This story caught my eye. Sharks are such timeless creatures and have existed for so many millions of years and yet, mortality catches up with them just like it does us. Of course, with sharks, most die at the hands of humans that want their fins or meat, not from mysterious diseases. Even in their evolutionary mastery, the shark remains a vulnerable life form. Was this pollution, some form of red tide phenomena? If so, it's new. Shark deaths from water quality are rare.
From the Oakland Tribune
Dead sharks found in Redwood Shores were suffering from internal bleeding, necropsy shows
By Bonnie Eslinger
Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: 05/12/2011 12:17:37 AM PDT
Updated: 05/12/2011 06:48:52 AM PDT
Officials have completed a necropsy on one of the dozens of leopard sharks found dead in Redwood Shores last month but aren't any closer to pinpointing the cause of the sudden die-off.
The necropsy performed by a California Department of Fish and Game pathologist found "inflammation, bleeding, and lesions in the brain, and hemorrhaging from the skin near vents." Bleeding was also detected around the female shark's internal organs.
Additional tests, such as a bacterial study and microscopic tissue analysis, may provide an answer, according to a statement released by Redwood City. Results could be available by the end of the week.
"The ... pathologist is not drawing any conclusions until more examinations and all tests are performed," the statement said.
About 50 leopard sharks have been found dead in Redwood Shores since mid-April, according to the city.
Hundreds of the creatures have washed up on the shores of other Bay Area communities in recent weeks, said Sean Van Sommeran, executive director of the Santa Cruz-based Pelagic Shark Research Foundation. They have been reported in Foster City, Tiburon and as far north as Marin, but the highest concentration has been in the waterways of Redwood City.
"I suspect we're only seeing a tiny fraction of what's going on," he said.
Van Sommeran called the Department of Fish and Game's necropsy results "startling." He suspects a change in water quality may be to blame, but there
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has been no evidence of a large toxic spill in the area.
Tests of the Redwood Shores lagoon waters have revealed nothing unusual, according to Redwood City spokesman Malcolm Smith. The city is paying for the additional tests to determine the cause of the die-off.
Redwood City resident Catherine Greer was one of the first people to discover the dead sharks. She and her 13-year-old son Lorenzo Fernandez were fishing April 18 at the Redwood Shores lagoon when they spotted several of the creatures beached.
"I was really concerned to see one dead shark on the side of the water," she said. "Then what really concerned me is when I saw many more."
Greer said she and her son tried to push some of the sharks back into the water, "and they'd swim right back, thrashing their heads against the shore ... as if they were trying to commit suicide."
"I go fishing with my son," Greer added. "I know what their normal behavior is like, and what I saw was generally alarming."
According to Van Sommeran, the slender-bodied leopard shark, which typically grows to about four feet long, is a "pretty resistant" species.
Email Bonnie Eslinger at beslinger@dailynewsgroup.com.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Rachel Graham Honored for Whale Shark Conservation!
Scientist awarded for helping to make people love sharks
A scientist who has saved whale sharks in Belize from extinction has been honoured by the Princess Royal as the third woman in a row to win a prestigious prize for conservation.
Louise Gray
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 8:30PM BST 11 May 2011
Dr Rachel Graham was awarded the Whitley Gold Award by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne at the Royal Geographic Society in central London.
The £60,000 award, supported by Sir David Attenborough and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), will go towards further conservation work to try and save sharks and rays from overfishing off the coast of the Central American country.
Dr Graham has dedicated 20 years of her life to saving endangered species like the whale shark, a ‘gentle giant’ measuring up to 40ft long that feeds mostly on plankton.
The 43-year-old Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Gulf and Caribbean Sharks and Rays Programme, has won legal protection for the species in Belizean waters.
She also led innovative schemes to encourage people to protect rather than fear sharks by letting schoolchildren, students, planners and decision-makers see the gentle animals in the wild.
Dr Graham’s success is a further boost for women conservationists with last year’s Gold Award having gone to Angela Maldonado of Colombia for saving night monkeys and the 2009 prize to Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka of Uganda for her work with gorillas.
The same ceremony also saw the presentation of Whitley Awards worth £30,000 each in project funding to six other conservation leaders from Argentina, Croatia, India, Indonesian Borneo, Russia and Uzbekistan.
A short video about the work of each winner has been made with voice over from Sir David.
