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.”

Vast amounts of creatures looking like jelly balls have begun to appear off the eastern coast of Australia, and researchers now suspect that these animals may help slow down global warming by moving carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean floor.

The proper English name for this “jelly ball” being is salp. A salp is a barrel-shaped free-floating tunicate that moves around in the ocean by contracting and relaxing its gelatinous body. Just like the other tunicates, the salp is a filter feeder that loves to eat phytoplankton and this is why it has caught the attention of scientists researching global warming.

Phytoplankton are famous for their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the top level of the sea, and a salp feasting on phytoplankton will excrete that carbon dioxide in the form of faeces. The faeces will drop to the ocean floor; thus lowering the amount of carbon dioxide present in the upper part of the ocean. Since the carbon dioxide found in this level of the sea chiefly hails from the atmosphere, phytoplankton and salps are a great aid when it comes to removing carbon dioxide from the air. Salps will also bring carbon down to the ocean floor when they die, which happens fairly often since the life cycle of this organism is no more than a few weeks.

Salp species can be found in marine environments all over the world, but they are most abundant and concentrated in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica where it is possible to encounter enormous swarms of salp. Over the last 100 years, krill populations in the Southern Ocean have declined and salp populations seem to be replacing them in this cold ecosystem. According to researcher Mark Baird of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), the amount of salps in the waters off Australia are also on the increase, at least according to a survey carried out last month by CSIRO and the University of New South Wales.

While salp may help slow down global warming, their increase may also cause problems. Salp has a fairly low nutrient content and salps replacing nutrient rich krill in the Southern Sea may therefore prove detrimental for oceanic animals higher up in the food chain.

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.

A new subfamily has been created within the catfish family Loricariidae, the largest family of catfish and currently home to over 700 described species. The new subfamily has been named Otothyrinae and its members include the genera Corumbataia, Epactionotus, Eurycheilichthys, Hisonotus, Microlepidogaster, Otothyris, Otothyropsis, Parotocinclus, Pseudotothyris, and Schizolecis.

The new subfamily was named in a study published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution[1]. Juan Montoya-Burgos, Márcio Chiachio and Claudio Oliveira – the researchers behind the article – have studied the molecular phylogeny of the subfamilies Hypoptopomatinae and Neoplecostominae in the family Loricariidae. They decided to name a new subfamily after taking a closer look at the phylogeny of the fish using a partial sequence of the nuclear F-reticulon4 gene.

In addition to the nuclear F-reticulon4 gene, Burgos, Chiachio and Oliviera used morphological evidence to decide which catfish species that should be placed in the new subfamily, and the study has also examined the historical biogeography of the group.

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.

A study published in the online scientific journal PLoS Biology on October 27 with the provocative headline “Dams make no damn difference to salmon survival”[1] is now being questioned by a number of scientists, including several co-authors of the study.

According to the study, young fish running the gantlet of dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers did just as well as youngsters in an undammed river. Dams are widely regarded as one of the main reasons behind the sharp decline of salmon in North America’s western rivers and a study claiming that dams make no damn difference for salmon survival is therefore destined to receive a lot of attention from dam proponents and dam critics alike.

While a number of scientists, including several co-authors, are questioning the results and cautioning about what conclusions can really be drawn from them, lead-author David Welch stands by his report. “We’re not saying that the dams have never had an effect,” says Welch. “What we all have to ask ourselves is, if survival is up to the level of a river that doesn’t have dams, then what’s causing survival problems?”

Welch has already warned against overstating what the study proves, and continues to do so. According to Welch, the results of the study do however suggest that dams might not play such a big role in the fate of endangered Columbia River salmon today, and that the situation in the ocean – where the salmon live until it migrates upstream to spawn – is of higher importance than river conditions.

Michele DeHart, manager of the Fish Passage Center[2], strongly disagree with the conclusions drawn from the study. “There’s a huge mass of scientific literature that documents the impacts of dams. It’s just huge,” says DeHart. “It’s like saying, ‘Gosh, I just did this comparison and smoking does not cause cancer.’ Would you change your mind?”

