Pacific Ocean, and found that increases in the heat tolerance of reefs is possible. Reefs here are known as a bevy of biodiversity and provide a barrier from storms. The team used decades of data to create models of multiple future coral bleaching trajectories for Palauan reefs. Each model had a different simulated rate of thermal tolerance enhancement. The team found that if coral heat tolerance continues to rise throughout this century at the most-likely high rate, significant reductions in bleaching impacts are actually possible.

The results affirm the general scientific consensus that the severity of future coral bleaching will depend on reducing carbon emissions. For example, if the commitments of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit future warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, high-frequency bleaching can be fully mitigated at some reefs under low-to-middle emissions scenarios. These bleaching impacts are unavoidable under high emissions scenarios where society continues to rely on fossil fuels.  

Coral communities will need to persist under constant climate change and will likely need to endure progressively more intense and frequent marine heatwaves. The team believes that the observed increase in tolerance suggests that some natural mechanisms, such as genetic adaptation or acclimatization of corals or their symbiotic microalgae, may contribute to the increased heat tolerance. 

[Related: To save coral reefs, color the larvae.]

While this is some positive news for Pacific coral, the resilience comes at a high cost. Adaptations like these can reduce reef diversity and growth, and without cutting future greenhouse gas, the Pacific’s reefs won’t be able to provide the habitat resources and protection from waves that residents depend on.

“Our study indicates the presence of an ecological resilience to climate change, yet also highlights the need to fulfill Paris Agreement commitments to effectively preserve coral reefs,” study co-author and Newcastle University coral reef ecologist Liam Lachs said in a statement. “We quantified a natural increase in coral thermal tolerance over decadal time scales which can be directly compared to the rate of ocean warming. While our work offers a glimmer of hope, it also emphasizes the need for continued action on reducing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change and secure a future for these vital ecosystems.”

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education, or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef. But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.

Marine scientist Ken Nedimyer and his team at Reef Renewal USA began moving an entire coral tree nursery from shallow waters off Tavernier to an area 60 feet deep and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) cooler. Even there, temperatures were running about 85 to 86 F (30 C).

Their efforts are part of an emergency response on a scale never before seen in Florida.

The Florida Reef – a nearly 350-mile arc along the Florida Keys that is crucial to fish habitat, coastal storm protection and the local economy – began experiencing record-hot ocean temperatures in June 2023, weeks earlier than expected. The continuing heat has triggered widespread coral bleaching.

While corals can recover from mass bleaching events like this, long periods of high heat can leave them weak and vulnerable to disease that can ultimately kill them.

That’s what scientists and volunteers have been scrambling to avoid.

The heartbeat of the reef

The Florida Reef has struggled for years under the pressure of overfishing, disease, storms and global warming that have decimated its live corals.

A massive coral restoration effort – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mission: Iconic Reef – has been underway since 2019 to restore the reef with transplanted corals, particularly those most resilient to the rising temperatures. But even the hardiest coral transplants are now at risk.

Reef-building corals are the foundation species of shallow tropical waters due to their unique symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae in their tissues.

During the day, these algae photosynthesize, producing both food and oxygen for the coral animal. At night, coral polyps feed on plankton, providing nutrients for their algae. The result of this symbiotic relationship is the coral’s ability to build a calcium carbonate skeleton and reefs that support nearly 25% of all marine life.

Unfortunately, corals are very temperature sensitive, and the extreme ocean heat off South Florida, with some reef areas reaching temperatures in the 90s, has put them under extraordinary stress.

When corals get too hot, they expel their symbiotic algae. The corals appear white – bleached – because their carbonate skeleton shows through their clear tissue that lack any colorful algal cells.

Corals can recover new algal symbionts if water conditions return to normal within a few weeks. However, the increase in global temperatures due to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities is causing longer and more frequent periods of coral bleaching worldwide, leading to concerns for the future of coral reefs.

A MASH unit for corals

This year, the Florida Keys reached an alert level 2, indicating extreme risk of bleaching, about six weeks earlier than normal.

The early warnings and forecasts from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Network gave scientists time to begin preparing labs and equipment, track the locations and intensity of the growing marine heat and, importantly, recruit volunteers.

At the Keys Marine Laboratory, scientists and trained volunteers have dropped off thousands of coral fragments collected from heat-threatened offshore nurseries. Director Cindy Lewis described the lab’s giant tanks as looking like “a MASH unit for corals.”

Volunteers there and at other labs across Florida will hand-feed the tiny creatures to keep them alive until the Florida waters cool again and they can be returned to the ocean and eventually transplanted onto the reef.

Protecting corals still in the ocean

I.CARE launched another type of emergency response.

I.CARE co-founder Kylie Smith, a coral reef ecologist and a former student of mine in marine sciences, discovered a few years ago that coral transplants with large amounts of fleshy algae around them were more likely to bleach during times of elevated temperature. Removing that algae may give corals a better chance of survival.

Smith’s group typically works with local dive operators to train recreational divers to assist in transplanting and maintaining coral fragments in an effort to restore the reefs of Islamorada. In summer 2023, I.CARE has been training volunteers, like the young divers from Diving with a Purpose, to remove algae and coral predators, such as coral-eating snails and fireworms, to help boost the corals’ chances of survival.

Monitoring for corals at risk

To help spot corals in trouble, volunteer divers are also being trained as reef observers through Mote Marine Lab’s BleachWatch program.

Scuba divers have long been attracted to the reefs of the Florida Keys for their beauty and accessibility. The lab is training them to recognize bleached, diseased and dead corals of different species and then use an online portal to submit bleach reports across the entire Florida Reef.

The more eyes on the reef, the more accurate the maps showing the areas of greatest bleaching concern.

Rebuilding the reef

While the marine heat wave in the Keys will inevitably kill some corals, many more will survive.

Through careful analysis of the species, genotypes and reef locations experiencing bleaching, scientists and practitioners are learn valuable information as they work to protect and rebuild a more resilient coral reef for the future.

That is what gives hope to Smith, Lewis, Nedimyer and hundreds of others who believe this coral reef is worth saving. Volunteers are crucial to the effort, whether they’re helping with coral reef maintenance, reporting bleaching or raising the awareness of what is at stake if humanity fails to stop warming the planet.

Michael Childress is an associate professor of biological sciences and environmental conservation at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Marine biologists combing through some of the coldest ocean water on Earth have uncovered a never-before-seen sea creature they call the Antarctic strawberry feather star. But don’t let the cute name fool you. Though its body is shaped like a plump fruit, its other features are pure eldritch horror: 20 protruding arm-like appendages that could be sprouting from an Alien movie monster. Some of the “arms” are up to 8 inches long and studded with bumps or feathery tendrils. 

“As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem,” says Nerida Wilson, an invertebrate marine biologist at the Western Australian Museum. Wilson and her colleagues reported the Antarctic strawberry feather star and three other new feather star species in a study published in July in the journal Invertebrate Systematics. 

Those four species were among the creatures caught in a net cast in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean. Researchers used DNA samples from the invertebrates to look for a special genetic marker, named mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1. This gene is a popular identifier, because it mutates at a rate that helps distinguish between vertebrate and invertebrates, and also has conserved sequences that allow biologists to identify closely related species.

[Related: Scientists are tracking down deep sea creatures with free-floating DNA]

Some feather stars, even to a trained eye, look remarkably similar. These animals belong to the phylum Echinodermata—other members of this group are starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. These aquatic animals have five or more flexible arms with a cup-shaped body. Before DNA sequencing became available in 1977, Antarctic feather stars were thought to belong to a single species called Promachocrinus kerguelensis.

This new study adds seven species of these creatures, the DNA sequencing revealed—four were the newly discovered ones, and three were critters that had been originally misclassified as other kinds of animals. “The application of molecular tools to understanding biodiversity is widely applicable and has become a necessary part of understanding all living things,” Wilson says. 

“It is fantastic that the authors have done this taxonomic work. It is what ecologists like me depend on to do our work because the first step of understanding species interactions is knowing who’s there in the first place,” says Angela Stevenson, a postdoctoral researcher at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany who was not involved in the study. She adds that these genetic findings are helpful in understanding the diverse ecosystem lurking in deep sea zones, polar regions, and other hard-to-reach places.

Of the eight species, six have 20 arms and two have 10 arms. The most eye-catching of the bunch was the Antarctic strawberry feather star (formally, Promachocrinus fragarius.) On the base of its strawberry-sized body are circular bumps where tentacles with tiny claws anchor this animal to the ocean floor. The arms stretch out to help the creature move. 

[Related: What this jellyfish-like sea creature can teach us about underwater vehicles of the future]

The newfound animals have developed unusual colorations. Promachocrinus kerguelensis are a shade of yellow-brown. But the newly discovered Promachocrinus fragarius specimens had unexpected pigmentation, including purplish spots or dark red hues. 

“As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem,” says Wilson. “We need to conserve all habitats, not just the ones we can easily visit.” The strawberry feather star lives as deep as 3,800 feet under the ocean surface, the authors estimate—a fittingly extreme home for a far-out animal.

Correction (August 23, 2023): The article previously stated that feather stars are in the same taxonomic class as starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. They are in the same phylum (a broader taxonomic group) but not the same class.

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It’s not a bad time to be a bivalve. Oyster reefs are hailed as natural storm barrier protectors, and we’re learning more and more about the genomes of these odd little creatures. A study published August 15 in the journal Nature Communications found that hundreds of shellfish species that humans harvest tend to be more resistant to extinction. 

[Related: Wild oysters are tastiest in months that end with ‘R’—here’s why.]

A team of researchers found that humans exploit about 801 species of bivalves, a figure that adds 720 species to the 81 listed in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ Production Database. The team identified the traits like geographic diversity and adaptability that make them prime for aquaculture—humans tend to harvest bivalves that are large-bodied, occur in shallow waters, occupy a wide geographic area, and can survive in a large range of temperatures. 

Geography and climate adaptability are what make even the most used bivalve species less susceptible to the extinctions that have wiped out species in the past. Species including the Eastern oyster live in a wide range of climates all over the world that include a wide range of temperatures, and this adaptability promotes resilience against some of the natural drivers of extinction. However, increased demand for these species from hungry humans can put them and their ecosystems in danger. 

“We’re fortunate that the species we eat also tend to be more resistant to extinction,” study co-author and Smithsonian Institution research geologist Stewart Edie said in a statement. “But humans can transform the environment in the geologic blink of an eye, and we have to sustainably manage these species so they are available for generations that will come after us.”

Bivalve mollusks have been filtering water and feeding humans for thousands of years. The indigenous Calusa tribe sustainably harvested an estimated 18.6 billion oysters in Estero Bay, Florida and constructed an entire island and 30-foot high mounds out of their shells. However, for every sustainable use of bivalve aquaculture, there are also examples of overexploitation from European colonizers and overfishing. These practices have led to collapses of oyster populations in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay in California, and Botany Bay near Sydney, Australia. 

[Related: Oyster architecture could save our coastlines.]

“It is somewhat ironic that some of the traits that make bivalve species less vulnerable to extinction also make them far more attractive as a food source, being larger, and found in shallower waters in a wider geographical area,” study co-author and University of Birmingham macroecologist Shan Huang said in a statement. “The human effect, therefore, can disproportionately remove the strong species. By identifying these species and getting them recognised around the world, responsible fishing can diversify the species that are gathered and avoid making oysters the dodos of the sea.”

The team hopes that this data improves future conservation and management decisions, particularly their list of regions and species that are particularly prone to extinction. They also believe that this new list may help identify species that need further study to fully assess their current risk of extinction.

“We want to use what we learned from this study to identify any bivalves that are being harvested that we don’t already know about,” said Edie. “To manage bivalve populations effectively, we need to have a full picture of what species people are harvesting.”

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In a summer of smashed temperature records and extreme weather events, it’s natural to wonder if anywhere is safe from the wrath of human-made climate change. The answer is probably not, even in the most remote places. A study published August 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that extreme events, including ocean heatwaves and ice loss, will be more common and more severe in Antarctica. 

[Related: Record-breaking heat is bombarding the North and South poles.]

Drastic action is needed to limit global warming to the target of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the team on this study are warning that Antarctica’s recent extreme could only be the beginning.  

“Antarctic change has global implications,” study co-author and University of Exeter geoscientist and glaciologist Martin Siegert said in a statement. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet.”

Recently, the ice sheets on Antarctica’s western end and particularly its peninsula have seen dramatic and fast melting that threatens to raise global sea level over the next few centuries. The Thwaites glacier, also called the Doomsday Glacier, on the continent’s western side is melting at an especially rapid pace.

In the study, a team recorded extreme events occurring in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, including weather, ocean temperatures, sea ice, glacier and ice shelf systems, as well as biodiversity on the land and sea. They found that the continent’s fragile environments “may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades.” The team calls for urgent policy action to protect it and many countries could be breaching an international treaty by not protecting Antarctica.

“Signatories to the Antarctic Treaty (including the UK, USA, India and China) pledge to preserve the environment of this remote and fragile place,” said Siegert. “Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge.”

