Nearly 100 pounds of gleaming, fresh-caught California yellowtail and white sea bass arrived at Chef Michael Cimarusti’s Los Angeles-based restaurant Providence on Wednesday morning. But this wasn’t just another ho-hum seafood delivery.
The pile of fish marks an important step toward a fundamentally different way that prominent chefs are beginning to source American seafood: the restaurant-supported fishery.
Call it an evolutionary leap from community-supported-agriculture programs, which support local farmers, and community-supported fisheries, which support small-scale fishermen. Both models rely on members who share the risks of food production by pre-buying weekly subscriptions.
But chefs buy seafood in quantities that dwarf what individuals or families can purchase, so restaurant-supported fisheries could take the concept to a whole new level.
Cimarusti is acting as the pilot chef for California’s first such fishery, run by an organization called Dock To Dish.
[Dock to Dish started a restaurant program in New York in 2014. Last year in New York restaurants paid $2,500 per month for a weekly delivery of 100 pounds. On the East Coast, they get 50 pounds of premium catch, which might include scallops, striped bass or bigeye tuna, and 50 pounds of bycatch, like porgy, skate or sea robin.]
To start, Cimarusti has agreed to buy at least 300 pounds of whole, unprocessed, fresh seafood a month from 16 Santa Barbara-based fishermen participating in the program — approximately a four-day supply for his restaurant.
Cimarusti is a longtime advocate for sustainable seafood. Participating in the program guarantees he’ll have consistent access to the freshest California fish available, caught by small-scale fishermen using sustainable gear including hook and line, traps and spear. What the chef won’t have is any control over the species that will land in his kitchen each week.
“With this model, the chefs aren’t telling us what they want — whether it’s good weather or fish are biting,” says 39-year-old fisherman Eric Hodge. Instead, Hodge and other local fishermen will supply Cimarusti and future participating chefs with whatever nature, skill, and a little luck land for them each week. And because the chefs will buy the fish whole, hours of intense labor — cleaning, gutting and filleting — will now fall to restaurant kitchen staff, instead of the fishermen.
This week, Cimarusti is scoring some gorgeous yellowtail and white sea bass. But at other times there’s a strong possibility the chef may have to persuade his customers to choose less familiar, but locally caught, sheepshead or shovelnose guitarfish instead of the usual halibut or salmon. And species like mackerel, anchovies and market squid — which diners might think of as bait — may also end up on his menu frequently. He’ll have to think fast on his feet about how to transform the unfamiliar into the enticing.
Fisherman Eric Hodge is participating in the pilot Dock to Dish program in California. “We have a 10-year repertoire of dishes we can call upon,” says Cimarusti. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe the excitement of bringing in all these new things will spark inspiration. When 75 pounds of fish shows up at the back door and you have to do something with it, it’s an exciting challenge.”
The idea behind the restaurant-supported fishery isn’t only about moving chefs away from the mostly imported seafood we typically eat: shrimp, tuna, tilapia and farmed salmon. For fishermen like Hodge, it means he will be able to consistently sell his catch at a higher price than he can get from a wholesaler, enabling him to keep the Myrna Louise, his 17-foot, biodiesel-powered skiff named for his mother, afloat. And that’s a compelling draw for Cimarusti.
“I’m so often asked about issues of seafood sustainability, and I always feel that it’s incredibly important. But the side that is seldom discussed is about those who rely on the sea to make their living. We’re hoping to keep American fishermen on the water,” says Cimarusti.
While Cimarusti is testing the waters on the concept in LA, it’s already a success in New York, where Dock to Dish co-founder Sean Barrett launched the restaurant program in 2013. Today, 15 chefs — including powerhouses like Dan Barber, April Bloomfield and Eric Ripert — pay $3,225 a month for 300 pounds of locally caught fish. More than 60 restaurants are on the waiting list clamoring for a spot, including Craft Restaurant, owned by celebrity chef Tom Colicchio.
Paul Greenberg says the decline of local fish markets, and the resulting sequestration of seafood to a corner of our supermarkets, has contributed to “the facelessness and comodification of seafood.” THE SALT ‘The Great Fish Swap’: How America Is Downgrading Its Seafood Supply Chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill restaurant and author of The Third Plate, says the entire concept of moving a CSF-style program to the restaurant level isn’t simply about chefs having a more diverse seafood menu or about fishermen catching “fish at the best possible moment, because they’ll know they have a market for it and will get paid extra for it.” He says Dock to Dish radically upends the economic model for how fish are sold and distributed.
