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North Coast populations decline 90 percent, surge of juveniles continues



11/18/14





Marking a major breakthrough in the mystery of one of the largest wildlife die-offs ever recorded in the world’s oceans, scientists believe they have found the cause of a disease that has killed millions of starfish since last year along California and the Pacific Coast.



The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other institutions reported Monday.



Scientists found that the same virus that is killing starfish today is also present in museum starfish specimens dating back to 1942, indicating the disease has been present in Pacific waters for 72 years.  

Yet although there were smaller outbreaks in years past, nobody knows what triggered the current marine plague, which has killed up to 95 percent of starfish in some areas and spread from Alaska to Mexico.

“Something may have happened recently that caused it to go rogue, because we’ve never seen anything like the current outbreak,” said Peter Raimondi, a professor of biology at UC Santa Cruz and co-author of the study.

The outbreak, known as “wasting syndrome,” has infected at least 20 different species of starfish since it was first detected in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in June 2013. It spread to Oregon, Humboldt County, Monterey Bay and as far south as Baja California, even killing starfish in major aquariums.

Humboldt State University Marine Laboratory and Marine and Coastal Science Institute Director Brian Tissot said he just returned from a Western Society of Naturalist conference in Tacoma, Washington, where the study was brought up along with a dozen more on sea star wasting disease.

“It’s a pretty significant find to be able to link it to a virus and understand that part of it at this point,” he said. “... Once we do finally know that the disease is a cause of this, the next question becomes to understand what triggered this event and why it continues to propagate from place to place.”

When infected, starfish at first become sluggish, then develop white lesions. Within days, they curl up and parts of their arms break off, sometimes literally crawling away. Not long after, the entire starfish turns into a gooey mess and dies.

In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers concluded the disease is a type of densovirus. It is similar to viruses that affect insects, sea urchins and other invertebrates, and is distantly related to parvovirus, the cause of feline distemper in cats and canine parvovirus in dogs.

“It’s definitely a huge breakthrough,” said Dr. Mike Murray, director of veterinary services at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “It provides a lot of other researchers a place to start and say, ‘OK, we found this virus in lots of sea stars. What was the trigger? What started it all off? Are there other problems in other species?’” So far, the researchers found, the virus is present in sea urchins and sand dollars, but isn’t killing them in large numbers. Marine ecologist Joe Tyburczy of the California Sea Grant Extension said the urchins may serve as viral “reservoirs,” spelling bad news for the more susceptible sea stars.

“A species can be totally wiped out in an area,” he said. “If other species that can carry the disease remain, you can keep infecting the all of the most susceptible species.”

The virus spreads in seawater and sand, the scientists discovered. But it does not affect humans. And there is no way to offer a cure to starfish populations.

“It would be nice if we could do that, but it’s too simplistic,” Murray said, comparing it to human epidemics like the Spanish flu of 100 years ago or the Black Death in 14th-century Europe.

“This is one of those natural phenomena that may or may not have a human basis behind it,” he said. “It is going to play itself out, and hopefully it will do that in a way that will allow sea stars to persist. But there are no guarantees.”

Using cutting-edge genetic tools, scientists at Cornell pinpointed the disease.

“There are 10 million viruses in a drop of seawater, so discovering the virus associated with a marine disease can be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Cornell microbiologist Ian Hewson, lead author of the study.

Working with 335 starfish collected on the West Coast, the researchers ground up tiny amounts of tissue from infected starfish and injected it into healthy ones in lab tanks, learning how it spread.

Now that they believe they know the culprit, the next step will be to find out why it spread so widely. It could be something natural, like overpopulation of starfish in some areas. Or it could be related to pollution, warming waters or the increasing acidity of the oceans. If triggered by toxics, new laws could make a difference, experts say.

“It is probably part of their population cycle. But if it is driven by something linked to pollution or climate change or things like that, then we would have some responsibility to deal with it,” Tissot said.

While the study found that the disease has occurred in the past, Tissot said the current event is unprecedented in magnitude. On the North Coast, Tissot said there has been about a 90 percent drop in sea star populations. Starfish are key predators in tide pools and near-shore waters.

If their populations don’t recover relatively soon, mussels and other species could explode out of control, affecting other ocean life. Locally, Tissot said the surge of juvenile six-armed sea stars has not let up since August and the juveniles have not shown prolific signs of the disease.

“It’s really an important species and these changes are going to reverberate a long time into the future unless the species starts coming back very quickly,” he said.

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11/9/14

Standing in a cove off Massachusett’s North Shore, Juliet Simpson holds a tube filled with some of the most precious mud in the world, mud that could have significant impact in the fight against climate change. But first, that mud needs to revolutionize how we think of sea grass.

