Sea Notes

Talking Trash

Researchers from the Project Kaisei/Scripps expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are back ashore. They're sharing what they found -- and it's not a pretty picture.

Not too many surprises, just confirmation that there's an obscene amount of plastic debris floating in the ocean, causing a great deal of harm to marine life that confuses plastic with food.

While they expedition team was at sea, new research found that it's not just debris that's a problem. Turns out the plastic decomposes in seawater, leaving behind a soup of toxic chemicals that poses an additional set of problems for marine life.

It's a wake-up call to deal with how we use plastics. Here at Monterey Bay Aquarium, our cafe has eliminated all plastic straws and disposable beverage cups, and switched to plant-based materials for "plastic" food containers. We're reducing the amount of disposable plastic used elsewhere -- including encouragement for our vendors not to use plastic shrink-wrap on products they ship to us.

And our Laysan albatross, Makana, is a great ambassador for cleaner oceans.

It will take more, to be sure. But one step at a time.

Pick Your Poison

We blog as a way to inspire conservation of the oceans. At the same time, we're not Pollyannas, painting a rosy picture regardless of what's going on.

So, a couple pieces of grim news today, having to do with two significant types of pollution in the ocean and fresh water: mercury and plastic.

A new study published by the U.S. Geological Survey found mercury in every single fish tested over a seven-year period, in every one of the nearly 300 streams sampled by USGS scientists throughout the United States. No exceptions.

The Environmental Protection Agency considers mercury a neurotoxin; the new study found that one-quarter of the fish sampled had mercury levels in their tissues above the threshold considered safe by the EPA. Main sources of the mercury include mining operations and coal-burning power plants.

On to plastics. In a report presented at the American Chemical Society this week, researchers led by a team from Japan's Nihon University announced that plastics -- previously thought to last nearly forever in the environment -- in fact will decompose fairly rapidly. When they do, they release potentially toxic substances into the water.

There are billions of pieces of plastic in existence, washing down streams and into the ocean -- an estimated 150,000 tons a year. Much has accumulated in what's now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a plastic-filled region in the north-central Pacific that may cover an area twice the size of the state of Texas.

The toxics, including bisphenol A and PS oligomer, are known to disrupt hormone function in animals, and seriously affect reproductive systems.

We've got a lot of work to do.

Photo credits:  Power plant smokestacks, © John Zieran; trash in Los Angeles River, © Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Aquarium of Inspiration

The mission of the Monterey Bay Aquarium is to inspire conservation of the oceans. And sometimes, it's just that simple!

Darcy Taniguchi first visited the Aquarium at the age of 4, and was hooked! Says Darcy, "Starring, completely absorbed, at the striking exhibits of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and wetting my feet and hands in the tide pools of Asilomar Beach, instilled in me a lasting curiosity about the ocean."

Now a PhD student at Scripps, Darcy is going beyond inspiration to action. She's taking part in a voyage known as the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition or SEAPLEX. A journey to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to an area increasingly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. More correctly known as the North Pacific Gyre. The gyre's infamy comes from its ability to collect up all our trash, especially plastics, and hold them in a long, slow dance until the end of time. Plastics, like diamonds, are forever.

"Twice the size of Texas", some scientists claim. "Six times more plastic than plankton", say others. SEAPLEX seeks to find answers to these questions and more. The biggest one being, how do we clean this up, and then, how can we stop it from happening again?

Of course, we all have a hand in the answer to the second question, and that's a story we share with our visitors each day, as they meet our resident Laysan albatross, Makana.

But Makana's kin are not the only big birds in danger from eating our trash. Somewhat closer to home, a young condor chick was recently found dead in the Big Sur wilderness. Biologists from Ventana Wildlife Society found the cause of death was a belly full of litter. This is the first time this has occured in our region, and let's hope the last, but other young chicks are still in the nest and time is of the essence. If you are local you can help by volunteering in a litter cleanup over the next two weekends.

And you can check out our website to learn more about how plastic litter affects seabirds and other marine life, and what you can do to help in your everyday lives. Every day we can do something that helps our planet's wildlife. Now that's inspirational!

Researchers Set Sail for Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Out of sight is not out of mind, especially when it comes to all the plastic debris we generate on land. Everything flows downstream, ultimately into the ocean and then...it just stays there...forever.

