Sea Notes

Black Friday for Bluefin

 
Seems like at least once a year, we discuss the plight of the bluefin tuna and rarely have good news to report. This time is no exception with no let up for the beleaguered species in its Mediterranean breeding grounds. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) voted this week on the 2011 quota for the fishery.

Despite earlier promises to really slash the EU catch to give this species the vital break it needs from overfishing, in the end the quota for bluefin came in it at a reduction of 600 tons. Though this might sound like a break, this is a 13,500 ton fishery and so barely scratches the surface.

Once again politics trumps science. The bluefin - the world's most valuable wild animal - is still worth more dead than alive, threatened, than thriving.

When will the tide turn for the bluefin? Perhaps not until is is considered valuable for its own sake, and its value is seen as the vital component, top predator, in a complex marine web. A big leap for mankind? Perhaps, but in our not too distant past whales faced this exact same threat and we finally came through for them. Something to be thankful for this season.

Download your sustainable sushi guide today, and please Avoid bluefin, Hon Maguro.

Rockfish Under Pressure

There are more than 100 species of rockfish, and many prefer life down deep. They can be found at 300 feet or more, and some live at depths to 1,600 feet.

But just as human divers have problems when they come up from the deep, rockfish that are caught and brought to the surface can suffer pressure-related ailments, such as over-inflated air bladders or bulging eyes (exophthalmia).

Fortunately, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its partners have developed innovative ways to ensure the health of rockfish destined for our exhibits, where they can serve as ambassadors and promote awareness of the conservation issues that rockfishes face in the wild.

Pumped Up for the Ride Home 

While some rockfish are rare, others are abundant. The California Department of Fish and Game has established catch limits based on depth. It’s also established guidelines for returning rockfish that are accidentally caught at depth.

In order to be able to display these beautiful fish, Aquarium collecting staff has developed a series of chambers that “recompress” the captured fish and gradually allow them to acclimate to the shallower depths of our exhibits.

One type of recompressor, made of plastic pipe, uses two chambers that allow newly collected fish to be added as they are caught. “As soon as they’re brought on board, they go into a small chamber,” says Associate Curator of Collecting Joe Welsh. “We lock that down, and in 10 seconds we inflate it to 70 pounds per square inch using a small water pump.” After that, he opens a valve that allows the fish to go into a larger pressurized chamber that can hold up to a dozen fish. The “hyperbaric” device is carried straight from the boat into the Aquarium and connected to a pressurized recirculation system. The fish are gradually depressurized over a period of three to five days before being transferred to a holding tank, and then onto exhibit. The whole process is done under a special permit from the California Department of Fish and Game.

Since Joe started using the process in 2007, he estimates he’s successfully transferred more than 50 rockfish into our exhibits, and numerous others have been transferred to other institutions. 

“They all recover from the treatment quite well,” says Joe.

How Our Exhibits Benefit

The recompression system “opens up a whole list of species we couldn’t collect before,” says Joe, including fish that live as deep as 300 feet on the continental shelf that extends far offshore. “This shelf habitat is one of the largest in Monterey Bay, and now we can represent it in our exhibits.”

Rockfish species that have been acclimated and displayed include greenspot (see photos), bocaccio, canary, chilipepper, cowcod, halfbanded, rosy, starry and widow. At the Aquarium, you can see some of these rockfish in the giant Pacific octopus exhibit, the spot prawn gallery, the brittle star gallery or the Monterey Bay Habitats exhibit.

The recompression process is also being experimented with as a form of therapy for fish that have swim bladder or eye infection problems. “We’re also trying other species, and are using the system to provide fish for research,” says Joe.

But the greatest benefit has been the ability to show more of these colorful and beautiful species. “We’re opening up new habitats and locales for our visitors,” says Joe. “These are fish you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. It allows us to show a fuller community.”

Joe helped construct the complicated array of pumps, pipes and fittings, and says that “building the train set was half the fun of the whole project.

“How many institutions have the opportunity to do what we do?”

A Dedicated Diving Duo

How dedicated are Monterey Bay Aquarium volunteers? Lloyd Rice and his daughter, Karen Harris, recently celebrated fantastic milestones in their service as volunteer divers. Lloyd is a retired U.S. Navy Captain and just retired from maintenance diving at the Aquarium after 14 years. Karen, who has been diving at the Aquarium since 1985, planned a special evening so she would be suited up, at the diver entry point and ready to surprise him by offering to accompany him during his final dive.

