The Natural Patriot

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Egad, it’s been a month again. Just thought I’d drop a note to let concerned readers know that I am indeed still alive. For the last two weeks, I’ve been pedal-to-the-metal doing field research in the Caribbean, around the island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles to be specific (the previous three weeks, and for that matter the last several months, require a more prosaic excuse, with which I will not bore you). For some reason, it’s always very difficult to convince people that I have been working my you-know-what off on a tropical island. They invariably jump to the conclusion that we’re sitting around drinking fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. Which is not true at all — we never use those little umbrellas. I do realize that this does not qualify me for hardship pay. Hence the title of this post.

Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not complaining. If you’re going to be working somewhere, a tropical island is a favorable place to do it. Our team was on Curacao as part of a research project, supported by the National Geographic Society, studying the ecology and biogeography of symbiotic Caribbean shrimp, which I have alluded to before. This may sound a bit obscure (OK, it is obscure) but we argue that the high diversity and clearly definable habitats of these shrimp, which inhabit living coral-reef sponges, makes them an ideal group for studying general questions about the origin and maintenance of coral-reef biodiversity. And, since the Carmabi Research Station where we set up shop is surrounded by hotel beaches and tiki bars, we got a lot of practice honing this argument for the constant stream of mildly amused random passers-by who were wondering what on earth we were doing so intently while they lay all day in a state of sun-and umbrella-drink-induced torpor. I hope I don’t sound like an ingrate.

So (as the old explorers’ tales go): there we were. Very interesting place, Curacao. Quite different than anywhere else I’ve been in the Caribbean. Looks more like Texas. I’m told that the name Curacao derives from a Portugese term that translates roughly as “wasteland”. And it surely must have seemed so to exhausted 16th century sailors looking for decent food, water, and precious metals. The island is very arid, with a negligible layer of debris that passes for soil covering the limestone rock and supporting a burnt-looking vegetation of vicious thorn scrub (Acacia of some sort) and saguaro-like cacti. Not much good for anything other than goats. And lizards of several sorts, which are ubiquitous. Those enterprising colonialists did manage to find a use for the place as a hub of the slave trade, which they would no doubt be happy to forget. Nowadays, however, it’s a bustling place with a population of 150,000 people supported mainly by the massive oil refinery that processes the fruits of Venezuela’s wells a few miles away on the South American mainland.

For our specific purposes it was an equally interesting place. Great diving: clear water, and lots of the magic coral rubble that produces shrimp, in relatively shallow water. Indeed, the reef at Eastpunt, at the windward eastern end of the island removed from much human influence, had without a doubt the highest coral cover and diversity of any place I’ve seen in the Caribbean in the last few decades. Easily 80-90% cover of live coral. And small but healthy thickets of the formerly dominant shallow-water Caribbean corals Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata, which have long since succumbed to disease and various other stresses elsewhere. Very strange — like a visit several decades back in time. A rare and much valued ray of hope in a bleak outlook for Caribbean reefs. It is a tremendous relief to know that these reefs exist at least somewhere. Hope springs eternal.

To be continued . . .

The National Wildlife Federation has just released an important new report “Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Habitats of the Chesapeake Bay“, which provides the most detailed and comprehensive view yet of the likely impacts of climate change on specific habitats within the Chesapeake Bay region. The full report , as well as a 12-page summary are available here.

Among the highlghts:

“Coastal habitats in the Chesapeake Bay region will be dramatically altered if sea levels rise globally about two feet by the end of the century, which is at the low end of what is predicted if global warming pollution remains unaddressed. Under this scenario, the region would lose:

• More than 167,000 acres of undeveloped dry land
• 58% of beaches along ocean coasts
• 69% of estuarine beaches along the bay
• 161,000 acres of brackish marsh
• More than half of the region’s important tidal swamp

These important wetland habitats would be replaced in part by over 266,000 acres (415.6 square miles) of newly open water and 50,000 acres of saltmarsh.”

I participated in the press conference to summarize the likely effects on wildlife and ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay. The story was reported by the Baltimore Sun, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the Daily Press, among others.