That's the short story behind the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area perhaps twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific, where there's more floating plastic per square mile than there is living plankton.

And that's a big, big problem.

Now a scientific expedition uniting the nonprofit Project Kaisei and scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, is heading out to sea to study the Patch. By documenting its size, and the potential for cleaning it up, they hope to shed more light on the magnitude of the problem.

This all builds on good work by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, who first drew attention to the Patch. All this is of interest to us at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, since plastics are a persistent threat to marine wildlife-- including far-ranging albatross like the Laysan albatross, Makana, that visitors can meet here in Monterey.

Fortunately we can all do something, like limiting our own use of disposable plastics and helping clean up plastic trash wherever we see it. (International Coastal Clean-Up day is coming up again on September 19, at a coast or river near you!)

Get on board

Adventurer, environmentalist and British millionaire David de Rothschild will be embarking on a unique voyage in April to draw attention to plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean and “raise awareness of the challenges our oceans and its inhabitants face.”

 

He has been consulting with boat designers and scientists in preparation for a 10,000 mile sailing trip from San Francisco to Sydney. The 60-foot catamaran (a boat with two hulls) “Plastiki” will be built mostly from recycled plastic bottles, and is also meant to be recycled when the journey is complete. A design challenge to be sure, considering the waves and weather the vessel will encounter. You can follow the preparations on his blog, hosted by National Geographic.

Along the way de Rothschild plans to cruise through the north Pacific gyre and get a close look at the Eastern Garbage Patch and other threatened habitats, and he hopes to have a satellite link so he can share his experiences in real time. He especially wants to engage young people, and his non-profit Adventure Ecology educates children about the environment of remote places around the globe. For company, he plans to invite a rotating crew of scientists, filmmakers and celebrities to see this remote part of the ocean, investigate the effects of pollution, and also “tell positive stories about communities who are learning alternative ways of creating income now that the fisheries have been closed due to over-fishing.”

It might just be crazy enough to work. We’ll stay tuned for more news from this eco-explorer!

A Healing Act

Saving the oceans will take efforts on many fronts: big efforts by nations (like creating more marine protected areas), and countless small acts by individuals, whose collective impacts will make a difference.

That's why this story from the Los Angeles Times is so heartening. It's about a group of divers who banded together on Sunday to cut away parts of a fishing net enveloping a sunken trawler off Catalina Island. The net, which sank with the ship in 2006, is still snaring and killing sea life that comes to investigate the wreck.

Divers told the Times' Louis Sahagun they saw everything from sea lion skulls to the body of a shark trapped in the net.

"It's one of the spookiest things I've ever seen," dive organizer Kurt Lieber told Sahagun. (He founded the Ocean Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit marine conservation group based in Huntington Beach, and organized the clean-up effort.)

"It's a huge vessel encased in a net -- anything that swims into it gets trapped in its billows. The enormity of the task before us is daunting. We're making a little bit of difference today. But we have a long way to go."

Photos of the project by the Times' Bob Chamberlin show a multi-generational effort, with kids as young as 8 years old on deck, retrieving invertebrates and fishes from the net, then tossing the animals back into the ocean. (There's also video of the team at work.)

One day, one ship, one net. Now it's a bit less deadly to marine life today thanks to the determined efforts of one small group.

Are you doing something for the oceans today that can inspire others? You can share your story with a comment below. 

You can take action on lost and abandoned fishing gear on our website today. Let's help clear up these ghost fishing nets!

Cleaning the Seas

Beach cleanups are nothing new. Teams of scuba divers even help with the effort underwater.

But this is something innovative: A multi-year effort in California to clean up lost fishing gear that's killing marine life in offshore waters.

Last week, California's Wildlife Conservation Board awarded $400,000 to the University of California, Davis for its lost fishing gear recovery program. The program has been in operation for two years already, and has recovered 11 tons of abandoned gear from waters around the Channel islands National Park and other areas of the state.

Now it has more money for its work -- enough to cover two years of operations.

There's more good news: The project is modeled after similar efforts in Florida, Hawaii and Washington state. With luck, more states -- and nations -- will join the effort.

You can do your part by reporting any lost gear you see. And those beach cleanups? They're coming up later this month. It's a great time to join in, if you haven't participated before.

