Deep Sea News

President Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 into law yesterday, authorizing sustained funding for ocean exploration, mapping, coastal and ocean observation, ocean acidification research and monitoring, coastal and estuarine land conservation, and… shipwrecks! They’re in there somewhere. I just know it. ; )

An astute commenter pointed out this is authorizing language, not appropriation, so don’t get too excited. Not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds like a reference to teh Budget. Sheril has the scoop over at the Intersection.

What better way to get at the question of recreational fishing impacts to ocean wildlife than to study historical pictures of the day’s catch on the docks at Key West, Florida? The American island paradise is legendary for fishing, frequented by Ernest Hemingway and other huntsmen since the early 1950’s.

Trends in the size and types of trophy fish landed from Key West 1957 to 2008 is the subject Loren McClenachan’s thesis research at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The scientific results are published in Conservation Biology with the unsurprising title “loss of large trophy fish” (McClenachan, 2009). The photo below is from 1958, shall we say, back in the good old days?

Fishing trophies in 1958, from Monroe County Library in Key West.

To see what fishermen were catching off Key West between then and now, stop and visit Mark Powell at Blogfish, or read the interview with McClenachan by Julia Griffin from the Miller-McCune Center, also with images.

The photo survey documented major changes in the last 50 years, including large declines in fish size, and a shift from large Groupers to small Snappers. Its a great case study. Let’s hope this message gets to where it needs to be, among the fishermen.

What can be done to turn this around? First, set maximum (not only minimum) size limits. Old fish produce the most eggs. Second, secure marine protected areas around essential fish habitat. MPAs work, but too many lack no-take zones. Third, engage broad stewardship. Practice catch and release, limit destructive fishing gear, etc. There must be more. What’s your solution?

Citation:

McCLENACHAN, L. (2009). Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01152.x

Imagine yourself from the inside of the wave, barreling shoreward, and exploding out into millions of watery pieces. Intense stuff. Clark Little, a surfer from Hawai’i with over 30 years experience, took his intimate knowledge of the ocean and frames an awe-inspiring vision of his home state from the perspective of the wave.

“I enjoy the power and beauty of the thick bombs that roll through. Now I can capture some of those heavy moments without getting slammed. Well, most of the time.” – Clark Little

Clark’s work has appeared in magazines, newspapers, and news shows across the country, even receiving international acclaim. One of his portraits even hangs in the White House – a wave crashing into a beach where President Obama himself once body-surfed.

His gallery is a must see. I went through it all in one sitting. Can anyone else find the wave that looks like a conch shell? Or is just my imagination he has captured? Order a print from his very reasonably priced collection and don’t forget to surf around his website and get to know him a little bit. His positive energy and enthusiasm will keep you plenty stoked. Just check out this interview with Good Morning America!

Errant polychaete from a Pacific coast kelp holdfast; filmed during an Invertebrate Zoology lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

A sense of place. It’s essential to deep-sea exploration. We’re far from land, on a flat horizon, hovering over echosounder output from the seafloor below. We watch a map drawn line by line by line. It takes hours for small features, days for large ones. In time, different things are revealed to different people. Geological history unfolds in the minds of the geologists, habitats unfold for biologists. Then we dive to check our assumptions.

When we get home, the first decision is what to show you- the map, or the video. This is one reason I like Google Earth so much. It lets me do both. To be fair, Google Earth is not the only game in town for multimedia maps. Microsoft is offering a similar visualization platform through their Live Search Maps using NavTeq data in a BBC News story on Dam Construction in Ethiopia. Check it out. It flies!

Given, there’s no evidence of seafloor topography like you find in GE 5.0, but the interface is smooth. Zooming and panning are a breeze. The text and video are clear. The Ethiopian dam story makes me fear for the natural ecosystem, but there’s no denying that Live Maps could be a good platform for constrained area representation, visualizing expeditions on a regional scale, so long as seafloor topography’s not mission critical. If it is, you put it in a pop-up window. Sometimes we just don’t need the whole planet to tell our stories.

What do readers think? Google Earth vs Microsoft Virtual Earth. What works, what doesn’t?

Is over at Southern Fried Science. I thought I was pretty hairy, but man look at the russian bear with the shark! We are moving to biweekly updates now. See you in 2 weeks! (Although we might lose whysharksmatters underneath a mountain of hair…)

Courtesy of Morris Architects. In the future oil derricks will be luxury hotels and condos, and people wil ski around them in beautiful formations

Thousands of offshore oil rigs dot the ocean with nearly 4,000 in the Gulf of Mexico ready to be decommissioned.  What do we with all those derricks? Luxury Hotels

Morris Architects proposes:
If a deck on one of these rigs is about 20,000 square feet, then there is potentially 80 million square feet of programmable space just off the coast of the United States. The current method for rig removal is explosion, which costs millions of dollars and destroys massive amounts of aquatic life. What if these rigs were recommissioned as exclusive resort islands? Could the Gulf be America’s “Dubai” and the rig the artificial island on which to build it? This project examines the possibilities of creating a self-sufficient, eco-friendly high-end resort experience in our own backyard – the Gulf of Mexico.

The rooms themselves are prefabricated and shipped to the platform.  But don’t worry if they actually build these you won’t be able to afford it.  Hat tip to BLDGBLOG

Rooms arrive by ship, sliding open like Transformers to form individual cabinettes. Courtesy of Morris Architects

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Sheril Kirshenbaum of the new Intersection blog at Discover alerts us that the House passed HR 146 yesterday,  so the big ocean bill is one step closer to becoming law. Congrats to Sheril and Chris Mooney for their promotion from Scienceblogs. Here’s the details on the oceanic stimulus package.