Georgina Domberger, Director of the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN), the UK-based charity behind the international awards scheme, said an increasing number of conservation projects in Eastern Europe are being rewarded for their efforts to help protect animals as the area develops.
Cave systems in Croatia, saiga antelopes in Uzbekistan and bats in Russia are being protected thanks to the award.
"The aim of the Whitley Awards is to identify and applaud inspirational conservation leaders, and support their efforts to make even greater use of their scientific expertise and local knowledge to deliver real and lasting benefits for people and wildlife and the places both share,” she said.
The Whitley Awards scheme is an annual competition, first held in 1994. In the 18 years since the scheme began, it has given grants worth more than £6m to support the work of conservation leaders in 70 countries.
The Gold Award 2011 is, for the first time, being sponsored by WWF-UK to celebrate its decade of support for the Whitley Awards, and acknowledge the golden jubilee of WWF-UK’s formation in 1961.
Complete story here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8508097/Scientist-awarded-for-helping-to-make-people-love-sharks.html
A scientist who has saved whale sharks in Belize from extinction has been honoured by the Princess Royal as the third woman in a row to win a prestigious prize for conservation.
Louise Gray
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 8:30PM BST 11 May 2011
Dr Rachel Graham was awarded the Whitley Gold Award by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne at the Royal Geographic Society in central London.
The £60,000 award, supported by Sir David Attenborough and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), will go towards further conservation work to try and save sharks and rays from overfishing off the coast of the Central American country.
Dr Graham has dedicated 20 years of her life to saving endangered species like the whale shark, a ‘gentle giant’ measuring up to 40ft long that feeds mostly on plankton.
The 43-year-old Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Gulf and Caribbean Sharks and Rays Programme, has won legal protection for the species in Belizean waters.
She also led innovative schemes to encourage people to protect rather than fear sharks by letting schoolchildren, students, planners and decision-makers see the gentle animals in the wild.
Dr Graham’s success is a further boost for women conservationists with last year’s Gold Award having gone to Angela Maldonado of Colombia for saving night monkeys and the 2009 prize to Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka of Uganda for her work with gorillas.
The same ceremony also saw the presentation of Whitley Awards worth £30,000 each in project funding to six other conservation leaders from Argentina, Croatia, India, Indonesian Borneo, Russia and Uzbekistan.
A short video about the work of each winner has been made with voice over from Sir David.
Georgina Domberger, Director of the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN), the UK-based charity behind the international awards scheme, said an increasing number of conservation projects in Eastern Europe are being rewarded for their efforts to help protect animals as the area develops.
Cave systems in Croatia, saiga antelopes in Uzbekistan and bats in Russia are being protected thanks to the award.
"The aim of the Whitley Awards is to identify and applaud inspirational conservation leaders, and support their efforts to make even greater use of their scientific expertise and local knowledge to deliver real and lasting benefits for people and wildlife and the places both share,” she said.
The Whitley Awards scheme is an annual competition, first held in 1994. In the 18 years since the scheme began, it has given grants worth more than £6m to support the work of conservation leaders in 70 countries.
The Gold Award 2011 is, for the first time, being sponsored by WWF-UK to celebrate its decade of support for the Whitley Awards, and acknowledge the golden jubilee of WWF-UK’s formation in 1961.
Complete story here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8508097/Scientist-awarded-for-helping-to-make-people-love-sharks.html
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Nutrients in Mississippi is a Complex Subject--Not All Just Fertilizer
Our environmental problems are frequently complex and recalcitrant to simple solutions. It's not as simple as sinking the Japanese whales ships in "Saving the Whales--A Bwana Doc Adventure. How do you save the Gulf of Mexico and stop the growth of the dead zone?
Study Probes Sources Of Mississippi River Phosphorus; Don't Blame Cow And Over-Fertilization
by Underwatertimes.com News Service - May 9, 2011 17:13 EST
MADISON, Wisconsin -- In their eagerness to cut nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, people have often sought simple explanations for the problem: too many large animal operations, for instance, or farmers who apply too much fertilizer, which then flows into waterways.
But according to new modeling research that examined phosphorus loading from all 1768 counties in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), the true causes aren't nearly so straightforward. Livestock manure is widespread in many MRB counties, for example, but it shows little relationship to water quality, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University in the May-June 2011 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality.