“This is a different paradigm — and it’s a little bit shocking” for chefs, says Barber. He says it’s very likely that a chef could, at some point, end up with a week of sardines and anchovies.
Barrett is confident the idea will flourish in LA, and he has partnered with Sarah Rathbone, co-founder of Community Seafood in Santa Barbara, to run the program. Rathbone has been operating a CSF with local fishermen for several years. She and Barrett decided to partner on bringing Dock to Dish to the West Coast after meeting at a sustainable seafood conference two years ago.
Rathbone says they won’t sign up other chefs until the pilot program with Cimarusti has had time to work out any problems, but excitement over the concept is already growing.
“I was approached by a chef from a restaurant who wanted to be part of the program. He said, ‘Tell me what you want me to do? Do I need to audition for you?'” says Rathbone. “That immediately touched me and shows the love for what we do.”
Keith and Tiffani Andrews fish for ridgeback shrimp on the fishing vessel Alamo. Keith and Tiffani Andrews fish for ridgeback shrimp on the fishing vessel Alamo. Courtesy of Sarah Rathbone/Community Seafood Barrett says there’s huge demand for dock-to-dish-style seafood. But unlike Chefs Collaborative, a nonprofit that promotes the use of underutilized fish by holding a series of “Trash Fish Dinners,” Barrett is adamant that the term “trash fish” undermines the value of these lesser-known species. (He isn’t alone.)
He says the restaurant-supported-fishery model elevates those fish from trash to treasures, by making them the centerpieces of fine dining — while also supporting American fishermen.
“Diners want a good seafood dish, but they want to feel good about it, too, and this aligns with their values,” he says.
Clare Leschin-Hoar is a journalist based in San Diego who covers food policy and sustainability issues.
Over the past year, scientists have been keeping a close eye on an important swath of the Pacific Ocean, just along the equator. When conditions here are just right, an El Niño can form — and wreak havoc on weather patterns across the globe.
And right now, it looks like we’re on pace for a very large El Niño this fall or winter. Quite possibly one of the strongest on record. Based on past experience, that could potentially bring much-needed rain in California, but also drought in Australia, destructive floods in Peru, and so on. A strong El Niño could also help make 2015 and 2016 some of the hottest years ever recorded. It’d be a very big deal.
But El Niño events are often unpredictable and full of surprises. So nothing’s guaranteed just yet. What follows is a guide to how El Niño works, what we know about the 2015 event, and how a potentially massive El Niño could upend the world’s weather later this year.
A very basic definition of El Niño
El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs irregularly in the eastern tropical Pacific every two to seven years. When the trade winds that usually blow from east to west weaken, sea surface temperatures start rising, setting off a chain of weather impacts.
El Niños can be strong or weak. Strong events can temporarily disrupt weather patterns around the world, typically making certain regions wetter (Peru or California, say) and others drier (Southeast Asia). Some countries suffer major damage as a result.
El Niños also transfer heat stored in the deeper layers of the ocean to the surface. When combined with global warming, that can lead to record hot years, as in 1998.
“El Niño” got its name in the 1800s from Peruvian fisherman, who first noticed a mysterious warm current that would appear around Christmas. They called it the “little boy” or “Christ child.”
Why this year’s El Niño could be a huge deal
The last truly massive El Niño appeared in 1997-’98 and ended up causing an estimated $35 billion in destruction and 23,000 deaths around the world. (It also inspired that famous Chris Farley sketch.) Now we may be on the verge of a similar-size event:
Early-August status of the 1997 and 2015 El NIño events. Satellite imagery shows the departure from average sea-surface height for a given time of year, which is correlated with warmth in the upper ocean. (NASA/JPL via Weather Underground)
That, in itself, is a surprise. Back in March, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center announced that a weak El Niño had formed in the Pacific, but many experts initially thought it might just fizzle out in the summer. Instead, El Niño kept getting stronger, with ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific continuing to soar. Some forecasters now think this could turn into one of the strongest El Niño events in memory when it peaks later this fall or winter.
“We’re predicting this El Niño could be among the strongest El Niños in the historical record, dating back to 1950,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, in a recent press call. We’ll see if this latest forecast holds up.
If it does, countries across the globe will have to brace themselves. In the past, major El Niño events have brought unusually hot, dry weather to Australia that can cramp wheat yields and amp up wildfires. It can bring hotter, drier weather to India that hurts agriculture. It can bring heavy rain and destructive flooding to Peru, washing away houses and spreading cholera. In 1997, El Niño dried out Indonesia so badly that it led to huge forest fires whose smoke disrupted daily life in Singapore.
