7. One Global Ocean

2008

2008 December 10. 1 / 5 of Coral Reefs Already Lost, Much More Feared. The New York Times. Excerpt: POZNAN, Poland (AP) -- The world has lost nearly one-fifth of its coral reefs and much of the rest could be destroyed by increasingly acidic seas if climate change continues unchecked, an environmental group warned Wednesday.
Global warming and the rising temperature of the oceans are the latest and most serious threats to coral, already damaged by destructive fishing methods and pollution, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said.
''The world has lost about 19 percent of its coral reefs during the last 20 years,'' said IUCN's director general, Julia Marton-Lefevre...
''If current trends in carbon dioxide emission continue, many of the remaining reefs will be lost in the next 20 to 40 years,'' she told reporters....
Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which fuels global warming, is raising the level as well as the temperature of the oceans, said Olof Linden of the World Maritime University in Malmo, Sweden. That makes the water more acidic, adversely affecting reef-building coral that rely on calcification to build their shells....

2008 August 3. Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline. By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times. Excerpt: BARCELONA, Spain — Blue patrol boats crisscross the swimming areas of beaches here with their huge nets skimming the water’s surface. The yellow flags that urge caution and the red flags that prohibit swimming because of risky currents are sometimes topped now with blue ones warning of a new danger: swarms of jellyfish.
In a period of hours during a day a couple of weeks ago, 300 people on Barcelona’s bustling beaches were treated for stings, and 11 were taken to hospitals.
From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say....
But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.
...The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows....

2008 July 8. Corals, Already in Danger, Are Facing New Threat From Farmed Algae. By CHRISTOPHER PALA, The New York Times. Excerpt: BUTARITARI, Kiribati — Off the palm-fringed white beach of this remote Pacific atoll, the view underwater is downright scary.
Corals are being covered and smothered to death by a bushy seaweed that is so tough even algae-grazing fish avoid it. It settles in the reef’s crevices that fish once called home, driving them away.
Dead coral stops supporting the ecosystem and, within a couple of decades, it will crumble into rubble, allowing big ocean waves to reach the beach during storms and destroy the flimsy thatched huts of the Micronesians.
“We are catching less and less fish, and the seaweeds are fouling our nets,” says Henry Totie, a fisherman and Butaritari’s traditional chief, in an interview in his traditionally built house in the village near the blue-green lagoon.
“This is one of the most damaging seaweeds I have ever seen,” says Jennifer E. Smith of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied the Hawaiian invasion for eight years...
Moiwa Erutarem, the Butaritari representative of the fisheries ministry, said the biggest losses were being felt by the most vulnerable: those who use nets in the shallow coral table and do not have the boats required to fish farther away. Seafood is virtually the only source of protein in Butaritari, complemented by breadfruit and coconut.
This equatorial island of 4,000 people is the latest victim of a 30-year global effort to encourage poor people in the coastal areas of the tropics to grow seaweed that, while not edible, produces carrageenan, an increasingly sought-after binder and fat substitute used in the food industry, notably in ice cream...

2008 June 10. Tallying the Toll on an Elder of the Sea. By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times. Excerpt: MILFORD, Conn. - Horseshoe crabs may look ancient and alien and battery-operated, they may look like Wilma Flintstone's idea of a Roomba vacuum cleaner, yet to the sixth-grade students from Columbus School in nearby Bridgeport, the most outrageous thing about the bronze-helmeted creatures crawling clumsily along the beach was not their appearance but their size - or rather sizes.
One boy pointed to a linked pair of horseshoe crabs, a relatively compact specimen maybe seven inches across clinging to the tail end of a much larger companion. A kid crab hitching a ride on its mother? No, explained Jennifer H. Mattei, head of the biology department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, who led the expedition. They were both full-grown, a male and a female, and the female was the bruiser out front.
Among horseshoe crabs, Dr. Mattei explained, adult females are a good 25 to 30 percent bigger than their mates, a fact that the girls greeted with hoots of triumph, boys of indignation. Why are the females bigger? a boy demanded. It's supposed to be the other way around!
As it turned out, the answer to that question was closely tied to the reason the students from Cheryl Crevier's class had ventured out on a flawless June morning to the shores of Long Island Sound. With clipboards purposefully in hand and tape measures jauntily around neck, the 22 children were there to help catch, measure and tag as many specimens as they could find of the American horseshoe crab, or Limulus polyphemus, one of the oldest and most tenacious species on Earth. Fossils found this year in Manitoba reveal that the animal's architecture has hardly changed in 445 million years.
The student project is part of a major effort now under way from Maine to Florida...(www.projectlimulus.org). Experts are desperate to know whether their suspicions are correct - that as a result of being harvested en masse for use as fishing bait, horseshoe crab populations are beginning to crash.
The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic, researchers said, not only because the creatures are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs by 200 million years, but also because so many contemporary life forms depend on them. Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles, amphibians and various other alimentary canals eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus eggs.
..."A single female horseshoe crab can put down 80,000 eggs a year, four million in her lifetime," said John T. Tanacredi, a professor of earth and marine sciences at Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y....
In the last few years, the Asian market for North American eel and conch meat has soared, and it seems that gravid female horseshoe crabs make the best bait. Even the stalwart Limulus can't last if all its eggs end up in one basket - shaped like a fisherman's boat.