Simpson, a coastal ecologist at MIT’s Sea Grant program, is on the search for carbon, and in this particular mud sample, which came from a sea grass bed about eight feet below the water’s surface in Nahant Harbor, chances are she’ll find quite a bit. Sea grass, also called eelgrass, photosynthesizes carbon out of the water column and then stores, concentrates, and locks it into the soils beneath it. There, because there is little to no oxygen, bacteria can take centuries to millennia to break it down and to re-release it back into the water and atmosphere.

Two years ago, in a first-ever global assessment, scientists calculated that the soils in sea grass meadows — despite being less than 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans — captured at least 10 percent of the ocean’s carbon. Since then the estimate has increased. Fred Short, a University of New Hampshire marine ecologist, puts the latest range between 12 and 20 percent. When combined with marshes and tropical mangroves, sea grasses are part of ecosystems comprising only 2 percent of ocean area — but accounting for a whopping 50 percent of ocean carbon storage.

Those discoveries are quickly elevating the concept of “blue carbon” among scientists and rapidly suggesting that these marine forests are as critical to controlling climate change as the emerald green Amazonian jungles and North American boreal expanses.

For some perspective, known terrestial forests take up at least 40 times more area than sea grasses, marshes, and mangroves. Yet the carbon storage capability of just 1 acre of sea grass is equal to 40 acres of terrestrial forest, Australian researcher Peter Ralph said in an interview last year with Voice of America. Marine plants, at the most minimal estimates, can bury carbon at a rate at least half that of all land forests combined. More optimistic estimates suggest their total ability at least equals and probably surpasses that of forests.

In the bays of Virginia, Karen McGlathery, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, is studying the world’s largest restoration of sea grass beds, a 5,000-acre effort led by the College of William & Mary. “We easily think of forests as important to climate change because they are tall and visible,” McGlathery said. “We see this little strip of grass along the ocean, and we think they can’t be as important as forests — but they are.”

But even as the importance of sea grass is being recognized, many coastal environments are literally slipping away. Short says the world has lost 29 percent of its known seabeds since 1879, and they continue to disappear at an annual rate of 7 percent — a loss that leads to the re-release of carbon back into the atmosphere at a volume equivalent to the emissions of 350 Bostons.

“[More sea grass] is disappearing than coral reefs, and that doesn’t account for meadows we don’t know about,” Short said. “What we do know is that we’re losing something like 20 football fields a day.”

New England is part of that global decline. Charles Costello, who has mapped sea grass beds for the last two decades for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, said the state has lost half its sea grass beds since colonial times. Massachusetts continues to lose up to 3 percent a year due to development, boating, and excess nitrogen and other nutrients in coastal waters from human waste as well as fertilizer and pollution runoffs from farms, lawns, and streets. Too many nutrients promote the growth of algae and seaweed, which block light from reaching sea grass beds. As the Smithsonian Environmenal Research Center says, “darkness can kill.”

While there have been small sea grass recoveries in waters off Gloucester, New Bedford, and Wareham, there have been significant losses off Salem and Martha’s Vineyard. Despite its globally praised cleanup, which has aided new pockets of sea grass growth, even Boston Harbor has overall annually lost four percent of its sea grass since 1994. In a parallel story, the harbor has lost 81 percent of its pre-colonial salt marsh and much of today’s remaining marsh is “degraded,” according to the Massachusetts Bays Program.

“Our lifestyle is a big problem,” Costello said. “There is so much activity on the coastline. I live on the coast, everybody wants to boat, everyone wants access to a marina.”

Attention should quickly turn toward coming up with policies to save the beds left and create programs to promote new ones. Cities, states, and the federal government should take a fresh look at water-quality efforts near our shorelines, from human waste to agricultural runoff to riverside industrial pollution. The clearer the water, the deeper and farther out sea grass can grow.

Though New England contributes to part of the decline, it also hold the hope for repair. Simpson — with the help of MIT Sea Grant Program engineer Michael Sarcany, Suffolk University student Briana McDowell, and Environmental Protection Agency research diver Phil Colarusso, among others — is working to map out the first estimates of carbon in Boston-area sea grass beds. The first measurements this summer off Nahant and Gloucester indicate that our local sea grass beds may contain as much or more carbon by area as what is being found in the rest of the world. Simpson believes the region’s salt marshes probably hold similar possibilities as constantly growing and shedding plant material decomposes into the soil. “In our more undisturbed areas,” she said, “you could go out to a salt marsh, pick up the soil and half of what you’re holding in your hand is probably straight carbon.”

