Sea Notes

Oceans of BLUE in Monterey

The Monterey Peninsula is set to host its first-ever ocean film festival. The BLUE Ocean Film Festival and Conservation Summit will be in town from August 25 to 29 with a top lineup of ocean-inspired films, documentaries and events for ocean lovers, professionals and everyone in between!

As a hot spot for ocean wildlife and the people who study, research and love them, Monterey Bay seemed a perfect choice for the festival's second event, previously held in Georgia.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is the lead sponsor for the event, acknowledging that film -- like the face-to-face experiences the aquarium provides -- is a great way to inspire people to care more, and then do more, for the oceans.

Aquarium members can get a 20% discount off the regular pass price. You'll also find some of our exhibits and programs highlighted in a number of the 85 different screenings set to play at six different venues across the Peninsula.

To see the schedule and learn more go to www.blueoceanfestival.com.

Save Us, Sea Creatures!

Given the almost endless stream of insults we're hurling at the oceans and marine life, isn't it time we recognize how much we have to gain from these marvelous creatures? For concrete, bottom-line thinkers, that's the selfish, anthropocentric "we" -- forget appreciating the intrinsic majesty of marine life. I'm talking saving our lives, and saving our planet.

Take humpback whales. Cruise ships may run them over and kill them, but scientist Frank Fish found inspiration for more-efficient wind turbines from the shape of humpback flippers. As a result, clean wind energy could be more profitable to bring to market from Whalepower, a company using the humpback-inspired design.

How about seahorses? Researchers in Australia are studying the development of the seahorse eye for clues that may help reverse macular degeneration -- a disease that causes progressive blindness as people age.

Living corals, so vulnerable to climate change as oceans warm and turn more acidic, may also hold a solution to the threat. The Moss Landing Cement Co., just up the road from Monterey Bay Aquarium, believes it can produce an eco-friendly cement by mimicking the way corals build their skeletons -- in this case, by combining seawater with carbon dioxide from a neighboring power plant.

And what about kelp, the humble seaweed? Like the humpback-inspired turbine, a new bioWave turbine design is based on the way that marine plants sway back and forth with the pulsing of the waves.

There are so many more innovations just like these, and likely others to come as we learn more about how animals and plants have adapted to life in the ocean. The aquarium's sharing a number of stories in a daily auditorium program, Whales to Windmills: Inventions Inspired by the Sea.

The trick now is to preserve them -- and their homes -- so we can reap the benefits.

Plankton in Peril

Soylent Green.

The apocalyptic 1973 film was my first shuddering thought when I read about a new research study documenting a dramatic decline in phytoplankton -- the plants at the base of the ocean food web -- over the past century. The cause, according to researchers at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia? Warming oceans that are one result of global climate change.

There's no way to sugarcoat the findings by Boris Worm and his team. That point was driven home in the email note I received with link to the study -- a note from a leader in the campaign to get political and business leaders to act now and reduce human-generated carbon pollution that is driving climate change:

"Friends, this is stunning. Unfathomable, really. A new article in Nature from Boris Worm at Dalhousie (one of the most respected oceanographers around), claims that phytoplankton biomass in oceans -- the basic engine of carbon fixation and the basis of the food chain -- has dropped, since 1950, by 40%!!!!!

"If this is true, the implications of this are just staggering. It means that the non-linear acceleration has already begun, massively, at the very heart of the carbon cycle. It also means that marine food production systems are already utterly out of kilter."

Friends on the East Coast and Midwest are sweltering, with each month bringing new reports that this is the warmest May (or June, or July) on record. NOAA's just-released State of the Climate report for 2009 confirms these trends. Yet the U.S. Senate can't muster the votes to pass legislation tackling climate change.

 In California, our visionary climate-change law is under assault. (Oil companies are the big backers of a ballot proposition to suspend the law.) And, as I learned on a field trip to a Central Valley dairy farm on Tuesday, dairymen eager to convert manure into biomass energy (thus keeping methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere) are running into regulatory hurdles.

The result? We only have ten manure to biogas plants in California, compared with 8,000 in Germany.

It may be summertime, vacation time, but it's time to act -- to tell our members of Congress that addressing climate change is a priority as urgent as cleaning up the Gulf or putting people back to work.

The alternative, vividly realized in Soylent Green, isn't pretty.

