Rare coral species may be saving themselves from extinction by hybridising with other coral species, says Australian scientist Zoe Richards. Richards and his colleagues have studied 14 rare[1] and eight common coral species of the genus Acropora in the Indo-Pacific.

In order to find out more about hybridisation among corals, the team did a phylogenetic analysis using the highly polymorphic single-copy nuclear Pax-C 46/47 intron and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region as markers.

The analysis showed that many of the rare species are polyphyletic for both Pax-C and mitochondrial phylogenies, and this is seen as a clear sign of interspecific hybridisation.

The results of the study “Some rare Indo-Pacific coral species are probable hybrids” by Richards, Oppen, Wallace, Willis and Miller were published in a recent issue of the journal PLoS ONE[2].

In their paper, the authors explain how “[t]he results presented here imply that a number of rare Indo-Pacific Acropora species are the products of recent hybridisation events, and highlight the significance of hybridisation in coral diversification. Whether these species have hybrid origins or have evolved and then hybridised in the absence of conspecific gametes remains to be elucidated.”

“In summary, although it has often been assumed that small populations have a decreased potential for adaptation, our analyses imply that some rare acroporid corals may actually have increased adaptive potential as a consequence of introgressive hybridisation, and therefore may be less vulnerable to extinction than has been assumed.”

A six-month long investigation by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) has led to the arrest of seven adults and one juvenile in Tampa. The arrested persons are believed to have been involved in various illegal activates concerning marine life, including catching protected sharks, sea horses, peppermint shrimp and bay scallops in Floridian waters, and exporting illegally obtained marine life to Europe. They are also suspected of having sold bait fish and bait shrimp as food for human consumption.

According to the FWC, the ring is believed to have operated for at least five years before attracting the attention of FWC. The ring lost a lot of animals due to poor maintenance, but the FWC still believes the group managed to sell $600,000 worth of peppermint shrimp alone.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission came into existence on July 1, 1999. The Investigations Section of the commission conducts both overt (uniform) and covert (plainclothes) investigations, and one of their tasks is to target hard-core commercial violators by conducting long-term undercover investigations. In 2003, the Investigations Section made 554 arrests/warnings and seized 130 illegally possessed specimens of fish and wildlife including a cougar, tigers, leopards, primates, exotic deer, venomous reptiles, protected birds and exotic aquatic species.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is now carrying out tests in hope of finding out if bacteria can aid them in their struggle against invasive mussel species that are threatening to spread across the West’s waterways.

During the summer of 2008, a preliminary test was executed at Davis Dam on the Colorado River at Laughlin in Nevada. In this dam, Quagga mussels (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis) were exposed to dead bacteria of the Pseudomonas fluorescens species, a non-infectious bacterium that is commonly found in water, soil and food.

Quagga Mussels

During the first test the mussels where exposed to bacteria in jars, but the next test will take place in 10-20 gallon aquariums to in order to more accurately mimic real dam conditions. Water will flow through the aquariums, but will not be released back into the river – it will instead be disposed of through an evaporation pond. A third experiment is also planned, where bacteria will be released in a domestic water intake line which is currently encrusted with a 2-3 inches thick layer of mussels (approximately 5-7.5 cm).

“We are always looking for new, more effective techniques for managing mussels, and this one looks very safe and very promising,” says Reclamation scientist Fred Nibling. “We’ll have a series of tests where we’re going to be testing off-line, off the river, so we can have the data to where we can apply for the permits to test elsewhere.

If the initial testing proves to be successful, the Bureau of Reclamation hopes to have a larger scale test approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation got the idea to use Pseudomonas fluorescens from Daniel Molloy, a researcher at the New York State Museum who discovered that both zebra and quagga mussels died if they ingest the bacterium. He confirmed the effect in 1998 and the method was patented by the museum. Eventually, the Californian firm Marrone Organic Innovations was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to commercialize the technology.

According to Molloy’s research, a mussel needs to ingest a high density of a strain of the bacteria in order for the bacteria to be lethal. If the density is high enough, a toxin inside the bacterium cell will efficiently devastate the digestive tract of the animal.

One advantage with Pseudomonas fluorescens compared to conventional anti-mussel treatments like chlorine is that mussels recognize chlorine as dangerous and close their feeding valves to keep the chemical out. They do however happily devour Pseudomonas fluorescens. Another important aspect is that research has found that Pseudomonas fluorescens does not kill fish or shellfish.