• “Ocean and Coastal Exploration and NOAA Act.” Directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to establish an integrated mapping program encompassing the Great Lakes, coastal state waters, the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone, and the continental shelf of the United States. Cost: $872 million over five years, $1.5 billion over the 2008-2017 period.
• “Coastal and Ocean Observation Act.” Directs the National Ocean Research Leadership Council to develop and operate an integrated coastal and ocean observation system. Cost: $800 million over five years.
• “Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act.” Establishes a new federal program within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to conduct research and public outreach on ocean acidification. Cost: $100 million over five years.
• “Coastal and Estuarine Land Protection Act.” Directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to establish a new federal program to protect land near coastal areas and estuaries. Under the program, NOAA would make grants to coastal states that wish to purchase eligible lands or other property interests. Cost: $240 million over five years.

This is supplemental to RFPs for newly minted funds for habitat restoration and education making the rounds recently among marine science organizations. Suddenly there’s so much money around that people are wondering how to spend it. Not a bad problem to have!

A gold coral (Gerardia sp.) from 400 m in Hawaii est. 2700 years old.

It hasn’t been too long since Brendan Roark first reported that deep-sea corals off Hawaii are clocking in as the world’s oldest animal. At four thousand years old, the Leiopathes sp. black corals beat the quahog clams, which live to be four hundred, and they beat the tortoise Jonathon, who’s 176. Of course, these deep-sea gold and black corals are colonial creatures, a little bit like the giant honey mushroom in Oregon that 35 miles across and 2400 years old. That means the individual polyps can die back, but the stalk remains for the polyps to recolonize. Here lies a bit of a conflict, which was published March 23 in the online edition of PNAS.

The polyps may have been feeding on re-suspended sediment, which could have a carbon signature older than the colony, not on photosynthesized carbon from surface waters. However, the carbon 14 in the polyps matches the overlying water column, indeed its been reported that the deep-sea corals are feeding on freshly minted organic material as young as five days old. That’s rapid transport to the deep-sea. Read more about the details from Roark’s colleague Dr. Tom Guilderson at Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory. The investigation was teamwork from a broad group of scientists from Stanford, LLNL, UC Santa Cruz, and Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratories.

To credit the skeptics, once you take the carbon 14 out of the picture, not everything makes sense. Dr. Richard Grigg at Univ of Hawaii has been studying in-situ growth rates of black corals and gold corals since the mid-70’s. He’s perhaps the only person in Hawaii to have actually tagged a coral 400 m deep and returned to measure its radial growth. Grigg estimated these corals at 70 years. He told me once, “There’s one thing you can’t deny, and that’s reality.” Nature News gives credit to the argument that the animals ingest old and new carbon.

Part of the confusion lies in the fact that growth rings in the marine environment are not necessarily annual growth rings. Bamboo corals are relatively “weedy” deep-coral species, from 50 – 150 years old. These have subannual, or lunar, growth rings linked to plankton cycles (Roark et al 2005) or tidal fluctuations on seamounts. Gold corals may lay down their growth rings once a decade. The problem is there has been no longitudinal study measuring in-situ growth rates, current flows, and suspended sediments, so perhaps we’ll never know for sure.

Here’s a few things to consider. First, benthic cnidarians are one of the most basal groups in the tree of life, among the oldest metazoans, in the fossil record back to the Proterozoic. Let’s just say they’re highly adapted to their environment. Second, if you think about clonal marine organisms, you’ll eventually need to revise your definition of what makes a living thing. Anemones reproduce clones by pinching off little buds of flesh. They have been called “immortal” in the sense that their DNA lingers on even as the cloned individuals expire. How do you define old in this sense? Finally, there is evidence that some deep octocorals have expired, and their axis recolonized. The evidence is in the relaxed growth of a 300 year old bamboo coral (Noe and Dullo 2006). Did the colony ever die if it lived to grow again?

Either way, the carbon says these corals are old as the hills, my friends. Think about that next time you order the orange roughy. They trawl for that stuff, dragging up corals by the dozens.

UPDATE, April 6 – Gerardia captured alive on video!

Citation:

Roark, E., Guilderson, T., Dunbar, R., Fallon, S., & Mucciarone, D. (2009). Extreme longevity in proteinaceous deep-sea corals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810875106

Noé, S., & Dullo, W. (2006). Skeletal morphogenesis and growth mode of modern and fossil deep-water isidid gorgonians (Octocorallia) in the West Pacific (New Zealand and Sea of Okhotsk) Coral Reefs, 25 (3), 303-320 DOI: 10.1007/s00338-006-0095-8

Roark, E., Guilderson, T.P., Flood-Page, S., Dunbar, R.B., Ingram, B.L., Fallon, S.J., & McCulloch, M. (2005). Radiocarbon-based ages and growth rates of bamboo corals from the Gulf of Alaska Geophysical Research Letters, 32 (4) DOI: 10.1029/2004GL021919

Oxygen candles and CO2 scrubbers are the lifeline of a submarine dwelling 200 feet under Arctic ice, but faulty units are to blame for the deaths of two British mariners in 2007, according to coroner’s findings reported by the BBC.

The deaths of Anthony Huntrod, 20, from Sunderland and Paul McCann, 32, from Halesowen in the West Midlands, aboard HMS Tireless have been attributed to systematic failures related to the procurement and maintenance of self-contained oxygen generators (SCOG) in the forward compartments of the submarine. 

The two mechanics were trapped in a forward escape by the explosion of a SCOG while the submarine was under hundreds of feet of Arctic ice. May they rest in peace. The incident highlights the importance of knowing your equipment’s life history, as the unit in question may have been retrieved from a hazardous waste depot.