I was born in 1985, which is a bit of an awkward year, culturally. I’m technically a millennial, but I was a bit too old for most of the fads that swept through the millennial generation. I never owned a Bratz doll. I missed the brief yo-yo boom. And I never played Pokémon, in game or card form. That’s not to say I was too cool for that sort of thing as a kid; I was a total geek. Heck, I had a dragon deck before the Onslaught block made tribal decks cool (that would be Magic the Gathering, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about)—I just wasn’t quite the right age at the right time to be hit by the Pokémon craze. I had never tried to catch a Pokémon until last week, when my boyfriend and roommate convinced me to try Pokémon Go. It’s… addicting.
A few days later, I was already one of “those” people, glued to my phone as I paced up and down Kohou street. THERE! I stopped abruptly as I engaged a Tentacool that appeared on my screen. My eyes narrowed as I gently flicked my Pokéball at the cp179 Tentacool perched awkwardly on the hood of a parked car. After a few rattles, the red and white ball became still, emitting the “Gotcha!” stars, and I did a slightly embarrassing victory dance (my friend once dubbed it my “T. rex dance” because of my jilted arm movements). As a box jelly scientist, I had been keeping a keen eye out for these jellyfish Pokémon for days, but I had only seen them off in the distance, some three footsteps away. Frustrated, I finally had decided to go hunting near a local canal on my way back home from running errands, hoping I would find these water Pokémon near, you know, water—a tactic that paid off. My goofy grin quickly changed, however, when I was awarded a metal for catching my 10th “Poison-type” Pokémon. “Poison!” I actually exclaimed aloud. “Jellies are venomous!”
Researchers survey bleached corals in the shallow water in Cygnet Bay, Western Australia, during current bleaching event. Photo Credit: Chris Cornwall
April marked the twelfth consecutive month of record-breaking temperatures. That’s an entire year of our planet, on land and in the sea, being hotter-than-ever-recorded since record keeping began in 1880. Such extraordinary warmth is affecting ecosystems globally, but perhaps the hardest hit are coral reefs, whose fundamental organisms are incredibly sensitive to the heat.
Earlier this year, authorities in Australia reported that the Great Barrier Reef was in the midst of its worst bleaching event ever. Surveys above and below the water estimated that over 90% of the reefs were affected by bleaching. Now, as the summer wanes down under, scientists are finally able to begin to assess the lasting damage caused by this event. Their findings are heartbreaking. Continue reading “The Summer One Third of the Great Barrier Reef Died”
The stunning biodiversity of a “coral” reef. Photo by Laura D
Rising carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are changing Earth’s climate at an unprecedented rate. Not only is our planet getting warmer on average—in the oceans, a chemical reaction spurred by dissolved CO2 is altering water chemistry, causing a decrease in pH. This effect of climate change, called ocean acidification, can dissolve the calcium carbonate foundations of coral reefs and other calcifying organisms, making it impossible to build and maintain healthy reefs. Luckily, recent studies on how corals react to lower pHs has given scientists hope that they may be more resilient than previously thought. However, to truly understand how reefs will respond to climate change, we have to look at more than just corals.
Reefs are complex ecosystems, the bases of which are comprised of so much more than corals. There are other species which act as calcifiers, adding to the carbonate foundation (such as crustose coralline algae). The contribution of these non-coral species to reef growth, called secondary accretion, helps shape the surface and guide the settlement of larval corals. There are also species that eat away at the reef, including many worms and sponges. These bioeroders can weaken reef structures until they crumble apart. Whether a reef grows or shrinks over time depends on the interplay between its corals, other reef-builders, and the burrowing organisms which eat their way through the reef’s carbonate foundation. Continue reading “Reef “Cat Scans” Reveal Another Way Acidification Speeds Erosion”
Who’s the cutest wittle snakey-wakey? This Western hognose, that’s who. Photo by Borhuah Chen
When you look one of these little snakes in its adorable little face, it’s not hard to see how the hognose got its name. Their upturned snoots give the snakes a porcine appearance.
But hognoses don’t just have adorable nasal features—they are also the drama queens of the serpent world. If you thought William Shatner wins the prize for worst over-actor on the planet, think again:
Though scientists have been warning about the disastrous impacts that climate change will have on our planet for decades, we are now starting to feel those predictions manifest. As Eric Holthaus pointed out, the “worst nightmare” scenarios are already happening. Droughts, storms, fires, you name it—the world as we knew it is under siege. Heck, we just had the most abnormally hot month on record; February 2016 was 1.35 degrees Celsius warmer than the average, making it two-tenths of a degree more unusually warm than the previous record month: January 2016.
And as water supplies dwindle, rainforests burn, and corals bleach, we may have yet another thing to worry about: frickin’ snakes.