Here are the points I made:

There’s now strong international consensus among scientists that climate change is real, and already happening. But most previous research has focused on very broad continental scales. The new report by the NWF is important because it shows in unprecedented detail how climate change is affecting our local Chesapeake Bay region.

The bottom line is that this is not a future threat. Rising temperatures and sea levels are already changing distributions, life cycles, and interactions of key animals and plants in our area. And those changes are disrupting important ecosystem services that coastal communities depend on—fisheries, water quality, shoreline protection.

The life cycles of animals and plants are closely tied to temperature, which determines when they emerge from dormant stages, reproduce, start seasonal migrations, and so on. For example, recruitment of commercially important fish and shellfish is highly sensitive to variation in both temperature and rainfall patterns. Springtime in the Chesapeake is starting about three weeks earlier now than it did in 1960. And the summers are getting hotter. In the Chesapeake, we may be in danger of losing more northerly species such as winter flounder and softshell clams.

One serious concern involves how changing climate affects “foundation species”, that is, key species that support entire ecosystems. One of these is eelgrass, an underwater plant that forms dense meadows throughout Chesapeake Bay and is a critical nursery habitat for young fish and shellfish, including blue crabs, rockfish, and speckled trout, among others.

Eelgrass is highly vulnerable to climate change, first because it’s near the southern end of its distribution in the Bay and thus already near the highest temperatures it can tolerate, and second because it’s already stressed from poor water quality. We got a preview of this in summer 2005 when we had record high water temperatures throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Eelgrass was wiped out in a matter of weeks from large areas of the Bay, and still hasn’t returned to some.

A few more hot summers like 2005 could give eelgrass the one-two punch that knocks it out for good. That would be bad for the animals it supports and for the coastal communities that depend on them.

Another set of threatened foundation species are the plants that support wetlands such as brackish marshes. These are important in literally holding the land together by trapping sediments to make soil. Roughly two thirds of the Chesapeake region’s commercial fishes depend on coastal marshes for nursery and spawning grounds, and these are highly sensitive to both habitat quality and climate.

Chesapeake wetlands have been declining fast in recent decades. The classic example is the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, which has been called the “Everglades of the North” because of its great abundance and diversity of wildlife, including the largest population of bald eagles north of Florida.

Blackwater illustrates well how climate change interacts with other stresses. Over the last seventy years, it’s lost a third of its marsh area to sea level rise, sinking of the land, and overgrazing by nutria, an alien rodent. The nutria is currently kept from spreading north largely by its intolerance of cold winters, and there’s real concern that it could spread as winters warm.

Finally, an important impact of climate change is that it alters interactions between species that respond differently to changes, with important implications for food chains and ecosystems. One important case involves the oyster disease Dermo, which proliferates in warmer waters. Starting in the mid-1980s, Dermo spread rapidly up the East Coast from Chesapeake Bay during a series of unusually mild winters and is now found up through Maine, with major consequences for the oyster industry.

These changes have fundamental consequences for coastal ecosystems, economies, and ways of life.

Tired of sifting through the virtual world for interesting stuff?

Blog carnivals in two pleasing, environmentally friendly colors are now online. Get your blue at Kate Wing’s blog, host this time around of the tenth monthly Carnival of the Blue, which covers the waterfront as the saying goes . . .

 . . . and your green at Confessions of a Closet Environmentalist, this week’s host (they’re a bit ahead of us above the tide line). Good stuff at both venues.

As global society begins to come to grips with the reality of climate change underway, and the James Inhofes of the world fade into obscurity or historical curiosity, the focus is turning slowly to the real work of figuring out how to deal with it. 

A major concern is sea level rise. More than half the American population (not to mention the millions in places like Bangladesh) lives in the coastal fringe that makes up only 17% of the country’s land area. In 2003, 23 of the 25 most densely populated U.S. counties were in the coastal zone.