Yet El Niño isn’t all bad. In the United States, it could potentially bring needed rain this winter to ease California’s drought (though also mudslides and flooding). Historically, El Niño has also served up milder US winters and helped tamp down hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
One important caveat here is that every El Niño is a bit different — and some have unexpected impacts. As NOAA’s Emily Becker points out, strong El Niño events usually bring rain to California (as in 1982-’83), but occasionally they don’t (as in 1965-’66):
Another story to watch is whether a strong El Niño could help make 2015 or 2016 the hottest year on record. This one seems increasingly plausible.
Global temperatures are already going up over time, thanks to all the carbon dioxide we’re adding to the atmosphere. According to NASA, 2014 was already the hottest year on record. But there was no El Niño that year — and El Niño years tend to be a bit hotter than average, as heat gets transferred from the ocean to the surface. So the combination of El Niño and rising CO2 could help 2015 and even 2016 break records:
Bottom line: There’s still a lot of uncertainty here, but El Niño could very well be the biggest weather story of late 2015, with potentially far-reaching impacts.
How El Niño actually works, step by step
To see how El Niño works, it helps to understand what the equatorial Pacific looks like under normal, or “neutral,” conditions:
1) Neutral conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean
Normally, the tropical Pacific features strong trade winds that blow warm ocean water from east to west, where it piles up near Indonesia. Meanwhile, back east along South America, frigid water deep down in the ocean gets pulled up closer to the surface, cooling the area around Peru. Here’s a diagram:
(William Kessler/NOAA/PMEL)
As a result, during “neutral” conditions, sea levels are about half a meter higher near Indonesia than they are in Peru. And the surface water near Indonesia is about 8°C warmer (14.4°F) than it is near Peru. That temperature difference creates a convective loop in the atmosphere that, in turn, reinforces the trade winds.
This ends up affecting a lot more than just this stretch of ocean. Because the Pacific is so vast, this system is a major driving force in the global climate. The large, warm pool of water near Indonesia causes the air above it to rise, creating rainfall in the region. And this system shapes the jet streams that guide weather and storms around the world.
That’s how it works under normal conditions, anyway. But things look a little different when El Niño comes along.
2) Now along comes El Niño
Every few years, those prevailing Pacific trade winds that blow east to west can weaken. (Scientists are still debating the nuances of exactly why this happens.)
When the trade winds weaken, all that warm water that was piled up near Indonesia starts sloshing back eastward, pulled back down by gravity. What’s more, the underwater layer known as the thermocline starts sinking. As a result, there’s less cold water rising up from the deep ocean near South America — so the waters near Peru start warming up. Here’s another diagram:
(William Kessler/NOAA/PMEL)
This causes sea surface temperatures in the east and central Pacific to start rising and the trade winds to weaken even further. What’s more, rainfall starts following that warm pool of water as it travels eastward. That’s why El Niño is usually associated with drier weather in places like Indonesia and Australia, as well as heavier rains in places like Peru (or California). The rain is essentially moving east.
Scientists officially declare an El Niño when sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean (known as the Niño 3.4 region) rise 0.5°C above their historical baseline for three months in a row — and once atmospheric conditions and rainfall patterns shift accordingly.
Again, because the Pacific is so vast, an El Niño can have large ripple effects on weather around the world, especially during the winter months. Here’s a look at the changes that have historically accompanied El Niño events:
Typical effects of an El Niño during the winter:
(NOAA)
A strong El Niño can weaken monsoons in the Indian Ocean, for example. It can also cause the jet stream to start stretching from the Eastern Pacific across the southern United States, bringing rainfall and storms with it. Still, a lot depends on how strong the El Niño actually is — and occasionally there are aberrations and exceptions to the rule. More on that below.
El Niño’s return in 2015 — and why scientists are talking about a “Godzilla” event
Ever since early 2014, scientists have been expecting this latest El Niño to form. But, in a sign of how slippery the system can be, El Niño kept defying predictions and not showing up.
Finally, in March 2015, after a number of false starts, scientists at NOAA’s climate prediction center were ready to declare that a weak El Niño was underway. Specifically, sea surface temperatures in that Niño 3.4 region (roughly in the center of the chart below) had been at least 0.5°C above their baseline since September. And, importantly, atmospheric conditions were responding in turn, with more rain over the central Pacific and less rain over Indonesia:
Sea surface temperature departures from average (based on 1981–2010) at the end of February 2015. NOAA map by Emily Becker, Climate Prediction Center.
At the time, however, NOAA’s forecasters said that this El Niño looked “weak,” with possibly minimal effects on global weather patterns, and only had a 50 to 60 percent chance of lasting through the summer.
