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11/5/13


Local starfish appearing to be dying of a disease spreading along the West Coast that causes the inver­tebrates to lose their arms — and in the most advanced cases disintegrate.



“It’s some of the worst stuff we’ve seen on starfish in this area,” said Joe Tyburczy, a California Sea Grant Extension scientist. “It’s potentially important because sea stars are an important predator in the intertidal, and they consume mussels, and mussels are really good at occupying a lot of space and pushing other things out.



“So, if there are fewer sea stars, there may be more mussels and less diversity because the sea stars open up space,” he said.



On Sunday night, Humboldt State Uni­versity marine biologists and students conducted surveys at Luffenholtz to deter­mine the extent of the damage caused by sea star wasting disease. Tyburczy esti­mates about 20 percent of local sea stars exhibit at least mild symptoms, including losing pigment and developing open sores. Sick stars have also been found at Trinidad State Beach.



“It’s a noticeable percentage, or we wouldn’t all be looking at it if it was just a random one in one place,” Tyburczy said.



From Vancouver, British Columbia to Santa Barbara, starfish are dying of the disease.



“I think people are trying to see whether it’s a virus or a bacteria,” Tyburczy said. “Diseases in the ocean are notoriously dif­ficult to figure out because you might detect bacteria on a sick sea star, but is the bacteria causing it? Or is the bacteria already there, just breaking down on something that’s already there?” HSU scientists began conducting sur­veys about a month ago after noticing some of the sea stars collected in the wild and brought to the Telonicher Marine Lab became sick and died.



“We noticed the collected animals we brought back to the lab autotomized so rapidly they fell apart,” HSU marine biol­ogist Kathryn McDonald said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.” The wasting disease was first noticed on the West Coast in June.

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10/16/13

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency today for failing to address ocean acidification that’s killing oysters in Oregon and Washington and threatening a wide range of other sea life. The lawsuit challenges the EPA’s decision that seawaters in those two states meet water-quality standards meant to protect marine life despite disturbing increases in acidity.

“Our oceans are taking a deadly turn. If we don’t act fast, we may not have oceans full of life and wonder for much longer,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the Center’s oceans director. “The EPA can help put us back on the right track, but not if it continues to ignore the problem.”

Marine waters are growing more acidic because, every day, oceans absorb 22 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution from power plants and cars. That, in turn, strips seawater of the chemicals marine animals need to build their protective shells and skeletons. The Pacific Northwest is particularly vulnerable; harmful impacts are already being observed in Oregon and Washington as acidified water comes near shore.

Since about 2005, shellfish hatcheries in Washington and Oregon have experienced massive die-offs of oyster larvae with losses of up to 80 percent of production. Oysters are failing to reproduce in Willapa Bay, Wash., and, elsewhere, corals are growing more sluggishly, while some plankton have thin, weak shells.

“If we stand by and wait for things to get worse, it’ll be too late,” said Sakashita. “We need fast action to save marine diversity, because when the harm of ocean acidification deepens we’ll realize how much we all depend on the ocean.”

Ocean acidification poses long-term, severe problems for ocean ecosystems. It also magnifies the toxins in harmful algal blooms known as red tides. Research suggests that toxins increase five-fold in harmful algae that can poison shellfish, marine mammals, fish, and even cause paralytic shellfish poisoning in people.

“The Pacific Northwest is among the places getting hit hardest at the outset of this crisis. Although some state officials in Washington are taking it seriously, we need the EPA and the Clean Water Act to truly begin addressing it on a broader scale,” said Sakashita.

The Clean Water Act has an important role to play in addressing ocean acidification. The law requires that waters not meeting water-quality standards, including those for acidity, be identified as impaired. In turn, impaired waters can lead to pollution control, which here can result in needed measures to reduce carbon emissions and other pollution that drives acidification. Similarly, the EPA uses the Clean Water Act for water-quality problems caused by atmospheric mercury and acid rain. Using the Clean Water Act to address ocean acidification complements efforts to reduce CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act and state initiatives.  

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10/17/13

Oh, ocean creatures are just amazing! While you’ve likely heard about the oarfish carcass that washed up near Catalina Island, we’ve had some fantastic sightings closer to home, too. Orcas aren’t quite as exotic as oarfish, but they’ll impress you with their beauty, speed and mad predatory skills – who else (other than humans) goes after sharks?