If large scale testing also proves successful, the Bureau of Reclamation say they wish to meet with municipal public works and water authority officials before the bacterium is put into general use. “We want to make sure they’re very comfortable and they have a chance to ask questions,” says Nibbling.

Zebra mussels

Thanks to the efforts of local resident Pak Dodent, coral destroyed around Sumatra by the 2004 tsunami is now making a remarkably recovery.

Dodent lives on the island of Pulau Wey off the north coast of Sumatra and the narrow channel between his small village Ibioh and a nearby island was particularly devastated by the enormous forces unleashed by the tsunami.

“It was like a washing machine out there and all of the coral was broken,” Dodent explained to a reporter from the Telegraph. Afterwards I thought to myself what can I do to make the coral grow again and I started to experiment.“

After some experimentation, Dodent decided to aid the corals by dropping concrete mounds over the sandy bottom, since reef building corals need a suitable surface to attach them selves to. He creates the concrete mounds by pouring concrete into a bucket, and he also embeds a plastic bottle or tube into the concrete so that a part of the plastic sticks up.

When the concrete is set, the devoted reef gardener drops his mounds by boat in the shallow waters near the beach and leaves them there for a month to allow any potentially harmful chemicals present in the concrete to dissipate. After that, he carefully begins to transplant corals to the mounds by harvesting small patches of corals from the healthy reef on the far side of the island. “I am careful to only take a little from here and there so that I don’t affect the healthy eco system”, says Dodent.

Dodent uses cable ties to attach the transplants to the plastic bottles and tubes to prevent the corals from being dislocated by water movements.

Almost four years after the tsunami, Dodent’s coral garden is now covered with coral and has attracted an abundance of fishes and other animals. The coral is thriving and there is virtually impossible to the underlying concrete mounds. The garden currently comprises over 200 square metres and is home to over 25 different species of coral.

To prevent algae from overgrowing the new coral and killing it, Dodent regularly cleans infested coral patches with a toothbrush, but fishes and other coral eating organisms will soon alleviate him of this task. “I monitor and clean it for one year, after that it is up to the fishes,” he says.

Dodent has now recently received a small grant from Fauna and Flora International to develop his project.

According to University of Queensland marine biologist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, recipient of the prestigious Eureka science prize in 1999 for his work on coral bleaching, sea temperatures are likely to rise 2 degrees C over the next three decades due to climate change and such an increase will cause Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to die.

Hoegh-Guldberg’s statement is now being criticized by other scientists for being overly pessimistic, since it does not consider the adaptive capabilities of coral reefs. According to Andrew Baird, principal research fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, there are serious knowledge gaps when it comes to predicting how rising sea temperatures would affect the coral.

Great barrier reef

“Ove is very dismissive of coral’s ability to adapt, to respond in an evolutionary manner to climate change,” says Dr Baird. “I believe coral has an underappreciated capacity to evolve. It’s one of the biological laws that, wherever you look, organisms have adapted to radical changes.”

According to Dr Baird, climate change would result in major alterations of the reef, but not necessarily death since the adaptive qualities of coral reefs would mitigate the effects of an increased water temperature. “There will be sweeping changes in the relative abundance of species,” he says. “There’ll be changes in what species occur where. But wholesale destruction of reefs? I think that’s overly pessimistic.”

Marine scientist Dr Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, agrees with Dr Baird. “I think that he’s right,” says Dr Reichelt. “The reef is more adaptable and research is coming out now to show adaptation is possible for the reef.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg responds to the criticism by saying that the view “that reefs somehow have some magical adaptation ability” is unfounded. He also raises the question of how big of a risk we are willing to take. “The other thing is, are we willing to take the risk, given we’ve got a more than 50 per cent likelihood that these scenarios are going to come up?” professor Hoegh-Guldberg asks.”If I asked (my colleagues) to get into my car and I told them it was more than 50 per cent likely to crash, I don’t think they’d be very sensible getting in it.“

I thought I would report on a few good news in the world of marine conservation. First of we are going to look at tuna fishing and the endangered Mediterranean Blue fin Tuna. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) an organization consisting of NGOs and governments surprisingly voted to cut tuna quotas in half (almost) in the Mediterranean as well as instituting a complete fishing ban during the spawning season in May and June when they meet at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. The surprising result came after Spain (an important fishing nation) and Japan (the key blue fin market) supported the restricted fishing to prevent the tuna population from collapsing. The IUCN Decision is not legally binding but puts a considerable amount of pressure on the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) which will decide the future of tuna fishing for the coming years at a meeting in December. The effects of diminished quotas remain to be seen as a rapport from the WWF earlier this month showed that half all tuna caught in Italy was caught illegally and that illegal fishing was rampant in Italy.