In the study, the survival rate of young salmon and steelhead heading for the ocean (so called smolts) was measured in the rivers Columbia and Snake, which are heavily dammed, and in Fraser River, which has no dams at all. To the researchers’ surprise, the recorded survival rate was around 25 percent for all smolts, regardless of whether they travelled in dammed or undammed waters. If you take into account that smolt in the Columbia River actually have to travel a longer distance, it even looks as if smolt traversing dammed waters are doing better than their counterparts in the undammed Fraser.

Environmental groups are now claiming that comparing the different rivers with each other is like comparing apples and oranges, and co-author Carl Schreck, head of the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Oregon State University, warns that the study could have failed to account for fish that die in the ocean due to the stress they have been subjected to while traversing dams in Columbia and Snake.

Ed Bowles, biologist and head of fisheries for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, says that it would be better to compare how similar fish, e.g. spring Chinook, do when they spawn in the same river – some above dams and some below.

Otto the Octopus, an eight-armed resident of the Sea Star Aquarium in Germany, baffled his caregivers by deliberately short-circuiting an annoyingly bright light that shone into his otherwise cosy aquarium.

According to staff, the marine exhibition began to suffer from mysterious blackouts to which the puzzled electricians could not find any reasonable explanation. This prompted the aquarium staff to take shifts sleeping on the floor in hope of solving the mystery. “It was a serious matter because it shorted the electricity supply to the whole aquarium that threatened the lives of the other animals when water pumps ceased to work,” a spokesman of the aquarium explains.

During the third night, a befuddled aquarium crew found out the reason behind the incidents – an annoyed octopus that had realised that he could extinguish the irritating lamp by climbing onto the rum of his tank and squirting a jet of water at it.

“We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water“, says the spokes man.

Octopuses are clever and curious animals and they can easily grow bored in captivity. If you wish to keep an octopus, it is very important to constantly provide it with challenging tasks and things to explore to keep it happy and healthy. An octopus must also have suitable caves or similar in the aquarium where it can relive stress, carry out its natural behaviours – and hide from pesky lights. You can read more about octopuses in captivity here.

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.“

New species of catfish from the Ngounié River

Belgian and French scientist[1] have now described and named an African catfish sporting a striking pattern of irregular whitish lines and dots over a black background. The fish has been given the name Synodontis ngouniensis after its type locality, the Ngounié River drainage. The Ngounie River is the last and second most important tributary of the famous Ogowe River and flows through the country Gabon in west central Africa. The species can also be found in the Nyanga River drainage in Congo. (Nyanga is a smaller coastal river that runs through southern Gabon and northern Congo.)

The researchers collected Synodontis ngouniensis from a turbid part of the Ngounié River, where the temperature was 24°C (roughly 75°F) and the pH-value 8.4 (very alkaline).

Synodontis ngouniensis is a mochokid catfish. Its dorsal spine has a smooth anterior margin except for 1-4 feeble serrations that can be seen on the distal part. The species also has a maxillary barbel with a smooth membrane which is proximally at least as broad as the barbel thread and located on the posterior basal two third of the barbel. The fish is equipped with 12-19 mandibular teeth, 10-13 gill rakers on the ceratobranchial of the first branchial arch, and a triangular humeral process.

If you want to learn more, you can find the description of the fish in Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters 19[2].

New species of catfish from the Woleu River

This new species of mochokid catfish has long been confused with another similar species, Synodontis batesii, but has now been recognized as a species in its own right thanks to the work of researchers John Friel and John Sullivan. The new species has been given the name Synodontis woleuensis after the river Woleu and has is known to be present in the Woleu/Mbini/Uoro and Ntem basins of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea in west central Africa.

Synodontis woleuensis sports a dark background colour decorated with numerous small light spots of irregular shapes. A pair of light spots can be seen anterior and posterior to the adipose fin, and a narrow depigmented curved band runs along the anterior margin of the caudal fin. Another notable feature is the serrations on the anterior edge of the dorsal spine of the fish. 

If you wish to learn more about this new species, you can find the description in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia[3].