A team of Canadian and American ecologists, led by world-renowned fisheries biologist Ransom Myers at Dalhousie University, has found that overfishing the largest predatory sharks, such as the bull, great white, dusky, and hammerhead sharks, along the Atlantic Coast of the United States has led to an explosion of their ray, skate, and small shark prey species.
“With fewer sharks around, the species they prey upon — like cownose rays — have increased in numbers, and in turn, hordes of cownose rays dining on bay scallops, have wiped the scallops out,” says co-author Julia Baum of Dalhousie.
The study, which described the evidence for a shark-ray-shellfish trophic cascade leading to a collapse of the Chesapeake Bay scallop fishery, became an instant classic. “This is the first published field experiment to demonstrate that the loss of sharks is cascading through ocean ecosystems and inflicting collateral damage on food fisheries such as scallops,” said Ellen Pikitch, then a professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, in the original press release.
The study had all the ideal components of blockbuster research: it was led by one of the world’s most preeminent fisheries biologists. It played to both sides of an age-old rivalry; it had a strong shark conservation message, providing much needed data to support the claim that sharks are vital ecosystem components. Yet at the same time, the study hit home with locals and fishermen, explaining why a once lucrative fishery was reduced to a mere shell of its former glory. The phenomenon it described—a top-down trophic cascade, with sharks as the key species—had been hypothesized for years but never demonstrated. And, whether intended or not, the paper provided an easy and achievable solution for the area’s woes: fish the rays instead of the sharks, and everyone wins. Frankly, it just made sense.
“People thought ‘Finally! Some evidence for this top down control by sharks,’ and accepted it without critically reading and reviewing the paper,” said Dean Grubbs, an elasmobranch ecologist with Florida State University. Though Grubbs and others had issues with the paper’s methods and conclusions, especially regarding the reproductive biology of rays, their initial worries were drowned out by the loud trumpeting the paper received. “We were concerned that this could quickly get out of hand,” Grubbs said. And it did. The paper became one of the most well known studies ever conducted in marine ecology, garnering almost 900 citations in the last 9 years.
“It just seems like virtually everyone who wants to talk about shark conservation knows this story, and most of them believe it,” said Sonja Fordham, founder and president of the non-profit Shark Advocates International. But when she read the press release almost a decade ago, she remembers being “troubled” by the reference to “hordes” of cownose rays. Rays, after all, are just flattened sharks, and share many of the same life history characteristics that make sharks so vulnerable to overfishing in the first place. “The paper was very pro shark conservation, so I found it very surprising that it would not see the potential danger of suggesting that a different type of elasmobranch had run amok.”
Her worst fears were soon realized, as cownose rays became touted as sustainable seafood. The states where the rays are native, including Maryland and Virginia, pushed to put ray fillets on everyone’s plates. “As this fishery developed and this paper became more and more widely cited, we decided we had to put a rebuttal together,” said Grubbs. That rebuttal was published last week in Scientific Reports, and it tears the notion of a shark-ray-shellfish trophic cascade to shreds. Continue reading “Ray Fillets Won’t Save The Bay: Scientists Exonerate Cownose Rays After Nine Years”
An angry octopus ready for a fight. Image credit: David Scheel
Scientists have long thought that octopus are largely asocial creatures. But a new study finds that these eight-legged cephalopods are actually quite gregarious, and their lives are full of sex and conflict. There hasn’t been this much drama under the sea since The Little Mermaid! Continue reading “The Real Octowives of Jervis Bay”
The dreaded tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier) is among a tiny minority of fish species (<1%!) whose distributions span oceans, according to a new paper. Range map from FishBase, picture of shark by Albert Kok.
Fifty-five years ago, Jack Briggs determined there were 107 fish species with a trait most fish cannot boast: a global distribution. These circumtropical species can be found in all tropical oceans, having found their way around the land masses which split the seas (at least often enough to persist as a single species). Now, in a publication for the journal Fish and Fisheries, Briggs has teamed up with Michelle Gaither, a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University, UK, and colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the California Academy of Sciences to update the half-century-old list. Of the over 20,000 marine fish species, a mere 284 span the seas to maintain a global distribution.
The team was able to re-evaluate Briggs’ original list thanks to breakthroughs in DNA sequencing that have occurred over the past 50 years. By looking at genetic sequences rather than just morphological differences, scientists are able to not only separate similar looking species, they are able to determine whether a single species is split into distinct populations or whether individuals are able to travel vast distances to keep disparate areas connected. Thanks to genetic data, nineteen of the original 107 have since been shown to be complexes of multiple species or not to make it around the globe, while 196 new species have joined the 1% club. Continue reading “What It Takes To Rule The (Marine) World”