Last week’s issue of Science features a special section on “Reimagining Cities” (including, among other things, a brief but fascinating piece on the prospects for “vertical farms” that grow crops within urbanized city limits).  One of the articles focuses on the special threats to coastal cities and populations stemming from climate change, starting with a central problem in human nature, exemplified by the psychological inability of New Orleans residents to give up even the flooded low-lying areas that are clearly already lost to Hurricane Katrina:

“Residents of New Orleans are not alone in their dogged determination to place themselves in harm’s way. According to a report last August from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half the U.S. population lived in counties that had declared flood disasters at least six times between 1980 and 2005, and 29% made their home in a county hit by at least one hurricane in that time. Large swaths of the western United States are at risk of wildfires, such as those that emptied parts of southern California last October. People are willing to gamble by building homes on earthquake fault lines, in landslide zones, and along tornado alleys. ‘Population trends are increasing the nation’s vulnerability to these risks,’ the GAO report noted dryly.”

Hope springs eternal, which is generally inspiring of course, but sometimes blinds us.  Urban planners have made little headway in convincing people or local governments that some of their policies place people and property in serious danger.  But economic forces (take note, skeptical conservatives) are beginning to respond, in the form of jittery insurance companies:

“Allstate Insurance let 120,000 policies lapse in Florida in 2006, after canceling 95,000 the year before. Another major insurer, State Farm, declined to renew 39,000 windstorm policies in 2006. In a sign of how dire the situation has become, the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., set up by Florida legislators in 2002 as the insurer of last resort, is now the state’s biggest property insurer. It has raised premiums by as much as 150% in the last 2 years. Rising premiums may price some residents out of hurricane zones”.

It will be fascinating, albeit unnerving, to see whether we as a society (or societies) can rise above our inherited emotional attachments and act on the rational knowledge we have to make the coming transition without catatsrophe.  Surely we’re smart and resourceful enough to do that . . .?

. . . is now online.  Check it out at The Other 95%.  Among the usual intriguing flotsam, Kevin calls upon all ocean bloggers to use the power of the proverbial pen in 2008 to dedicate their writing to solving the ocean’s problems — and live blue!  

[Editor’s note: Spent the last week in Jamaica, stalking the elusive social shrimp for an ongoing biogeographic study supported by the National Geographic Society.  “Irie” is a Jamaican, and more specifically Rastafarian, general purpose word that is said to refer to “high emotions and peaceful vibrations“.  Our team resolved to name the first new species we found on the trip Synalpheus irie.  Following is an entry from the journal:]

Man, how I love working in the Caribbean.  The escape from routine, the healthful vigor of the work for body, mind, and spirit — working in the open air, in the water, wiithout shoes for days on end, focusing on a single goal for a week at a time — unheard of in splintered everyday life where concentrating on one task for even a few hours seems a luxury.  The opportunity for quiet reflection is worth more than any lesson from a master, any  drug, any expensive therapy — merely being able to live simply for a while.

The last day, at dusk, after sitting hunched over the picnic table picking sponges and curating the specimens all day, we got in the water for a break.  I was tired and uninspired, and joined only for a little exercise and to be a good sport. The water near the dock was characteristically blurry and very cold due to mixing of fresh groundwater that flows down through the porous limestone of the hills and up out of fissures in the coral-rock pavement just beyond the shore.  I paddled around in the shallows and grassbeds and over to the backreef, killing time mainly, looking at a sea hare undulating in the grass here or an anemone there.  It was a beautiful, very placid evening and the atmosphere took on the magical quality that comes over water at this time of day in calm weather.  Suddenly it occurred to me that the Sea was quiet enough that I might make it through maze of the very shallow reef crest, which is normally impassably pounded by surf.  Charged with a little adrenaline by the swell rolling over the treacherous outcrops, even as lazy as it was, I pumped through a little channel in the reef, working gingerly but quickly, hand over hand, along the brown seaweed-covered rock, chest nearly scraping bottom in places, and finally shot out the other side. 