2008 Apr 12. Even the Whales Have Their Predators: Ships. By SHAILA DEWAN, NY Times. The federal fisheries service is attempting to put a speed limit on some ships to keep them from killing endangered right whales.

2008 Mar 4. Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Needles. By PATRICIA COHEN, The New York Times. The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and into women's laps and shopping bags. When fully grown, these curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version of the Great Barrier Reef. But at the moment they were emerging at a remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by members of the audience.
...This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the reef, the world's largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an organizer of the project, who was in Manhattan last weekend to lecture, offer crocheting workshops and gather recruits. The reef is scheduled to arrive in New York City next month.
As she explained to the 40 people, nearly all women, who had gathered at New York University on Saturday, "This has grown from something that was a little object on our coffee table" to an exhibition that, so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet. And that was before the addition of that day's catch.
...the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the Humanities at New York University is co-sponsoring the exhibit, which will appear in the university's Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at the World Financial Center April 5 through May 18.
In the university's auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn, thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens, tans, purples and yellows.
Later the group members traipsed upstairs to a large jewelry studio where they settled at one of six thick wooden worktables and began crocheting. The woven organisms developed so quickly it seemed as though time-lapse photography was at work....

2008 Feb 14. Map shows toll on world's oceans. By Helen Briggs, Science reporter, BBC News, Boston Excerpt: Only about 4% of the world's oceans remain undamaged by human activity, according to the first detailed global map of human impacts on the seas. A study in Science journal says climate change, fishing, pollution and other human factors have exacted a heavy toll on almost half of the marine waters. Only remote icy areas near the poles are relatively pristine, but they face threats as ice sheets melt, it warns.
The authors say the data is a "wake-up call" to policymakers. ...Lead scientist, Dr Benjamin Halpern, of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, US, said humans were having a major impact on the oceans and the marine ecosystems within them. "In the past, many studies have shown the impact of individual activities," he said. "But here for the first time we have produced a global map of all of these different activities layered on top of each other so that we can get this big picture of the overall impact that humans are having rather than just single impacts."
...The researchers divided the world's oceans into 1km-square sections and examined all real data available on how humankind is influencing the marine environment. They then calculated "human impact scores" for each location, presenting this as a global map of the toll people have exacted on the seas. The scientists say they were shocked by the findings. "I think the big surprise from all of this was seeing what the complete coverage of human impacts was," said Dr Spalding, senior marine scientist for international conservation group The Nature Conservancy. "There's nowhere really that escaped. It's quite a shocking map to see." He said the two biggest drivers in destroying marine habitats were climate change and over-fishing....

2008 February 5. MARIN SALMON POPULATIONS PLUMMET. Excerpt: Worst Spawning Numbers in 12 Years Raise Fears for Recovery The spawning season for endangered coho salmon of Marin is the worst recorded in 12 years, causing high levels of concern by biologists who have been working to monitor and restore the endangered populations following a decade of stable or slightly increasing spawning numbers. Marin's Lagunitas Watershed, located just 25 miles
from downtown San Francisco, and one of the Bay Area's most beloved salmon runs, boasts the largest remaining population of coho salmon left in Central California and upwards of 20% of the State's total. Coho have already gone extinct in 90 percent of California streams that once supported this species....
For more information, please contact:
Todd Steiner, Executive Director and biologist 415.663.8590 ext. 103, tsteiner{AT}tirn.net
Paola Bouley, Watershed Biologist 415.663.8590 ext. 102, paola{AT}tirn.net

2008 January 24. Tuna Troubles. Excerpt: Here is a simple rule for life: the food you eat is only as safe as the environment it comes from. This is narrowly true, in that food from a dirty kitchen is likely to be unsafe. But it’s also true in the broadest sense. A good example is the tuna in sushi. Many New Yorkers have come to love the convenience, taste and aesthetic appeal of sushi. But as The Times reported Wednesday after testing tuna from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants, sushi made from bluefin tuna may contain unacceptable levels of mercury, which acts as a neurotoxin. Every piece of that tuna, glistening on its bed of rice, is a
report on the worrisome state of the oceans....

2008 January 11. Greenhouse ocean may downsize fish. [EurekAlert (11.1.08)] By 2100, warmer oceans with more carbon dioxide may no longer sustain 1 of the world's most productive fisheries, says USC marine ecologist. The last fish you ate probably came from the Bering Sea. But during this century, the sea's rich food web stretching from Alaska to Russia-could fray as algae adapt to greenhouse conditions. "All the fish that ends up in McDonald's, fish sandwiches-that's all Bering Sea fish," said USC marine ecologist Dave Hutchins, whose former student at the University of Delaware, Clinton Hare, led research published Dec. 20 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, a leading journal in the field. At present, the Bering Sea provides roughly half the fish caught in U.S. waters each year and nearly a third caught worldwide. "The experiments we did up there definitely suggest that the changing ecosystem may support less of what we're harvesting things like pollock and hake," Hutchins said.

2008 January 5. EMPTY SEAS Europe's Appetite for Seafood Propels Illegal
Trade. By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. Europe's dinner tables are increasingly supplied by global fishing fleets, which are depleting the world's oceans.