The study also considered Antarctica’s vulnerability to a range of extreme events to understand the causes and likely future changes. One of these includes the world’s largest recorded heatwave, which occurred in East Antarctica in 2022. Temperatures were a staggering 70 degrees above average, and winter sea ice formation is currently the lowest on record. 

The high temperatures have also been linked to years with lower krill numbers. Species reliant on krill like fur seals have had breeding failures as a result.

[Related: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels 16 feet by 2500.]

“Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heatwaves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions,” co-autor and University of Leeds professor of Earth observation Anna Hogg said in a statement. “Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions.”

The study also calls for careful management of the area to protect vulnerable sites, as the retreat of the Antarctic sea ice sheet will make new areas of the region accessible by ships. Using the European Space Agency and European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites can provide regular monitoring of the entire Antarctic region and Southern Ocean, and can measure the ice. 

“Antarctic sea ice has been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, and this paper shows how sea ice records—first record highs but, since 2017, record lows—have been tumbling in Antarctica for several years,” study co-author and British Antarctic Survey sea ice expert Caroline Holmes said in a statement. “On top of that, there are deep interconnections between extreme events in different aspects of the Antarctic physical and biological system, almost all of them vulnerable to human influence in some way.”

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While most people think of the beach as a place to relax, it has always served a more purposeful role: a buffer against storms. It’s a role that will become even more important as climate change continues to disrupt nature’s delicate balance, inciting sea level rise and stronger, more frequent storms on the coasts.

But those living right along the shore may soon find themselves without as much of a cushion, as coastal erosion diminishes or displaces major beaches. At least 13 miles of beaches have been lost on the Hawaiian islands of Kauai, Oahu, and Maui, and entire beachfront communities are collapsing on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. States like Texas and Alaska have seen their coastlines “retreat” by an average of five to 10 feet per year since 1900. Two-thirds of California beaches could disappear by 2100 all because of sea level rise.

Some forms of soft and hard engineering, like trapping sand with wooden fences, promise to keep erosion at bay, but scientists warn these shouldn’t be considered a permanent fix.

How does coastal erosion work?

When a beach shrinks or even disappears, it’s because coastal erosion removes sand, mud, pebbles, or other sediment along large bodies of water. This could include the saltmarshes in southern Louisiana, sandy strips in the Bay Area of California, and the Great Lakes. 

It’s natural for the beach to be wider in northern summers, when waves are weaker and leave more sediment, and sparser in northern winters, when waves are stronger, according to Jennifer Miselis, who studies the effects of storms and sea level rise on coastal geology for the United States Geological Survey. This is because of many seasonal factors, including increased winds, storms, groundswell, and gravitational pull from the moon in winter.

[Related on PopSci+: Humans and nature will handle rising tides, together]

The problem is when sand is taken from the shoreline and then not replenished, resulting in chronic erosion. In the US, this is usually because the pathways that bring sand from the ocean or river become blocked. For example, an inlet that forms naturally might prevent sediment from flowing alongside the coast. In other countries, especially in the Global South, companies are intentionally eroding beaches through sand mining. Sand, which is a key ingredient in concrete, is the second most used resource in the world after water, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. 

Climate change could also mean less sand on shorelines. Stronger storms mean that more sand will be swept off beaches and into the water. Rising sea levels will cause more areas of beaches to be covered by water. “It’s what I call the bathtub model,” says Stephen Leatherman, a professor at Florida International University who researches beach erosion and sea level rise. “If you bring the water level up, it submerges things, but you’re not having any erosion. Your bathtub’s not falling apart.” However, when coupled with stronger storms, he explains, sea level rise can cause more of the beach to be washed away.

Where do people factor into all this?

Coastlines have always changed over time, says Mark Kulp, a professor of geology at the University of New Orleans. If you study the geologic record, you would find that sea levels have risen about 400 feet over the past 20,000 years or so. But climate change is causing sea levels to rise faster than before, and coastal infrastructure will make it harder for home and business owners to migrate. 

Unlike many millennia ago, humans help drive erosion today. It’s often exacerbated by structures that were built to protect people from flooding, but block off sediment flow from bodies of water as a consequence.

Take Galveston, Texas, where a hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. After that, the city built a 10-mile-long seawall along the coast. The seawall has kept residents and property safe for the past century, but it also decimated what was once a wide beach, causing the city to lose 100 yards of sand a year and hurting local ecosystems and the tourism industry. And in southern Louisiana, which has some of the fastest deteriorating coasts in the country, part of the problem is the levees built to protect communities from flooding, which also prevent sediment from flowing through and replenishing the marshes. 

While people might think development along the coast is responsible for driving coastal erosion, Leatherman says this isn’t true—the reasons for coastal erosion and solutions vary significantly from place to place. But generally, he thinks jetties, which are rock structures built perpendicular to beaches to provide a safe passage for ships into harbors, and then seawalls cause the most erosion out of manmade structures.

What solutions are there?

Renourishment, which could mean dumping trucked-in sand on a beach, designing ways to trap sediment the tide washes in from flowing back into the ocean, or even dredging up sand from the ocean or lake floor to redistribute it on the beach, has been an increasingly popular method of slowing down the effects of erosion around the world. In the northeastern US in particular, “we’re doing a good job by nourishing beaches and keeping them in place,” Miselis says.

But renourishment, especially when it involves transporting new sand, is costly and only a Band-Aid for the problem. “Everybody wants beach nourishment,” Leatherman says. “But people don’t realize, you only set back the erosion clock. In other words, it’s like you’re treating the symptom, not curing the disease. You’re not stopping the sea level from coming up; you’re not stopping coastal storms from coming in.”

Other fixes might employ “soft engineering” techniques to trap sand on the beach, like fashioning wooden fences to build artificial sand dunes, and then planting native plant species to keep the dunes put. And in some cases, like in Louisiana, the levees that keep out flooding could be altered to allow some sediment to flow back into the Mississippi Delta, Kulp says. 

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

But ultimately, people have to accept that some of their favorite beaches will wash away little by little. “If we’re gonna live in coastal environments, we just have to come up with creative and unique solutions to try to limit or reduce some of the erosion,” Kulp says. “But we also need to simultaneously recognize that there may be coastal sections on a global [level] that we can’t necessarily do anything about. We just have to accept that they’re going to disappear and change and that’s part of the process.”

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Coral reefs are a bevy of biodiversity, supporting an estimated 25 percent of all known marine species. These reefs are home to many mutually beneficial relationships, but the animals that live there still have to eat. Scientists are learning more about the hunting tactics of some coral reef fish. 

[Related: Coral is reproducing in broad daylight.]

A study published August 7 in the journal Current Biology found the first known experimental evidence that trumpetfish conceal themselves by swimming closely behind another fish when it is hunting. This reduces the likelihood of being detected by its prey. 

This shadowing behavior typically uses a non-threatening fish species as camouflage, similar to how duck hunters will hide behind cardboard cut-outs of domesticated animals called “stalking horses” to approach ducks undetected. However, this strategy hasn’t been observed much in non-human animals.

“When a trumpetfish swims closely alongside another species of fish, it’s either hidden from its’ prey entirely, or seen but not recognised as a predator because the shape is different,” study co-author and University of Cambridge behavioral ecologist Sam Matchette said in a statement.

In the study, the team conducted field work in the Caribbean Sea near the coral reefs off the island of Curaçao. The team set up an underwater system to pull 3D-printed models of trumpetfish on nylon lines past colonies of damselfish, which are a common meal for the trumpetfish. They had to spend hours underwater perfectly still to conduct the experiment that they recorded using video cameras. 

“Doing manipulative experiments in the wild like this allows us to test the ecological relevance of these behaviors,” study co-author and University of Bristol behavioral biologist Andy Radford said in the statement.

[Related: Google is inviting citizen scientists to its underwater listening room.]

When the pseudo-trumpetfish moved past by itself, the damselfish swam up to inspect it and then rapidly fled back to their shelter in response to this potential threat from a predator.  When a model of an herbivorous and non-threatening parrotfish moved past alone, the damselfish inspected it and did not have as big a reaction. 

The team then used a trumpetfish model that was attached to the side of a parrotfish model as a way to replicate the shadowing behavior that the real trumpetfish use on the reef. The damselfish did not appear to detect the threat and responded the same way they did to the parrotfish model. 

“I was surprised that the damselfish had such a profoundly different response to the different fish; it was great to watch this happening in real time,” said Matchette.

Local divers were interviewed to see if this was happening out in the wild. The divers said they were more likely to observe shadowing behavior on degraded, less structurally complex reefs. Global warming from human-caused climate change, pollution, and overfishing are harming coral reefs around the world. In July, water temperatures off the coast of Florida reached a staggering 100 degrees Fahrenheit, prompting coral bleaching and efforts to preserve coral species in laboratories. 

“The shadowing behavior of the trumpetfish appears [to be] a useful strategy to improve its hunting success. We might see this behavior becoming more common in the future as fewer structures on the reef are available for them to hide behind,” co-author and University of Cambridge biologist James Herbert-Read said in a statement.

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Dungeness crabs hunt by flicking their chemical-detecting antennae to and fro. Sensing the water—the underwater equivalent of sniffing the air—is a well-trod strategy for homing in on potential prey. But that timeless tactic appears to be at risk, as new research shows that climate change–induced ocean acidification seems to cause Dungeness crabs’ antennae to falter.

Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario put Dungeness crabs in water just slightly more acidic than normal—conditions that are already present in some coastal ecosystems and could be widespread by the year 2100 if humans continue to emit a high level of greenhouse gases. They found that the animals need to be exposed to cadaverine, a food signaling chemical, at a concentration 10 times higher than normal before they register its presence.

And it’s not just Dungeness crabs that appear to be in trouble. Acidification threatens to deprive a variety of marine species of crucial chemical cues. Research into this phenomenon is still limited, but as the field develops, the scope of the potential consequences is growing clearer.

“Almost every chemical that’s in the sea could be affected,” says Jorg Hardege, a chemical ecologist at the University of Hull in England.

Just like on land, where animals smell and taste chemicals to glean vital information, many marine creatures use chemical cues to spot food, locate potential mates, or avoid nearby predators. Chemoreception works because each of these cues is a molecule with a distinct chemical structure and physical shape. But because all of these chemicals are floating around in water, they’re susceptible to a range of chemical reactions. More acidic water, says Hardege, has more positively charged hydrogen ions floating around. Those hydrogen ions can bind to the cue chemicals, changing their shape—and how they’re detected. Hydrogen ions can also bind to the animals’ chemoreceptors, changing how they sense those chemical cues, Hardege says.

If you think of these chemical cues as a language, Hardege says, it’s as if words start sounding different while, at the same time, your ears are changing how they hear sound.

Unsurprisingly, disrupting an animal’s ability to detect key chemical cues can alter its behavior. Take the European green crab, for example. One study, coauthored by Hardege, shows that a slight increase in water’s acidity can change the shape of chemicals that tell the crabs to fan their eggs with water to provide fresh oxygen and remove waste. Crabs in experimentally acidified water were less sensitive to these cues—they needed at least 10 times as much of these chemicals added to the water before they started fanning their eggs more frequently.

Some fish have also demonstrated having trouble picking up on chemical cues in more acidic water. In one study, juvenile pink salmon seemed less attuned to chemical cues and less able to avoid predators. Gilthead seabream—a commonly eaten European fish—have shown the same trend.

Many of these experiments tested levels of ocean acidification that could be widespread by the end of the century if the world hits extreme climate change projections. But with coastal upwelling, a process that can bring acidic deep-ocean water to the surface, some coastal environments already see this level of acidification occasionally. And even if future carbon emissions are reigned in, the whole ocean will still grow more acidic than it is now. Individual species will likely have different thresholds at which the increasing acidity suddenly derails their ability to detect certain chemicals, Hardege says, and scientists don’t yet know where those thresholds might be.

Christina Roggatz, a marine chemical ecologist at the University of Bremen in Germany, notes that acidification does not always reduce animals’ sensitivity to chemicals. For example, one study found that in more acidic water, hermit crabs seem to be even more attracted to a particular chemical cue.

But with some cues growing stronger and others growing weaker, widespread acidification could upend the balance of chemical communication in the ocean, Roggatz says.

This is on top of the other, more overtly threatening, consequences of changing marine chemistry. In a particularly frightening case, Roggatz discovered that a combination of increasing acidity and rising temperatures actually increases the toxicities of saxitoxin, a potent neurotoxin from contaminated shellfish, and tetrodotoxin, produced by pufferfish, blue-ringed octopuses, and other animals.

Research into acidification’s potential to disrupt underwater chemical communication and sensory perception is really just getting started. Last year, Hardege, Roggatz, and others wrote a paper urging researchers, from chemists to ecologists, to unravel what these changes could mean.

It is possible, Hardege says, that wildlife could adapt to the changing chemical environment. The signal of nearby food, for instance, isn’t often one chemical, but an array of chemicals. Even if a species can no longer detect one of those chemicals, it might still be able to detect the others. Or, it might turn to its other senses, like vision.

Of course, it’s best if we don’t put that to the test. The best way to protect marine ecosystems from ocean acidification is to limit acidification, says Roggatz.