Even after reading for years about Jamaica as the poster child of coral reef ecosystem collapse, the scene shocked me.  It literally looked like the scene of a bombing — the place was littered with slabs of broken coral lying everywhere, the sense of desolation heightened by the nearly complete absence of any macroscopic life. Very little live coral, almost no algae, no sponges or soft corals.  It was a striking picture of a wasteland.  And this is nearly three decades after Hurrican Allen dealt Jamaica the final blow that knocked the teetering ecosystem out. By now the grazing sea urchins have come back with a vengeance and are bristling from every cervice and overhang.  The algae are accordingly scarce, which bodes well for the return of live coral, but I still saw little sign of coral recovery.  Quite unsettling. 

But the darkening ocean seemed to invite me and I swam on over the deepening reef.  The water was very clear, at least 50 feet of visibility, and seemed to hold the light with that indescribable, intrinsic luminosity found at dusk underwater.  The rocky spurs sloped away steadily and soon I floated like one of the light motionless frigatebirds over an expansive reefscape, maybe 30 feet deep, with canyons of white sand going blue in the fading light between the dusky bulwarks of encrusted coral rock.  Here and there were big flat plates of living mustard-colored coral, and a few other species in the deeper water, which gave me a seed of hope.  There is still life, and it is still kicking.  A small shoal of electric blue Chromis flitted above a coral head, and algae and soft corals swayed rhythmically in the gentle swell, back and forth, back and forth.  This, I realized with sudden certainty, is why I come, why I continue to come back to the reef.  I was filled with a powerful sense of calm and gratitude and harmony.  I realized also that this was a gift, dropped in my lap when least expected, after climbing into the water for the last time in a rote way, preoccupied and without awareness.  I hovered there for some time, then swam back in the dusk. Everything looked different on the way back.

. . . is now online at “I’m a Chordata, Urochordata“.  Lots of food, sex, death, and more — what’s not to like?!  The history of the COB is written there, including last months’s episode, proudly hosted here by the Natural Patriot.  Dive in, and get the blues!

I know, I used the same subtitle for another recent post.  But I’m not recycling titles out of laziness — well, not entirely anyway. I do so here to highlight the simple, yet perversely (and perhaps intentionally) misunderstood theme whose centrality to the broad range of environmental problems is increasingly obvious.  Hence the “stupid” bit. 

The simple, central, misunderstood theme is this: Despite the rosy optimism one hears from various quarters, We can’t grow our way out of our environmental problems. Yes, of course technology can help, and we need creative entrepeneurship.  But blind reliance on the “free” market is not going to do the trick. 

The latest evidence on this front comes from an analysis, across 102 countries, of the impacts of human population density, urbanization, and economic growth on the condition of marine biological communities.  Rebecca Clausen and Richard York set out to quantify the role of changing human social development and economic institutions in the accelerating decline of marine biological diversity.  It’s well-recognized that human impact on the environment is ultimately a result of demographic and economic factors. But there is disagreement about how these processes affect the environment.  Indeed, as they note:

“Neoclassical economists argue that environmental quality is a luxury good and, therefore, only affluent societies are willing to heavily invest in environmental protection. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) describes this hypothetical relationship between affluence and environmental quality. The EKC hypothesis suggests that environmental problems escalate in the early stages of economic development, but eventually a tipping point is reached, after which further economic growth leads to improvements in environmental quality.” 

In other words, the argument goes, once you get to be as rich as the United States, it’s all good.  The idea is that affluence leads to better resource and environmental management.  For example, we often hear that concern over global overfishing is alarmist because we have (some) good fishery management practices in effect in civilized places like the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. Though the latter bit is true, it’s not clear that such practices are becoming more widespread in time or space. 

In fact, there is considerable evidence against the hypothesis that economic development improves environmental quality on anything more than a local scale.  But the aim of this paper was to test the EKC hypothesis broadly, by considering diverse marine ecosystems rather than single fished species or stocks.  As an indicator of marine biodiversity they used the “mean trophic level” of fisheries catches between 1960 and 2003.  The basic rationale here is twofold.  First, mean trophic level roughly estimates the proportion of the catch that is made up of big top predators (tunas, cod, etc.), compared with, say, anchovies, and the abundance of top predators is in turn a good indicator of the degree to which the ecosystem supports a taxonomically and functionally diverse biological community.  Second, fishing tends to target top predators, so the decline in mean trophic level signals increasing human impact.  Indeed, the targeting of top predators is consistent enough that Daniel Pauly and colleagues famously summarized the succession of industrial fishing impacts as “fishing down the food web” (see the figure). 