2008 January 3. Federal Judge Orders Navy To Adopt Significant Mitigation Measures For Sonar Use. District Court Establishes Protections For
Marine Mammals During Exercises. Excerpt: LOS ANGELES - The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued today a preliminary injunction requiring a series of mitigation measures that will govern the use of mid-frequency (MFA) sonar by the U.S. Navy during training exercises in the rich biological waters off Southern California. In its order, the Court considered both the environmental benefits of mitigation and the feasibility of specific measures.
Calling key elements of the Navy's mitigation scheme "grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure," the court imposed ... additional limitations to protect marine mammals....
...."We have said from the beginning of this litigation
that the Navy can meet its training objectives while substantially increasing protections against unnecessary harm to whales and other marine mammals," said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which filed the lawsuit. "We are very pleased that the Court has agreed with us and has enjoined the Navy from conducting these
exercises unless it takes the necessary precautions."
...The high-intensity MFA sonar system can blast vast areas of the oceans with dangerous levels of underwater noise and has killed marine mammals in numerous incidents around the world. The waters off Southern California have some of the richest marine habitat in the country, and include five endangered species of whales, a globally important population of blue whales, the largest animal ever to live on earth, and as many as seven individual species of beaked whales, which are known to be particularly vulnerable to underwater sound....

2007

15 December 2007. In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters. By DAVID
BARBOZA, The New York Times. Excerpt: FUQING, China - Here in southern China, beneath the looming mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia, much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West....Fuqing is No. 1 on a list for refused seafood shipments from China....the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.
"Our waters here are filthy," said Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer who has 20 giant ponds in western Fuqing. "There are simply too many aquaculture farms in this area. They're all discharging water here, fouling up other farms." Farmers have coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish feed, which helps keep their stocks alive yet leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues in seafood, posing health threats to consumers.
...No one is more vulnerable to these health risks than the Chinese, because most of the seafood in China stays at home. But foreign importers are also worried.
...China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country...."There are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish samples we've tested," said Ming Hung Wong, a professor of biology at Hong Kong Baptist University. "We've got to stop the pollutants entering the food system."
...More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water....

11 December 2007. Experts Study Lake Champlain Eel Decline. (AP) Excerpt: Scientists are trying to determine what caused Lake Champlain's populations of American eels to decline to almost nothing over the last two decades. ..Until the early 1980s ...commercial anglers would harvest tons of them every year. "We have a fairly large vertebrate that has gone from abundant to virtually absent in 20 years," said Tom Berry, Lake Champlain program director for the Nature Conservancy. ...By the early 1990s Quebec banned the commercial fishing of eels. American eels start life in the Sargasso Sea, an area in the Atlantic Ocean between the West Indies and the Azores. After hatching, eel larvae float on ocean currents to East Coast rivers, including the St. Lawrence. Historically, immature female eels swam up the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers and lived 10 to 20 years in Lake Champlain before returning to the Sargasso Sea. "It is just remarkable they travel 3,000 miles when they are only an inch long. It boggles the mind," said UVM fisheries biologist Ellen Marsden.
Biologists do not fully understand the reason for the decline.
Theories include climate change, pollution, and overfishing of young eels. But the decline could also be due to the reconstruction in the 1960s of two hydroelectric dams on the Richelieu River in Quebec. The dams could have prevented the eels from reaching Lake Champlain. A decade ago, Hydro-Quebec installed an eel ladder at one of the dams. "Within 10 days we measured eels going up the ladder," said
Quebec fisheries biologist Pierre Dumont....

1 May 2007. Coral Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn? By CORNELIA DEAN, NY Times. TAVERNIER, Fla. - ... Meaghan Johnson ..., a program coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, ...Ken Nedimyer, ...and Philip Kramer, who directs the conservancy's Caribbean Marine Program, ...had come to see... an array of concrete disks set in the sand. Each one held a tiny piece of coral. Mr. Nedimyer had led them to a nursery, one of a number he has established since 2000, .... He is working with assistance from the conservancy, which in turn cooperates with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has its own coral efforts in places like Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is looking at water quality standards for corals in Florida, Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico, .... The Coral Reef Task Force, created in the Clinton administration, regularly assesses coral health. ... Many would say corals globally are already so damaged, and so threatened by further environmental degradation, that there is little chance restoration efforts can turn things around. Staghorn and elkhorn corals, Mr. Nedimyer's principal interests, were once abundant in South Florida, the Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean. But since the 1990s they have significantly declined, to the point that last year they were placed on the threatened list, under the Endangered Species Act...."We have lost 25 percent of the world's corals in the last 25 years," David E. Vaughan, director of the Center for Coral Reef Research at Mote, said in an interview, adding that 25 percent more are expected to die in the next decade or two. "Sometimes we sound like doomsday sayers," Dr. Vaughan said, "but those are the facts." ...Corals in South Florida have another big problem, a die-off of sea urchins, which began succumbing wholesale to a mysterious ailment about 20 years ago. Urchins graze on unwanted algae, and without them, corals in many areas have been smothered in overgrowth, making it difficult or impossible for them to grow or propagate.