“If we can buy time by reducing the carbon dioxide amounts we emit substantially,” Roggatz says, “I think that is the solution.”

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

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

Vetea Liao was late. Two or three times a week, the Tahitian-born marine scientist heads out for an early-morning dive. He likes to start just as the first rays of light break the horizon. But that morning, in November 2014, the sun was already warming the lagoon off Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island in French Polynesia, when Liao hit the water. Peering down, Liao spotted the familiar branches of Porites rus, a common coral around the archipelago’s western islands that looks a little like ginger root studded with strawberry seeds. He also saw something else: something he’d never seen before. A delicate fog was rising up from the reef. It looked like the coral was smoking.

Liao sought out his colleagues at Moorea’s French Centre for Island Research and Environmental Observatory (CRIOBE). No one had ever seen anything like it. But one offered a lead: maybe the coral was having sex? It was a bold hypothesis.

Coral reproduction is thought to be largely a nighttime activity. In response to environmental cues—the full moon, temperature fluctuations, even the duration of darkness—corals simultaneously release clouds of tiny eggs and sperm into the water, which are fertilized and then float with the current and eventually settle on a new patch of reef. Scientists had witnessed corals spawning in daylight just a handful of times before 2014, but never in French Polynesia. Could the P. rus Liao had seen really be doing it, too?

For years, though he returned to the lagoon many times, Liao didn’t see the coral haze again. Then, in 2018, a friend spotted misty waters from her deck, which overlooks a different lagoon in Tahiti. As with Liao’s initial sighting, it was just a few hours after dawn. With confirmation of when to search, Liao soon got proof that the haze was what his colleague had suspected: the sure sign of coral spawning in daylight. Within the next two years, he and a dozen others recorded daytime spawning events across Tahiti, Moorea, and four other islands in the archipelago. P. rus sex, he eventually found, occurs like clockwork: five days after the full moon, from October to April, about two hours after daybreak—roughly 7:00 a.m. in French Polynesia. On deeper reefs, P. rus does the deed later, around 10:00 a.m.

Liao now has a team of more than 100 locals—families, schoolkids, fishers, and volunteer divers—who have reported 226 daytime spawning events by P. rus, surveying more than 100 reefs on 14 islands, including several remote atolls. “Without citizens, it would have taken ages to know all this,” Liao says.

In 2020, marine biologist Camille Leonard witnessed the precision of daytime spawning at CRIOBE, where she was monitoring P. rus coral growing in tanks at the same time that divers were surveying a nearby reef. “The Porites spawned at the exact same minute [in the two places],” Leonard says. Liao’s timing was spot on. “I thought, Okay, he knows what he’s doing,” says Leonard.

That remarkable synchrony extends far beyond Polynesia. In December 2022, after reading about Liao’s work on Facebook, coral scientist Victor Bonito with Reef Explorer Fiji P. rus recorded coral spawning two hours after sunrise in Fiji, more than 3,000 kilometers away. The same is true near the island of Réunion, 15,000 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean. In general, though, observations of daytime spawning remain staggeringly rare. Liao hasn’t yet published his research, which he conducts through the nonprofit Tama No Te Tairoto (Children of the Lagoon in Tahitian) outside his full-time job developing sustainable pearl farming for French Polynesia’s Department of Marine Resources. Publishing is secondary, he says, to sharing knowledge with the locals who have helped survey the reefs.

The team’s work is impressive. “I have not heard of such an extensive citizen science project for coral spawning before,” says James Guest, a coral researcher at Newcastle University in England who launched the Coral Spawning Database. Liao’s contributions to the database, which gathers and shares data on coral spawning times in the Indo-Pacific, filled scientific gaps about Porites corals. “In the Indo-Pacific particularly,” Guest says, “there’s so much focus on Acropora [corals].”

Equally impressive is that this new discovery is already being put to work for the coral’s benefit. Thanks to Liao’s research, two of the biggest environmental consulting companies in French Polynesia now recommend that developers stop all work in nearby coastal areas during the P. rus spawning period to avoid disturbing reproduction.

As the climate continues to change, says Guest, it’s possible that corals in the Porites genus will begin to dominate reefs in the Indo-Pacific. Porites corals are tough, he says. They can handle conditions that challenge other corals, including heat, ocean acidification, and murky water. They also spawn more frequently. “It’s fair to say they are a bit more resistant,” Guest says. But “if [their reproduction] is disrupted, reef recovery could be slower or nonexistent,” he adds.

What actually triggers the special spawn timing of P. rus, though, is still unknown. It could be a certain amount of solar radiation, a precise rise in temperature, both, or something else. But Liao isn’t done investigating. Using some of Tama No Te Tairoto’s limited funds, he recently installed light meters on reefs to investigate if spawning is related to a specific wavelength of light. “Maybe it will remain a mystery,” he says. Whether or not Liao can pinpoint the triggers, corals around the world continue to do it, right on cue, in the light of day.

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

The post Coral is reproducing in broad daylight appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

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

The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango trees and neighbors, not house numbers and street names. The harbor has a few long-term residents and a lone police boat that monitors an area roughly the size of Mexico for illegal fishing by vessels from Europe, North America, and Asia. There are also vessels that transport building materials and basic food such as flour and rice to outer islands, some of them 1,200 kilometers away, where more than one-quarter of the Cook Islands’ 14,600 residents live, fish, forage, and harvest.

Visitors to the harbor include fuel tankers and a cargo ship that arrives twice a month from New Zealand to deliver almost all of the country’s groceries. These are the largest vessels that enter the harbor; cruise ships that feed the islands’ primary industry—tourism—have to anchor at sea and transfer passengers ashore in tenders. There isn’t room on Rarotonga to permanently accommodate the ships that have come to scope the potential of the deep sea for commercial mining. One came from Galveston, Texas, in February; another is returning this year from a fit-out in Wellington, New Zealand. Both can call into Aitutaki, a nearby island with a population of about 1,800, when Rarotonga’s port is occupied. The Cook Islands government began widening and deepening Aitutaki’s harbor in 2021, several months before awarding three companies licenses to explore the country’s territorial waters for polymetallic nodules. This is the official name for the lumps found on the seabed, between 3.5 and six kilometers deep, that contain multiple minerals, including manganese and cobalt, a component of batteries in cellphones, laptops, electric vehicles, and other technologies considered essential to the energy revolution. Time magazine called the nodules a “climate solution”; to Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, they’re “golden apples” ripe for picking.

The ships are the latest and largest indicators that deep-sea mining companies have arrived in the Cook Islands. They came bearing gifts and promises of prosperity, progress, and knowledge. They arrived to drums, fire, and chanting by a man dressed in tī leaves. Vessels with millions of dollars of equipment on board unloaded their crews into an incongruous landscape: lush jungle, brilliant blue sky, trees full of flowers and fruit. The vessels are authorized to conduct research expeditions for five years. After this, the Cook Islands government will make a decision: reject mining, continue collecting data, or, in the government’s parlance, begin harvesting.

For years, there were signs that deep-sea mining was coming to the Cook Islands: speeches by politicians, public meetings, a government agency called the Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA) that employed a handful of people. Cook Islanders had been hearing about the nodules since a scientific expedition discovered them in neighboring French Polynesia in the late 1950s, back when New Zealand still ran the country’s government. Research boats came for decades from places like the Soviet Union and Japan to study the deep-sea minerals, but always it remained too expensive to commercially extract anything from kilometers down, where the pressure is intense enough to implode submarines. Research, too, remained cost-prohibitive. After half a century of investigating the deep sea, we know more about the moon.

In 2008, the prices of manganese and cobalt spiked. Corporations courted the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body in Kingston, Jamaica, created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to regulate access to the seabed in international waters. Already the ISA had engaged contractors to explore the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area of ocean beyond national jurisdiction between Hawai‘i and Mexico. Mining was finally starting to make more economic sense. Companies also began engaging with the governments of small island states that control large oceans. In 2009, the Cook Islands parliament passed the Seabed Minerals Act.

Across the sea, in other worlds, scientists raised questions. Why stage industrial operations in a place we know almost nothing about? Could waste—the sediment and heavy metals that get vacuumed off the seabed, processed aboard large ships, and returned to the ocean—enter food chains, including those that connect the ocean to the people of the ocean? What happens when we disturb the seafloor, which locks carbon in its sediments?

Still, like the deep sea itself, the industry remained largely out of public focus. In the Cook Islands, only decision-makers and the civically engaged paid attention when the Seabed Minerals Act was replaced in 2019 and then amended in 2020. Among the changes was the delegation of authority that left seabed-related decisions largely in the hands of a single person: the minister of minerals, who is currently the prime minister.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic stalled the Cook Islands’ economic engine—the tourism industry that contributed 61 percent of the country’s GDP in 2019. Passenger planes and cruise ships stopped coming. Aid floated the cash economy. People returned to communal life: tending plantations on the land islanders inherit by birthright, catching fish, and bartering what they grew and caught. Despite the march of modernity, islanders still have land and sea and a deep, lived connection to both. On most islands, a cargo ship comes a few times a year. “You can’t really starve here unless you’re completely useless,” says Jason Tuara, a 45-year-old father who lives on Rarotonga and feeds his family by fishing tuna and marlin, hunting pigs, trapping chickens, and tending fruits and vegetables.

Sealed borders strengthened an already close-knit community. Elsewhere in the world, people could not gather, but in the COVID-free Cook Islands, there were more parties and sporting events than usual. Expatriates reported feeling newly embraced during that time. Tourists who were in the country when the borders closed became part of the community, too. Two of the people who got happily stuck in the Cook Islands were Greg and Laurie Stemm of Tampa, Florida. Greg had registered deep-sea mining company CIC with the Cook Islands Ministry of Justice the previous year, and in early 2020, the couple was stopping by Rarotonga on the way to a conference in Australia. “I only had a carry-on,” Laurie says, laughing.

Greg is the cofounder and chairman emeritus of Odyssey Marine Exploration, a company whose website announces it found more shipwrecks than any other organization in the world before shifting focus in 2009 to a “multibillion-dollar idea”: deep-sea minerals. Odyssey made headlines in 2019 for suing the Mexican government for US $3.5-billion over the denial of environmental permits for a seabed mining project on the grounds that the decision violated the North American Free Trade Agreement. Stranded in paradise, the Stemms made friends at yoga classes and Māori lessons with people who describe them as “lovely” and “down-to-earth.” Laurie befriended Michael Tavioni, an artist and writer, on a tour of Rarotonga she took with CIC’s in-country manager. She told Tavioni that her grandfather was a carver and she wanted to learn how to carve; he invited her to show up at 9:00 a.m. the next day. “And then I never left,” Laurie says. She registered a company called Cook Islands Traditional Arts Press, through which she helped Tavioni print a book he’d been drafting on his laptop. “It all just flowed,” Laurie recalls.

When I returned to the Cook Islands after spending the pandemic in a place that definitely did not experience a higher-than-usual volume of parties and sporting events, the “coconut wireless”—a gossip channel with a remarkably high penetration rate—was carrying stories of gifts local people had received from seabed mining companies, in particular CIC. There was unsubstantiated talk of new trucks and boats. The substantiated gifts, which appear in CIC’s application for a research license from the SBMA, are more benevolent: medical equipment used to treat COVID-19, funding for arts curricula in schools, support for Tavioni’s work.

Tavioni, 76, has a white ponytail and strong, well-researched opinions. He’s best known for carving traditional canoes. People fly to Rarotonga to learn from him. For decades, he has been writing letters to the editor of the Cook Islands News, asking the government to fund the traditional arts. He is grateful to the Stemms and all the other donors who have helped to bring his dream to life by supporting a gallery and gathering space where people can make traditional art.

Beneath the iron roof of his workshop, Tavioni tells me that for 20 years he has been advocating for the nodules as a pathway to sovereign wealth—not wealth generated by tourism, a trade in which “we dance like monkeys for other people,” nor handouts from the governments of New Zealand, China, or any other country. “We are not beggars,” he says over the tapping of the sawdust-covered student who is carving beside him.

Tavioni sees the nodules as a means of alleviating depopulation—the mass migration to urban centers such as Auckland, New Zealand, and Brisbane, Australia, that leaves homes abandoned, yards overgrown, and positions vacant for workers from Fiji and the Philippines to fill. He thinks environmentalists should pay more attention to existing problems, such as the plastic tourists contribute to Rarotonga’s only dump. Besides, he says, deep-sea mining isn’t really mining; there’s no dynamite. “They dramatize it like mining where they blow up the mountain,” he says. “No such thing. … They’re just picking [the minerals] up.”

In June 2021, the president of the Republic of Nauru, a Pacific Island nation about one-third the size of Rarotonga, sent a letter to the ISA that invoked a clause in the law of the sea requiring the completion of guidelines for mining in international waters within two years. Only countries can be members of the ISA, so companies interested in deep-sea mining have to find a sponsoring state. Nauru is a sponsoring state for Nauru Ocean Resources, a subsidiary of Canadian corporation the Metals Company, whose CEO was involved with another company that “lost a half-billion dollars of investor money, got crosswise with a South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat and ultimately went broke,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal. That “South Pacific government” was Papua New Guinea’s; the country now supports a 10-year moratorium on seabed mining. Since being introduced at a regional meeting in 2019, the proposal for a moratorium has gained the support of such players as Google, Samsung, Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW, New Zealand, Germany, France, Spain, a number of Pacific island nations, including French Polynesia, and more than 760 science and policy experts who warn that the impact of deep-sea mining will be “irreversible on multigenerational timescales.”