Clausen and York developed mathematical models to capture the effects on mean trophic level of human population, per capita GDP, degree of urbanization (% of population living in urban areas).  The model included various terms to account for changes in marine productivity, geographic expansion of fisheries, changes in fishing effort, and so on.

What they found is important, if not terribly surprising.  First of all, at the risk of stating the obvious, countries with higher populations, urbanization, and economic growth caught more fish.  Overall, the healthy structure of marine ecosystems, as indexed by mean trophic level of catch, declined as economic growth, urbanization, and human population size increased. 

But there were some interesting twists with respect to the EKC hypothesis.  For example, fishery catch roughly matched the EKC predictions, dramatically increasing with per capita GDP during early stages of economic development, reaching a plateau at ~ US $3000, then declining modestly.  Urbanization, however, showed a pattern opposite to that predicted by EKC:  fish catch by a country initially declined with urbanization, then increased again after ~36% of the population was living in cities.   Importantly, “the total effect of GDP per capita [on MTL] was monotonically negative”, meaning roughly that as average individual income increased, the abundance of predators in that country’s exclusive economic zone declined (see graph at left).  This effect was strongest during early stages of economic development. On the bright side, growth in per capita GDP above $10,000 had little effect on mean trophic level of catches.

Long story short - “Our results contradicted both the economic and urbanization EKC hypotheses, indicating that economic development and urbanization led to marine biodiversity loss. Likewise, population growth clearly led to depletion of marine fisheries.” From a policy perspective, the take-home message is the “grow-your-way-out-of-your-problems” economic theory championed by the likes of Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomberg doesn’t work, at least fr marine fisheries and ecosystem health. 

One might be forgiven for thinking this would be common sense.  How can building more buildings and roads and ships and airplanes and iPods and vacuuming up the earth’s living and nonliving resources to fuel it all reduce our impact on the environment? The simple fact is: it can’t.  Alas, that sense is not in fact common, at least not in mainstream economic theory, which of course is the philosophical guiding light of modern civilization.  Fortunately, there is growing recognition that the physical basis on which the economy is built is finite, and that a sustainable future will require a steady-state economy.

Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood, since I know certain readers may jump to conclusions here. Obviously, economic development is important, and people need food, of which marine fish are a very important source worldwide and will continue to be.  It would be silly to think that we can or even should stop fishing.  But this and a growing body of other evidence are making it clear that humanity will have to manage marine fisheries and other interactions with the environment much more thoughtfully than we have done if we expect our grandkids to be enjoying them too.  Pretending that “free”-market economics alone will magically solve such problems is a fantasy.

[Original source: Clausen, R. and R. York. 2007. Economic Growth and Marine Biodiversity: Influence of Human Social Structure on Decline of Marine Trophic Levels. Conservation Biology doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00851.x]

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, and all the ships at sea:

The Natural Patriot is honored to present the 7th monthly episode of the Carnival of the Blue, continuing a hallowed tradition initiated just six short moons ago on World Ocean Day by Mark Powell of Blogfish. Our salty selections this month span the gamut from, well perhaps not all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they cover a lot of ground nevertheless.  

Biophilia

Most of us, it’s probably safe to say, were motivated to become marine biologists (or ocean enthusiasts more generally) by a strong sense of biophilia, although we didn’t know it by that name at the time.  The Sea is so full of beatiful and bizarre curiosities that reality rivals even the fertile imagination of Dr. Seuss in, say, McElligott’s Pool, a “watershed” book for me (I’m sorry — I really can’t help it) in 2nd grade that is probably ultimately to blame for why I am here now, hosting this carnival.