The pair started diving together in Hawaii when Karen was just 15. Lloyd loved diving so much he became an instructor and taught classes in Virginia and then in Hawaii when he was fatefully stationed there again.  Lloyd worked in dive shops in Virginia and also operated the Dive Shop at the Defense Language Institute’s Recreation Center, overseeing the purchase and certification of their new air fill compressor and their entire inventory management program.  He’s also a certified scuba repairman. Congratulations and thank you to both for their years of service!

Cosmic Jellyfish

One of my favorite quotes comes from John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in The Log from the Sea of Cortez:

"And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable....that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things -- plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.

"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."

So what a delight this morning to find an article from Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory linking new discoveries in deep space if not to tide pools, then to the deep sea. And to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The JPL released new images of an interstellar object called NGC 1514 that, it says "shows what looks like a glowing jellyfish floating at the bottom of a dark, speckled sea. In reality, this critter belongs to the cosmos -- it's a dying star surrounded by fluorescing gas and two very unusual rings."

"I am reminded of the jellyfish exhibition at the Monterey Bay Aquarium -- beautiful things floating in water, except this one is in space," said Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator of the WISE mission at UCLA, and a co-author of a paper on the findings, reported in the Astronomical Journal.

(One of the co-authors is Martin Cohen of the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy, located just down the road from the aquarium -- in close proximity to jellyfish.)

The image has inspired a lot of conversation, and comparisons not just to jellyfish (to our eyes, a comb jelly) but to the space station in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The WISE satellite telescope has been surveying the sky in infrared light since January 2010. The jellyfish-like rings on NGC 1514 are visible only in the infrared spectrum.

Scientists expect more serendipitous findings as its mission continues. Maybe a few more analogies to marine life on Earth? Definitely more reminders that it's advisable to "look from the tide pools to the stars and back again."

Steinbeck and Ricketts would approve.

Credit NGC 1514 photos to NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; spotted comb jelly is copyright Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation

 

 

A Floating Green City?

A city that grows just like a lily floating on the water. A city of the equatorial region where sunlight is plentiful and the impact of typhoons is minimal. A carbon-negative city that absorbs CO2 like a plant.

Fantasy? Perhaps.

But it's one of several concepts put forward by Japan's Shimizu Corporation on the principle that "happiness should be measured separately from material wealth."

The company, a 200-year-old construction and civil engineering firm, is devoted to far more than the bottom line. Its founder embraced the idea that businesses can contribute to society by incorporating a balance between ethics and economics -- earning a fair profit and growing at a manageable pace.

Today, it's putting forth visionary ideas for projects that embody these values. The floating city is one. They also imagine:

-- A networks of lakes and canals bringing life to desert regions.

-- A Luna Ring clean-energy project to meet all our power needs on Earth.

-- New designs for urban communities that would be sustainable for more than a century.

Heady stuff. But we need big dreams if we're going to reshape the world for a sustainable future.

You can let your imagination soar as you consider the possibilities at Shimizu's Dream.

(Many thanks to GizMag for drawing my attention to Shimizu.)

 

A Billion Sardines, Dancing

Alton Brown loves to chow down on sardines. Cannery Row rose and fell on the strength of a sardine fishery that turned Monterey Bay into an "industrial hellhole" (and John Steinbeck into a Nobel Prize-winning novelist) before the bay recovered to become a national marine sanctuary.

Today they're a "super green" sustainable choice of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program, and a primary food for everything from dolphins and tunas to sea birds and thresher sharks.

First and foremost, they are beautiful living ocean animals -- poetry in motion when swimming in vast schools. Aquarium visitors are mesmerized by the "disco ball" effect of sardine schools in the Kelp Forest or our million-gallon open ocean exhibit.

In the wild, the effect is even more amazing. Check out this video of vast sardine schools filmed in the waters off Cebu in the Philippines. It's truly amazing.

SPF for Sunburned Whales

They're hunted for meat by Japan, Norway and Iceland. The recovering population of California gray whales may need to go back on the endangered species list.

And now, sunburn? 

A research team observing blue, sperm and fin whales in the Gulf of California reports evidence of sunburn on the skin of whales observed in the Gulf over the past three years. Tell-tale signs include blisters and evidence of the cetacean equivalent of tanning: higher levels of melanin in skin samples collected by scientists. Whales are at greater risk, the researchers said, because they spend so much time at the surface: to breathe and to socialize.