In January 2022, after nearly two years of remaining shut, the borders of the Cook Islands reopened. The following month, the government hosted a formal ceremony to celebrate the awarding of exploration licenses to three deep-sea mining companies: CIC; CIICSR, the government’s joint venture with Belgian mining company GSR; and Moana Minerals, an offshoot of Ocean Minerals, a Texas-based corporation founded by an engineer who worked in deep-water oil and gas drilling and run by a diamond miner from South Africa. After receiving their licenses, the three companies hired managers and staff, rented office spaces, and began promoting their activities in the Cook Islands. Advertising in the local paper, Moana Minerals described itself as a company focused on metals “critical to the transition to green energy, responsibly sourced from seafloor nodules.” Greg Stemm tells the camera in a video posted on YouTube: “I think everybody believes we have a climate change emergency. Do we want to wait 10 years or 15 or 20 years [to address it]? Maybe, but how much longer do we want to keep using oil and gas, keep polluting our atmosphere, and continuing to create huge climate change issues?”

At COP 27, the international climate change conference convened in Egypt in November 2022, Prime Minister Brown issued a strong statement to supporters of the proposal for a moratorium on seabed mining. In his speech, Brown took exception to the fact that the countries that had destroyed our planet through “decades of profit-driven development” were now making demands restricting use of the Cook Islands’ territorial waters. “It is patronizing and it implies that we are too dumb or too greedy to know what we are doing in our oceans,” he said. “We know what we are doing to protect ourselves and to protect our ocean.”

Applications for the exploration licenses awarded in February 2022 were reviewed by the SBMA and a licensing panel made up of government officials and foreign consultants. In 2020, the prime minister appointed seven members to the Seabed Minerals Advisory Committee to “provide a voice for the community,” according to a press release. The committee’s chair, Bishop Tutai Pere, said in a speech at the licensing ceremony that it would be a sin to leave the nodules on the seabed. In a Q&A posted on the SBMA website, Pere attributes discussion about the environmental impact of deep-sea mining to “only a fear of the untapped depth of the unknown, surrounded by sacred taboos, superstition, and lack of faith.” One member of the committee, who represents traditional leaders, applied for a job with Moana Minerals; he lit up when he mentioned the NZ $1,000 he received for spending a week at sea with the company’s scientists. (This is not a paltry sum; most workers in the Cook Islands earn less than NZ $20,000 annually.) Another member of the advisory committee isn’t sure whether the companies that are licensed in the Cook Islands have the technological capacity to access the nodules (they do); he also thinks the nodules drift here with the current, like the fish, though scientists say they formed in place, slowly accreting over millions of years.

As is the case when any community grapples with an issue, perspectives on deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands vary. Advocates ask: Why shouldn’t we gain the means to better resource the ministries of health and education so we don’t have to fly to New Zealand for medical attention and send our kids to boarding school? Shouldn’t we pursue industry so we can entice some of our people to return home from the cities? They say it’s possible to mine the seafloor responsibly.

Opponents say the risk is too high, particularly now, as climate change and overfishing alter the ocean for island people. Lawyer and former politician Iaveta Short sees the nodules as yet another opportunity for corruption and financial mismanagement. “To me, we’re heading down the same road as Nauru,” he says, referring to the phosphate mining that made the island of Nauru briefly rich. The government squandered the money on an airline, a musical, and hotels overseas, among other unsuccessful investments. The land is now 80 percent infertile. A 1999 report by the island’s government describes Nauru as “one of the most environmentally degraded areas on Earth.” Short adds: “I think we’re going to be taken to the cleaners, just like everybody else.”

There are also people in the Cook Islands who don’t agree with seabed mining but will only talk to me off the record. A few insist on meeting under cover of night. They saw what happened to Jacqui Evans, a scientist who helped draft the Marae Moana Act, which passed in 2017, creating a legal basis for the world’s largest marine protected area. She won the distinguished Goldman Environmental Prize for this work and was shortly thereafter replaced as the marine park’s director and sole employee because she wrote an internal email in which she expressed support for a moratorium on mining. Many see the risk of questioning their government as too great. The government is a significant employer; in a place where most people are related, everyone is close to someone who works for the public service. Some chiefs—who wield influence, and, on some islands, explicit political power—work for the government, too.

A lot of people just don’t have enough time and interest to study the technical information provided by the government. A leader of a new political party vying for seats in parliament describes all the minerals-related material he’s asked to read as boring. “I look at it as, oh my gosh, who has the time?” he says.

One observer in an art-filled house on a red-dirt road has the time. The man, who requested anonymity, has closely tracked the development of the deep-sea minerals industry in the Cook Islands and recognizes historical patterns reminiscent of the colonial project that occurred in the Pacific and elsewhere.

His theory triggers a range of reactions in people I repeat it to—indignation, defensiveness, anger, fear—but he discusses it unremarkably. “Well, what’s happening?” he asks. “The Seabed Minerals Authority [is] emphasizing that they’re taking a precautionary approach by doing the research, yeah? But in fact, that’s the first stage of colonization. The mining companies are going out there exploring it, and they’re going to map it. And then they’re going to extract from it.”

He sees other colonial echoes, too: “alienating scientific discourse,” the role of religion, the compradores. Comprador, a Portuguese word for “buyer,” denotes a local person who acts as an agent on behalf of a foreign organization.

As the world engages in a debate over deep-sea mining, life proceeds on the islands. Some people dream about golden apples. Others feed pigs and plant taro. Beyond the reef, the 1,347-tonne ship Anuanua Moana, which belongs to Moana Minerals, is mapping the seafloor in the Cook Islands’ territorial waters with sonar and collecting samples of the material that some describe as humanity’s only hope, the minerals needed to free us from the grip of fossil fuels. The other two license holders are working toward completing their own research expeditions, estimated to cost US $100,000 per day.

Anuanua Moana means “rainbow ocean” in Māori. The 12-year-old who won the contest to name the ship got an iPad Pro and a NZ $2,000 check for her school. The girl, who attends Rarotonga’s Seventh-day Adventist school, wrote in her submission that the name signifies God’s promise to never destroy the world again.

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe, and with reporting by Raf Custers and Greet Brauwers.

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

The post The Cook Islands appear to embrace deep-sea mining—but at what risk? appeared first on Popular Science.

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As the western United States continues to battle extreme temperatures, the waters off southern Florida are also heating up. Ocean temperatures reached unprecedented 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, as a mass bleaching event and die off from these scorching ocean temperatures is spreading across the reefs near Miami and the Florida Keys. 

[Related: Fish poop might help fight coral reef bleaching.]

Coral reefs are vital ecosystems, housing marine life from smaller fish up to turtles and sharks. They also buffer coastlines from increasingly chaotic storms. Climate change is one of the greatest threats currently facing coral ecosystems, as rising temperatures contribute to the scale and frequency of bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks. When the water gets too warm, coral can become stressed and express algae living in their tissues, thus turning white. Corals are more likely to experience die-offs during these bleaching events. 

Scientists are now on a rescue mission to save the region’s coral species from extinction. Coral experts expect a “complete mortality” of the bleached reefs around the Florida Keys in only a week, and fear that other reefs deeper in the ocean could face this same fate.

“This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying,” Florida Aquarium director and senior scientist Keri O’Neal told CNN. “Where do all of the other animals that rely on the rainforest go to live? This is the underwater version of the trees in the rainforest disappearing. Corals serve that same fundamental role.”

The University of South Florida and Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Keys Marine Laboratory (KML) is currently housing more than 1,500 coral specimens in an effort to save them. The corals were harvested over the past week from offshore nurseries and parent colonies. 

“For years we have been developing the infrastructure capacity to support reef restoration efforts that enable KML to temporarily house corals during emergencies such as this,” said KML director Cynthia Lewis said in a statement. “Typically, water temperatures at this time of year are in the mid 80s, but we are already recording temperatures of 90 degrees. It is very alarming.” 

This summer’s extreme heat and a lack of rainfall in Florida pushed water temperatures around the Sunshine State to some of the highest levels observed around the world. The National Buoy Center recorded a temperature of 101.1 degrees at a depth of five feet on Monday July 24 in Florida Bay. Other stations hit saw temperatures in the mid to upper-90s. While the most significant concentration of Florida coral isn’t located in Florida Bay, the coral around the Florida Keys still experienced temperatures topping 90 degrees.

[Related: To save coral reefs, color the larvae.]

“Climate change is our present reality,” Coral Restoration Foundation CEO R. Scott Winters, said in a statement.  “The impact on our reefs is undeniable. This crisis must serve as a wake-up call, emphasizing the need for globally concerted efforts to combat climate change.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) raised its coral bleaching warning system to their highest level (Alert Level 2) for the Florida Keys. This level means that the average water temperatures have been about 1.8 degrees above normal for at least eight consecutive weeks. The Florida Keys are expected to remain at Alert Level 2 for at least nine to 12 weeks. 

The post Mass coral reef bleaching in Florida as ocean temperatures hit 100 degrees appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

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

During Japan’s sweltering summers, nothing hits the spot quite like a frozen orange. The popular treat, known as reito mikan, tastes great when made at home. But it tastes even better when made 850 meters below the ocean’s surface. “A bit salty, but super delicious,” says Shinsuke Kawagucci, a deep-sea geochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The frozen fruit was the product of a particularly tasty scientific experiment. In 2020, Kawagucci and his colleagues designed a highly unusual freezer—one built to operate in the intense pressure of the deep sea. The frozen orange, chilled in the depths of Japan’s Sagami Bay, was their proof that such a thing is even possible.

Kawagucci and his colleagues’ prototype deep-sea freezer is essentially a pressure-resistant tube with a thermoelectric cooling device inside. By running an electric current through a pair of semiconductors, the device creates a temperature difference thanks to a phenomenon known as the Peltier effect. The device can chill its contents down to -13 °C—well below the freezing point of seawater. Because it does not require liquid nitrogen or refrigerants to cool its housing, the freezer can be built both compactly and with minimal engineering skill.

With a few adjustments, Kawagucci and his colleagues write in a recent paper, their prototype freezer can be more than a fancy snack machine. By offering a way to freeze samples at depth, such a device could improve scientists’ ability to study deep-sea life.

Bringing animals up from the deep is often a destructive affair that can leave them damaged and disfigured. The best example is the smooth-head blobfish, a sad, misshapen lump of a fish that got its name from the blob-like shape it takes when wrenched from its home more than 1,000 meters below. (In its deep-sea habitat, the fish looks like many other fish and hardly lives up to its name.)

Although scientists have previously designed tools to keep deep-sea specimens cold on their way to the surface, the new prototype freezer is the first device capable of freezing specimens in the deep sea. Similarly, other tools do exist that allow scientists to collect creatures from the deep unharmed, such as pressurized collection chambers. Yet these often don’t work well for small and soft-bodied deep-sea animals that are prone to dying and decomposing when kept in such containers for too long—an oft-unavoidable reality, says Luiz Rocha, the curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “It can take hours to bring samples up,” Rocha says.

A device that freezes samples first would stave off degradation, enabling better scientific analysis of everything from anatomy to gene expression. While the freezing process will undoubtedly damage the tissues of some of the deep’s more delicate life forms, specimens damaged by freezing tend to be more useful to scientists than specimens damaged by decomposition—at least when it comes to DNA analysis.

The prototype freezer takes over an hour to freeze a sample, which is probably “too slow to be broadly useful,” says Steve Haddock, a marine biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California who studies bioluminescence in jellyfish and ctenophores. Every minute of deep-sea exploration is precious, he says. “We typically spend our time searching for animals, and we bring them to the surface in great shape using insulated chambers.” However, if the freezing time could be improved, Haddock believes such a device could be “empowering” for those who study deep-sea creatures that are extremely sensitive to changes in pressure and temperature, such as microbes living on hydrothermal vents.

Kawagucci says he and his team plan to improve their freezer before testing it out on any living specimens. But he hopes that with such improvements, their tool will give scientists a way to collect even the most delicate deep-sea organisms.

In the meantime, Kawagucci is just happy his device proved that deep-sea freezing by a thermoelectric cooler is possible. “Throughout the Earth’s history, ice has never existed in the deep sea,” he says. “I wanted to be the first person to generate and see the ice in the deep sea with my freezer.” And when he finally sank his teeth into that tangy, salty, sweet reito mikan, “one of my dreams came true.”

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

The post The key to bringing deep sea samples up to the coast? An underwater freezer. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

With those two ominous notes, a 25-foot long mechanical great white shark named Bruce, and the menacing tagline “you’ll never go in the water again,” Jaws practically invented the summer blockbuster. It became the first film to gross over $100 million at the box office and put a young filmmaker named Steven Speilberg on the map. But along with some of the most quotable lines in movie history, it induced a societal fear of sharks as mindless monsters that hunt people with virtually indiscriminate taste and threaten seaside communities. Since then, both the author of the original novel and Spielberg have expressed some remorse over their mega-hit creation. 