I am going to leave tuna and talk about something completely different, Beluga whales. The US government this week listed the Beluga whales of Alaska’s Cook Inlet as an endangered species / population. The decision means much stricter rules about what can and can’t be done in the area and local authorities need to get the permission of the National Marine Fisheries Service before they can approve a number of activities in the area. Governor and GOP vice president candidate Sara Palin is worried that the decision will prevent economic growth in the area. She fears that the decision among other things will prevent the expansion of the harbor. The population declined nearly 50 percent between 1994 and 1998 and has not yet recovered. This is believed to be due to developments in the area, predation from killer whales and frequent whale strandings. Environmentalists hope that the new found protection will help increase the population again.

Beluga whale

According to a new report from the World Bank, inefficiency, wastefulness and poor management of fishing fleets are causing immense economic losses world wide. The report The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, which was launched at the World Bank headquarters in New York and discussed at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in Barcelona, says it would be possible to save 50 billion USD a year through wide-ranging reforms.

According to the World Bank study, the two main reasons behind the massive losses are depleted fish stocks and fleet overcapacity. Depleted fish stocks make it more expensive to locate and catch fish, turning commercial fishing into a less efficient business. The fleet overcapacity adds to the problem through redundant investment and operating costs.

While calling for wide-ranging reforms – including a comprehensive restructuring of fishing methods, removal of subsidies, and a more responsible and impartial stewardship of the seas – the report also acknowledges that such an endeavour won’t be without political, social, and economic costs. The current ‘business as usual’ attitude would however be even more costly in the long run, since it would lead to a scenario where commercial fishing becomes a drain on society through extensive subsidies.

According to the report, the recent steep increase in fuel prices can not be blamed for the loss-making since the marine fishing industry has been in decline for a much longer period of time. Despite increased fishing efforts and increasingly high-tech fishing fleets, depleted fish populations have caused the global marine catch to stay at the same level for over a decade.

Reef building corals rely on herbivore animals to continuously remove unwanted algae growth from them, since algae compete with the corals for both sunlight and nutrients. Without regular cleaning, corals eventually die and the reef becomes overgrown by various types of algae. A report scheduled to be published this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences now suggests that having herbivore animals present on the reef isn’t enough; there must also be a proper balance between the various species. This conclusion results from a long-term study on coral reef recovery and seaweed[1] carried out by Dr. Mark Hay, the Harry and Linda Teasley Professor of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his co-author Dr. Deron Burkepile who is now Assistant Professor at the Florida International University’s Marine Science Program.

Different fish feed on different algae and maintaining a proper balance may therefore be critical. “Of the many different fish that are part of coral ecosystems, there may be a small number of species that are really critical for keeping big seaweeds from over-growing and killing corals,” says Hay. “Our study shows that in addition to having enough herbivores, coral ecosystems also need the right mix of species to overcome the different defensive tactics of the seaweeds. This could offer one more approach to resource managers. If ecosystems were managed for critical mixes of herbivorous species, we might see more rapid recovery of the reefs.”

Coral reef

The 10 month long study was carried out 18 metres (60 feet) below the surface off the coast of Florida, where Hay and Burkepile placed 32 cages on a coral reef in November 2003. At this point, the coral reef area chosen by the researchers had only four to five percent live coral coverage. Each cage was roughly two metres square and one metre tall (1 metre = 3.3 feet) and the mesh was fine enough to prevent large fish from entering or leaving the cage. The scientists then carefully selected the number and type of fish to place in each cage, using the four following combinations:

· Two fish capable of eating hard, calcified plants

· Two fish capable of eating eat soft plants that defends themselves chemically

· Both types of fish.

· No fish at all

The two species used for the experiement where the Redband parrotfish (Sparisoma aurofrenatum) and the Ocean surgeonfish (Acanthurus bahianus).

As suspected, the type of fish turned out to play a key role in the growth of algae and seaweed on the reef.

“For the cages in which we mixed the two species of herbivores, the fish were able to remove much more of the upright seaweeds, and the corals in those areas increased in cover by more than 20 percent during ten months,” says Hay. “That is a dramatic rate of increase for a Caribbean reef.”

Areas with only one type of fish or no fish at all lost as much as 30 percent of their live coral coverage during the research, while areas with two species of fish increased their live coral coverage from four to five percent to six to seven percent.

“Species diversity is critically important, but we are losing critical components of the Earth’s ecosystem at an alarming rate,” says Hay. “There has been little work on the role of diversity among consumers and the effect that has on communities. This study will help add to our knowledge in this critical area.”

After the initial 10-month experiment, Hay and Burkepile launched a second study where the Ocean surgeonfish (Acanthurus bahianus) was substituted with Princess parrotfish (Scarus taeniopterus). Unfortunately, the cages only stayed on the reef for seven months before being wiped away by Hurricane Dennis in July 2005.

The research was conducted at the National Undersea Research Center in Key Largo, Florida and supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Teasley Endowment at Georgia Tech.

You can read more about Hay’s and Burkepile’s work at

http://www.biology.gatech.edu/faculty/mark-hay/ http://www.biology.gatech.edu/faculty/mark-hay/lab.php
http://www.fiu.edu/~dburkepi/front.htm
http://www.fiu.edu/~dburkepi/research.htm

Is the scary looking Atlantic Wolffish, Anarhichas lupus, on the brink of extinction? Today, The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and others filed a scientific petition with the federal government of the United States, seeking endangered species protection for this intimidating eel-like creature. If the petition is successful, the Atlantic Wolffish will be the first marine fish to receive endangered species protection in New England.

The Atlantic Wolffish, also known as the Seawolf, is primarily found in cold parts of the Atlantic, but can also be encountered in warmer locations, such as the north-western Mediterranean Sea and the Bay of Biscay. Along the North American coast, it is found as north as the Davis Strait between mid-western Greenland and Baffin Island, and as far south as New Jersey. It is however uncommon south of Cape Cod, New England. In order to survive the cold temperature of its northern habitat, the Atlantic Wolffish has developed a natural anti-freeze that prevents its body from freezing.

The CLF petition cites federal and independent scientific studies that show a dramatic decline of Atlantic Wolffish during the past two decades. According to federal statistics, commercial fishermen are now landing 95% less Atlantic Wolffish than in 1983. Back in the early 1980s, commercial fishermen landed about 1,200 metric tones of this fish per annum, which can be compared to the mere 64.7 metric tons of Atlantic Wolffish landed last year. The Atlantic Wolffish has also worried the scientific community by virtually disappearing from the scientific research trawls carried out twice a year off the coast of New England.

”Based on all available science, Atlantic wolffish are rapidly headed toward extinction in New England’s ocean waters,” said Peter Shelley , CLF Vice President and Senior Attorney. “The dramatic decline in wolffish is a troubling indication that while there is some good news about marine species like haddock and sea scallops that have been successfully restored, our ocean’s long term health continues to hang for other species by a precarious balance. Key species like the wolffish and endangered whales remain in serious jeopardy.”

The main threats against the Atlantic Wolffish are commercial fishing (including by-catch) and habitat degradation, with a major part of the habitat degradation being the result of commercial fishing since it is carried out using trawls and dredges. “Absent some action to reduce or eliminate the destruction of seafloor habitat in the few remaining areas of United States waters that harbor remnant populations of the Atlantic wolffish, it is probable that it will be faced with extinction in those waters in the near future,” says marine scientist and co-petitioner Dr Les Watling.

The Atlantic Wolffish is listed as a Species of Concern by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

In addition to the recently proposed areas in the Pacific Ocean, (See this and this) president Bush now says he wants to find even more regions of the Pacific Ocean to protect.

This Friday, Bush made public that he has asked the secretaries of the Interior, Commerce and Defense to identify additional areas of the Pacific Ocean that could be eligible for conservation. He also revealed that the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary will be expanded by 585 square nautical miles and come to include the Davidson Seamount. Davidson Seamount is a 42 km long underwater mountain located roughly 120 km southwest of Monterey, California. The seamount rises 2400 meters off the ocean floor, but its highest point is still more than a kilometre below the surface.