Colarusso is also an adviser on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, created by the United States, Canada, and Mexico as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The CEC is making a continental assessment of sea grass, marsh, and mangrove carbon. While Virginia’s sea grass renaissance is inspiring, Colarusso cautions that a large-scale restoration up and down New England’s coastline with its countless coves and crannies would be very expensive.

“The best thing we should be doing is conserving what we have in water quality,” Colarusso said. “We should be doing everything we can to keep nitrogen out of the water in drainage and runoffs.”

He adds, “With the cleanup we’ve had, we’ve seen some small patches of eelgrass appear by Logan Airport, the Outer Brewsters, by Hull, and off Winthrop. If we clean up the water further, we might see even more.”

More of a little-seen, but much-needed, powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.

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10/3/14

Nestled in the sand, hidden amongst debris or floating across the water like a message in a bottle are vessels carrying valuable research information from Japan to North America.



Three years ago, about 30 instruments called transponders were released from various ports in Japan, tasked with recording the patterns of debris from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that was ending up on beaches from California to Alaska.



The remaining transponders’ batteries are now dead, so researchers are asking beachgoers and fishermen to search for the soda bottle-like containers and return them to Oregon State University, which is partnering with Tattori University for Environmental Studies in Japan. 


Debris is still arriving on the coast nearly four years after the massive tsunami, bringing with it species that are native to Japan, said Sam Chan, a watershed health specialist with Oregon State University Extension and Oregon Sea Grant.

The paths of marine debris and where it ends up are largely unknown, so charting this would give researchers a better understanding of currents, timing and how species survive the long trip across the ocean through different habitats. It could also assist in being able to locate the estimated 1.5 million tons of debris set adrift by the surging waves.

These transponders have an antenna and record data about their paths and location. While this technology is not new, Chan said, it has never been used for this purpose.

“No one has actually used these to see how marine debris moves,” Chan said. “It can maybe help us learn how to reduce and locate it, and maybe clean it up.”

Originally, three transponders were released and two of the three were found — one in Arch Cape, Oregon, 19 months after it left Japan, and the other near the Haida Heritage Site, formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, more than three years after it was set adrift, Chan said.

The second group of transponders was sent out about a year after the tsunami, and none from this study group have been found.

“We figure that they would be arriving any time now through next year,” Chan said.

Message in a bottle

Chan said the researchers lost signals on the transponders earlier this summer while they were a few hundred miles off the coast.

The units are small and can only hold a relatively small battery without sinking, so sending out signals 16 hours a day drained the battery before any made it to shore, he said.

“One of the units that we knew about this summer was drifting off the California coast about 200 miles,” Chan said.

With no signal, the researchers need to rely on people returning the instruments.

“We would be happy to pay for the shipping,” Chan said.

However, he wants people to be sure that it is actually a transponder before shipping it.

“We don’t want a whole bunch of people shipping 2-liter soda bottles,” he said.

The transponders are easy to identify. They are orange with an antenna and writing in both English and Japanese that describes what they are and where to return them.

Chan asks that people return the bottles to Oregon State University, rather than the address on the bottle.

Coming ashore

The Northcoast Environmental Center holds regular coastal clean-up days that focus on locations where tsunami debris is expected, said Coastal Programs Director Jennifer Savage.

“We encourage people to keep an eye out for anything that could potentially be tsunami debris, but we haven’t had any reports,” she said.

A 21-foot panga boat from Rikuzentakata, Japan, found on a beach south of Crescent City in April 2013 was the first documented piece of tsunami debris to reach California’s shores.

Savage said the Samoa Dunes Recreation Area and Del Norte County’s Point St. George are locations where debris often ends up.

“For whatever reason, the currents send things in the water to those beaches,” she said. “It is quite likely that if something were sent, like a transponder, it could end up there.”

The transponders are just one of many ways to study the debris that was swept into the ocean in the 2011 tsunami, said Nir Barnea, West Coast regional coordinator for the NOAA Marine Debris Program. He has worked with Oregon State University to get out information about the transponders.

“It is one piece of the puzzle,” Barnea said. “There are a lot of information sources, because this was really an unfortunate event, and we are still learning from it.”

While aerial observation, satellites and shoreline surveys are other ways that marine debris is tracked, Barnea said this is one more avenue to learn and to get information Barnea said severe marine debris events like the tsunami in Japan are rare and create public interest in where the debris goes.

Learning about the debris paths are important to the public, fishermen, the Coast Guard and other agencies who are affected, he added.

