Just a quick list of posts that might be written in the future:
Hanauma Bay (Oahu, Hawaii) Case Study Coral Bleaching Environmental implications of the next US election More news updates Current initiatives/projects around the world
Yes, even though this blog was created to enter in the YMBA 2008 blog competition, my team member and I have decided to continue the blog even after the competition ends.
As of right now The Ocean Skeleton has over 30 posts which were all created in the time span of 2 weeks.
I made a cool video and a nice slideshow and posted them both on YouTube. I got positive responses for them, so I'm sharing it on here as well.
This was all recorded at the Waikiki Aquarium in Honolulu, Hawaii (on the island of Oahu). The Waikiki Aquarium is often cited as the 3rd oldest public aquarium in the United States. Here's there website by the way: http://www.waquarium.org/
Oh, and cool fact: The Waikiki Aquarium was the first aquarium in the world to maintain the chambered nautilus and the first to breed them (there's a pic of one in the slideshow).
Every single one of these video clips and pictures are from my own camera (that's actually true for the entire site, including the header design, unless pics are linked to somewhere else).
With the proliferation of movies such as Jaws and the typical James Bond fight scene with sharks, it’s no wonder we see sharks as vicious beasts, lying in wait to take chunks out of our flesh. This assumption could be no further than the truth. In fact, most sharks aren’t suited to hunting prey as big as humans and are more afraid of us than we are of them. After all, we kill 100 million sharks a year for shark’s fin soup and other uses. Sharks, on the other hand, kill six to ten people a year, much, much less than the amount of people killed yearly by lightning. The only reasons that sharks would attack humans are because they occasionally mistake us for their prey or they feel threatened by us.
The number one victims of shark bites are shark fishermen. It should be obvious that they’re not hunting humans; they’re fighting for their lives as they get dragged out of the water and viciously have their fins cut off. The U.S. National Parks Association states that being attacked by a shark is extremely rare and goes on to state that if you want to practice safety, the number one tip is to not carry dead fish with you because the shark would want to eat it. Another tip was to not try to touch or ride the sharks as that might scare them into attacking. It is fairly obvious that they’re not vicious human-hunters. In fact, the National Parks Association says that most species of sharks attack humans only when they mistake them for seals and sea lions, which happens very rarely due to sharks’ incredible sense of smell and ability to detect electrical fields.
So, sharks are not monsters and do not actively prey on humans. In fact, it is the other way around.
Every year humans kill 100 million sharks. We kill them for shark’s fin soup, which can sell for 100 US dollars a bowl in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. We kill them for sport, and we kill them by accident while fishing for other aquatic life. By far the worst are the shark finners. They catch the sharks, pull them out of the water, cut their fins off, and then dump them back in the water where the sharks sink to the bottom and suffocate (most species of sharks need to be able to move to breathe, as they have no way to push water across their gill surfaces). Even if they didn’t suffocate, they would starve from not being able to move and eat.
We cannot keep fishing 100 million sharks per year out of the ocean. Sharks are not your typical fish. Sharks only reach adulthood at the age of 20 years, so they rarely produce offspring before then. Given their long reproduction time, they can’t recover anywhere near as fast as we are killing them. Furthermore, as top predators they control the top of the food chain, without them there would be effects on the lower levels of the food chain, the fish they eat would have less constraints on their population, and would then affect the level below them. This would continue on through all levels of the food chain. For example, without sharks, perhaps the numbers of fish on coral reefs would increase a drastic amount. Then, instead of eating bacteria or algae, the increased population of fish may resort to eating coral polyps. We are not sure of the effects yet, but by removing the top predator in an ecosystem, it would be like removing lions and cheetahs from an ecosystem. All the grazing animals that they ate would no longer be eaten, so there would be more of them, and they could overgraze the land and cause desertification. Scientists hypothesize this is what could happen to the oceans and plankton (the “grass” of the sea) were sharks to disappear.
Furthermore, regarding the actual shark fin soup, the flavor doesn’t even come from the shark’s fin. Shark fin is made out of cartilage, which has no taste. The flavor instead comes from chicken stock or other meat. The eating of shark’s fin comes with the common misconception that it prevents cancer because sharks don’t get cancer. That could not be further from the truth. Sharks do suffer from cancer just as humans do, and, as top predators, sharks actually have high concentrations of toxins (like mercury) resulting from human pollution in their bodies because they eat many other fish contaminated by these toxins. Not only does shark’s fin NOT prevent cancer, in fact, it is more likely to INCREASE the toxins in your system.