Moreover, areas that load the most phosphorus into the Mississippi are also places where farmers add less phosphorus to the soil than they remove each year in crop harvests, suggesting that overzealous fertilizer use is not the issue.
"If it were that, it would be easy to solve. But it's not that," says Mark David, a University of Illinois biogeochemist who led the research. "It's much more complex. So I think in that sense addressing the problem is harder."
Soil erosion and tile drainage contribute large amounts of phosphorus to the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico each year, helping fuel a "dead zone" of oxygen-starved water in the Gulf that reached near-record size last summer. Local water quality may also decline due to phosphorus-driven algal blooms.
In an effort to pinpoint the most important sources of phosphorus across the entire MRB, David's team calculated the yearly phosphorus inputs and outputs for every county in the basin from 1997 to 2006. After aggregating these and other data within 113 watersheds throughout the MRB, they then estimated the river load of phosphorus from every county between January and June for the same time period.
Not surprisingly, counties with intensive row crop agriculture, such as those in the Upper Midwest Corn Belt states of Iowa, Illinois and Ohio, contributed the most phosphorus to rivers. However, these same counties often showed negative phosphorus balances, meaning that phosphorus outputs in crops exceeded inputs by farmers.
In other words, farmers in these regions are actually mining stored phosphorus from the soil, rather than putting more into the system, David says. "But that negative balance doesn't have much to do with the phosphorus that gets in the river." Instead, the overall intensity of agriculture seems to matter most. "When I'm sitting here in Illinois in a watershed that's 95% corn and soybeans, it's going to lose some phosphorus," he says, "whether the balance is negative or positive."
In addition, although animal manure is considered a major phosphorus source to streams and rivers, it was relatively unimportant to phosphorus loading across the entire MRB. David suspects the reason is that most large-scale animal farms have moved to western states in the basin, such as Colorado, where there's less precipitation to carry manure nutrients into the Mississippi.
Phosphorus from human waste did prove significant. Counties encompassing Chicago and other major metropolitan areas "showed up as hot spots," David says, because most municipalities don't remove phosphorus from the otherwise clean sewage effluent they discharge into streams. The team further found that about half of the variation in phosphorus loadings was not explained by their models, suggesting that other factors also contribute, such as stream bank erosion and phosphorus deposits in river sediments.
Overall, the findings suggest that reducing phosphorus pollution will require broad adoption of practices that limit nutrient runoff, such as cover crops, buffer strips, and incorporation of fertilizers. It will also require limits on phosphorus discharge from cities.
Achieving these objectives across the entire MRB won't be easy, but David hopes the study helps people move beyond common assumptions about causes to focus on the real issues.
"To me the value of the study is that it helps shift the debate," David says. "The problem is not as simple as two things. It's not as simple as too much fertilizer or manure."
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Biocomplexity in the Environment/Coupled Natural-Human Cycles Program.
Study Probes Sources Of Mississippi River Phosphorus; Don't Blame Cow And Over-Fertilization
by Underwatertimes.com News Service - May 9, 2011 17:13 EST
MADISON, Wisconsin -- In their eagerness to cut nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, people have often sought simple explanations for the problem: too many large animal operations, for instance, or farmers who apply too much fertilizer, which then flows into waterways.
But according to new modeling research that examined phosphorus loading from all 1768 counties in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), the true causes aren't nearly so straightforward. Livestock manure is widespread in many MRB counties, for example, but it shows little relationship to water quality, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University in the May-June 2011 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality.
Moreover, areas that load the most phosphorus into the Mississippi are also places where farmers add less phosphorus to the soil than they remove each year in crop harvests, suggesting that overzealous fertilizer use is not the issue.
"If it were that, it would be easy to solve. But it's not that," says Mark David, a University of Illinois biogeochemist who led the research. "It's much more complex. So I think in that sense addressing the problem is harder."
Soil erosion and tile drainage contribute large amounts of phosphorus to the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico each year, helping fuel a "dead zone" of oxygen-starved water in the Gulf that reached near-record size last summer. Local water quality may also decline due to phosphorus-driven algal blooms.
In an effort to pinpoint the most important sources of phosphorus across the entire MRB, David's team calculated the yearly phosphorus inputs and outputs for every county in the basin from 1997 to 2006. After aggregating these and other data within 113 watersheds throughout the MRB, they then estimated the river load of phosphorus from every county between January and June for the same time period.