17 April 2007. No-Fishing Zones in Tropics Yield Fast Payoffs for Reefs. By CHRISTOPHER PALA. NY Times. Excerpt: NGIWAL, Palau - ...on Palau's main island of Babeldaob, Islias Yano, 57, ..."We fished certain fish in certain seasons," he recalled. "Each reef could only be fished by people from a certain village." Village elders would rotate fishing on reefs, he recounted, to husband their slow-growing main source of food. Starting in the 1980s, population growth, new seafood markets in Asia and modern ways of thinking washed away the elders' authority and rules. "Outsiders started coming into our reefs, they used scuba gear and dynamite, and the fish got smaller and fewer," Mr. Yano said, shaking his head. ... In Ngiwal, the reaction was not long in coming. Once again, the elders ruled. In 1994, they banned fishing in a small area of reef that was partly accessible on foot. The village women, who traditionally gather shellfish at low tide, noticed how the fish became more plentiful there in a few years. The reef became locally famous, and other villages started to do the same. Today, Palau, a tiny island state 600 miles east of the Philippines that is internationally known as a site for recreational diving, is at the forefront of a worldwide movement to ban fishing in key reefs to allow the return of prized species. It now protects a patchwork of reefs and lagoon waters amounting to 460 square miles. ...That Palau has taken the lead in ocean conservation is no accident. Even among Pacific peoples, Palauans have been known for prizing fish and seafood over meat and farmed vegetables, and its fishermen have stood out for their keen understanding of the reefs. ...

4 April 2007. Quake lifts Solomons island out of the sea. By Neil Sands. Excerpt: RANONGGA, Solomon Islands (AFP) - The seismic jolt that unleashed the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying some of the world's most pristine coral reefs. In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the
8.0magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot). Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide. ...The stench of rotting fish and other marine life stranded on the reefs when the seas receded is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral is dry and crunches underfoot. Dazed villagers stand on the shoreline, still coming to terms with the cataclysmic shift that changed the geography of their island forever, pushing the shoreline out to sea by up to 70 metres. ...fisherman Hendrik Kegala had just finished exploring the new underwater landscape of the island with a snorkel when contacted by the AFP team. He said a huge submerged chasm had opened up, running at least 500 metres (550 yards) parallel to the coast. On the beach at Niu Barae, the earthquake has revealed a sunken vessel that locals believe is a Japanese patrol boat, a remnant of the fierce fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese in WWII. ...Jackie Thomas, acting manager for Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the Solomons, said the loss of the reefs was a huge blow for the fishing communities that are dotted along Ranongga's coast. "The fish from the reefs are the major source of protein for the villagers," she told AFP from Gizo."....

27 February 2007. EU Wants to Speed Up Tuna Protection. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Excerpt: BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union's top fisheries official on Tuesday pressed for stronger protections for the overfished bluefin tuna, an increasingly rare delicacy in high-end restaurants around the world. EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said he wants to extend the fishing offseason, reduce tuna sold on the black market, and impose new worldwide cuts in catch quotas as quickly as possible. The EU's 27 member states were expected to approve the measure within weeks, officials said. The proposal would reduce catch quotas this year for bluefin tuna caught in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean to 29,500 tons from 32,000 officials said....Globally two years ago, Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks have dropped by 80 percent over the past 30 years. The global tuna export market in 2002 was $5 billion, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

13 February 2007. GOLFO DE SANTA CLARA JOURNAL: Vaquita Porpoise, and a Way of Life, Face Extinction. By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times. Excerpt: Fishermen in Golfo de Santa Clara say their catches of shrimp and fish have steadily declined over the years. GOLFO DE SANTA CLARA, Mexico - ...The Mexican government set up a reserve in 1993 to protect the vaquita porpoises, which become entangled in fishing nets and drown. But the area is too small, with fishing banned in only about 637 square miles. Environmentalists from the United States and Mexico had begged the fishermen to stop using the gill nets that are killing off La Vaquita, or the little cow, a porpoise that now has the dubious distinction of being one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world. Only about 400 of them survive in the waters at the tip of the Gulf of California where the Colorado River once poured into the sea, environmentalists say, and the only way to save them is to ban commercial fishing with nets in about 1,545 square miles.... Environmentalists have put forward proposals to pay the fishermen not to fish and to develop tourism as an alternative source of income. But the men with rope-hardened hands and weathered faces are skeptical. ..."They want us to stop fishing," said Andres Gonzalez, a 43-year-old fisherman. "They want to take care of the animals here, but they are not taking care of the people." ...biologists say studies of the carcasses of the vaquita porpoises show no signs of malnourishment, but plenty of scars from fishing nets. The advocates of buying out the fishermen note that the human population at the gulf's tip is quite small, about 50,000 people in three towns, including maybe 10,000 fishermen. The solution, they say, is to ban fishing with nets in the upper gulf and establish a $50 million trust fund and use the earnings to pay fishermen a total of about $4 million a year, not to fish but to pursue other trades. The program would last at least seven years, until the porpoise population could recover....

2006

17 December 2006. 20 Million Years and a Farewell. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt: The first species to be erased from this planet's great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin. It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China. On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji's only known habitat. The Yangtze, Asia's longest waterway and thought to be akin to the Amazon long ago in its biological richness, now has a dominant species: the 400 million (and counting) people busily plying its waters and industrializing its banks. For some 20 million years, the baiji, also called the white-flag dolphin, frequented the Yangtze's sandy shallows, using sonar to catch fish in the silty flow. In the last few decades, the dolphin's numbers plunged as rapidly as the Chinese economy surged. The Yangtze's sandy shallows, which the baiji frequented, have largely been dredged for shipping. The baiji sought fish that have been netted or driven from the river by pollution. And its sonar may have been disrupted by the propeller noise from boats above. A 1997 survey counted 13 baiji in the river. None of the dolphins survive in captivity......