Coastal sightings of these killer whales are rare. Out at sea, however, odds of seeing orcas increase and the folks at Naked Whale Research are hoping more people will share their stories and photos. Researcher Jeff Jacobsen recently relayed a couple:

On October 5, Robert Reed and Bob Stewart were fishing near the Eel River Buoy when a pair of killer whales happened by. Stewart took photos of the male, which Jacobsen sent to Alisa Shulman-Janiger who maintains the killer whale photo-ID catalog for California. She identified the male as CA60 aka “Canopener,” who was first identified off of Humboldt on Sept. 20 1980 – 1980!

Canopener’s been seen from Santa Rosa Island off of Santa Barbara to the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii), most frequently in Monterey Bay lately.  He is a mammal eater, a “transient” ecotype, maybe the biggest one in her catalog. And despite his fearsomeness, he always travels with his mom.

The next day, Jim Yarnall and wife were in the same general area and saw another transient pair, a male and a female. Shulman-Janiger identified the female as the rarely seen CA136 and is still trying to match the male.

Jacobsen explained that a rich history exists on most of the killer whales traversing the coast and, importantly, that individual whale background can be accessed via a simple photograph – providing it shows enough detail of the side, trailing edge of the dorsal fin and overall shape, and the gray saddle patch behind it.  

You can be part of things! Report sightings and upload photos at the Naked Whale Research website.

Here’s some more fun local orca facts:

The mammal eaters – “transients” – seem to run a trap line along the coast, keeping that element of surprise on their side by not hanging out in one area for long.  

The salmon-eating “residents” from the Salish Sea area (Puget Sound) also pass back and forth – the K pod made the news because researchers were able to track one of the whales from a satellite tag placed temporarily in his dorsal fin.  

And, no doubt, Jacobsen says, the third and less-known type, the “offshores,” who tend to spend most their time west of the shelf break in deep water feeding on sharks, can be seen here too.  

Remember to observe NOAA’s Whale Watching Guidelines.

More at the Center for Whale Research and Wild Whales.

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9/12/13

Marine ecologists have been grappling with a puzzler. They had expected that, as climate change warms the oceans, most species would migrate toward the poles, fleeing the ever hotter waters near the equator and tracking the zone of their preferred water temperature as it shifts. But some studies revealed that some species seemed to migrate in the “wrong” direction. Now, however, researchers have apparently solved the riddle: For the past 4 decades, marine species found along North America’s coasts mostly have followed cooler water, but that doesn't always mean moving poleward.

“This is really quite a neat study," says Trevor Branch, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who was not involved in the work. “It is likely to be the highest profile fisheries paper this year and an instant classic.”

Scientists had long assumed warming oceans would generally drive species' geographical ranges toward higher latitudes. But some studies have found just the opposite, says Malin Pinsky, a marine ecologist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in New Jersey. Off the shores of California, he notes, some species have been moving south, not north. Other researchers have seen the same trend in the Gulf of Mexico. “Scientists were asking themselves, ‘Why aren’t certain species doing what we expect?’ ” Pinsky notes.

In a new analysis, Pinsky and his colleagues show there's more to the story: Many of those species were moving to cooler waters, it’s just that the studies weren’t detailed enough to reveal that. The team looked at data gathered during coastal surveys between 1968 and 2011—a census of more than 60,000 trawler hauls from coastal regions that together cover more than 3.3 million square kilometers, an area almost twice the size of Alaska. The tally includes more than 128 million organisms representing 360 species or groups of closely related species. “There’s no better data set than this for North America,” Branch says.

From water temperatures measured during the surveys, the researchers calculated which way and how fast lines of constant temperature (similar to temperature contours on a weather map) had been moving. All of a sudden, some of the odd-looking results made sense, Pinsky says. Along the California coast, the "climate velocity" pointed south, so sea creatures had to head that way—not toward the pole—to stay ahead of warming waters. And along the Gulf Coast, species had been moving south to reach deeper—and therefore cooler—waters. Overall, more than 70% of the species that shifted latitude or depth did so in the direction predicted by climate velocity, the researchers report today in Science.

The new research “increases confidence in the science linking oceanography, fish physiology, and [species] movements,” says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada. The findings also show that over time, as climate change continues, most marine organisms will gradually move away from what’s thought of as their traditional territories.

The new study will likely help scientists anticipate the future movements of marine species—information that may help people better manage fisheries or pick better sites for areas intended to protect marine species or ecosystems. “There’s no point in putting a marine preserve in one place, and then have species move out of it” a few decades later due to climate change, Branch says.

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