News



Tech can help monitor oyster industry health 



11/23/14



A new research tool launched this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is allowing scientists to better track changes in ocean chemistry along the U.S. West Coast.



The tool provides real-time ocean acidification data along the coast and in some protected bays. It captures data from a couple dozen sensors installed at shellfish farms and hatcheries and other monitoring sites in Oregon, Washington, California, Alaska and Hawaii.



University of Washington oceanographer Jan Newton, who led the collaborative effort, said the information can help shellfish growers make crucial decisions about when and how to grow shellfish.



“That’s a really big thing, to enable shellfish growers to have better information so they can adapt to ocean acidification,” Newton said Friday.



The website data tool also serves as an early warning system about ocean acidification. Acidification is caused when oceans absorb carbon-dioxide emissions, mostly from the atmosphere. Research has shown souring seas have damaged certain marine organisms such as oysters and corals.



Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation & Conservation District Commissioner and Coast Seafoods Operations Manager Greg Dale said the monitoring of ocean acidification is particularly important for oyster hatcheries. Larval oysters in the hatcheries and in the wild absorb calcium carbonate — the most common being in the form of calcite and aragonite — to build their shells, but an increase in acidification reduces the saturation of these crucial compounds in the water.



“(Aragonite) is the easiest one to get out of the water, but it is one the most susceptible to any change in ocean pH,” Dale said. “With a lower pH, meaning it’s more acidic, it’s more difficult to accumulate that aragonite. They need to expend more energy or may not be able to at certain levels of pH. As the pH drops, it becomes less available to them to build shells.”

Other devices have been invented to gauge the effects of ocean acidification, including one known as the Beta Burkelator, named after Dr. Burke Hales of Oregon State University. The Burkelator measures for the concentration of aragonite in the water.

Humboldt Bay currently has a Burkelator, but no oyster hatcheries, Dale said.

“They look like a Rube Goldberg device or something out of NASA. They are extremely sensitive,” he said. “They have to have water pumped through them continuously. We have one for Humboldt Bay. The problem is we don’t have a hatchery here. Not yet. Currently Hog Island Oyster Co. is building a hatchery here. ... We didn’t a want to miss the opportunity to get this piece of equipment.”

Federal, tribal and state governments, private companies, nonprofit organizations and others have combined forces to monitor ocean acidification.

The data will come from a number of sensors installed at sites, including the Seattle Aquarium, the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Alaska, Hog Island Oyster Co. in Central California and the Whiskey Creek Shellfish hatchery in Oregon.

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11/19/14

[The following is an excerpt from Your Week in Ocean, a regular column on the Lost Coast Outpost. For photos and more links, read the original article.]

Most everyone agrees that trashing Humboldt’s beaches, rivers, bay, wetlands and other waterways is a bad thing. But a vast divide lies between cleaning up after partiers, illegal dumpers and generally lazy people, and in facing the problems created by homeless camps. The latter brings up not only environmental concerns, but also issues of social inequity and county resources – what do we do as a community for people too poor, ill or addicted to maintain a housed way of life?

This ongoing issue came up again yesterday when PacOut Green Team leader Aaron Ostrom posted to Facebook his dismay at an attempt to clean up around the foot of Del Norte Street in Eureka:

When we arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It was tent city! I was very nervous about walking on the trail that the city invested in, but we did. I counted over 100+ shelters on that little peninsula. Within the 100+ shelters, the trash was insane! I felt like I was in a 3rd world country. Huge numbers of vagrants, dogs running around (several of them were German Shepherds and Pit Bulls). A lot of the dogs were limping, in obvious pain. I saw waterways that lead out to the bay being used as toilets, huge amounts of garbage everywhere, lots of it was finding its way to the bay. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t believe that the city appears to be turning its back on this.

This isn’t the first time the PacOut Green Team has been deterred from cleaning up a particular site. In March, Tim Haywood resorted to calling the Eureka Police Department about a camp on Woodley Island. In that case, however, the folks who’d made the mess were gone.

At the time, EPD Detective Neal Hubbard explained the way enforcement typically works, beginning with a citation for illegal camping, for unlicensed dogs if applicable and, if trash is prevalent, a citation for “unlawful storage of garbage.” People are allowed a chance to clean up. Arrests, Hubbard noted, are rare unless warrants have been issued.

This is hardly a situation unique to Humboldt. In today’s L.A. Times, an editorial titled “The homeless in the Ballona Wetlands should be moved, and given help” asserts, “No one likes evicting desperate people from camps, but the ecologically fragile wetlands must be protected.” The Times also makes the important point that, “The difficult question is not whether to remove homeless people… but how to help get them services in an area low on shelters and transitional housing.”

Ostrom finished his FB post with a plea for action:

Something needs to happen. PacOut Green Team wants to clean that area up, but first law enforcement needs to run the illegal campers out. Why can’t the destruction of our local wetlands and pollution into the bay be a big enough reason to do something about it? Can the feds fine Humboldt for allowing illegal campers to destroy our wetlands and coastal waters? Everyone talks about potential hazards hitting our storm drains. What about the crap that hits the bay from these camps! Why isn’t this a problem worth fixing?

I’m hoping you could bring some awareness to this issue. I’m sure the citizens of Eureka have no idea of the damage that is being done to our land.

Consider this an awareness boost. Next steps in bolstering environmental protection while remaining compassionate to our fellow humans? You might start by reaching out to your elected officials.

(Note: As I was writing this post in LoCOHQ, the same area referenced above became the site of a shooting.)

To make a more immediate difference, show up this Saturday to help the PacOut Green Team make Scenic Drive a cleaner place.

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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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