3 November 2006. Study Sees 'Global Collapse' of Fish Species. By CORNELIA DEAN, NY Times. Excerpt: If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be "global collapse" of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting. The scientists, who report their findings today in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say. But improvements must come quickly, said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who led the work. Otherwise, he said, "we are seeing the bottom of the barrel." ...Twelve scientists from the United States, Canada, Sweden and Panama contributed to the work reported in Science today. "We extracted all data on fish and invertebrate catches from 1950 to 2003 within all 64 large marine ecosystems worldwide," they wrote. "Collectively, these areas produced 83 percent of global fisheries yields over the past 50 years." ...The researchers found that 29 percent of species had been fished so heavily or were so affected by pollution or habitat loss that they were down to 10 percent of previous levels, their definition of "collapse." ...Dr. Worm said ... he...extrapolated the data into the future "to see where it ends at 100 percent collapse, you arrive at 2048."....

31 October 2006. Building Resilience May Help Corals, Mangroves Survive. Excerpt: GENEVA, Switzerland, Environment News Service (ENS) - Survival strategies for coral reefs and mangroves threatened by climate change are outlined by scientists of IUCN-World Conservation Union and the Nature Conservancy in two new publications launched today. The strategies rely on managing stressors other than global warming so that corals and mangroves are more resilient and able to survive in a warming world. Climate change is destroying tropical marine ecosystems through sea temperature increase and ocean acidification. Scientists say 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have already been ruined and a further 50 percent are facing immediate or long term danger of collapse. Yet, one of the reports published today shows that saving the world's coral reefs may still be possible. By fighting other stress factors such as pollution or overfishing impacting coral reefs, the reefs will be able to better adapt to climate change impacts, according to the report, "Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching." ...Coral reefs only cover 0.2 percent of the ocean floor, but contain 25 percent of marine species globally. Coral reefs provide livelihoods to 100 million people and provide the basis for industries such as tourism and fishing, worth an annual net benefit of US$30 billion, the report states. One hectare of mangroves is estimated to deliver products and services worth up to $900,000. Examples of these products and services include timber and wood chips, an environment for fish spawning, and habitat for economically important species. ...View the publications online: "Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching," Gabriel D. Grimsditch and Rodney V. Salm and "Managing Mangroves for Resilience to Climate Change," Elizabeth Mcleod and Rodney V. Salm.

24 October 2006. The Biologist and the Sea: Lessons in Marine-Life Restoration. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. Excerpt: MONTAUK, N.Y. - For Carl Safina - a biologist, conservationist and prize-winning author - passions and intellectual pursuits are deeply entwined. Dr. Safina's doctoral thesis was on the interrelated behaviors and annual rhythms of the common tern and bluefish, which feast on the same bay anchovies and other small prey. On a recent three-hour fishing trip Dr. Safina reflected on two decades of work revealing the enormous disruption of ocean ecosystems by industrial-scale fishing and other human activities.  His prime goal, he has said, is to develop a "sea ethic" similar to the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, and a scattering of success stories has convinced him that a balance is still possible between exploitation and conservation of marine resources.
Dr. Safina: In general, I'm O.K. with using what's in the oceans. I just don't think we should be using it up. So the point to me is not necessarily to put things off limits, although some places probably should be off limits where fish spawn and places like that. But the main thing is to restore the abundance of what's in the ocean so that we can have a viable system where all these animals can live and eat each other, and then we can take a little bit.
Q. What most discourages you related to the trends you see in the oceans?
A. That it's so easy to see what we need to do, it's so easy to see how things can be so much better and yet it's taking so much time to come around to it.
Q. What are some of those improvements?
A. We need to just set fishing quotas and adhere to them, and make them realistic, and listen to what the scientists say about how many fish can come out of the ocean. And if we do that, we will get more of what we want.
Q. And what's one of the most encouraging things you've seen?
A. That fish are recoverable. Many of the fish that we have here were much less abundant 15 years ago than they are now. We did get some good regulations passed, and the fish began recovering right away. They know what to do. If you just don't kill them as fast, they start coming back. So the most encouraging thing is that it works, but a lot of that could be much more widespread throughout the country and the rest of the world.

28 September 2006. After a Seven-Year Ban, Salmon Fishing Returns to Maine. By PAM BELLUCK, The New York Times. Excerpt: EDDINGTON, Me. - Forget your trout, your striped bass. Wild Atlantic salmon are a fisherman's Holy Grail. For the first time since 1999, Maine salmon fishermen wait to try their luck in the Eddington Pool below the Veazie Dam on the Penobscot River. ... in 1999, Maine, the last American bastion of wild Atlantic salmon, closed its rivers to salmon fishing to save the salmon, whose numbers had shrunk from pollution, dams and other forces. ...Now, with salmon slowly returning, Maine has opened its first wild salmon season in seven years - a month of restricted fishing on the state's storied Penobscot River. ...Maine is starting with baby steps: fall fishing, when salmon are smaller; catch-and-release only; no barbs on fishhooks; and no fishing when the water temperature hits 70 degrees because hooked fish recover better in cooler water. Mr. Keliher said each salmon reaching the Veazie Dam, where they are temporarily trapped, will be checked to see if it was hooked and what condition it is in. If the fish seem to withstand the fall season, Maine may allow the more-popular spring fishing. The restrictions satisfied most environmentalists, said Andrew Goode, board president of the Penobscot River Restoration Project, the coalition buying the dams....