Not surprisingly, counties with intensive row crop agriculture, such as those in the Upper Midwest Corn Belt states of Iowa, Illinois and Ohio, contributed the most phosphorus to rivers. However, these same counties often showed negative phosphorus balances, meaning that phosphorus outputs in crops exceeded inputs by farmers.
In other words, farmers in these regions are actually mining stored phosphorus from the soil, rather than putting more into the system, David says. "But that negative balance doesn't have much to do with the phosphorus that gets in the river." Instead, the overall intensity of agriculture seems to matter most. "When I'm sitting here in Illinois in a watershed that's 95% corn and soybeans, it's going to lose some phosphorus," he says, "whether the balance is negative or positive."
In addition, although animal manure is considered a major phosphorus source to streams and rivers, it was relatively unimportant to phosphorus loading across the entire MRB. David suspects the reason is that most large-scale animal farms have moved to western states in the basin, such as Colorado, where there's less precipitation to carry manure nutrients into the Mississippi.
Phosphorus from human waste did prove significant. Counties encompassing Chicago and other major metropolitan areas "showed up as hot spots," David says, because most municipalities don't remove phosphorus from the otherwise clean sewage effluent they discharge into streams. The team further found that about half of the variation in phosphorus loadings was not explained by their models, suggesting that other factors also contribute, such as stream bank erosion and phosphorus deposits in river sediments.
Overall, the findings suggest that reducing phosphorus pollution will require broad adoption of practices that limit nutrient runoff, such as cover crops, buffer strips, and incorporation of fertilizers. It will also require limits on phosphorus discharge from cities.
Achieving these objectives across the entire MRB won't be easy, but David hopes the study helps people move beyond common assumptions about causes to focus on the real issues.
"To me the value of the study is that it helps shift the debate," David says. "The problem is not as simple as two things. It's not as simple as too much fertilizer or manure."
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Biocomplexity in the Environment/Coupled Natural-Human Cycles Program.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thoughts on Bin Laden's House and Environmental Consciousness
I was struck by how dingy and colorless Bin Laden's supposed "mansion" was. A grimmer house one could not imagine. Gray, no paint, no stucco, only his marijuana plants were green. I was struck by the similarity to the old Soviet Zone in East Berlin. In West Berlin there were lights, colorful billboards, painted buildings--in the East-everything was gray. People that rejoice in life like color. It makes us feel alive. People that appreciate the natural world and respect it likewise rejoice in color. The green of the forest, the many blues and grays of the seas, the extravagant palettes of animals and flowers. When people don't appreciate nature, everything is gray in their souls. Just like Bin Laden's house.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sharks can't see in color very well, but still are awesome predators
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Fire and Ice
Nowadays when I think about global warming, I think about that Robert Frost poem, "Fire and Ice".
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great,
And would suffice.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great,
And would suffice.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Reef Revelations: Saving Corals from Hotter Oceans
Written by Rod Salm
Published on August 4th, 2010
ShareThis | Discuss This Article
In 1990, I was living a conservationist’s dream.
While developing conservation plans along the coast of Oman, I found a place with great reefs and no people. It looked like protecting the reefs was going to be easy… until the waters heated, and heated, and heated.
This year, things are once again heating up, and we fear that we may witness the worst global coral bleaching event since 1998. But back in 1990, temperatures reached 95°F, hovering there for over a month and killing 95% of the corals through a process called bleaching. It raised a worrying question: how could we conserve coral reefs in the face of climate change?
This dilemma challenged me for a decade. I was based in East Africa when the 1997-’98 El Niño—and the following 1998-’99 La Niña—caused the greatest mass coral bleaching in recorded history, killing off 16% of the world’s coral reefs.
When I joined the Conservancy in 1999, I suddenly had access to a new range of project sites where I could study how climate change hastened coral bleaching. And the clear patterns in bleaching resistance and coral mortality in Palau helped me piece together a possible solution that could reduce bleaching caused by the current warming.
Bleaching is a stress response in corals caused by a number of factors, particularly hotter water temperatures and intense sunshine. So, it stands to reason that reducing the heat or light stress on corals will diminish the intensity of bleaching and reduce mortality.
