Researchers have been going on dives into the Gulf of Mexico utilizing a mini-sub to take a gander at how the ecosystems are dealing with the recent BP oil fiasco.

It may seem like the Gulf of Mexico is a muddled mass of black goo and completely devoid of life, however that is not the case.

This past November, the three man mini-sub dove every day from the back end of the science boat Atlantis, which is the property of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Every day the Alvin came bearing gifts of mud from the seabed, red rock samples, and seawater.

However, one fine day, close to Thanksgiving, the Alvin brought up something amazing – Signs of life.

A professor of marine sciences with the University of North Carolina, Andreas Teske, really was astonished by the find.

He has described a scene you wouldn’t expect to see near ground zero of the BP oil fiasco. Mussel beds, white and orange carpets of bacteria, and even shrimp fish and sea cucumbers.

These survivors were all making their homes around an underwater lake, made of brine, which has been cleverly dubbed “Dead Crab Lake” due to the fact that anything that stays in too long gets pickled.

“You could see the surface of the brine pool just like the surface of a garden pond, totally clear,” Teske explains. “And in the brine pond, some animals that fell in got pickled — some crabs and others. So once they fall in, if they don’t manage to climb out quickly, that’s it!”

It’s good to see that nature once again proves that it will take more than a small little oil fiasco to take it down.

A new ruling by the NOAA will effectively stop boaters from pumping any sewage they may have accumulated into the waters of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. This new ruling – which will put a stop to dumping your waste this December 27th – also dictates that you must secure your sanitation devices to prevent any accidental leaks into the waters of the sanctuary.

The methods which have been deemed appropriate include, but are not limited to, all the ways that the US coast guard, along with other State and Private entities, have approved previously. They are even going to put in some new “pump-out” stations to help boaters comply with the new rules.

“This rule is another important step in restoring the water quality of the Florida Keys,” explained sanctuary superintendent, Sean Morton. “Combined with other strategies such as increased pump-out facility availability and ongoing progress in advanced wastewater treatment, this new rule brings us closer to reversing the trends of declining water quality associated with human sources of pollution.”

The discharging of waste materials has been prohibited in state waters of the sanctuary ever since it was labeled a “no poop” zone by the US Environmental Protection Agency back in 2002. Under this new ruling will effectively protect state and federal sanctuary waters from harmful wastes from boats.

Well, it’s good to know that we now need to be careful where we dump our sewage in the ocean. Just because it’s big, does not make it a giant sewer.

Yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna did not accept the idea of reducing fishing of the Atlantic bluefin, whose populations have been declining for the past few decades from fishing pressure and, who could forget, the BP oil spill fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico. With the bluefin heading towards certain doom, the Center for Biological Diversity in May called for more protection, and invoked the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The decision to not reduce the international catch quotas by the commission means that the survival of the bluefin is riding very heavily on the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

“The international tuna commission had an opportunity to take bluefin tuna off the path to extinction but didn’t. Instead, the commission ignored years of scientific evidence about the perilous decline of bluefin tuna and chose to allow fishing to continue as if nothing is wrong,” commented a staff attorney at the Center, Catherine Kilduff.

Ever since 1969, when the international commission first came into being, the bluefin tuna – which was once very abundant – has been fished almost to the point of being extinct. The commission has set 2011 catch quotas of 12,900 tons, and 1,750 tons for the two different stocks of bluefin tuna: the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic stock and the western Atlantic stock. The quotas have dipped a little, but not enough. They came down from 13,500 tons and 1,800 tons respectively. That is a step in the right direction, but not enough to help the bluefin regain a toehold in the world.

“This level of fishing pressure sentences bluefin tuna to yet another decade of depletion,” Kilduff explained. “The fishing quotas adopted today bank on overly optimistic conditions for tuna recovery so that fishermen can continue to catch the prized bluefin tuna as they have in past years. As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows, bluefin face more threats than just fishing.”

A “killer” shrimp which makes meals out of young fish, insect larva, and the shrimp native to the area has been discovered at two different locations in Wales, comments the Environment Agency.