September 2006. "Super Sucker" keeping coral reefs health. Nature Conservancy. Marine researchers in Hawaii have a new weapon in the battle against alien algae: an underwater vacuum cleaner affectionately named the Super Sucker. In initial tests, the machine in one hour removed up to 800 pounds of invasive algae, which smothers and kills coral. ...The new tool is one component of a larger strategy to combat non-native algae invasions, which dominate Kaneohe Bay and Oahu's south shore and are also abundant on the south shores of Maui and Molokai.

10 August 2006. Federal Action Helps Salmon Fishermen By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) - Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez on Thursday declared commercial salmon fishing off Oregon and California a failure this year, after sharp harvest cutbacks imposed to protect the struggling return of salmon to the Klamath River. Under federal fisheries law, the formal declaration, the first since 1992 to come before the end of the fishing season, makes it possible for lawmakers from the two states to move forward in seeking up to $80 million in aid, an effort that has been stymied for lack of a declaration.

8 August 2006. Unlikely Partners Create Plan to Save Ocean Habitat Along With Fishing
By JON CHRISTENSEN. NY Times. Excerpt: MORRO BAY, Calif. - Fishery closings are generally not greeted as good news in ports like this.
Angry protests are more likely. So to find an environmentalist and two commercial fishermen quietly conspiring on the bridge of a fishing boat docked in Morro Bay as a far-reaching prohibition on bottom trawling went into effect on the West Coast this summer was unusual, to say the least.
The environmentalist, Chuck Cook, said he had been called a "conservation Nazi" in some ports. And Gordon Fox, who has been dragging fish and shrimp from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for nearly 30 years, admitted the conversation would be "perceived by some in the industry to be sleeping with the enemy." Together with other fishermen and conservationists, Mr. Cook and Mr. Fox have fashioned a plan that they hope will preserve the fish and, just as important to both of them, fishing here off the central coast of California. It is a complicated deal centered on a simple quid pro quo, Mr. Cook said. The trawlers in Morro Bay agreed to join the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense, an organization that advocates market-based solutions, in proposing three "no-trawl zones." They would cover nearly 6,000 square miles of ocean between here and Monterey Bay, an area roughly the size of Connecticut. In exchange, the Nature Conservancy agreed to buy fishing permits and boats from fishermen, like Mr. Fox, who want to get out of the trawling business, trade their boats for smaller vessels, and try to find more selective, sustainable ways to continue fishing. ...The deal struck by conservationists and fishermen follows a chart laid out by the National Research Council in a 2002 report on the devastating effect of repeatedly dragging nets across seafloor habitat. "That's been our bible on this project," Mr. Cook said of his well-worn copy of the study, which surveyed years of research on trawling. Its recommendations included closing vulnerable areas of the ocean floor to bottom trawling and reducing fishing outside protected areas in tandem, rather than as separate strategies, as had been done in the past.

26 July 2006. NASA CORAL REEF IMAGES KEY TO NEW GLOBAL SURVEY. A first-of-its-kind survey of how well the world's coral reefs are being protected was made possible by a unique collection of NASA views from space.

16 July 2006. Fishing Depletes Mediterranean Tuna, Conservationists Say. By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. NY Times. Excerpt: SUCURAJ, Croatia - Two decades ago, the channels that separate the Adriatic Islands here were brimming with giant bluefin tuna, a species so plentiful that tourists used to climb ladders by the sea to watch the schools swim by.
Today, these majestic predators are rarely if ever caught. ...The tuna population in the Mediterranean is nearing extinction, a new World Wildlife Fund report concludes, with catches down 80 percent over the past few years, even for high-tech trawlers that now comb remote corners of the sea in search of the hard-to-find fish. ..."Significant negative changes" have occurred in the fish stocks of the Adriatic because of overfishing, said Dr. Nedo Vrgoc of the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split, Croatia, with a particularly steep reduction in long-lived fish species like rays, John Dory and anglerfish....

2005

26 October 2005. Half of Coral Reefs Could Be Destroyed. Nearly half of the world's coral reefs may be lost in the next 40 years unless urgent measures are taken to protect them against the threat of climate change, according to a new report released Tuesday by the World Conservation Union. The Swiss-based organization called for the establishment of additional marine protected areas to prevent further degradation by making corals more robust and helping them resist bleaching...Coral bleaching is caused by increased surface temperatures in the high seas and higher levels of sunlight caused by climate change. As temperatures rise, the algae on which corals depend for food and color die out, causing the coral to whiten, or "bleach."

