by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 11, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By the Associated Press
The U.S. Navy may hurt more dolphins and whales by using sonar and explosives in Hawaii and California under a more thorough analysis that reflects new research and covers naval activities in a wider area than previous studies.
The Navy estimates its use of explosives and sonar may unintentionally cause more than 1,600 instances of hearing loss or other injury to marine mammals each year, according to a draft environmental impact statement that covers training and testing planned from 2014 to 2019. The Navy calculates the explosives could potentially kill more than 200 marine mammals a year.
A notice about the study is due to appear Friday in the Federal Register.
The old Navy analysis — covering 2009-2013 — estimated the service might unintentionally cause injury or death to about 100 marine mammals in Hawaii and California, although no deaths have been reported.
The larger numbers are partially the result of the Navy’s use of new research on marine mammal behavior and updated computer models that predict how sonar affects animals.
The Navy also expanded the scope of its study to include things like in-port sonar testing — something sailors have long done but wasn’t analyzed in the Navy’s last environmental impact statement. The analysis covers training and testing in waters between Hawaii and California for the first time as well.
“Each time around, each time we swing through this process, we get better, we take a harder look, we become more inclusive,” said John Van Name, senior environmental planner at the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The Navy isn’t saying it will injure whales and dolphins as it trains sailors and tests equipment. It’s telling the public and environmental regulators that its actions have the potential to harm or otherwise prompt a reaction in the animals.
The Navy takes a variety of measures to prevent harm to the animals, including turning off sonar when marine mammals are spotted nearby. It says the actual numbers of injured animals would be lower as a result.
Read more from The Washington Post:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 9, 2012 | Toxification
By University of California, San Diego
A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.
At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
Such an increase, documented for the first time in a marine invertebrate (animal without a backbone) in the open ocean, may have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs.
“This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it’s having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate,” said Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, lead author of the study and chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a UC Ship Funds-supported voyage. “We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic.”
The new study follows a report published last year by Scripps researchers in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series showing that nine percent of the fish collected during SEAPLEX contained plastic waste in their stomachs. That study estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year.
The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.
In April, researchers with the Instituto Oceanográfico in Brazil published a report that eggs of Halobates micans, another species of sea skater, were found on many plastic bits in the South Atlantic off Brazil.
“Plastic only became widespread in late ’40s and early ’50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we’ve seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic,” said Goldstein. “Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better.”
From PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-05-plastic-trash-ocean-habitats.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 12, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Craig Welch / The Seattle Times
Researchers said Wednesday they have conclusive evidence that ocean acidification is at least partly responsible for killing oysters on the West Coast.
It’s been eight years since baby oysters started dying by the billions at an Oregon hatchery and in Washington’s Willapa Bay.
In 2009, top scientists drew global attention when they said evidence suggested the culprit might be changing ocean chemistry from the same greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. They just couldn’t prove it — until now.
Researchers said Wednesday they can definitively show that ocean acidification is at least partly responsible for massive oyster die-offs at the hatchery in Netarts Bay, Ore.
It’s the first concrete finding in North America that carbon dioxide being taken up by the oceans already is helping kill marine species.
“This is the smoking gun for oyster larvae,” said Richard Feely, an oceanographer and leading marine-chemistry researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle and one of the paper’s authors.
Said Alan Barton, another of the paper’s authors: “It’s now an incontrovertible fact that ocean chemistry is affecting our larvae.”
In a paper published this week in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, the scientists studied the water that gets pumped from the Pacific Ocean into the Whiskey Creek Hatchery, which supplies baby shellfish for most of the West Coast’s $110 million-a-year oyster industry.
Here’s why: Since 2005, wild oysters along the Washington coast and at the hatchery had been dying inexplicably in their larval stages. At first the suspect was a bacterial disease, but hatchery workers soon noticed that the die-offs only occurred after high winds drew water from the ocean deep.
Unlike the complex mechanics of climate change, ocean acidification is just basic chemistry. Scientists long had predicted that as carbon dioxide from fossil fuels gets taken up by the seas, ocean waters — typically slightly alkaline — would slide closer to the acidic side of the pH scale. They just expected it would take 50 to 100 years.
But Feely and other top researchers in 2007 and 2008 had discovered that the pH of marine waters along the West Coast had dropped decades earlier than expected.
Read more from The Seattle Times
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 10, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling
By New Zealand Herald
The death of about 3000 dolphins on a stretch of Peruvian coast in recent months is being blamed on a controversial oil exploration technique.
However other experts are not convinced, and believe a virus or pathogen may be responsible for one of the largest dolphin die-offs recorded.
So far this year, thousands of dolphins have washed up on a 135km stretch of coastline in Lambayeque, in northwestern Peru.
Numbers differ between reports, with some reporting more than 3000 of the mammals have been found dead in the past three months. Others have the figure around 2800.
Ninety percent of the dead are long-beaked common dolphins, while the remainder are Burmeister’s porpoises.
Veterinarian Carlos Yaipen, director of Lima’s Scientific Organisation for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals told Peru21 the deaths were the result of sonar testing for oil.
“The oil companies use different frequencies of acoustic waves and the effects produced by these bubbles are not plainly visible, but they generate effects later in the animals.
That can cause death by acoustic impact, not only in dolphins, but also in marine seals and whales,” Yaipen said.
All of 20 of the mammals Yaipen examined had middle ear hemorrhaging, fractures to the ear’s periotic bone, lung lesions and bubbles in the blood. Yaipen said this indicated the animals were injured but still alive when they beached.
According to a report in the Environmental Health News, oil exploration has been undertaken in the region, however it is not known whether seismic testing was underway.
Peter Ross, a research scientist at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, told the Environmental Health News stress or toxic contaminants may have made the dolphins more vulnerable to pathogens. He said there may be two or three factors responsible for the deaths.
From New Zealand Herald: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10797875
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 10, 2012 | Toxification
By Agence France-Presse
Radioactive iodine was found in kelp off the US West Coast following last year’s earthquake-triggered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, according to a new study.
It was already known that radioactive iodine 131 (131-I), carried in the atmosphere, made it across the Pacific within days of the March 11, 2011 tsunami disaster, albeit in minuscule amounts.
But marine biologists at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) discovered the radioactive isotope in ocean kelp, which is “one of the strongest plant accumulators of iodine,” within a month of the accident.
“We measured significant, although most likely non-harmful levels of radioactive iodine in tissue of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera,” said Steven L. Manley, author of the study with Christopher G. Lowe
“Although it is probably not harmful for humans because it was relatively low levels, it may have affected certain fish that graze on the tissue because fish have a thyroid system that utilizes iodine.”
The study, “Canopy-Forming Kelps as California’s Coastal Dosimeter: 131I from Damaged Japanese Reactor Measured in Macrocystis pyrifera,” appears in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Read more from PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-04-japan-kelp-west-coast.html