The importance of this conclusion finally struck me when I was snorkeling around Palau’s Rock Islands. As I swam into the shade provided by one of the island’s rocky overhangs, I noticed live corals under my facemask of the same species that were dead under my swim fins. It all fell together: corals were alive and healthy when protected by cooler water or by shade.
Coral reef scientists were at their wits’ end about what to do regarding coral bleaching. But our observations of factors that help corals survive—and our knowledge of how to design networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) to protect and expand natural refuges—resonated with people around the world and prepared us for the impending bleaching event.
We have waited more than 10 years for another mass bleaching event to be able to test and refine the resilience hypotheses and the principles that Stephanie Wear and our Global Marine team have helped popularize. So, we are mobilizing our field teams and partners to track the current bleaching event in Indonesia and Palau as well as the Caribbean. This new information will allow us to better design MPA networks and ensure that they protect the most resilient corals that will repopulate and heal more vulnerable reefs.
While it’s tragic to witness another major bleaching event, this one can help us improve our methods and the prospects for global coral reef survival. Reefs provide fish, diving and coastal protection: hopefully, we can ensure that enough of them remain to fulfill any conservationist’s dream.
Rod Salm is the Conservancy’s director of marine conservation programs in the Asia Pacific.
(Image 1: Shaded corals with no bleaching. Credit: Rod Salm/TNC. Image 2: Fantasy Reef pale corals with early heat stress. Credit: Rod Salm/TNC.)
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Published on August 4th, 2010
ShareThis | Discuss This Article
In 1990, I was living a conservationist’s dream.
While developing conservation plans along the coast of Oman, I found a place with great reefs and no people. It looked like protecting the reefs was going to be easy… until the waters heated, and heated, and heated.
This year, things are once again heating up, and we fear that we may witness the worst global coral bleaching event since 1998. But back in 1990, temperatures reached 95°F, hovering there for over a month and killing 95% of the corals through a process called bleaching. It raised a worrying question: how could we conserve coral reefs in the face of climate change?
This dilemma challenged me for a decade. I was based in East Africa when the 1997-’98 El Niño—and the following 1998-’99 La Niña—caused the greatest mass coral bleaching in recorded history, killing off 16% of the world’s coral reefs.
When I joined the Conservancy in 1999, I suddenly had access to a new range of project sites where I could study how climate change hastened coral bleaching. And the clear patterns in bleaching resistance and coral mortality in Palau helped me piece together a possible solution that could reduce bleaching caused by the current warming.
Bleaching is a stress response in corals caused by a number of factors, particularly hotter water temperatures and intense sunshine. So, it stands to reason that reducing the heat or light stress on corals will diminish the intensity of bleaching and reduce mortality.
The importance of this conclusion finally struck me when I was snorkeling around Palau’s Rock Islands. As I swam into the shade provided by one of the island’s rocky overhangs, I noticed live corals under my facemask of the same species that were dead under my swim fins. It all fell together: corals were alive and healthy when protected by cooler water or by shade.
Coral reef scientists were at their wits’ end about what to do regarding coral bleaching. But our observations of factors that help corals survive—and our knowledge of how to design networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) to protect and expand natural refuges—resonated with people around the world and prepared us for the impending bleaching event.
We have waited more than 10 years for another mass bleaching event to be able to test and refine the resilience hypotheses and the principles that Stephanie Wear and our Global Marine team have helped popularize. So, we are mobilizing our field teams and partners to track the current bleaching event in Indonesia and Palau as well as the Caribbean. This new information will allow us to better design MPA networks and ensure that they protect the most resilient corals that will repopulate and heal more vulnerable reefs.
While it’s tragic to witness another major bleaching event, this one can help us improve our methods and the prospects for global coral reef survival. Reefs provide fish, diving and coastal protection: hopefully, we can ensure that enough of them remain to fulfill any conservationist’s dream.
Rod Salm is the Conservancy’s director of marine conservation programs in the Asia Pacific.
(Image 1: Shaded corals with no bleaching. Credit: Rod Salm/TNC. Image 2: Fantasy Reef pale corals with early heat stress. Credit: Rod Salm/TNC.)
You might also like:
Expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands: Monitoring Coral Reef ...
Expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands: Ecoresort Protects ...
Expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands: The Beauty of ...
LinkWithin
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