Sustainable Seafood: An Interview with Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Lynne Rossetto Kasper is the creator of July's Seafood Watch Sustainable Seafood Recipe: Sicilian Sweet-and-Sour Seared Tuna. She's a respected authority on food and has published three bestselling books including The Splendid Table^®'s How to Eat Supper with Sally Swift. Her popular program, "The Splendid Table^®", can be heard on more than 200 public radio stations nationwide and her syndicated column, "How to Eat Supper," appears in 700 newspapers.

Where did the inspiration for this recipe come from?
The recipe is based on one from Sicily that's in a book I did called The Italian Country Table, that looks at rural life and country food of people all over Italy. Sicily is an island and most people think of it as being Italian, but it's just 90 miles off of the North African coast. It was taken over by the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago. The Arabs controlled the island from the ninth Century to around 1492, then France and Spain jockeyed back and forth for control—so the recipe comes out of an incredible history. It has flavors in it you would not see in much of the rest of Italy.

For the longest time, sugar was something that was only affordable to the very wealthy. It wasn't until maybe the Industrial Revolution, or at least the beginning of the 1800s, that most people could afford it. But Sicily was one of the places where sugar was processed, and this is one of the reasons why...you see a tremendous amount of sweet-sour flavors there. In the rest of Italy you would rarely ever see those tastes. So it's a really interesting kind of telltale recipe with a lot of historical threads you can follow like a yellow brick road.

What's the question you get asked most often about how to prepare seafood?
"How do I avoid overcooking it?" And the biggest mistake that people generally make is they use a fire or a burner that's too hot.

Any animal protein is going to be juicier, more tender and have more of its natural flavor if you cook it slowly. So use really aggressive heat just for a very short time—to get a little bit of browning—and then knock the heat down. If you're on a grill, use an indirect heat setup: one side of the grill with very few coals or a low burner, and the other side high, with a lot of coals. You start out on the high side, just to get a nice attractive bit of caramelization on the surface because that makes things taste so good, and then you just move it over and cook it really slow.

Are people more interested in where their food comes from today, than when your radio program started in 1995?
Yes, people are so much more curious, aware and concerned about where their food comes from, how it's been raised, how it's been caught and how it's been shipped. The only real objection I have to all of this is that all of those choices are generally only available to people of some affluence. And I wish those choices were available to everyone no matter where they were or where they stand on the economic scale.

Why do you feel it's important to use sustainable seafood?
There are only so many fish in this world, and only so many sources for safe food, from a health point of view as well as an ecological point of view. If we don't take care of seafood, if we don't protect it and grow up enough to understand that we can't have it all, all the time, there's just not going to be any more.

Tell us about the new cookbook you're working on.
It's about how to eat on weekends. We did a book about how to eat weeknight supper and there were so many things we had to leave out that take longer to cook, or that I think of as being "project" food: the kind of thing where you want to get together with a significant other or some pals, and go to an ethnic market and hang out in the neighborhood for a while, then make something really special; your own hand-made ravioli, or an India biryani, which is just an incredible dish.

Julie Packard: A Great Day for the Oceans

I am excited to share two wonderful pieces of news that offer great hope for the health of our oceans.

Later today, President Obama is expected to sign an executive order establishing –- for the first time ever -– a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts and Great Lakes that makes protection and restoration of our coasts and oceans the top priority for all federal agencies that manage marine resources.

The executive order will also create a National Ocean Council made up of senior administration officials to implement the new policy.

The announcement reflects more than a decade of talking with –- and listening to –- ocean experts and user groups across the United States, and reviewing thousands of citizen comments (including many submitted by Aquarium members and supporters). It draws on the longstanding recommendations of two separate blue-ribbon panels, including the Pew Oceans Commission on which I served.

The President’s announcement comes just days after a significant ocean protection bill cleared a key committee in the House of Representatives. Among other things, the bill, known as the CLEAR Act, would help safeguard the oceans from catastrophic events like the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster by authorizing substantial reforms of federal offshore and onshore oil and gas leasing programs.

It would also establish a sizable ocean investment fund to pay for fund projects that conserve, protect, maintain and restore ocean and coastal ecosystems.　

The Aquarium has long supported these approaches, and worked hard to see them through. Last month when I was in Washington, DC for Capitol Hill Ocean Week, I advocated for exactly this kind of thoughtful, far-reaching response to the Gulf oil disaster.