[Related: Great white shark sightings are up in the US, which is kind of good news.]

Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name has sold over 20 million copies. It drew from Benchley’s life-long fascination with the sea, that he took into his shark conservation work. His novel and the subsequent film were both loosely inspired by a series of shark encounters along the Jersey Shore in July 1916. The tales of what locals dubbed the Matawan Maneater were products of the early 20th century, when ocean swimming was new and sharks were still misunderstood by the general public and scientists alike. This confusion continued when Benchley first wrote the novel.

In the March 1995 issue of Popular Science magazine Benchley wrote, “My research for the book was thorough and good…for its time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions. I couldn’t write Jaws today. The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”

Almost three decades later in a 2022 interview with BBC Radio, Speilberg joined his former collaborator in expressing the regret for the terrible reputation sharks are facing due to the film. The 76 year-old director said he feels responsible for the shark’s troubles in the almost 50 years since the film’s release.

“I still fear… that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sword fishermen that happened after 1975,” said Spielberg. “I really, truly regret that.” The film has been blamed for leading to trophy hunting for sharks through the United States, due to its misrepresentation of great whites. 

The destruction has only continued in the nearly two decades since Benchley died in 2006. A 2021 study found that the population of sharks and rays decreased by over 71 percent between 1970 and 2018 worldwide. Even as their numbers drop, an estimated 100 million sharks are killed per year and roughly 37 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction largely from overfishing and shark finning. 

“We only conserve what we love.”

The fear certainly presents itself as more fictionalized than reality-based at this point. Despite only killing 11 people worldwide in 2021 in isolated incidents, 96 percent of shark films still play into that fear and portray the fish as imminently threatening mass murderers. To help combat these stark exaggerations, shark researcher Heidy Martinez–who is affiliated with Minorities in Shark Science and is currently surveying a shark pupping nursery in the Gulf of Mexico as part of NOAA’s GULFSPAN project–utilizes her psychology background in her marine biology work. She uses empathy and understanding as starting points to try to change the relationship humans have with sharks. 

“A fear of predators is normal and it’s healthy. It allows for respect, but that irrational fear of sharks also created a generation of people with galeophobia,” Martinez tells PopSci. “It’s so hard to correct because it targets emotions. It targets feelings and that is so much harder to change than logic.”

[Related: Great whites don’t hunt humans—they just have blind spots.]

She says acknowledging that fear, particularly the fear that a great white shark is going to repeatedly come after you Jaws-style, can be reframed with the knowledge that there are only three species out of roughly 500 sharks that are known to inflict serious injuries on humans and most sharks are only about three feet long. 

Martinez also cites a 1968 quote attributed to Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum with respect to how shark conservation can historically be viewed. “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.” 

These misconceptions about sharks coincide with devastation of shark habitats and overfishing that are putting their existence in jeopardy. Misunderstanding sharks came at a very inopportune time. 

“I don’t feel like Jaws is solely responsible for the decimation of the shark population. I think overfishing was going to happen with or without it,” she says. “I think the role that it did play was that it made people have a misunderstanding of sharks. People did not care to love sharks because of what they saw in the media, so there wasn’t a push for society to step in and help sharks.”

Changing tastes

Martinez and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution fish ecologist Simon Thorrold both point to numbers as examples of why getting attacked and eaten by a shark is so unlikely. 

Thorrold uses the recently exploding white shark hotspot around the waters of Cape Cod in Massachusetts as a prime example of how well white sharks get out of the way of humans.

“We might have hundreds of white sharks go by the Cape every year and we’ve got thousands of people in the water, some wearing black wetsuits on surfboards that look very similar to their natural prey. And yet, the odds of any kind of interaction are vanishingly small,” Thorrold tells PopSci. 

[Related: Sharks are learning to love coastal cities.]

They do not eat humans like lions can and have also proven to be more discriminate in their tastes and have better eyesight than scientists initially believed. The sharks that share these northern waters with humans also have significantly more to fear from us. People too are slowly rehabilitating the sharks’ image. Cape Cod is potentially home to the largest concentrations of white sharks in the world, yet its ocean-conscious community and its leaders aren’t running out and attacking their aquatic neighbors with harpoons. 

“A juvenile white shark basically got stranded on the Cape and a whole bunch of people showed up that were keeping the shark wet. They got it back into the water and it swam off,” he says. “Those are the kinds of interactions that we have come to expect when whales or dolphins strand, but to see it for a white shark sort of made my heart skip a beat. It’s sort of evidence of a much more mature relationship that the public has with our wild ocean fauna.”

Encounters with a full grown white shark, however, aren’t exclusively wholesome. They can be fatal due to the way the sharks ambush their prey using intense speed and the element of surprise. In 2018, Massachusetts had its first fatality since 1936 off the coast of Cape Cod, in a day that “changed Cape Cod forever.” Despite the immense tragedy when it occurs, dying from a shark attack remains exceedingly rare. According to NOAA, people are three times more likely to be struck by lightning than by a shark and data from the Florida Museum shows that dog attack fatalities are five times more common than shark bites. 

From monster to making it right

Despite Peter Benchley’s remorse over his fearsome novel and its legacy, he has since worked directly on shifting the perception of the sharks. His conservation and advocacy work shone a spotlight on reality. Along with his wife Wendy Benchley, Peter traveled the world speaking with scientists and conservationists, lending their time, resources, and talents to preserving the animals that helped earn him fame and fortune. 

In his 2006 obituary in The New York Times, Wendy recounted that many of the letters that Peter received were from people who read his novel when they were younger who went on to become marine biologists or science teachers, and that the generation after Jaws found it a great adventure story instead of a monster story. 

Peter lived long enough to see this pivot in popular opinion, but the mistakes made at the expense of sharks is one that would be wise to remember.

“The mistake we make, then, either in seeking to destroy sharks or in not caring if we even inadvertently destroy them, is one of cosmic stupidity,” he wrote in 1995. “If I have one hope, it is that we will come to appreciate and protect these wonderful animals before we manage, through ignorance, stupidity, and greed, to wipe them out altogether.”

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It’s been 12 years since Japan’s catastrophic Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster, and the country is running out of space to contain the fallout. Over 1 million metric tons of radioactive water is currently housed in massive on-site metal tanks—enough to fill around 500 Olympic sized swimming pools—but authorities need to make room for the naturally occurring groundwaters and rains that will continue to become contaminated.

According to officials, however, treatment processes will render the stored waters safe to be slowly released into the Pacific Ocean over at least the next three decades. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is already filtering the water to remove most of its radioactive isotopes. To do this, contaminated water is passed through multiple standalone chambers, each containing various adsorbents to remove specific radioactive isotopes. A hydrogen isotope called tritium, however, cannot be sequestered from water due to a number of factors, including its high boiling temperature. To address this problem, Tepco is diluting the tritium-heavy waters down to levels widely regarded as safe by many governments and international regulatory bodies.

[Related: Fukushima fallout was almost twice as bad as official estimates, new study says.]

The water disbursal plan comes following a 2021 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment of Tepco’s decontamination strategies, which the regulatory body determined to be “consistent with relevant international safety standards.” As The Washington Post notes, the wastewater in question will be diluted to just 1,500 becquerels of tritium per liter of clean water, which is “far below” global standards. Japan’s legal limit is 60,000 becquerels per liter, for example, while the World Health Organization sets their recommended maximum at 10,000.

Supporters of the plan argue that humans are exposed to low levels of tritium everyday via tap water, air, and rain. Meanwhile, other nuclear plants around the world currently release tritiated water into oceans and rivers at even higher levels than what will come from Fukushima. Critics and protesters, however, have voiced concerns for years about the impending water release plans, arguing that more research is needed to assess potential effects of long-term exposure to low doses of tritium.

Local fisheries are also concerned about potential public blowback and reputational damage that may stem from being associated with the nearby treated water release initiative. Residents in nearby China and South Korea also fear potential unforeseen consequences to the decades’ long remediation procedures. Protestors recently took to the streets of Seoul, South Korea to voice their concerns.

Despite lingering concerns, it is undeniable that the current stores of irradiated water have to go somewhere. While there is no perfect solution, the slow-but-sure filtering processes appear to be the best bet at handling what will be a decades’ long cleanup project.

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Excerpted from Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Karen Pinchin.

More than 30,000 years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar was a broad plain. Lapping several kilometers from the limestone cliffs that now tower above its blue, continent‑splitting waters, sea levels were roughly 120 meters lower than those in modern times, a height difference about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In spring, as they had for thousands of years before the earliest hominid evolved, bluefin tuna migrated from the cold, deep Atlantic inward toward the Mediterranean, drawn by instinct and ancient memories of spawning in the in‑land ocean’s shallower, warmer currents. At the time, the African and European continents were a mere 10 kilometers apart, separated by two distinct, deep channels that had not yet merged, and wouldn’t for thousands of years.

Throughout the fall and winter, huge schools of millions of bluefin prowled the chilly Atlantic Ocean, feasting on its bounty of fatty mackerel and herring, building fat stores and millions of eggs and spermatozoa that would help them complete their annual cycle. These ancient ancestors navigated using a combination of light, scent, and possibly electromagnetism. Each had a translucent pinhole atop its forehead, called a pineal window, which channeled light down a cartilaginous stalk to the pineal organ. That organ allowed each fish to sense light, possibly even beams from the moon and stars. Just before dawn and just after dusk, the fish plunged away from the ocean’s surface to recalibrate their internal compasses. By sensing light during the day and tracking the sun’s progress around the earth, they followed cosmic patterns that accompanied their ancestors and would guide their children. They oriented themselves in relation to polarized light in the water, and used shifts in temperature, salinity, and the directions of the currents they swam with and against to find their way. Some of their bones contained trace amounts of the iron‑ based mineral magnetite, hardly surprising on a planet beset with electromagnetic waves—waves that could provide clues on where the tuna were and where they were heading.

Heading eastward, the outflowing ocean current was strong, but so were they. In the open ocean they were kings, but in the narrowing bottleneck of the strait they were suddenly transformed into prey themselves, now pursued by pods of canny orca whales. It was a race some of them couldn’t win, their fast, stiff bodies darting and cornered, diving and leaping out of the water. At least they had their speed. That speed was their defense, but could also be their downfall. Blinded by an instinct to escape, some fish rocketed onto the shallow beaches and shoals, where, as they had for countless seasons, small groups of Neanderthals waited, arms outstretched, for a gift from the sea.

Starting in 1989, the Gibraltar Museum supervised excavations of Gorham’s Cave, part of a network of tunnels and chambers unearthed by colonial British engineers between 1782 and 1968, about an hour’s drive from Cádiz, Spain. In 1907, Captain A. Gorham explored the high‑ceilinged cave that would later bear his name. Tucking themselves into the Paleolithic caves, the modern researchers unearthed a trove of evidence of the Neanderthals who once sheltered there, covered by layers of sand gradually blown, grain by grain, into the cave by harsh easterly winds, drawn toward fires vented through the cave’s 80‑meter chimney. “Gorham’s Cave is a time machine,” evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson told tuna writer and researcher Steven Adolf in his book Tuna Wars.

Throughout the 1990s, while exploring Gorham’s Cave and other neighboring caves within a 28‑hectare complex spanning the main ridge, researchers from around the world found charcoal, bone fragments, charred pine seeds, and what seemed to be blade fragments. They also found what they identified as “macro‑ichthyofauna identifiable by tuna vertebrae of medium and large size”—or, in other words, evidence that both medium and large bluefin had been eaten within the caves. Paired with later‑found evidence of fires and of tuna beachings caused by orca attacks in shallow waters, it signaled that even as the earliest modern humans spread across the globe, at least one hominid species already had figured out how to catch and consume tuna.

One of the researchers working in the field was a young professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid named Arturo Morales‑Muñiz. In the mid‑1990s Morales‑Muñiz was widely referred to by Madrid’s fishmongers as “the bone man.” He visited their central fish market, Mercamadrid, every few weeks searching for the carcasses and bodies of their strangest creatures. Sometimes he’d buy a whole fish or a bagful, paying with coins he pulled from a battered leather change purse. Other times the fish were too large, like tuna or swordfish, so he’d settle for stripped, bloody skeletons. He loaded them into his trunk in leakproof containers scavenged from the market’s garbage piles. His car stank, he knew, but it helped that he was “almost like a whale,” he said, in that he had very little sense of smell.

In April 2022, I joined the tall, amiable Morales‑Muñiz on a predawn visit to Mercamadrid, home of the second‑largest fish market in the world after Tokyo’s. Since 1982, cars have flowed past its entrance hours before the sun rises. Within its cavernous fish warehouse, thousands of people working for more than 100 companies operate forklifts, butcher fish, and sort a dazzling array of marine creatures by weight and size, quality, and when they’ll spoil. Its aisles are closely packed with boxes of fish, cooler booths, and walk‑in refrigerators with offices above.