“There was a lot of need to have more information,” Barnea said. “It is very important to know how to respond to this and to learn from this.”

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First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia

10/2/14

Rocky, man-made shores echo with barking dogs and squawking riparian life. Inky waters bob with seals, kayaks, porpoises and sputtering boats. Cyclists challenge 18-wheelers; hikers meet the homeless. High tide to low tide, day in and day out, Humboldt Bay is host to recreation, mariculture, economy and life.

"Simply by dint of its geographical power — its organizational reality — it's at the center of everything we do," says First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley. "From transportation to our economy to its effects on our environment," he says, the influence of Humboldt Bay cannot be overstated.

This month, Humboldt State University's First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia, a show examining how the bay shapes life for and is shaped by the people of the North Coast, connecting us as a community and linking us with the rest of the world.

Situated a block from the bay, the First Street Gallery is in a unique position to examine these issues from an artistic perspective. A Negotiable Utopia is part of HSU's Art in the Environment series, combining the university's scientific strengths with artistic vision. Indeed, Bentley describes the work of the two featured artists as "artful design driven by careful scientific observation." Mary Mallahan's monumental sculpture details life below the surface, Cynthia Hooper's video and essay installations highlight activities above water.

Mallahan has created an interpretive sculpture that presents the bay's floor as a visual, color-coded map detailing natural and man-made fields. Over 18 feet long, 7 feet wide and 2 feet high, Mallahan's sculpture is composed of 41 individual pieces. Using satellite imagery and scientific reports, she divided the bay along its major water channels — those aqueous avenues still present during low tide — and crafted ceramic slabs to form a puzzle-like model of the bay.

With liberal artistic license, Mallahan took the generally flat profile of the bay and added a swelling undulation to reflect the local geography adjacent to it. The anticlines and synclines, mountains and valleys that outline the bay create a sloping topography for her sculpture, adding both visual interest and visceral form to her work.

Along the exposed edges of the piece, several distinct layers interpret the structure of Humboldt Bay's earthen strata. From the side, you can see protruding shell fragments, smooth clay deposits, sandy layers and rough-textured sediment. These layers, while based in science, are not accurate to scale per se, but remind us that the subterranean surface of the bay is comprised of countless levels of natural and human-made deposits.

For the top, Mallahan drew upon hard geological data to map out much more than mud. Using textured underglazes, the surface of her massive sculpture accentuates the diversity of plant life, terrestrial deposits and marine habitats on the bay, distinguishing tomato red regions of macro algae, silvery-green sections of patchy eel grass and chocolate-brown blotches of oysters and clams.

Hooper's interpretation of the bay focuses on human interaction with it — fishing cranes lining commercial docks, former pulp mills dominating the skyline and power plants anchoring the southern shores. Six documentary videos capture hard evidence of the sights and sounds that emerge from the water, and accompanying essays poetically explain how we've arrived at this historic clash of natural and economic forces.

"Humboldt Bay is this incredibly exhaustive topic," gushes Hooper. "Oh my God! There's so much to it!" Facts and figures fly from her tongue at breakneck speed and sentences barely finish before another passionate spiel spills forth. She's a voracious researcher, documenting the images and imprints that humans have made upon our waterway.

When looking at the politicized landscapes of Humboldt Bay, Hooper sees all sides. "We find common ground here and yet we find controversy in these places, as well," she says, noting that she avoids political stumping in her work, but "it's impossible to be politically neutral."

It's hard to argue with her videos, though. Averaging 10 minutes, each video documents one of six topics: water, power, transportation, conservation, shoreline and natural resources. Each topic gets its own video monitor and, to one side, an informed essay. Hooper says she's "cleaving to the factual" in her writings, yet "condensing the information in a manner that's entertaining and amusing and interesting and has my own artistic take on it."

The images can rest alone, but beg the viewer to look more closely at the explanations of how things got this way. Throughout the installation, the sounds of the bay mingle to create an aural simulation of the place and a metaphor for the overlapping intentions of those who use it.

Hooper shares a story about her project, describing how a First Street Gallery intern was unaware of the Coast Seafoods dock only a few blocks away, and how a fishermen Hooper met while filming at those docks had never heard of HSU's gallery.

A Negotiable Utopia, with its simultaneous scientific and artistic threads exposes the living organism as we've never seen it before, setting the stage for a wider discussion of our bay's historic and future significance to life on the North Coast.

A reception for the artists will be held from 6-9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4. The gallery's South Room will feature traditional landscape works by Stock Schlueter, Kathy O'Leary, Mimi LaPlant, and Andrew Daniel.

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