There’s still a lot of work to be done so that our oceans reap the full benefit of these exciting, and promising, developments. We have come a long way –- and with your help and support we’ll get closer to our goal of a future with healthy oceans.

-- Julie Packard, Executive Director, Monterey Bay Aquarium

 

 

 

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A Craving for Krill

By Jim Covel, senior manager of guest experience at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Want a swift and silent way to view the whales? Check out the Aquarium's sailing adventures. 

Monterey Bay has been invaded by whales.  Every few years the krill population explodes, and that means dinner’s on for a wide variety of birds, fishes and marine mammals that gather for the feeding opportunity.  The shoals of krill are 200-300 feet thick and may extend for a couple of miles in each direction.  This is the stuff that baleen whales dream of!

In a good year we may see 10-12 blue whales in Monterey Bay.  This year over 40 blues are concentrated in this area.  There may be up to twice that number of humpback whales along with them.  These whales are in serious feeding mode.  They’ve been lounging in tropical waters off Central America all winter where food is relatively scarce.  So they’ve hit town with an appetite, ready to make up for many months on slim rations.  The blue  whales alone are consuming as much as 160 tons of krill each day collectively.  You can’t get that volume of food sucking up one krill at a time.  The whales look for dense swarms of krill, and then they literally take bites out of the ocean, but those bites contain tens of thousands of krill per bite.  After filtering out the sea water, they’re left with a mouth full of bright red crustaceans for lunch.  This strategy only works when the krill are very dense, and scientists think blue whales move from one krill swarm to the next up and down the coast. 

The humpback whales have a slightly different strategy.  Several whales work together, diving under a swarm of krill and pushing them up toward the surface.  They may blow a bubble ring around the krill to force them more closely together.  As the krill are trapped against the surface of the ocean, the humpbacks swim up through the swarm in sequence, mouths agape, scooping up hundreds of pounds of krill in each mouthful.  As the first whale hits the surface it closes its mouth to trap krill and water inside.  Some krill will spill out of the side of the whale’s mouth—right into the mouth of the whale coming up next to it, and so on until perhaps five or six whales have all hit the surface and gulped a big hole through the middle of the krill swarm.  This “lunge feeding” can go on for hours, and still not make a dent in the big shoals of krill. 

I recently spent the afternoon parked on top of a shoal of krill with blue whales and humpbacks feeding all around.  At one point I could look directly down into the red (with krill) waters below, and see the white flippers of humpbacks rising very close to our boat!  But the whales are just part of the show; many other creatures come to capitalize on the abundance of food.  Blue sharks and basking sharks appear to feed on krill near the surface.  Albatross, shearwaters and many other seabirds come from hundreds of miles away to feed on the krill and/or small fishes and squids that are drawn to the krill.  In past years I’ve caught my share of salmon around the edges of these krill swarms. 

These feeding frenzies are a spectacular example of nature’s abundance in a healthy ecosystem.  What I find truly amazing is how these creatures of the open ocean find these concentrated feeding opportunities with so many thousands of square miles to search.  As we learn more about the lives of whales and seabirds, we’re starting see how they follow sea surface temperature gradients, pressure systems and other subtle clues that may guide them to ideal conditions that concentrate food.  Whales may able to communicate across miles of open ocean, so if one whale finds the groceries, it may be able to invite others from some distance to join in the meal. 

We never know how long these conditions will persist and how long the whales will stick around.  We’re just enjoying the scene while it lasts, and trying to learn as much as we can while we’re observing these magnificent creatures.

Photos by Alison Barratt, communications associate manager.

Tuna: What's in the Can?

Our Seafood Watch pocket guides (and iPhone app) are designed to help you have a conversation at the fresh fish counter, or the restaurant. But how do you converse with a can?

In our newly minted July 2010 pocket guides (download one today), we're suggesting that tuna lovers who care about ocean wildlife take a careful look at canned tuna labels for clues about ocean-friendly choices.

I'm sure many of you look for the "dolphin-friendly" label. Actually (good news) ALL tuna sold in the U.S. is dolphin friendly; that's the law. So what else can you look for?

Here are our four top tips as you browse the aisle:

1. Look for the blue eco-label of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) - as featured on the back of our pocket guide. Albacore tuna caught by eco-friendly methods on the Pacific coast is certified to the MSC standards and is being seen increasingly regularly in stores. (In fact, if you stop by the Aquarium Gift & Bookstore you can purchase a can or two!)