Sharks are not dangerous to humans and are a key part of ocean ecosystems. They cannot recover from the way we are massacring them and they must be protected.
Yes, I have posted this graph up before: (Joseph and I question the "sedimentation" column. The turbidity of water is questionable in Singapore. We believe sedimentation does play a major part in Singapore.)
By the way, the graph is there to show readers that reefs in Singapore are under major risks and it looks like it is mostly due to coastal development and shipping.
Our original threats to the coral reef post: Click here
In between California and Japan, just north of Hawaii, there is an area of the sea that the rotating current from Japan to California and back winds up in. This causes a huge portion of the debris that flows into the oceans to arrive in this patch. There are more than 6 of these garbage dumps in our oceans.
It is estimated that the surface area of the Great Pacific Garbage dump is only slightly smaller than Africa, and that this only amounts to the plastic on the surface. A great deal more plastic gets covered by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, Charles Moore of the Angalita Marine Research Foundation took samples of the surface and found that on the surface, there was 6 times as much plastic as there was plankton.
Furthermore, tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles, which are used in the plastic manufacturing process, have the unfortunate resemblance to krill and fish eggs which results in them being eaten by fish and seabirds. This becomes a problem because plastics collect toxins
Studies done have shown that free-floating plastics in the ocean act like sponges and magnets for toxins. Many chemicals that we dump into the ocean, on purpose or by accident, readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic. The measurement results stated that in many cases, the surfaces of plastic had one million times the amount of chemical concentrated on their surface than the surrounding water had. When animals consume these pellets, they are consuming all of the chemical that goes along with them.
Even though it is more expensive to do so, we must recycle all the plastic we can and try to avoid using plastic whenever possible. The best estimates say that plastics will take hundreds of thousands of years to biodegrade, so we have to avoid allowing plastic to escape our hands into the environment. Hopefully one day we have the technology to pull all of this trash out of our seas.
[Picture from lolcats].
Information gathered for this post was taken once again from Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. The chapter where we got our information for this post is chapter Chapter 9: Polymers are Forever. Here's the Amazon page: Click here
Mr. Fred Crawford - he's a pretty cool guy. He's head of the SAVE aluminum recycling initiative and he can teach college level physics to high school students. The Ocean Skeleton interviewed him about his thoughts about coral reef conservation. He answers pretty brilliantly. The first part of the interview was added to the ICCS post here.
Q: Why should coral reefs be protected?
Q: What's the best way to motivate people to help the coral reefs?
According to this article, Australia's environment minister, Peter Garrett, is taking matters into his own hands. He's temporarily stopped a tourist development (called Reef Cove Resort) in north Queensland because of claims that sediment run-off will damage the Reef.
[Quote] "There can't be any construction at the site until I'm satisfied that the developer appropriate remediation work and could complete the construction of this development in a responsible manner in full compliance with the approval conditions without any impact on the marine environment and the Great Barrier Reef itself," Mr Garrett said.
Apparently, Reef Cove Resort is looking for legal advice in regards to this matter now.
So this is interesting. The article is a little complicated to understand if you haven't taken a course about marine biology before though.
Basically, when corals die, algae growth blankets over the dead skeletal structures. This algae cover is a prefect for colonization by dinoflagellates (a type of plankton) of the Gambierdiscus genus. What's the big deal is that these microscopic organisms secrete toxins into the atmosphere which is ingested by fish and travels up the food chain in bioaccumulation. When humans eat the contaminated fish, they are infected by Ciguatera.
Bioaccumulation is a growing worry for humans. Toxins ingested by fish pass on to us when we eat them and humans can get sick at very high poisonous dosages because of it (the highest concentrations are in top predators, for example sharks - for mercury poisoning).
According to this article, in French Polynesia and in Caledonia (where the effect is particularly strong), about 100,000 people are severely infected annually. One of the most telling symptoms is a burning sensation in the mouth and throat after the fish has been eaten.
A similar effect has also been noted when giant clams have been consumed (although cyanobacteria is what causes it, and not the Gambierdiscus dinoflagellates).
The research study links that because global climate change can kill coral reefs (through bleaching) which then degrades the environment so that microrganisms like the ones describe in the article can thrive, global climate change therefore could not only express a sign of degraded fishing grounds, but also of the presence of emerging cardiovascular diseases and poisoning.
Mr. Doug Neihart is a deputy principal of Singapore American School's high school division (this is his second year at SAS). Mr. Neihart did participate at ICCS last year and he plans to attend again this year. The other excerpt of the interview can be found on the ICCS post.