These sneaky little invaders, known in scientific circles as Dikerogammarus villosus, actually changes the ecology of the environments that it takes over, and can even cause mass die offs and extinctions.

The invader was discovered in the UK at reservoir in Cambridgeshire this past September.

Environment Agency Wales has commented that it has just confirmed the presence at Cardiff Bay and Eglwys Nunyd Reservoir in Port Talbot. It is still unknown as to how the interloper got there.

You see, this “killer” shrimp originally hails from a region between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, however it has spread over most of Western Europe across the last decade.

This sneaky invader can be as tiny as 3 millimeters, but can grow as large as 30 millimeters long, making it much bigger than the freshwater shrimp native to the area.

Biologists have dubbed this tiny invader a killer, as it mainly kills more than its fill, and leaves its meals largely uneaten.

This invader is really causing some alarm, and has led to the Welsh Assembly Government setting up an all-wales group to help and figure out how to contain problem, so that it doesn’t spread any further.

Environment Agency Wales director Chris Mills commented:

“We will continue with our monitoring work across Wales to identify any other water recreation spots where they could be to see how widespread the problem has become.”

Hammerhead shark by Suneko

Shark Advocates International is giving a warm welcome to progress towards helping conserve sharks. This progress was made at the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) this week.

There were a record number – six to be exact – proposals for shark measures, the parties of the ICCAT agreed to put a stop to the retention of oceanic whitetip sharks, prohibit exploiting of hammerheads, and set up a process for punishing countries who do not get with the program and accurately report catches and reduce fishing pressure on shortfin mako sharks. The proposals to stop the retention of abundant thresher and porbeagle sharks were thrown out as a measure to help ICCAT gain a stronger position to ban shark “finning” by prohibiting removing the fins of a shark at sea.

“ICCAT has taken significant steps toward safeguarding sharks this week, but much more must be done to effectively conserve this highly vulnerable species,” explained President of Shark Advocates International, Sonja Fordham, who serves on the US ICCAT Advisory Committee and has participated in ICCAT meetings since 2004. “We are particularly pleased with the agreements aimed at protecting oceanic whitetip sharks and reducing international trade in the fins of hammerhead sharks, as well as US efforts to conserve mako sharks.”

It’s good to see that progress is being made, and all parties involved are rather pleased that the meetings have gone so well so far. Hopefully, this means a better world for sharks.

A diving team from Kuwait has commented that this past Saturday that it had just completed their latest step in cleaning up 7 tons of harmful materials from the coral reef shelf of Qaruh island.

Walid Al-Shattie, the Marine Operations chief of the team, has commented recently to KUNA that this latest step in the cleanup effort utilized a seventy ton crane to help lift the harmful materials above the coral reefs as well as made use of a truck and trailer to transport the materials once they hit land.

Al-Shattie added that the diving team also used airbags and large canvas sacks during their twenty day mission to aid in the efforts to pick up the hazardous material from the coral reefs, and relocate it to more appropriate places in the seabed.

He explained that the team made use of special nets around the island of Qaruh to help contain the hazardous materials until such a time as they could be removed by lifting.

He also noted that the members of the diving team were leery that they may run into some of the old military equipment left over from the Iraqi 1990 invasion, as some military equipment has already been found above the coral reefs at Qaruh and Umm Al-Maradim islands.

That aside, it is good to see that interest in protecting and cleaning up the areas of coral reefs, and even though the face some element of danger, the efforts of this diving team are very much appreciated.

The two branches of the central government for China, who are responsible for the well being of underwater cultural heritage, have just signed an agreement this past Monday to cooperate more fully with one another.

Under this new agreement, the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) will cooperate more fully in fields of underwater archeology and the management of relics recovered from beneath the sea.

The two agencies will also help each other out in performing regular surveys of underwater relics, to help ensure that they do not become damaged in some way.

Shan Jixiang, the director of the SACH, commented during the signing ceremony that the agreement was a move at the state-level to help keep the underwater cultural heritage of China safe in the midst of the worldwide boom in ocean development.