2. Look for an indication of how the tuna was caught. We recommend you look for one of the following:

• "pole-caught"
• "troll-caught "
• "pole-and-line caught"

These are all methods that practically eliminate bycatch of unwanted ocean wildlife - one of the biggest issues of concern with the other methods of catching the nation's second most popular seafood item.

3. Buyer beware! "Line-caught" usually indicates longline, not a single hook-and-line. Longlines can be 60 miles long, or more, with thousands of baited hooks that snag unsuspecting animals like endangered albatross, sea turtles and sharks. Longlining is the most common way to catch albacore tuna - commonly sold as "white tuna" or "solid white."

4. If you're looking at a can of "light" tuna - which could be skipjack, tongol, yellowfin, bigeye, or a combination of these, again look for troll- or pole-caught. If the label doesn't say how the tuna was caught, then it's safe to assume that it was caught in purse seine nets. Unfortunately, this catch method often results in the bycatch of many other species, and also of juvenile tuna that will never get a chance to have offspring of their own.

The good news is that more and more retailers are bringing the ocean-friendly products to their shelves - and asking their suppliers to use ocean-friendly fishing methods. Demand from consumers, just like you, really makes a difference.

That's what happens when you're a can-do tuna shopper!

Man and Shark: The Musical

Time for something a little lighter, after yesterday's horror show of shark-finning photos:

Andy Brandy Casagrande IV made his mark a couple years ago with his Great White Shark Song. Good natural history, strong conservation message, plus quirky and goofy lyrics that should give it long legs as a novelty song. (Dr. Demento, are you listening?) Heck, Andy was even invited to perform at an ocean film festival, and for researchers at an international white shark symposium in Hawaii earlier this year.

Now he's taken things to a whole 'nother level. He brought his his guitar (and his song) to Guadalupe Island, off the Pacific Coast of Baja California, to perform underwater for an audience of free-swimming great white sharks. Andy, too, was free-swimming. No cage for him, thank you.

As he told The Sun newspaper:

"When you first see that first white shark approach the boat, it's a feeling you'll never forget. You'll never forget that image for the rest of your life: this big, giant smile coming straight at you. And you realize you're not afraid of that animal at all. It's just beautiful, majestic, come swimming, gliding by."

He's his full, quirky self, in this Q&A for the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival Blog. And, of course, in the music video of his adventure -- here to enjoy, in all its glory.

 

Man and Shark: The Horror

It's one thing to talk about shark finning in the abstract. It's something entirely different to see and understand the impacts viscerally. The film Sharkwater brought the tragedy home. So, too, does Man & Shark-- a new book and accompanying short documentary about industrial-scale shark finning and its impacts around the globe.

Not only do photojournalists Paul Hilton and Alex Hofford tell the story on film. Alex is blogging about the issue, as is Paul. They are sharing their words and gut-wrenching photos online.

It's impossible to look at their work without grasping instantly the enormity of the problem, and what's at stake.

Many of Alex's photos (like the one above) come from Kesen-Numa City in Japan -- a place where, as he describes it, you can "see what happens when modern manufacturing processes and shark finning collide."

(If you've seen the Academy Award-winning film The Cove, imagine the same sort of slaughter taking place not annually but systematically to feed a voracious market for shark fins.)

Fortunately, the issue's coming to the fore, through groups like WildAid and through the efforts of many ocean conservation groups, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

If you live in the United States, you can urge your Senators to support legislation that would close one final loophole so we'll better enforce the U.S. ban on shark finning. It takes just a second to act.

We can't have healthy oceans without protecting the top predators, who play such an essential role in preserving the balance and vitality of ecosystems. We can make a difference -- by caring, by learning, by standing up and speaking out.

Photo copyright by Alex Hofford; used with permission;  www.manandshark.com

The Pygmy Seahorse, a Mighty Mite

For your enjoyment, a video tribute to the pygmy seahorse -- tiniest of the seahorse species. They're so small that new species are still being discovered.

We've blogged a lot about seahorses. And you can get a closer look at 15 species of seahorses, sea dragons and pipefishes in the Monterey Bay Aquarium special exhibition, "The Secret Lives of Seahorses."

Meanwhile, pygmy seahorses, courtesy of Jean-Michel Cousteau and his Ocean Futures Society: