Oil detection - picture by CSIRO

Scientists of the CSIRO have come up with a revolutionary new way to quickly detect and find out how much petroleum hydrocarbons (which you get from crude oil) is present in soil, silt, sediment, or even rock.

This new technique to detect oil was developed with the aid of the waste technology specialist Ziltek Pty Ltd. What makes this new technique so revolutionary is that scientists are now able to detect and find out how much oil there is in a specific area by using a hand-held infrared spectrometer. This means no more bothersome tests, or taking samples and engaging in arduous processing practices.

This technique is not only useful for finding new sources of oil, but it can also be useful when it comes to assessing and monitoring those places where off-shore oil spills have occurred, or even assessing sites where urban redevelopment is planned.

“Petroleum hydrocarbons are a valuable resource, but can also be pretty nasty environmental contaminants,” explains Sean Forrester, a CSIRO scientist.

“They can remain in the environment for extended periods of time and can be harmful to wildlife, plants and humans. Better tools to detect them makes a rapid response possible.”

The technique developed utilizes infrared signals to detect petroleum and hydrocarbons in samples collected from sites of interest.
“The ability of this new technique to rapidly detect the presence of contaminants at the site has the potential to provide significant cost advantages, in terms of reduced testing costs and the avoidance of delays.” Mr Forrester concluded.

Handcuffs

A Japanese company was caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They were caught in one of the biggest fisheries bust in New Zealand, illegally reeling in 600 tonnes of fish.

The Fisheries ministry has said that Kanai Fisheries Company, Aurora Fisheries, a New Zealand fishing company, and four Japanese Citizens have pleaded guilt to a combine 54 charges in the Wellington district court.

Each charge means a hefty fine of up to $250,000, bringing the possible total to a staggering $1,350,000 in damages, not including other penalties.

Andrew Coleman, the Fisheries Ministry’s field operations deputy chief executive, has commented that the operation lasted almost two years, involved 25 staff, and was the biggest operation in the history of the organization.

He went on to comment that the Japanese company bought out part of Aurora Fisheries quota which in turned allowed them to fish in New Zealand waters.

Tomi Maru 87, the company’s fishing boat, then proceeded to catch 112 tonnes of silver warehou and 481 tonnes of ling in a short two year period. The problem is that the area where the fish were reeled in was off the southern coast of the South Island, and outside of Aurora’s quota area.

However the company reported that the fish were caught well inside these boundaries. The export value of the ill gotten fish was estimated to be in the vicinity of $2.4 Million.

It should be noted that even though a guilty plea has been entered, does not mean any convictions will be made… Only time will tell.

The temperature of the ocean is key in determining just how productive and how much biodiversity there is in the ocean and also where it is.

There have been two separate studies in which researchers discovered that the ocean heating up has caused a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the ocean over the past 100 years. The studies also indicated that there is a link between the ambient temperature of the water of the ocean and the different patterns of marine biodiversity.

“We are just now understanding how deeply temperature affects ocean life,” explained Boris Worm, a biologist of Dalhousie University, and also co-author on both reports published in the July 28 edition of Nature. “It is not necessarily that increased temperature is destroying biodiversity, but we do know that a warmer ocean will look very different.”

In one of the studies performed which took a look at the historical amounts of algae concentrations over the last century, Worm and his associates have discovered that the rising temperatures of the oceans are directly related to the massive decline in marine algae, commonly know in scientific circles as phytoplankton. These phytoplankton also happen to be the base of the food chain for the ocean, and were responsible for creating oxygen on Earth.

The research seems to indicate that the marine algae has declined by about 40 percent since the 1950’s.
“I think that if this study holds up, it will be one of the biggest biological changes in recent times simply because of its scale,” explained Worm. “The ocean is two-thirds of the earth’s surface area, and because of the depth dimension it is probably 80 to 90 percent of the biosphere. Even the deep sea depends on phytoplankton production that rains down. On land, by contrast, there is only a very thin layer of production.”

The study focused on the phytoplankton is the first study to have looked at the changes over the past 100 years, on a global scale and using data from as far back as 1899. Some similar models have been made using the newly available data from satellites, however that data only goes back as far as 1979.

“One of the most important aspects of the new paper is that they’ve come up with the same answer but from a different approach than we saw from space,” explained Michael Behrenfeld, a marine biologist from Oregon State University. “I think that we should be concerned that this convergence of multiple approaches sees a reduction in the phytoplankton pigments as the ocean warms. If we continue to warm the climate we will probably see further reductions.”

So there you have it.. Global warming is having an adverse effect on our oceans.. I guess it’s time somebody stepped up to the plate to do something about it, however the issue has been ignored for so long, it might be very difficult to remedy the situation. Well, at least now there is solid “proof” that there is a problem, and it might finally provide the incentive needed for action to be taken.

Faroe Islands

On the 19th of July, some 236 pilot whales met a rather ruthless demise in the town of Klaksvik, located in the Danish Faeroe Islands. Thanks to the excellent work of an undercover operative of Sea Shepherd, who was amongst the locals to document “the grind”, the whole thing was caught on tape! The grind is a very inhumane practice of whaling which involves herding the pods of cetaceans in coves, before stabbing them in the back with a knife!

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd undercover operative who also happens to be the First Mate of Sea Shepherd’s vessel the Bob Barker, had been deeply undercover with these barbaric islanders for seven days when he heard the news of a grind taking place in Klaksvik over the radio. He jumped into his car and raced off to the scene. Unfortunately, he was badly outnumbered, and wasn’t in any way able to stop the massacre, so he caught the whole thing on video instead.

“Pilot whales are known to travel in pods of 200-300 members. Two hundred and thirty-six pilot whales were slaughtered last night in Klaksvik: bulls, pregnant and lactating females, juveniles, and unborn babies still attached to their mothers by the umbilical chord. An entire pod that once swam freely through the North Atlantic has been exterminated in a single blood bath,” explained Hammarstedt.

Pilot whales - Picture by: Clark Anderson

The local government is claiming that the deaths of these whales are over quickly and painless, however the footage Hammarstedt captured begs to differ.

“One whale had five to six brutal chops to her head,” Hammarstedt began, “The islanders basically used her as a chopping board. Her death would have been slow and extremely painful. Some whales are hacked repeatedly for up to four minutes before they finally die.”

It was also painfully apparent that “the grind” is indiscriminate as well as gruesome.

“Babies had been cut out of their mother’s dead bodies and left to rot on the docks,” reported Hammarstedt, who got quite a few shots of dead babies and even fetuses. “Pilot whale groups are strongly matriarchal; I can’t imagine the fear and panic that these mothers must have felt as their families were wiped out in front of them.”

The Faroese pilot what grind is very similar to the yearly Taiji dolphin slaughter perpetrated in Japan. The slaughter of dolphins is very well documented in the bone chilling documentary, “The Cove”. The thing that sets apart the two activities is that there are more than 18 different coves in the Faeroes where the grind can happen, as opposed to the single cove in Taiji. This makes it almost impossible to find out where the killings will take place, or to get there in time to help prevent this heinous act.

Now that this barbaric act has been brought to light, and into the public eye, one can only hope that there will be steps taken to help avoid this kind of thing in the future.

Anyone who wants to know more or see pictures from the slaughter can visit http://www.seashepherd.org/

Great Barrier Reef

New research has discovered that seaweed is leeching the life right out of the Great Barrier Reef and annihilating coral!

Researchers who were engaged in one of the most extensive water quality and pollution studies on the reef have concluded that seaweed is taking a toll on the $1 Billion a year tourist attraction.

Due to run off in the area, the water quality on the reef is extremely poor. The study discovered the level of nutrients and high turbidity of the water was increasing the occurrence of seaweed and decreasing the biodiversity of corals on the reef.

The areas which seem to be the most effected are the inshore reef to the north of the Burdekin River and the whole of the Wet Tropics zone from Port Douglas to Townsville.

“Seaweeds are a natural part of the reef,” said Dr. Katharina Fabricius, an Australian Institute of Marine Science coral reef ecologist. “But what we don’t want is billions of algae smothering coral.”

“Choking is a loaded term but when seaweed abundance becomes too high there is no space left for coral to grow.”

This study and its results were recently published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications. The data published included data collected from 150 reefs and over 2000 water quality stations located across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since the early 1990’s.

Dr. Glenn Death, the principal investigator has said that the seaweed is now covering five times the coral under these poor water conditions.

“The diversity of corals was also affected, decreasing in poor water quality,” he explained.

“Currently, the water on 22 per cent of reefs – about 647 reefs – on the Great Barrier Reef does not meet water quality guidelines.”

The conclusion that the study eludes to is that if the quality of the water was improved in the problem areas, then the seaweed would diminish to one third of what it is now, and the coral species would exhibit a 13 percent increase.

The area that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park covers is approximately 345,000 square kilometers and extends itself for 2,000 kilometers along the northeast coast of Australia.

As the size of the disaster seems to shrink away to nothing, experts are saying that the oil is actually breaking up, and staying beneath the waves.

For a blood curdling two and a half months, oil was gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of BP’s damaged oil well. It pumped out somewhere in the vicinity of 200 million gallons of the black gold into the surrounding ecosystems. Along with the federal government, BP has gotten together an army of people to help deal with the mess. There just seems to be one problem – the oil seems to have gone AWOL.

At its most devastating levels last month, the area the oil covered was comparable to that of Kansas, however the spill has rapidly started to disappear, and it now only the size of New Hampshire.

Yesterday, reporters working for ABC News went out to look for themselves, and they didn’t see anything. Even when they flew out to the site of the rig this past Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was surprisingly no oil around.

“That oil is somewhere. It didn’t just disappear,” said Billy Nungesser, the Plaquemines Parish President.

One of the men in search of the black gold is Salvador Cepriano. Cepriano, a professional shrimper, has been attempting to scoop up some of the precious black stuff, but there just doesn’t seem to be any to scoop up.

“I think it is underneath the water. It’s in between the bottom and the top of the water,” Cepriano commented when asked about the strange phenomenon.

The federal government seems to be stumped as well, and has publicly admitted that finding the oil has become an issue.

“It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find,” said Thad Allen, the National Incident Commander.

Skimmers are Scooping UP Less Crude:
Well, the math is right, and numbers rarely lie: a fortnight ago, the skimming boats scooped up around 25,000 barrels of oily water. This past Thursday, they only scooped up about 200 barrels.

Don’t break out the wine yet.. This does not mean that the oil which was pumped out over the past weeks is gone. There are still thousands of small patches of oil which are staying beneath the waves. Be that the case, experts have said that an amazing amount of the black gold has simply disappeared, apparently reabsorbed by the environment.

“[It’s] mother nature doing her job,” explained a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University, Ed Overton.

Scientists: The Oil in The Gulf is Breaking Up:
The lighter of the black gold started to break down when it first squirted from the pipes at high pressure, and then it was inundated with dispersants to help catalyze the process.

The oil that actually did make it to the surface of the ocean was deteriorated by 88 degree water, and then baked by 100 degree sun, chowed down by a bunch of microbes, and then ripped apart by the wind and waves in the area.. Quite a welcoming party huh?

Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five percent of the surface water in China is so contaminated that it can’t even be used for industrial purposes. The sad thing about that figure is, while twenty-five percent is that contaminated, less than half of the total supply available is fit for human consumption. This data came from an environment watchdog this past Monday.

Inspectors in China have been painstakingly testing water samples from the major rivers and lakes for the first half of this year, and have proclaimed that just 49.3 percent of the water would be safe for human consumption. This number is actually up from the 48 percent of last year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection declared in a public notice from their website.

China has six grades they use for classifying their water supplies, with the first three grades being considered safe for human use, such as drinking and bathing.

Another 24.6 percent of the water supply was said to have fallen in categories four and five, which is only good for industrial or agricultural use. This leaves a total of 24.3 percent in category six, which is not suitable for any use at all.

This is an absolute appalling state of affairs, and despite tougher regulations being implemented over the past 10 years, the ministry is still struggling to keep tabs on thousands of paper mills, cement factories, and chemical plants which are pumping their industrial waste right into the water supplies of the country.

This is a serious problem, but it seems like it will be quite some time before they get a handle on it.

Yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares

You like to think you’re doing the world a favor, and doing your part by making sure that can of tuna you pick up at the supermarket is “Dolphin Safe”, however, have you ever stopped to think what it might be doing to other sea life?

To properly understand the conundrum, we first need to look at the underlying history of “Dolphin
Safe” tuna.

The story goes something like this.. Way back when, a bunch of environmental activists got together and exposed those nasty tuna fisherman for the vermins they were. They were reeling in record amounts of tuna sure. But how did they find the tuna? Truth of the matter is, there are really only two ways to go about looking to tuna in the sea; rigorously searching using sonar, boats, and planes, or following around the dolphins.

No one really knows why, but dolphins tend to be associated with huge schools of tuna. So whenever a group of these tuna fishermen went out, they looked for pockets of dolphins and cast their lines.. It worked. They brought in record amounts of tuna, but they were also harming the dolphins.