An Ocean of Oil

From San Francisco Bay, to the Sea of Azov, to the coast south of Santa Cruz, it's been a week of bad news involving oil spills and dead birds.

Most dramatic, at least in our corner of the world, is the damage that resulted when a cargo ship hit a Bay Bridge abutment last week, spilling 58,000 gallons of bunker oil. It's still fouling beaches, killing birds and forcing closure of fisheries -- including the sustainable Dungeness crab fishery.

Most significant was the breakup of an oil tanker and the sinking or grounding of 11 other ships in a severe storm that hit the Kerch Strait on Sunday. The strait links the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov, in southern Russia. At least half a million gallons of fuel oil spilled, killing thousands of birds and fouling at least 16 miles of beaches. The spill affected the Taman Peninsula, home to a wildlife preserve, and oil is sinking to the seafloor, meaning the after-effects will linger for a long time.

Most mysterious was a small spill of a "clear, oily substance" that killed more than 50 seabirds in Monterey Bay early this week.

We're blogging elsewhere about how to get involved if you live in or near the Bay Area. We've already sent several trained Monterey Bay Aquarium staff members north to wildlife rehab facilities, along with a donation of food for the oiled birds. Our staff and volunteers, trained in caring for oiled wildlife, are doing whatever is needed to help the most.

The trifecta of oil spills -- and doubtless others we haven't heard about -- begs a larger question: what can we do?

Clearly, the global appetite for petroleum and imported consumer goods is increasing the risk of oil spills. The world demands more oil, so tankers carry it from the places where it's found to the markets that crave it. Russia sends 25 percent of its oil through the Black Sea, and this isn't the first time there's been a spill. The United States imports a staggering volume of goods from Asia, and this won't be the last shipping accident.

The mantra of "reduce, reuse, recyle" applies here, as with other environmental threats. If we use less energy, if we consume fewer goods, that will have an incremental effect on shipping, and incrementally reduce the likelihood that human error or bad weather will create a local disaster.

Cut back on plastics, and you reduce the need for oil to create plastic products as well as ships to carry them to distant markets. (That's also going to affect the growth of the floating plastic patch in the mid-Pacific.) Drive less, and you reduce incrementally the oil from land that ends up in the ocean.

Meanwhile, we can all work to create systems in which accidents are less likely, or less disastrous: 1. Support efforts to require double-hull construction on all ships, and not just tankers. 2. Eliminate more harmful forms of fuel oil as we search for environmentally acceptable biofuels to replace them. (The shipping industry has an entire website devoted to news about sustainable shipping practices.) 3. Create marine protected areas in which ecosystems will be healthier and more resilient in the face of the inevitable accidents.

Just seven years ago, California's threatened sea otters were extremely vulnerable to a catastrophic oil spill along their range. Thanks to citizen lobbying efforts and collaborative negotiations, federal and international rules were changed to move shipping lanes farther offshore -- giving the otters a bigger buffer zone.

We can address other threats facing ocean wildlife as well. That's one reason the Aquarium created its Ocean Action Team. By getting folks to stand up and speak out now, maybe we won't have to write as much about diasters in the future.

Great Pacific Trash Patch

In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus spends each Halloween in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin -- to no avail. If he'd headed out to another patch, the Great Pacific Trash Patch any day of the year, there'd be a lot to find -- but no pumpkins.

The Patch is a swirling, 3-million-pound mass of plastic and other trash that covers an area twice the size of Texas, according to researchers with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which has been tracking the Patch for a decade. And it's not going away.

That's a big problem for ocean wildlife, like albatross that nest in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Foraging adults mistake trash for food, and fill the bellies of their growing chicks with debris (including cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, syringes, toys, clothespins and every other type of plastic). On Midway Atoll alone, 40 percent of albatross chicks die from trash filling their bellies. By some estimates, they feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year.

There are rays of hope. A new law in California takes effect in 2009 and require manufacturers of nurdles -- the BB-sized pre-production plastic pellets that are the basis of all plastic products -- to prevent nurdle spills into waterways.

And each of us, wherever we live, can make a difference: by using fewer disposable plastic products, and by picking up plastic litter wherever we find it.

You can learn more in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Altered Oceans; and you can meet a Laysan albatross, and get the story firsthand, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.