The Ocean Skeleton asked him how he would motivate people to help the coral reefs.
You know that image we've all had, the one of a reef filled with colorful little fish darting between corals? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s actually absolutely, and completely wrong. Kingman Reef, regarded as the most natural reef on Earth due to its isolated area that protects it from pollution and many other problems that plague our reefs, shows how it really is out there.
On land, we are used to a food chain where there are many grazers and few top predators. In a healthy reef, it is the exact opposite. 25 pound red snappers with fangs, sharks, and other big predators are the most common sight, contributing to over 70% of the biomass.
The small fish are also present in massive swarms. They reproduce extremely fast to make up for the fact that so many of them are eaten by predatory fish. In fact, parrotfish will sometimes even change sex to make sure there are enough of them to keep their reproductive rates up.
To also follow-up from the parrotfish post, a healthy ocean zone such as Kingman reef only has 1 million bacteria per milliliter of water because parrotfish and other small herbivorous fish graze on the algae and keep bacteria levels low. Around populated islands such as the Line Islands, samples show up to 15 million bacteria, using up oxygen and suffocating coral, allowing more and more slime to strangle the reefs.
Kingman reef is a sign that our very idea of reefs as havens of colorful little fish is actually an unhealthy reef. Instead, reefs are the home to many of these fish but many more predators and large ocean fish who spawn and grow there.
Even Kingman reef isn’t completely safe from our influence though. Only one shark during the White Holly research vessel’s voyage there was actually a fully-grown, matured adult over 20 years old. The rest were still adolescent sharks, so it seems that shark finners had attacked some of this population in their yearly 100 million shark catch which goes on to be sold as shark’s fin soup in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore at up to $100 a bowl.
If you want to learn more check out Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. It's a great book (a bestseller) and it's got some neat stuff. The chapter where we got our information for this post is chapter 19: The Sea Cradle. Here's the Amazon page: Click here
Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, from the Centre for Marine Sciences at the University of Queensland, named several of the Reef's biggest problems which include ocean acidification and coral bleaching. Apparently, carbon dioxide levels are increasing at 1 to 2 ppm (parts per million) per year (about 380 ppm) and it has never been that high for the past 720,000 years. Even the industrial revolution had lower levels of atmospheric carbon - around 280 ppm.
Coral bleaching, another problem that's causing stress to the Great Barrier Reef , has previously been manageable, according to Professor Hoegh-Guldberg. Coral bleaching has been occuring over the past 30 years and there have been 6 major bleaching events since the 1980s. However, the difference is that this time, the reefs don't have time to recover.
This other article here goes into further detail about what Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says in his talk.
We're at that "fork in the road", people. Better decide which path we want to take.
The study in Sydney has researchers proving that some seaweeds or algae have the ability to produce toxic chemical signals that "deter coral larvae from settling on reefs devastated by bleaching, storms, or other impacts". I guess that can work in favor for the corals though. They can find better homes this way because they could move to a place where bleaching hasn't destroyed everything.
Seaweed can produce other signals too, like ones that encourage coral growth. So seaweed has a good side and a bad side. A good side because some help corals grow (calcareous red algae) and a bad side because they compete with corals for the ocean floor space and are competition for the same resources. According to past observations, algae nearly always beat the corals in the race to resettle the devastated area. However, factors like the number of organisms that eat the algae also need to be considered - like turtles.
[Quotes]
"On the Great Barrier Reef we have been relatively lucky, but elsewhere we have seen a number of instances where seaweeds simply took over the reef, completely preventing the corals from coming back," said McCook (Laurence McCook of ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority).
"The greatest threat seems to be when we get thick mats of algae combined with sediment runoff, which smother the reef and stop corals gaining a foothold - a serious problem for our coastal reefs", he added.
Just to explain it again, NTA zones were set up to protect fish in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before climate change was a major issue.
Anyway, I found another article, posted today about the study. This one in particular has a lot more info about the actual study itself.
Apparently the study conducted by an international team of scientists from all over the world was "the largest study of its kind to have been carried out, covering 66 sites across seven countries and spanning over a decade in the Indian Ocean".
[Thats pretty cool.]
Previous work by this same team includes investigations to the 1998 coral bleaching even that affected coral reefs all around the world.
I think this article is the most comprehensive of all the other ones so far.
"They conclude that while the existing zones should not be removed, new areas are needed in the right place to protect corals against the effects of rising temperatures."