We got all worked up about the poor dolphins, so the fishermen had to get creative. They now use floating objects on the ocean surface to attract the tuna, and then circle around them with a bunch of boats and reel in everything in the circle using seine nets.

Well surprise surprise… The dolphins are now safe, however any number of other species are now being caught as by-catch in bigger numbers than ever! You see, it seems that most sea faring creatures are drawn to these interesting floating things in the ocean, as they’ve never seen them before.. They go in to investigate, and BAM! They are stuck too!

So, did we REALLY do a favor by introducing “Dolphin-Safe” tuna? The dolphin isn’t endangered after all, but some of the other sea creatures being reeled in now are.. So we saved one species, but put another 100 or more at risk of extinction…

You can read a more extensive examination of the problem by visiting Southern Fried Science.

bighead carp

Permanent barrier against the invasive species of fish, will not be constructed in the Chicago area.

Governor Ted Strickland is getting about half of what he pleaded the White House to do in a July 8th letter about the Asian Carp problem. As you know, the Asian carp are entering into Lake Michigan, and if not stopped, it could become a colossal problem!

“They are going to be naming a carp commander,” explained the legislative liaison for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Trish Lanahan. “It’s important to have someone in an executive-level position at the White House.”

Time is quickly running out, giving the upper hand to the devastating pair of invading fish known as Asian Carp. These two fish are more commonly known as the bighead carp and the silver carp, and have already taken over many areas of the Mississippi River drainage after craftily escaping their fish farms a few decades ago.

Something obviously needs to be done.. However the jury is still out as to what. Something which definitely is not being considered as a viable solution, despite the opinions of Ohio executives, is building a permanent barrier at Chicago, beginning no later than the 19th of August.

Ohio, in conjunction with other great lake States, got a lawsuit on the roll Monday, which is aimed at forcing the government along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to close off the canal without any further deliberation.

On Thursday, all the big players got together to announce their plans to sit down to analyze economic and environmentally friendly solutions to effectively separate the Mississippi basin from the Great Lakes at Chicago.

Neither species of the carp is though to have gotten a stronghold in Lake Michigan. If they did have a stronghold there, that would render any sort of barrier useless. If they do get themselves a stronghold, it could take a few years before the invading carp can get themselves set up in Lake Erie.

The major concern is that the carp, as with other invasive species, could spread like wildfire through ship bilge and ballast water. The dumping of ballast is not really monitored properly, and certainly not enforced.

However, Chicago isn’t the only one to show concern.

The Silver carp have been slowly creeping their way up the Wabash River in Indiana. There is a bit of wetland that separates the headwaters of the Wabash and the Maumee rivers in Indiana. Biologists from both Indiana and Ohio are examining whether or not if the flooding which occurs there, might just give the carp a chance to jump into the Lake Erie basin.

“I don’t think it’s the threat’s immediate, like Chicago,” the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s program administrator for Lake Erie, Roger Knight said. “It might be another avenue they can use to get in.”

Well if that is the attitude taken by all sides.. That the “threat is not imminent” then it will be too little too late to help get rid of this problem.. One can hope a plan of action is formulated quickly.

Great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa)

Scientists and conservationists might be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to finding corals which are suited to surviving the global climate crisis. This is according to a recent research paper which was published in the journal Science.

Two researchers, Ann Budd and John Pandolf, came to this conclusion after they closely analyzed the link between evolutionary innovation and geography of the boulder star coral species complex (which is known in the scientific community as Montastrae annularis). The boulder star coral complex is a group of Caribbean reef corals.

They took a look at the shape of various growths of coral, both recent and fossil in order to see what morphology differences existed. The fossils involved dated back to over 850,000 years ago.

The results were that the quickest, and most drastic, changes to the morphology of the fossil coral growth happened at the outer edges, and the least drastic, and slowest, changes happened in the more central parts.

This seems to suggest that the edge of the coral played an integral role in evolutionary innovation, which may just be caused by cross breeding, or any other number of factors.

This is very big in terms of conservation of the coral reefs. The conventional wisdom dictates that we preserve the center of the coral, more so than focus on conserving the outer edges.

However, by focusing our efforts on the center, we may be overlooking the important sources of adaptation during climate changes.

Ann Budd, lead author of the paper, elaborates more on the subject. “…areas ranked highly for species richness, endemism and threats may not represent regions of maximum evolutionary potential.”

The conclusion of the paper is that in order to properly design marine reserves in the future we need to also take the evolutionary processes and the link between the coral and other species into account by looking at the outer edges as well.