Seven days a week, the market echoes with the shouts of fish‑mongers, some clad in blood‑and-ichor‑stained aprons and ranging on a temperamental scale from furious to jolly. They’re closely flanked and constantly approached by insistent salesmen, competitors gathering intel, and cooks in chefs’ jackets looking for the day’s fish specials. The day I visited, the sellers of fish were only men—men with beards and mustaches, bald men, old men, young men—who used whetstone‑sharpened machetes, cleavers, and fine boning knives to separate bluefin flesh from bone and portion steaks. Their short, blunt fingernails scraped against the shells of shrimp and mussels as they weighed fish, shellfish, and a dizzying array of marine creatures on metal scales by the handful, the bucketful, the crateful.

Back in the early years, as Morales‑Muñiz pursued his mission to gather as many animal skeletons as he could, he often found himself in bizarre and sometimes dangerous situations. What he was doing seemed insane, he knew, scavenging carcasses of “strange beasts” from the side of the road and harassing fishmongers for their strangest, most far‑fetched and ‑flung fish. But it drove him crazy, how his country’s archeologists seemed to worship only the relics and old walls left behind by the Romans and ancient Phoenicians, ignoring any bone that wasn’t human. But if bluefin had indeed been the mortar of conquest and early Mediterranean civilizations, why hadn’t his colleagues yet identified the fish’s huge, arcing bones anywhere in the fossil record? For decades, historians and archeologists had insisted that the fish’s calorie‑rich body had fueled armies and provided early Europe with garum, a fish sauce that was one of its most expensive products. But if that was the case, why wasn’t evidence of the fish being found on dig sites?

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Green sea turtles could be putting even the pickiest eaters to shame. Generations of them have returned to the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of northern Africa to feast for roughly 3,000 years, according to a study published July 17 in the journal PNAS.

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

When baby green sea turtles hatch on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea, they clumsily make their way into the ocean. Their parents have already left the shallows for a long migration, and baby sea turtles are not able to navigate this long trip, so they float around for a few years. During this awkward stage, they are typically not picky eaters. The youthful turtles are even considered omnivores, eating worms, insects, and crustaceans along with seagrasses. At about five years-old, they trek to the same areas where their parents traveled to eat the more seagrass-exclusive diet of herbivores.  

While scientists have known that sea turtles migrate between specific eating and breeding locations, seeing how far back this activity stretches highlights the importance of conserving sea grass locations that are suffering the effects of climate change the same way that nesting habitats are protected. 

“We currently spend a lot of effort protecting the babies, but not the place where they spend most of their time: the seagrass meadows,” study co-author and University of Groningen marine evolution and conservation PhD student Willemien de Kock said in a statement. 

The study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands combined archaeological findings with modern data. De Kock used boxes of sea turtle remains from archaeological sites in the Mediterranean Sea. By analyzing the bones, De Kock could distinguish two species within the collection: the green sea turtle and the loggerhead turtle. 

From there, De Kock was also able to identify what both species had been eating and found that they relied on bone collagen in the plants. She used a mass spectrometer to inspect the bone collagen in the turtle remains and found what types of plants the sea turtles ate. 

“For instance, one plant might contain more of the lighter carbon-12 than another plant, which contains more of the heavier carbon-13. Because carbon does not change when it is digested, we can detect what ratio of carbon is present in the bones and infer the diet from that,” De Kock said.

Satellite tracking data from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom revealed the current traveling routes and destinations of sea turtles. The team from Exeter had also been taking tiny skin samples from the sea turtles, which revealed similar dietary information that was present in the ancient bone samples. De Kock could then draw conclusions by connecting the diets of turtles from thousands of years ago to specific locations. The study found that for about 3,000 years, numerous generations of green sea turtles have been feeding in the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of Egypt and West Libya. 

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

Loggerhead turtles showed a more varied diet than the green sea turtles, so their results were less specific. 

Understanding more about how a species eats over past generations can help counteract shifting baseline syndrome. This is when slow changes to a larger system, like animal populations, are unnoticed since each new generation of researchers may redefine what the natural state was based on how the environment was at the start of their careers. 

“Even long-term data goes back only about 100 years. But tracing back further in time using archaeological data allows us to better see human-induced effects on the environment. And it allows us to predict, a bit,” De Kock said. 

Recent models have forecasted a high risk of widespread seagrass loss right where green sea turtles have been migrating for generations. Losing these food resources could be detrimental to the green sea turtle, and future conservation efforts can include supporting seagrass planting efforts, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and building better signs and markers so that boats do not weigh anchor in seagrass meadows. 

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Since the 1960s, the oxygen level in the world’s oceans has dropped by about 2 percent. While that may not sound like a lot, the continuous decline in oxygen content of oceanic and coastal waters, called deoxygenation, can alter marine ecosystems and biodiversity. This is largely happening due to global warming and nutrient runoff.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from anthropogenic activities like deforestation and fossil fuel use trap the sun’s heat, warming the planet and heating up the ocean. Oxygen becomes less soluble at higher temperatures, which means warm water holds less oxygen than cold water. Eutrophication due to excess inputs of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture or wastewater also stimulates algal blooms, resulting in oxygen depletion when they decompose.

[Related: Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault.]

Deoxygenation affects living resources and disrupts natural biogeochemical processes, says Nancy Rabalais, professor and chair in oceanography and wetland studies at Louisiana State University who researches coastal eutrophication and hypoxic environments. Oxygen concentrations play a role in the rates of breakdown of organic matter and the cycling of different elements in the environment. For instance, deoxygenation may enhance phosphorus recycling, reduce nitrogen losses, and initially enhance the availability of iron, all of which can alter the productivity of coastal and ocean ecosystems.

Loss of oxygen content also has significant impacts on marine microbes and animals. Deoxygenation can alter their abundance and diversity, reduce the quality and quantity of suitable habitats for them, and interfere with reproduction. The oxygen decline doesn’t have to be major to potentially cause ecosystem-wide changes. In oxygen minimum zones that may already be close to physiological thresholds, even small oxygen declines can have drastic impacts.

When oceans lose oxygen, marine organisms become stressed and need to adapt—if they can—to survive. Species that are especially sensitive to oxygenation changes, like tuna and sharks, are being driven to shallower habitats as oxygen-deficient zones expand, says Anya Hess, PhD candidate at Rutgers University who studies ocean oxygenation. Deoxygenation also threatens the ocean’s food provisioning ecosystem services for humans, potentially leading to reduced catches for fisheries and the collapse of regional stocks. 

Although new research suggests deoxygenation may eventually reverse, it might not happen until the far future. In a recent study published in Nature, Hess and her co-authors looked to the Miocene warm period about 16 to 14 million years ago when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher than today to study a “possible example of how oceans behave during sustained warm periods,” she says.

Their results show that the eastern tropical Pacific—a major oxygen-deficient or “dead” zone that has been losing oxygen as the climate warms—was well oxygenated at that time, which suggests that deoxygenation could reverse on long timeframes as the climate continues to warm.

[Related: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

Climate models from a 2018 study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles predict oxygen concentration may start increasing and oxygen-starved regions in the ocean can begin shrinking by 2150 through 2300 due to decreasing tropical export production—the nutrient supply from the ocean interior—combined with increased ocean ventilation or the transport of surface waters into the interior. But marine ecosystems are already facing various impacts today—and rebounding is hard because deoxygenation can reconfigure food webs and organisms that can’t avoid low oxygen levels can become lethargic or die.

“I don’t think we should wait around to see whether deoxygenation will reverse as the climate continues to warm,” says Hess. “We know that rising temperatures are causing ocean deoxygenation, so if we want to stop it we know what we need to do—reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Policymakers can also establish long-term monitoring programs around the world to study oxygen measurements, which will help identify patterns and predict biological responses. All in all, deoxygenation trends may eventually reverse in the future, but taking the steps to mitigate climate change and control nutrient runoff will benefit humans and marine ecosystems today.

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Climate change is already baking the Earth with record breaking heat, intensifying rain storms, and pushing the planet past eight major indicators of stability. The latest impact of increased greenhouse gas emissions could be changing the color of the world’s oceans. 

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

In a study published July 12 in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists found that the changes and blue-green fluctuations to the ocean’s hue over the last 20 years cannot be explained by the natural year-to-year variability alone. These changes are present in more than 56 percent of the planet’s oceans. The study also found that tropical oceans near the Earth’s equator have become steadily greener overtime. 

A shift in ocean color is an indication that ecosystems within the surface may also be changing. While the team can’t point to exactly how marine ecosystems are changing to reflect the shift, they are quite sure that human-induced climate change is likely behind it. 

“I’ve been running simulations that have been telling me for years that these changes in ocean color are going to happen,” study co-author and MIT senior research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz said in a statement. “To actually see it happening for real is not surprising, but frightening. And these changes are consistent with man-induced changes to our climate.”

The ocean gets its signature colors from what is living in its upper layers. Waters that are a deep blue typically reflect little life, while greener water indicates the presence of ecosystems. Greener water also generally means there is plenty of phytoplankton, the microscopic plant-like microbes that call the upper ocean home and are full of a pigment called chlorophyll. 

Phytoplankton are the backbone of the marine food web, and these tiny organisms support everything from tiny krill and fish up to marine mammals and seabirds. They also help the ocean capture and store carbon dioxide. Scientists monitor phytoplankton levels across the ocean’s surface as an indicator of how these essential ocean communities are responding to changes in climate. To keep an eye on it, scientists track changes in chlorophyll that are based on the ratio of how much green versus blue light is reflected from the ocean’s surface. These changes are monitored from space.

A 2010 paper by one of this new study’s co-authors, Stephanie Henson of the National Oceanography Center, found that if scientists were only tracking chlorophyll, it would take at least 30 years of continuous monitoring to detect a trend that was specially being driven by climate change. They argued that this was because large natural variations in chlorophyll that occur year to year would overtake any human-made influence on  chlorophyll concentrations. 

[Related: Jackrabbit’s color-changing fur may prepare them for climate change.]

A follow-up model in 2019 by Dutkiewicz confirmed that signals that climate change might be driving changes in hue should be easier to detect over the smaller and more normal variation in color and should be apparent within 20 years. 

“So I thought, doesn’t it make sense to look for a trend in all these other colors, rather than in chlorophyll alone?” study co-author and bio geoscientist at the National Oceanography Center in the United Kingdom B. B. Cael said in a statement.“It’s worth looking at the whole spectrum, rather than just trying to estimate one number from bits of the spectrum.”

In this new study, the team analyzed measurements of ocean color taken by an instrument aboard the Aqua satellite called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). True to its name, the Aqua satellite has been monitoring ocean color for 21 years and MODIS takes measurements in seven visible wavelengths, including the two colors that researchers generally use to estimate chlorophyll levels.

Using measurements taken from 2002 to 2022, Cael carried out a statistical analysis using all seven ocean colors. First, he looked at how much these colors changed between regions in a given year, to get a sense of their natural variations. Next, he looked at the bigger picture to see how annual variations in the ocean’s color changed over two decades. The analysis showed a clear trend of above the normal year-to-year variability in color. 

To determine if this trend is related to climate change, he looked at the model that Dutkiewicz determined in 2019. This model simulated the Earth’s oceans with the addition of greenhouse gasses and also without it. The model matched up almost exactly with the real-world satellite data–with greenhouse gasses, a change in ocean color will show up within 20 years and occur in about 50 percent of the world’s surface oceans. 

The team believes that this new study demonstrates that monitoring the oceans colors beyond green chlorophyll can give a faster and clearer way to detect changes to marine ecosystems. 

“The color of the oceans has changed. And we can’t say how. But we can say that changes in color reflect changes in plankton communities that will impact everything that feeds on plankton,” said Dutkiewicz. “It will also change how much the ocean will take up carbon, because different types of plankton have different abilities to do that. So, we hope people take this seriously. It’s not only models that are predicting these changes will happen. We can now see it happening, and the ocean is changing.”

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For annulated sea snakes, seeing the wonderful world of color wasn’t always possible. These venomous sea snakes that roam Australia and Asia’s oceans once lost their color vision, but a new study into their genomes reveals that they have potentially regained their ability to see a wider palette of colors over the last 100 million years. The findings were published July 12 in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press.

[Related: A guide to all the places with no snakes.]

For animals, normal color vision is mostly determined by genes called visual opsins. Multiple losses of opsin genes have occurred as tetrapods—a group including amphibians, reptiles, and mammals—have evolved. The emergence of new opsin genes is significantly more rare than losing them. A 2020 study found that some semi-aquatic snake species in the genus Helicops found in South America are the only known snakes to regain these opsin genes.

“The ancestral snake, which is the original snake species, lost the capacity for advanced color vision ~110 million years ago. This was because they likely dwelt in dim-light environments where visual perception would be limited,” study co-author and University of Adelaide PhD student and marine biologist Isaac Rosetteo tells PopSci.

This ancestral snake species lived on the land and would later evolve into all snake species, including sea snakes. When their genes for color vision were gone, they could only perceive a very limited range of colors. However, that likely started to change as some elapid descendants began to change. Within the last 25 million years, two elapid lineages have moved from terrestrial to marine environments.