In addition to the ocean’s well-known and publicized importance to the economy, the global carbon cycle and climate change, sushi, and so forth, the diversity of life on earth is what connects us to the greater cosmos.  And this month’s Carnival celebrates several examples:

First of all, how about those cheeky fake cleaner fish?  Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science relates the strange story, first reported by Cheney et al., of the blue-striped fangblenny.  This sea-wolf in sheep’s clothing mimics the familiar cleaner gobies of coral reefs, but when a prospective customer swims up for service, the turncoat fangblenny attacks, grabbing a mouthful of skin and scales.  But the really cool thing is that the fangblenny is also a chameleon, changing its color patterns depending on the presence of benevolent models in the vicinity.  Yet another example that truth is stranger than fiction.

In another paen to biophilia, Mark H at the Daily Kos presents a story from his Biomes series, this time on the bizarre but somehow endearing monkfish.

And from Mike at 10,000 Birds, we have an appreciation of the Norther Gannet, the largest seabird in its range and advertised as “the most beautiful bird on the North Atlantic” and “the most impressive bird in any chum slick”.   

What survey of oceanic biophilia could possibly be complete without a marine mammal?  This month’s entry from Cute Overload Zooillogix fills the bill, and with audience participation to boot! The post announces a write-in campaign to name the new baby beluga (apologies to parents scarred by Raffi songs) at the Shedd Aquarium. Several interesting suggestions, some of them pleasingly off-color. Vote early and often!

The Grandaddy of the Carnival of the Blue (an allusion to his authority, not his age), Mark at Blogfish, brings us an entry that skirts the fine line between biophilia and biophobia.  Commenting on an amazing video of a great white shark feeding frenzy on a whale carcass off South Africa, he notes the similarity (evolutionary link?) between frenzied sharks and frat boys at a party.  As the sharks gorge with whale blubber, they begin to appear intoxicated and then sexually interested and then . . . well, watch for yourselves.

And speaking of biophobia, newcomer to the COB Miriam at The Oyster’s Garter (say what?) reports on what happens when curious energetic kids are forced to play with boring plastic toys like laser beams and harpoons instead of going outdoors like red-blooded Americans and skinning their knees on tree swings and stuff.  They are in danger of becoming ant-sharkites!

The secrets of the Seas 

For many of us, fascination with the life of the Sea has led to questions: how do these strange creatures work?  Why are there so many species here and not there?  Why on earth does a sea urchin poop onto its own head? (Well, OK, they don’t really have heads).  And thus, humbly, begins the life of science, which is illustrated by several of our posts this time around.

Peter at Deep-Sea News takes us on a scientific journey through the deep dark world of seamounts and, more specifically, their biogeography.  Are they biodiversity islands or oases (figuratively speaking) and what would we need to know to answer this question? The discussion illustrates a central challenge to understanding the history of the oceans, especially the deeps but often enough the shallows as well — the rudimentary state of our taxonomic knowledge of many marine groups.

In a unique (perhaps pioneering) category this month is Kevin Z’s Introduction/prospectus to his nascent dissertation on “Biodiversity of Chemosynthetic Communities at the Eastern-Lau Spreading Centre“, posted bravely for all the world to see at The Other 95%.  I have resisted editing this, a knee-jerk professorial urge which arises from my spending an inordinate fraction of my time editing nowadays.  But several commentors on the post have offered suggestions — now Kevin has a graduate committee that potentially includes thousands of web-surfers!   Good luck Kevin . . .

For my own part, I find myself always sliding back and forth between the biophilic wonder at the beauty and mystery of sea creatures and the rush of excitement at figuring them out scientifically. Since the latter is what I am paid to do (in between reviewing grant proposals and MSs and student prospecti and theses and . . .), I especially relish the opportunity to get back out onto the reef.  I was able to do so recently on a field trip to Caribbean Panama, where I stalked the elusive wild snapping shrimp, as reported here.    