The director of the SOA, Sun Zhihui, has commented that the SOA would be actively providing support and assistance in protecting underwater relics by cooperating more fully with the SACH in areas such as the enforcement of the maritime laws and in the forecasting of marine disasters such as hurricanes, oil spills and the like.

The two agencies will look to establish a long term cooperation by devoting time to the creation and upkeep of their pilot cooperation programs.

It’s good to see that China has taken an interest in protecting their underwater cultural heritage, as so much has been lost, it would really be a shame if more of it were lost.

The very first research study to take a gander into what kind of biological activity there is in the deepest part of the ocean crust has turned up bacteria with an astonishing range of abilities, which include eating oil, natural gas, and “fixing” or storing carbon.

This new study, which was recently released in the journal PloS One, has demonstrated that a vast number of bacterial lifeforms were thriving, even when the temperatures reached the boiling point of water.

“This is a new ecosystem that almost no one has ever explored,” commented a professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, Martin Fisk. “We expected some bacterial forms, but the long list of biological functions that are taking place so deep beneath the Earth is surprising.”

The Oceans crust cover close to seventy percent of the surface of our planet and it’s geology has been explored to a certain degree, however no one has bothered to look into its biology – because it is hard to do, and very costly, but also because most scientists have always taken it for granted that nothing was happening down there.

The temperatures rise exponentially as you get deeper – as any high school graduate can tell you – and researchers now think that the maximum temperatures which can harbor life are at about 250 degrees.

So, now you know, when we think we know something about the world – such as boiling water kills bacteria – we are thrown a curve ball. However, the discovery that some of these organisms like to eat oil is very exciting indeed.

Spanish Fishing boat

The most widely accepted method of being able to determine the health of the world’s oceans and fisheries led to inaccurate conclusions in almost fifty percent of the ecosystems where it was utlilized.

This new analysis was done by an international group of fisheries researchers, and has been published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“Applied to individual ecosystems it’s like flipping a coin; half the time you get the right answer and half the time you get the wrong answer,” explained a University of Washington aquatic and fisheries researcher, Trevor Branch.

“Monitoring all the fish in the sea would be an enormous, and impossible, task,” explains a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology, Henry Gholz, whose department helped to fund the research with NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

“This study makes clear that the most common indicator, average catch trophic level, is a woefully inadequate measure of the status of marine fisheries.”

Back in 1998, the journal Science released a groundbreaking report that was the first to utilize trends in the trophic levels of fish which were reeled in to help figure out the health of world fisheries.

The trophic level of an organism indicates where it falls in the different food chains, with microscopic algae at a trophic level of one and large predatory creatures – such as sharks, halibut and tuna – at a trophic level of about four.

This 1998 report relied on forty years of catch data, and took the average of the trophic levels of those specimens which were caught.

Fishing is permitted in ninety-nine percent of Marine Protected Areas – also known as MPA – on the Pacific coast of Canada, so says a report put out by Living Oceans Society and released in Marine Policy this month. It is rather interesting that the fishing is permitted, given the fact that over fifty percent of the MPAs are labeled as “strictly prohibited” and are specifically set up to stop all fishing.

“Marine Protected Areas should be safe havens where species can regenerate, but the great majority of our MPAs are really just paper parks that offer almost nothing in the way of ocean conservation or sustainable fisheries,” explains Living Oceans Society’s Marine Planning and Protected Areas Campaign Manager, Kim Wright.

In order for the MPAs to be effective, the municipal and provincial government agencies that set up MPAs need to make sure that the fishing closures are actually put in place by DFO – Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Sadly, all levels of government are failing to get together and actually give any kind of real protection to the ecosystem of the ocean.

The study was carried out by Dr. Isabelle Cote, a Marine Protected Area specialist, and also a professor at Simon Fraser University. The study reveals that we really need to be protecting the oceans, however, that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon…

As Dr Isabelle Cote sums up: “Marine reserves, in which no fishing is permitted, increase the abundance and diversity of marine life within their boundaries. This study shows that the MPAs on Canada’s Pacific coast are less likely to show the same positive effects.”