With the fully sequenced genome of the annulated snake in hand, the team in this new study from the University of Adelaide in Australia, The University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom and The Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology looked at visual opsin genes in five ecologically distinct species of elapid snakes. Elapids are the family of about 300 venomous snakes that include mambas, cobras, and the annulated sea snake. Looking at this family more broadly offered an opportunity to investigate the molecular evolution of vision genes. 

The team found that the annulated sea snake now has four intact copies of the opsin gene SWS1. Two of these genes are sensitive to ultraviolet light that has shorter wavelengths, while the other two genes have evolved a new sensitivity to the longer wavelengths of light that dominate ocean habitats. 

“Only one [of these genes] was expected. To our knowledge, every other ~4000 snake species in the world (except a couple of Helicops species) have just one of these genes. The most interesting part is that two of these genes allow for perception of UV light, while the other two allow for the perception of blue light. This is expected to dramatically increase their sensitivity to colors which could be very useful in bright-light marine environments,” says Rosetto.

The authors believe that this sensitivity means that the snakes could have color discrimination that allows them to distinguish predators from prey, as well as potential snake mates against the more colorful background in the ocean.  

[Related: How cats and dogs see the world.]

This significantly differs from the evolution of opsins in mammals like bats, dolphins, and whales during their own ecological transitions. These mammals saw more opsin losses as they adapted to dim-light and aquatic environments.

“Our own primate ancestors developed the advanced color vision we enjoy via a similar mechanism. Their long-wavelength-sensitive opsin was duplicated, and one copy changed to allow for perception of a different wavelength of light than the original,” says Rosetto. “These snakes have done the exact same thing, just with a different visual opsin and there are now four copies instead of just two. Without these duplications, our (and their) capacity for color vision would be heavily reduced.”

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As we plunge into Earth’s sixth stage of mass extinction (that we are aware of), biologists looking to conserve and restore ecosystems that have been stripped of plant and animal life can face a pretty daunting task. However, help is on the way in the form of some of the ocean’s worms, mollusks, and crabs. A study published July 11 in the journal PeerJ, finds that fossils from these groups are actually preserved in the fossil record in proportion to their diversity, making for a solid source of information about past ecosystems.

[Related: Fossil trove in Wales is a 462-million-year-old world of wee sea creatures.]

Reliable evidence of what they looked like before humans arrived can be tough to come by, especially in coastal ecosystems. These spots were ravaged by overharvesting and pollution centuries before humans began to monitor their health. This is where the lowly mollusk can help.

“This has been a topic in paleontology for decades. People have looked at modern ecosystems in a variety of habitats to see how well the fossil record reflects what’s living there,” study co-author and chair of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History Michal Kowalewski said in a statement. “But most previous studies looked at how species are recorded within a specific group. We wanted to know how groups are recorded within the entire system.”

Ancient organisms that were primarily made of soft tissues are less likely to be in the fossil record than those with harder body parts like bones and shells. These tougher parts also come in varying degrees of thickness and strength, primarily depending on what organism they belonged to and what stage of development they were in.

Researchers have looked to mollusks as a proxy for the overall health of ecosystems since they are common in the fossil record and can represent the health of an ecosystem. Their sturdy shells litter the seafloor and show patterns of species diversity and distribution that can provide a window into the past states of the ocean before humans entered the picture. 

According to the team, mollusks past and present can be used to broadly infer the health of an ecosystem, in part due to their status as the backbone of an aquatic ecosystem, the way that vital signs are used to signal a patient’s health. Scientists can then perform a more robust check-up and find patterns of population declines, shifting habitat ranges, and if invasive species were introduced when comparing the remains of long dead species with living ones. 

In 2021, scientists in Europe demonstrated that the native molluscan biodiversity of the eastern Mediterranean Sea has almost entirely collapsed due to global warming, which suggests that other organisms may be struggling too.

“Most of what we know, in terms of biases in the fossil record, is based on mollusks,” co-author and University of Nevada, Las Vegas marine conservation paleobiologist Carrie Tyler said in a statement. “We designed our study to determine whether those biases are consistent when you include many types of organisms, not just mollusks. What happens when you have worms and sea urchins and all other groups in a marine ecosystem?”

[Related from PopSci+: The ghosts of the dinosaurs we may never discover.]

In this study, the team’s first step was to find a suitable marine ecosystem to compare living and fossil organisms to examine the discrepancies between past and present communities. They used a relatively unchanged environment off the coast of North Carolina that had the skeletal remains of dead animals and living animals. While there, the team collected samples from 52 locations that include a wide spectrum of onshore and offshore habitats that support specialized communities of organisms. 

Over the course of two years, the team counted over 60,000 living and dead specimens representing hundreds of different marine invertebrates. The thick shells of mollusks were overly represented in the fossil record, compared with other softer groups. However, the fragments of dead sand dollars, corals, tube-forming worms, and other non-mollusks were more broadly represented at the same level of both abundance and diversity as their living counterparts.

Brachiopods and sea stars that had less current-day diversity in the region were not seen in fossil record, partially due to their low numbers. Past and present habitats were also dominated by different species. For example, a type of hermit crab that is common today didn’t appear in the fossil record, but the overall number of species in different groups remained consistent.

According to the team, most marine ecosystems do not have a complete inventory of the species that live there, and the existing count is shrinking as some species decline and others go extinct. If these other marine environments are archived like the one in North Carolina in this study, researchers will have a baseline to evaluate the long term viability in those communities. 

“We can use the whole fossil assemblage as a picture into the past for a particular place despite differences in preservation among animals,” Tyler said. “By comparing it to the living community, we can see how much an ecosystem has changed and decide on the best conservation strategies based on those changes.”

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Forget Baby Shark—this summer’s marine darling is the baby octopus. Scientists working off the coast of Costa Rica say they’ve confirmed the location of the world’s third known octopus nursery and possibly a new species of the eight legged cephalopod. If confirmed, the new species would belong to Muusoctopus, a genus of small to medium sized octopus that do not not have ink sacs. 

[Related: Female octopuses will chuck seashells at males who irk them.]

This deep-sea octopus nursery is located in a low-temperature hydrothermal vent in the Dorado Outcrop offshore of Costa Rica. The nursery was initially discovered in 2013 and was the first observation of a female octopus gathering together to brood or incubate their eggs. When the scientists didn’t see any developing embryos when the site was first explored, scientists believed that the Dorado Outcrop may not support octopus growth.

According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the team watched the Muusoctopus species hatch during their work, disproving the idea that this area of the deep sea is inhospitable for developing octopus young. The Schmidt Ocean Institute is a nonprofit research organization that was founded in 2009 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy.

The team of 18 scientists from all over the world also explored five never-before-seen seamounts in the northwestern corner of Costa Rica’s waters. These undersea giants are teeming with thriving biodiversity—some of which are suspected to be new species. 

These seamounts are currently not protected from human activities like fishing, and many local scientists are working to determine if this area should become a designated marine protected area.

“This expedition to the Pacific deep waters of Costa Rica has been a superb opportunity for us to get to know our own country,” University of Costa Rica marine biologist Jorge Cortes said in a statement. “The expedition had a significant number of local scientists and students which will accelerate our capacity to study deep regions. The information, samples, and images are important to Costa Rica to show its richness and will be used for scientific studies, and outreach to raise awareness of what we have and why we should protect it.” 

The team used an underwater robot called a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to observe the vents and new octopuses. These kinds of submersibles are valuable for conducting deep-sea expeditions like the ones that discovered the wreckage of the RMS Titanic in 1985.

[Related: Scientists Freak Out Over Newly Discovered Hydrothermal Vents.]

“The discovery of a new active octopus nursery over 2,800 meters [9186 feet] beneath the sea surface in Costa Rican waters proves there is still so much to learn about our Ocean,” Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director Jyotika Virmani said in a statement. “The deep-sea off Costa Rica rides the edge of human imagination, with spectacular footage collected by ROV SuBastian of tripod fish, octopus hatchlings, and coral gardens. We look forward to continuing to help the world witness and study the wonders of our incredible Ocean.”    

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Seeing a majestic superpod or “stampede” of hundreds of free-ranging dolphins swimming and surfacing in the ocean is not only a spectacle for the eye, but can help scientists better monitor populations of the marine mammal. A study published in June in the journal Ecology and Evolution found that using unoccupied aerial systems, or drones, to photograph bottlenose dolphins can inform their conservation efforts.

[Related: How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound.]

When a dolphin swims up to the surface to breathe, their blowhole and dorsal fin are visible. Measuring the distance between these two body parts can help researchers estimate their total length—and therefore the dolphin’s age. The team on the study developed a technique of inferring age based on length for each dolphin measured in a group. The spots that appear with age on some cetaceans like Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins can also reveal the animals’ age to scientists.

“This method can help us quantify the age-structure of free-ranging populations,” co-author and PhD candidate at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Fabien Vivier said in a statement. “Healthy dolphin populations usually contain a certain proportion of newborn, immature, and mature animals, while deviances from this distribution may be interpreted as a population growth or decline.”

Earlier studies on using drone photos to measure the body condition and sizes of large whales showed encouraging results, but this is the first to show how this aerial approach can be used to study smaller mammals like bottlenose dolphins.

“Because it is difficult working with free-ranging animals, we could not be sure if it would work out as planned,” said Vivier.

In the study, the team collaborated with a swim with the dolphins program called Dolphin Quest O‘ahu to test out this measuring method on that population of bottlenose dolphins. They then took what they learned with those dolphins and applied it to free-ranging dolphins by collaborating with the world’s longest running dolphin research project, Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida.

The research program provided the team with the total body length, distance between the blowhole and dorsal fin, and age for many of the individuals within their study community. They used this data to test the accuracy of this measurement method and age estimates on the free-range dolphins. 

[Related: Male dolphins form alliances to help each other pick up mates.]

“Our hope in developing and using this method is that we can quickly monitor the health of free-ranging dolphin populations,” said Vivier. “This may facilitate the detection of early signs of population changes, for example, a decrease in the number of calves, and provide important insights for timely management decisions.”

This method was initially developed for bottlenose dolphins that are found in temperate and tropical waters around the world. This species, known for their intelligence and echolocation, are well studied due to their proximity to humans, but can also run a high risk of injury due to their closeness to people. 

Currently, the team is applying it to the spinner dolphins, which have a longer snout and smaller stature than bottlenose dolphins, in the main Hawaiian Islands. These mammals are known in the Pacific Ocean for their habit of leaping from the water and spinning in the air before plunging back into the water.

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

Around the world, communities are bracing for sea level rise: the Netherlands is stabilizing its dikes, Senegal is relocating neighborhoods, Indonesia is moving its entire capital city. These projects are hefty, expensive, and slow.

But they may need to pick up the pace. As new research shows, in many places, sea level rise will cause coastal flooding and other disruptions much sooner than anyone realized. It’s not that the water is rising faster; it’s that the land was lower to begin with.

Calculating when a rising sea will flood any one place involves a lot of math: you need to know the height of the water, the range of the tide, the elevation and slope of the land, the pace of sea level rise, and how much the land itself is rising or falling, among myriad other factors. As with all of science, the accuracy of these predictions is only as good as the data flowing into them.

The problem, according to the new study by Ronald Vernimmen and Aljosja Hooijer, two data analysts working on flood risk in Southeast Asia, is that time after time, the measurements of coastal elevation that scientists feed into their models have been wildly inaccurate. In tropical forests, says Vernimmen, these misinterpretations can be off by 20 meters or more. “Obviously, you can’t use that,” he says.

The problem stems from limitations in the technology typically used to measure elevation: radar. Radar blankets an area in radio waves, then measures how long it takes the waves to bounce back. But radar isn’t precise enough to separate treetops from terra firma, and a patch of pines or cluster of condos can easily exaggerate the elevation. Many studies of sea level rise still use radar elevation data collected by the space shuttle in 2000.

Lidar is a lot like radar, but it uses lasers instead of radio waves. A lidar detector like the one on the ICESat-2 satellite, which NASA launched in 2018, can send up to one million pulses each second, firing lasers that can pinpoint the gaps between buildings and trees to more accurately gauge the elevation of the land underneath. Analysts still need algorithms to filter that barrage of information into a functional map, but the results are far more precise.

Vernimmen and Hooijer spent the past few years filtering the new satellite data for Earth’s immense coastline, comparing elevation estimates gathered from radar with the newer lidar-based measurements. It wasn’t pretty.

The scientists’ big finding is that forests and buildings along the coast have skewed radar maps, presenting planners with inaccurate elevation data. Lidar showed coastlines often lower than first realized. This has two important implications: the same amount of sea level rise will be able to reach much farther inland, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than expected.

The scientists’ new lidar-based estimate predicts that roughly 482,000 square kilometers of land will be submerged with one meter of sea level rise, nearly triple the 123,000 square kilometers predicted by radar-based projections. That’s an extra Cameroon-sized chunk of Earth, currently home to roughly 132 million people, that will be underwater by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario.

The risk is greatest for river deltas in tropical regions where the land is flat, the population is often high, and the data tends to be old. With two meters of sea level rise, by around the year 2150 under a high-emission scenario, the Niger Delta in West Africa and Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta will have five times more land underwater than the older radar-based estimates suggested. The same is true for the Chao Phraya delta, which spans metropolitan Bangkok, Thailand’s capital of 11 million.