The likely culprit? Thinning of the ozone layer as a result of human use of now-banned CFCs as aerosol propellants, in refrigeration and in industrial solvents. While these compounds have been outlawed, the residual effects on the ozone layer are expected to last for decades.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Pass the sunscreen.

Photo copyright Diane Gendron, Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, La Paz, Baja California, Mexico.

Do the Locomotion (Jellyfish-Style)

For the past several months, we've been showing visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium how engineers and designers have taken inspiration from nature to design everything from energy-efficient cars to more efficient wind turbine blades. "Whales to Windmills" is hugely popular, and drawing attention beyond our walls.

Now comes new evidence that the natural world has a lot to teach us.

The Los Angeles Times just published an interview with Caltech professor, and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, John Dabiri, who thinks jellyfish have a lot to teach us about engineering -- with potential applications for designers who want to improve the efficiency of wind and wave technology.

As simple as jellies appear to be, he says, they're actually sophisticated masters of fluid dynamics. And the way they produce a vortex when moving could help engineers figure out ways to pack turbines more closely together on wind farms, with no loss of energy production.

Something to ponder on your next visit, when you're watching jellies pulse and glide in our Drifters gallery.

A Tale of Two Fisheries

Two excellent reports have just come out, both with important messages for everyone who's interested in a future with healthy populations of wild fish in our oceans. The first addresses the tragedy of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the face of relentless fishing pressure. The second is a hopeful report from the Gulf of Mexico about how fish populations can rebound dramatically once people stop catching them as if there were no tomorrow.

First, the very bad news.

For decades, Atlantic bluefin tuna have been spiraling toward commercial extinction under the insatiable demand of an international fishery that seems unable to stop hammering the population at levels that cannot be sustained.

This classic tragedy of the commons, played out on the high seas, is detailed in a new investigative report by an international team of journalists. (Many thanks to Andy Revkin of the dot.Earth blog at the New York Times for highlighting it.)

This tour de force of reporting underscores everything that Barbara Block, Julie Packard and the team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Tuna Research and Conservation Center have been saying for years: Short-term greed is quickly killing off the golden goose. (OK, golden tuna.) Will this new report be enough to turn the tide? That remains to be seen. But I'm not getting my hopes up -- especially in light of another report that found at least a 20 percent drop in juvenile Atlantic bluefin in the Gulf of Mexico this year. (The BP blowout hit right on their spawning grounds, at the peak of spawning season.)

Meanwhile, despite recent reports of a die-off of deep-water corals, likely the result of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and new information that contaminants from the oil are making their way into the ocean food web (and presumably onto our plates at some point), there's very encouraging news from the Gulf as well:

The closure of commercial fishing in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon diaster sparked an almost immediated threefold INCREASE in many populations of marine life, from sharks to shrimp to snapper, in Mobile Bay. Ben Raines of the Press Register in Mobile, Alabama reports on the findings of a research team from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, which has been surveying coastal marine life in Alabama and Mississippi for years.

This kind of rebound is exactly what scientists worldwide have found when you create marine protected areas that are closed to most commercial and sport fishing. Marine life in those waters increases dramatically, and their numbers spill over into adjacent waters, where fishermen are free to catch them. The overall result is more productive ocean ecosystems -- and healthier fisheries for people whose livelihoods depend on them.

California continues to expand its network of marine protected areas, a process that will be completed from the Oregon border to Mexico in 2011. It's encouraging to find evidence from the Gulf of Mexico disaster that the creating protected areas should pay big dividends -- without the added challenge of overcoming the impacts of a major oil spill.

Photo credit: Bluefin tuna school, © NOAA; kelp forest, © Douglas K. Klug

 

Unbelievable Mimic Octopus!

This is just too cool!

Check out this video of the mimic octopus, an animal that can morph its body shape and color -- and change its behavior -- to transform itself into everything from a poisonous lionfish or sea snake, to more than a dozen other species. It all seems to be a strategy to protect itself from predators.

The mimic octopus was first discovered by Australian and British researchers in 1998 off the coast of Indonesia, and it's been blowing scientists' minds ever since. "This," says one of the lead researchers, "is a rather dramatic animal."

See for yourself.