3 May 2005. Tracking the Imperiled Bluefin From Ocean to Sushi Platter. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. For sushi aficionados, the essence of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is its fat-laced, butter-soft belly meat, called toro. For the long-liners, purse seiners, harpooners, trappers and fish farmers who seek the bluefin from Cape Hatteras to the frigid waters south of Iceland to the balmy Mediterranean, the fish are a potential bonanza, with choice specimens fetching $50,000 or more in Tokyo. But the intensifying trade in bluefin may soon empty the waters of this master of the sea. In just the last 35 years, exploding markets for sushi-grade tuna, combined with intensifying industrial-scale hunts aided by satellites and spotters in airplanes, have devastated not only the fish but also many fisheries. ...The threat to the bluefin was underscored last week by researchers who have tracked hundreds of the fish on their ocean-spanning journeys using electronic tags. They found that the tuna that spawn in the west, which are most severely depleted, are further threatened by an ever-broadening gantlet of hooks, seines, harpoons, traps and now farm-style pens, in which netted fish are raised and fattened - all to supply the Japanese sushi trade. Dr. Barbara A. Block, a marine biologist at Stanford and the lead author of a study, published in the April 28 issue of Nature, said she found it hard to believe that "a fish of this size and beauty, an animal that had captured the hearts of fishermen and scientists alike for millennia, is slipping off Earth." ...Adult bluefins, some topping half a ton and living 40 years, slice through icy or tropical waters .... ...In the paper, Dr. Block and her colleagues recommended seasonal bans on long-line fishing in spawning hot spots in the gulf. They also urged tighter controls on fishing in the Central Atlantic, where a feeding area straddles the existing boundary line and fish from both coasts congregate. Right now, that area is intensively fished by a host of countries with almost no monitoring. Without action, Dr. Block said, the western population has little hope. "If such megafauna can disappear, imagine what else is occurring?" she said. "And it's all because we do not have a system that manages the oceans properly." American boat owners say that existing restrictions on long-line fishing in the Gulf are sufficient, and add that the spawning zones identified by Dr. Block are likely to shift each year, making specific "time-area closures" impossible. Long-liners in the area also use lightweight hooks that hold smaller yellowfin but are designed to uncoil under the powerful tug of a bluefin, they say. Dr. Block said that when she worked on long-line vessels in the region, the same smaller hooks caught and killed a substantial number of bluefin. She added that only a few percent of longliners in the area carry observers who independently tally bluefin deaths. Perhaps the biggest unresolved question is whether the new information can change an international regulatory regime that almost everyone, from anglers and commercial fishers to biologists and tuna diplomats, agrees is broken. There are signs that the accumulated scientific evidence is starting to sway some members of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the body created under a treaty in 1969 to oversee the fishery. ...In an interview last week, Masanori Miyahara, the chairman of the commission and a senior fisheries official from Japan, acknowledged that the existing system had failed. ..."We feel some responsibility for this mess," he said. "Japanese buyers are running all around the world and buying as many fish as possible, particularly bluefin.

January 2005. The Plastic Sea. by Kristi Coale, Terrain Magazine. Swirling in the Central and North Pacific Ocean is a mass of debris the size of Africa. Scientists have dubbed this mass, over which no country has authority or responsibility, the "Synthetic Sea." Why? Because it is filled with floating plastic waste. Between 1999 and 2002, Captain Charles Moore and researchers with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation made several trips to the Pacific Ocean halfway between San Francisco and Hawai'i to study the situation. What he has found is startling. Dragging trawlers behind his ship, Moore and his researchers took samples to assess the effects of the plastic on sea life. They compared the mass of zooplankton to the mass of plastic and found that for every pound of zooplankton, there were six pounds of plastic....Plastics in the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean trap, sicken, and otherwise disable an average of 25 sea lions, harbor seals, and other mammals locally each year, says Jennifer Witherspoon, formerly with the Marine Mammal Center. "Some get tangled in discarded fishing nets and packing strap, and we do save some," she explains. "We autopsy those who die, and we've found plastics and, in one instance, a sock." Externally, they can maim wildlife. Witherspoon recalls "Michelin," a sea lion found with a rubber tube around his neck; researchers had to euthanize him. An elephant seal with packing strap around her middle was lucky. "We cut the strap, and she doubled in size," says Witherspoon. "She hadn't been able to take a breath in some time." ...Sea-dwelling birds and other species do not distinguish between food and small pieces of plastic. That's because many of the plastic pieces are small and tan, resembling krill. Resin beads, or nurdles, resemble fish eggs. Birds and other animals ingest these particles, which make them feel sated, robbing them of the drive to find real food and depriving them of nutrients. Some birds, such as the albatross, regurgitate this polymer-laced meal to feed their chicks. Researchers have found shampoo bottle caps and electric wire plugs in the remains of albatross chicks. [See also http://www.sfei.org and http://www.algalita.org ]

17 March 2005. MARINE RESEARCHERS DELIVER BLUEPRINT FOR RESCUING AMERICA'S TROUBLED CORAL REEF. An international team of marine ecologists is urging the United States to take immediate action to save its fragile coral reefs. Their message is contained a strongly worded essay titled, "Are U.S. Coral Reefs on the Slippery Slope to Slime?" that appears in the March 18 edition of the journal Science.
"We're frustrated with how slowly things are moving with coral reef conservation in the United States," said Fiorenza Micheli, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. "Tiny steps are being taken, but they really don't address the overall problem."