To Vernimmen, the recalculation means society needs to rethink some things. “There are huge construction projects underway in areas that really should not be built on,” he says.

The researchers made their elevation data set publicly available in hopes that governments take note of the new timeline, adds Hooijer.

Mir Matin, a remote sensing expert at United Nations University in Ontario who was not involved in the study, says these estimates could be made even more accurate by using airborne lidar—the type attached to drones or airplanes—rather than passive satellite-based readings. Though more accurate, airborne lidar is also more expensive, requiring pilots, planes, and planning. Some rich countries and large cities have shelled out for airborne lidar surveys, but Matin says developing countries would benefit as well. Rich countries—responsible for the bulk of global warming—could cover the cost, he says. “At the end, climate change is a global phenomenon,” Matin adds.

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

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OceanGate announced on Thursday afternoon it believes a “debris field” discovered near the Titanic indicates all five passengers aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible “have sadly been lost.” The experimental, uncertified vessel disappeared on Sunday during its 2.5 mile descent to briefly visit the historic ship’s remains. The Titan’s $250,000-per-seat inhabitants included a billionaire British explorer Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Sulemanthe father-and-son scions of a Pakistani fertilizer company, French maritime expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, and OceanGate’s own CEO Stockton Rush.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said in a news conference on Thursday.

[Related: Why finding the missing Titanic-bound tourist submersible is so challenging.]

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” reads a portion of OceanGate’s statement, as reported via CNN. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

The news arrives after more than four days of frantic international search efforts that spanned over 10,000 square surface miles, as well as North Atlantic ocean floor. On Monday, experts estimated Titan possessed roughly 96 hours of oxygen reserves—according to US Coast Guard officials’ calculations, the Titan’s oxygen likely would have run out around 7:10am EST on Thursday morning. But even with some leeway given to that estimation, recovery teams reportedly still needed as long as 8 hours to return an intact submersible to the ocean’s surface.

On Thursday afternoon, however, US Coast Guard officials confirmed a newly located debris field clearly originating from the missing vessel. The discovery came via video evidence collected by a remote operating vehicle (ROV) deployed by the Canadian vessel, Horizon Arctic. Among the international, state-of-the-art fleet also searching for Titan were at least nine other ships, including US and Canadian Coast Guard vessels, deep sea pipeline construction ships, and multiple other ROVs including the French vessel L’Atalante’s Victor 6000. On Tuesday evening, Canadian aircraft also reportedly detected “underwater noises” of potential human origin within the search area. Subsequently redirected resources failed to determine or locate the sounds’ sources.

[Related: Staggering 3D scan of the Titanic shows the wreck down to the millimeter.]

Mike Reiss, a tourist aboard four previous Titan trips including one to the Titanic, described signing waivers that “mentioned death three times on the first page.” On each voyage, Reiss alleged the submersible briefly lost communications with OceanGate’s surface crew. During his trip to the Titanic, Reiss also recalled the vessel being briefly carried off course by ocean currents as the compass appeared to malfunction, and spending three hours attempting to locate the wreckage despite being only 500 yards from the site.

In the years since its initial debut, submersible experts warned of “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design, and voiced concerns regarding OceanGate disregarding standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to OceanGate obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry leaders, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the Titan’s “experimental” approach that they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

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

“Your marketing material advertises that the Titan design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that OceanGate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules,” the letter reads, referring to the internationally recognized maritime industry regulatory organization. “Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.”

In a blog post published by OceanGate the following year entitled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” unnamed authors argued, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

“The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission,” the company wrote in its statement Thursday. “We appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers, and their days and nights of tireless work in support of our crew and their families.”

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The world’s oceans are heating up at an alarming rate, threatening marine life, food security, and livelihoods. According to climate scientists and experts, the time to protect the oceans is now. In December 2022, nearly 200 countries agreed to the United Nations’ pledge of classifying 30 percent of the world’s maritime space as marine protected areas (MPAs) by 2030 and the High Seas Treaty signed in March aims to further protect marine life in the open ocean.

A study published June 22 in the journal Nature Sustainability finds that limiting human activity from fishing, boating, etc. in parts of the ocean can both enhance the health of marine environments, while also protecting the well-being of the coasting communities nearby. The researchers found that MPAs are part of the solution to reaching multiple sustainable development goals around the world.

[Related: Fish populations thrive near marine protected areas—and so do fishers.]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) defines MPA’s as a defined region designated and managed for the long-term conservation of marine resources, ecosystems services, or cultural heritage. Roughly 26 percent of the waters in the United States are designated at MPA’s, including Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. At 582,578 square miles, it is the world’s largest no-fishing zone and has also proven to be beneficial to both humans and marine life alike.

In this new study, researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), looked at the impacts of MPAs in the Mesoamerican Reef region. This nearly 700-mile-wide region within the Caribbean Sea contains the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere.

The team discovered that the MPA’s with the toughest fishing restrictions helped sustain critical fisheries. They also found a link between marine protections and increased income and the food security in nearby coastal communities in counties such as Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.  

“Marine protected areas are hailed as a way to protect fisheries and ecosystems and promote well-being in coastal communities simultaneously,” study co-author and SERC marine biologist Steve Canty said in a statement. “This is one of the first attempts to evaluate these benefits together. Our data critically shows that well-enforced, no-take zones help rebuild fish populations and that these zones are associated with higher well-being in nearby coastal communities.”

The team used a mix of data from ecological and social organizations in the area, including repurposed data on reef fish from the Healthy Reefs Initiative. Social datasets from the US Agency for International Development helped the team assess factors such as income, food security, and the likelihood of developmental issues in young children due to chronic malnutrition.

[Related: For marine life to survive, we must cut carbon emissions.]

The scientists calculated the presence of fish in terms of their biomass–the total mass of the fish population within a given area. The MPA’s with the highest protections had on average 27 percent more biomass than those without any restrictions. There was also a greater abundance of commercially valuable fish like grouper, with 35 percent more biomass.

Additionally, they found that young children living near an MPA were about half as likely to have stunted growth, which is a key indicator of food insecurity. The average wealth index was also 33 percent higher in communities near the best-protected MPAs.

“MPAs unquestionably help improve the health of reefs and fisheries and, in some cases, may positively impact the well-being of coastal communities,” study co-author and Penn State University PhD candidate in rural sociology Sara E. Bonilla-Anariba said in a statement. “However, there is an ongoing debate about the factors influencing their positive outcomes.”

The study was unable to discern which groups saw the most benefits from MPA’s—whether it was fishing households or those with income from tourism and other industries in the region. The power of community-led MPAs is also worth closer study.

 “The goals of sustainably managing marine resources, increasing food security and reducing poverty in local communities do not always lead to tradeoffs—these positive outcomes can occur in the same places,” study co-author and SERC research ecologist Justin Nowakowski said in a statement. “Under the right conditions, conservation interventions like MPAs may be central strategies for achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals.”

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Orcas may be one of the ocean’s top predators, but they’ve rarely shown aggression against humans or watercraft in the past. But since 2020, orca pods have increasingly targeted sailboats off the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe. In one instance, three of the black and white whales destroyed a vessel’s rudder, causing it to sink before it reached port. The Spanish coast guard called in a helicopter and sea cruiser to rescue the sailors.

The sea-mammal strikes have left scientists, sailors and social media users contemplating what’s changed in the last few years to cause this shift in behavior. Some experts suspect that one of the older female orcas involved, named White Gladis, had previously been hit by a ship or entrapped during illegal fishing. Questions arose. Are the whales attacking the boats to avenge White Gladis? Or are they simply defending themselves against more possible harm? Maybe they’re just playing with the sailboats? If the attacks were vengeful or defensive, does that mean orcas, and animals in general, can share their traumas with their social groups?

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

Wild orcas don’t attack humans or approach boats. The subpopulation off the Iberian coast is considered critically endangered with only up to 50 adults, according to a 2019 estimate from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But authorities worry that the number of attacks means they will continue. The Atlantic Orca Working group told The New York Times that since 2020, orcas were documented swimming at or reacting to vessels about 500 times in the seas around Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. They caused physical damage to the watercraft in about a fifth of those incidents.

Whether the attacks were motivated by vengeance, defense, or play is up for debate. David Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, who studies how stress affects the brain in humans and animals, says it’s important to remember that we never know what an animal is thinking. “We interpret what they’re thinking from their behavior.”

Some scientists who study orcas suggested the strikes were playful given the species’ mischievous nature. Diamond, on the other hand, believes the animals are capable of retribution. He often shows videos of orcas in class and notes how they have a mammalian brain that is functionally similar to humans. “I can actually see the killer whale taking a proactive approach to say, this thing on the surface caused me harm so I want to get all my hunting party together and attack it,” he explains.

Linking the orca attacks to post-traumatic stress disorder, though, could be taking it too far. While White Gladis might have had a negative experience with a boat, it’s unlikely that she suffers from PTSD as some have speculated. The condition is unique to humans as it is diagnosed through self reports and not any physical test, Diamond says. More importantly, its symptoms go deeper than just remembering a harrowing experience and being fearful of it. “It changes [a person’s] personality; it changes their life,” he says. “So we don’t want to trivialize PTSD by saying, this orca had a terrible experience, therefore it has PTSD. Most people have terrible experiences in their lives and don’t develop PTSD.”

Even if animals don’t fit the clinical definition of PTSD patients, they could remember traumatic experiences or develop PTSD-like effects. In one study, Diamond’s team put lab rats in a box with cats, their natural predator. It triggered a part of the rodents’ brains known to be connected to the fear of death. Many weeks later, researchers put the rats back in the box in a different room without similar scents or cats. The subjects showed tremendous unease with the box itself, Diamond says. In another experiment, he paired a different set of rats and cats in boxes multiple times, and then sent the rodents to live with an unfamiliar rat afterward to simulate an unstable social life. They started to produce PTSD-like effects with changes in their physiology and behavior.

[Related on PopSci+: Can captive parrots have PTSD?]

And what about their roommates, or in the orcas’ case, their pod mates? It’s unlikely that animals can rehash all the details of a traumatic event to their acquaintances, but they might still be able to tip them off to the source of the trauma—and the subsequent dangers. About 16 years ago, John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, captured American crows using nets to tag them with colored leg bands, so he could follow their behavior over their lifetimes. Now, many crows in the same neck of the woods show hostile behavior to humans. A lot of the birds that weren’t tagged “respond to us like we caught them,” Marzluff says. “So they are learning that we’re dangerous from others that either experienced it or saw the initial capture.”

Crows don’t just use group interactions to warn each other: They might take advantage of their numbers to engage with the threat. When the corvids see something they think is dangerous, they let out a harsh, scolding sound. Other crows hear it and then join in. “So it’s not like they’re telling one another, ‘Hey, there’s this guy who comes around once a year, watch out for him,’” Marzluff says. “It’s like, ‘I see this thing, which I’ve heard or known to be dangerous, come in here and learn about it with me. So from the orca example, it seems like they might be doing similar things.”

In another example, elephant mothers in Gorongosa National Park who survived hunters during Mozambique’s civil war sometimes enlist their kin and clans to chase away humans who come near them. It’s a defensive action, according to Liana Zanette, a biology professor at the University of Western Ontario, who researches predator-prey interactions. “These females lived during this time of this brutality by humans,” she says. “And so now whenever they see a human, they recognize it as a significant threat.”

While we may never fully never know why animals act the way they do, one thing is certain: Our presence makes a difference. Whether it’s an orca in the Strait of Gibraltar or a bird in your backyard, Marzluff says that we should know that animals are paying attention to what we do. “They do take information about our activities and use it in their behavior later,” he says. “We’re not just this static part of their environment. We’re an active species that they take seriously and respond to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

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

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

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

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

Tracing the lionfish’s spread

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aggressive predators without natural enemies

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

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

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

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

Facing the invasion: Brazil’s challenges

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

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

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

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

Making up for lost time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Code of ethics

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

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

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

Tools of the trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting to the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This year is going to be pretty unforgettable, and not in a good way. The National Weather Service has officially detected signs of El Niño, a climate pattern that temporarily warms up waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and will change precipitation and temperature patterns around the world.. The last El Niño event took place from 2018 to 2019.

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

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

What is the forecast for El Niño 2023?

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

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

How does El Niño warm the ocean?

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

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

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

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

How will El Niño affect global weather patterns?

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

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

Is climate change making El Niño worse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These findings were published today in the journal Science. 

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

[Related: Take the best naps, with science]

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

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

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

How do seals sleep in the ocean?

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

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

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

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

Different stages of underwater sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may boost collaboration and high seas research

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

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

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

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

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

Ratification and Indigenous inclusion are not guaranteed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is blue carbon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is blue carbon important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much can blue carbon help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dinosaur Mysteries digs into the secretive side of the “terrible lizards” and all the questions that keep paleontologists up at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two new national monuments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting Pacific Remote Islands

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

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

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

US Ocean Climate Action Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally featured on Grist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Earthlings, get ready for your closeups.

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

The story behind the overall winner (seen above):

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

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

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

– Photographer Samantha Stephens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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