Ocean conservation

Increasingly, alas, our attention and energies have been diverted from biophilia and questions of pure science toward the alarming state of the oceans and what might be done about it. Several of our intrepid ocean bloggers report from the front:

From Jennifer at Shifting Baselines, we have a profile of a modern day pirate of sorts, only one whose quarry is not buried treasure but the rear ends of whaling ships, which he and his motley crew are harassing throughout the Seven Seas.  Jennifer quotes from the New Yorker profile of Watson, which in turn quotes Daniel Pauly: “Animals that were once used for bait or that were considered worthless (hagfish, sea cucumber) were later taken in large quantities for human consumption. ‘Bait thirty years ago was calamari,’ Pauly [said]. ‘Now it is served in a restaurant. It is very nice. But it was bait before.’ Future generations, Pauly predicts, only half in jest, will grow up on jellyfish sandwiches.

Which brings us seamlessly to our next story.  Little did we know how soon jellyfish would actually end up on the plate.  Or at least in the bowl.  Kate at the NRDC’s Switchboard reports that this is exactly what is happening in Japan.  And no, we are not making this up — from the Wall Street Journal: In Japan, “One coastal firm . . . has for the past three years produced 2,000 or 3,000 cartons of vanilla-and-jellyfish ice cream. The jellyfish is soaked overnight in milk to reduce its smell, and is then diced. Fumiko Hirabayashi, a director of the dairy, says the jelly cubes are slightly chewy . . . ’We think it’s important to use local ingredients,’ says Mrs. Hirabayashi. ‘And this has now become a local ingredient.’”

Carl Safina, one of the pioneers of ocean conservation, weighs in this month with a withering critique of the seemingly unstoppable forces of greed and political impotence driving one of the ocean’s most majestic wildilfe species — the great bluefin tuna — down the spiral of extinction.

Moving from the water column down to the bottom, we have a detailed look from newcomer JimboDouglass at how the human footprint is squashing the seagrasses that provide critical habitat for biodiversity and nurseries for juvenile fish and shellfish throughout the world’s coastal regions an estuaries. Focusing on the Chesapeake Bay specifically, he discusses the complex interactions among nutrient pollution from land, overfishing of water-clearing oysters and predatory fishes, and coastal development in the long decline of this important ecoystem. 

All the world’s a stage 

Moving out from the oceans to the larger global ecosystem, Hugh at surf.bird.scribble ponder what many of us have been losing sleep over in recent years, the suffocating blanket of CO2 we are spewing into the atmosphere.  What to do about it?  Dump tankers of iron into the ocean to soak it up via phytoplankton.  Not.  Hugh asks, “Please, tax my carbon!”, an idea that is gaining strength from a surprisingly diverse coalition of interests.

Speaking of the warming atmosphere, as it interacts with the oceans, can’t help but remind us of the catastrophe in New Orleans that finally pushed global warming front and center on the world stage.  According to atmospheric scientists, we can expect more such mayhem in coming years.  Sheril at The Intersection reflects on the coming of the big storm Sidr to the coast of Bangladesh, perhaps the single region in the world most vulnerable to rising sea level and storms.  This, alarmingly, would appear to be the shape of things to come.

The fossil-fuel based global economy takes its toll on the oceans and coasts in other ways as well.  Rick at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets (try saying that ten times fast!) reports on a first-hand look at one of them, as he plowed through the recent oil spill in San Francisco Bay on his daily ferry commute across the Bay (ah, sounds so idyllic on any other day). 

Hard to get away from petroleum these days.  Another new entry to the Carnival comes from Paul at the Waterlogged Dog, with a summary of the alarming state of plastic pollution in the oceans.  Mr. McGuire was right when he confided to young Dustin Hoffmann the one word “Plastics” but, like so many of the great wonders of technology, this miracle substance has turned out to have a pernicious dark side.

And there you have it.  All the news that’s soggy enough to print.  Remember — you heard it here first (this month at least). Tune in next month for the 8th Carnival of the Blue at I’m a chordata, urochordata.  Until then, Best fishes!

Previous Carnivals

• Carnival of the Blue #6: Cephalopodcast
• Carnival of the Blue #5: Shifting Baselines
• Carnival of the Blue #4: The Saipan Blog
• Carnival of the Blue #3: Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets
• Carnival of the Blue #2: blogfish
• Carnival of the Blue #1: blogfish

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