2004

Summer 2004. Farming For Black Gold. Can California sturgeon farms help preserve a species half a world away? by Carol Hunter. Terrain Magazine pp. 22-27. Ken Beer has a farm in the Central Valley, just about 20 miles south of Sacramento. ... while his neighbors raise dairy cattle, alfalfa and winter wheat, Beer's farm is filled with row upon row of white, circular tanks that hold about one million pounds of California white sturgeon.... inside the belly of each mature female Beer hopes he'll find the black gold of the sea: caviar. For connoisseurs and gourmets, choices about caviar are usually pretty simple. Beluga or osetra? One ounce or two? But now, people like Ken Beer are allowing consumers to face a more profound choice: wild or farm-raised? Caviar has long been equated with luxury, the food of kings and czars. But while the sturgeons that produce caviar were once abundant in the oceans, lakes, and seas of the northern hemisphere, they have been fished to dangerously low levels around the world. In North America, five of the nine species of sturgeon and closely related paddlefish are federally listed as endangered, while in the Caspian Sea, which historically has been home to the world's largest abundance of sturgeon, annual catches have dropped by 95 percent in the last hundred years, from over 20,000 tons in the early 1900s to only 1000 tons in the late 1990s. While many government and international agencies have tried to regulate sturgeon fisheries, the high price of caviar, which can sell for well over $100 an ounce, continues to draw poachers and black market smugglers into an illegal trade....Ken Beer wasn't thinking of saving threatened species when he started studying sturgeon aquaculture 25 years ago. He had been raising catfish for about three years and was thinking of ways to make his farm more efficient. ...Because sturgeon farming uses a land-based facility with fresh water, it avoids many of the harmful environmental effects of other aquaculture, like open-water salmon farming. There are no escapes and mixing of gene pools, no contamination of wild species with diseases or parasites, and no flow of wastes directly into any open water resource.

21 December 2004. As the Seas Warm, Algae Help Some Coral Stand Up to the Heat. NY Times- By CORNELIA DEAN . KEY LARGO, Fla. - For some time, scientists have predicted that the world's coral reefs will be among the first ecosystems to suffer devastating damage from global warming. Some reefs, however, are proving surprisingly resilient, researchers say, not because of qualities of the corals themselves, but because of heat-tolerant algae that live with them. It may even be possible that heat-related episodes of coral bleaching, which had been viewed as ominous previews of mass coral death to come, could allow these robust algae to spread, leaving corals better able to survive in a warmer world. The scientists say this strength in the face of warming will not be enough to save the world's coral reefs, which are threatened by pollution, overfishing, tourism and other human activities. But if the findings hold up, "they essentially buy us time" to address those issues, said Dr. Andrew C. Baker of the Marine Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who led the new work.

23 November 2004. Earth's Uncanned Crusaders: Will Sardines Save Our Skin? NY Times. By CORNELIA DEAN. Scientists working off the west coast of Africa have identified sardines as an unexpected factor in global warming.

2 November 2004. NASA RELEASE: 04-355. NASA & PARTNERS CREATE NEW WORLDWIDE CORAL REEF LIBRARY. A NASA-funded project has created an archive of approximately 1,500 images of worldwide coral reefs. The archive is a tool international researchers will use, as they track reef health. The collection of coral reef images is the basis for a new Internet-based library for the Millennium Coral Reef Project. It was created in a partnership between NASA and the University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Fla. Additional contributors, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, international agencies and other universities, shared data, so natural resource managers could have a comprehensive world data resource on coral reefs and adjacent land areas. See also:
New Worldwide Coral Reef Library Created -- A collection of 1,490 coral reef images has become the basis for a new Internet- based library for the Millennium Coral Reef Project.
and Millennium Coral Reefs Landsat Archive

15 July 2004. Coalition Warns Navy Over Destructive Use of Mid-Frequency Sonar. Conservation and Animal Welfare Groups Decry Needless Harm to Whales and Other Species; Request Talks After Latest in String of Sonar-Linked Whale Deaths. LOS ANGELES - A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups yesterday threatened to take formal action against the U.S. Navy unless it agrees to adopt common sense measures to mitigate harm to marine mammals and fish caused by the Navy's use of mid-frequency, high intensity active sonar. The coalition includes NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), The Humane Society of the United States (The HSUS) and Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Futures Society. In a 13-page letter sent Wednesday to Navy Secretary Gordon England, the coalition detailed numerous mass strandings and mortalities of whales associated with the Navy's testing and training with mid-frequency sonar systems. http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/040715.asp and http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/marine/nlfa.asp

2003

November-December 2003. NRDC. An Open Letter About Whales and High-Intensity Sonar, by Kenneth Balxom.

Spring 2003. Deep Trouble. Article by Ben Raines from On Earth-NRDC. IN THE GULF OF MEXICO, IT'S BEST TO LET THE BIG ONES GETAWAY. On July 22, 2001, Alabama's Mobile Register (circulation 100,000) published its first article on methylmercury contamination in Gulf seafood. The investigative series that ensued, with more than forty articles to date, has shown not only that methylmercury has entered the human population by way of Gulf fish, but also that federal agencies charged with protecting people from such contamination have failed to do so. For the series, Ben Raines was awarded the 2002 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism. The stories that follow are compiled from a few of his original reports.

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