Then, somewhat unexpectedly, El Niño got stronger and stronger. By August 2015, sea surface temperatures had soared to more than 1.2°C above baseline in the Niño 3.4 region, and scientists were seeing the resulting telltale atmospheric changes. Here’s a chart from July and August — notice how the anomalous warm area has moved eastward since March:
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific: departure from the 1981-2010 average. (NOAA)
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is now estimating that there’s a 90 percent chance El Niño will persist through the fall/winter. And when it peaks, signs suggest that this could be an extremely strong event, rivaling the strongest El Niños since detailed records began in 1950. Some forecasters have even dubbed this one a potential “Godzilla.”
Over at NOAA’s ENSO blog, Emily Becker offers a more detailed breakdown of why forecasters are betting on a powerful, possibly record-setting, El Niño. Keep in mind that forecasts often go awry, that surprises occur regularly, and we can’t be perfectly certain of how things will turn out. Still, she writes, “We have a relatively confident forecast for a strong event.”
El Niño could bring rain to California — but may not end the drought
As noted above, El Niño tends to be associated with changes in weather patterns around the world, especially during the Northern Hemisphere winter. The most tantalizing possibility is that a strong El Niño could bring rain to California, potentially alleviating the state’s drought.
But even here, nothing is yet assured. El Niño only affects US weather indirectly, by altering atmospheric circulation and shifting the North Pacific jet stream. (See here for a lucid explanation by Columbia University’s Anthony Barnston.) This is an intricate chain of events, and small kinks at certain points can affect the ultimate outcome.
As such, Becker cautions people to think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities. Here’s an example of how El Niño might shift the odds of a wet winter for California (she notes that this isn’t a prediction, just an illustration):
An example of how a strong El Niño could shift the odds for the amount of seasonal precipitation. Official outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center are available here.
In other words, thanks to El Niño, California has a greater chance of more precipitation this winter, but not a 100 percent chance.
What’s more, even if rain does come, that may not be enough to completely erase the massive water deficit that California has built up over the past five years. The state likely needs record precipitation to end the drought, and it also needs the right mix of rain (to recharge the reservoirs) and snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains (to melt during the spring and summer).
Also, be warned: Heavy rain after a drought can bring floods and mudslides. So California needs to be ready for some negative impacts, as well.
El Niño tends to hurt some countries, and benefit others
It’s not quite right to say that El Niño events are “bad” or “good.” They tend to have different impacts on different regions.
One recent study from the University of Cambridge found that on average, El Niño events hurt economic activity in Australia, Chile, Indonesia, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa. The reasons varied: drought and reduced crop yields in Australia and India, forest fires in Indonesia, less-productive fisheries in Peru.
But that study also found that on average, El Niño tends to boost the economies in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and even the United States, at least in the very short term. Again, many factors were at play: In addition to bringing needed rain to California and Texas, El Niño was associated with less tornado activity in the Midwestern United States and fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Here’s a table of the estimated economic impacts on a broad selection of countries:
Again, every big El Niño is different and has its own idiosyncrasies. So think of this table as more a rough guide than gospel.
El Niño could help make 2015 or 2016 the hottest years on record
Thanks to global warming, the Earth’s average surface temperature has been going up over time. But there’s a lot of variation from year to year. El Niño years tend to be a bit hotter than average. La Niña years (when those trade winds strengthen rather than weaken) tend to be a bit cooler than average. Like so:
So what’s going on here? As humans load more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re trapping more and more heat on the Earth’s surface. But more than 90 percent of that extra heat is absorbed by the oceans. So subtle interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere can make a big difference for surface temperatures.
When conditions in the Pacific are neutral, more of that heat is trapped beneath the ocean surface. When a strong El Niño forms, more of that heat is transferred to the surface. That’s why the Earth’s average surface temperatures reached new highs in 1998: you had the combination of global warming and an extremely strong El Niño.
What was remarkable about 2014 is that it was likely the hottest year on record even without an El Niño event — a sign that Earth keeps getting warmer overall. Meanwhile, 2015 has so far been on track to be even hotter than 2014.
Now throw a potentially record-setting El Niño into the mix, and we’re looking at a potential shattering of records. Back in January, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt explained at a press conference that temperatures typically peak about three months after an El Niño event. Given that forecasters expect this current El Niño to last until next spring, it’s entirely possible we could see 2015 or 2016 break the temperature record. We’ll have to wait and see.
One of the most common things people have asked after reading the piece is, “What can I do to help?” So on Thursday afternoon, Holthaus, along with ten climate experts, participated in a Reddit AMA to answer readers’ questions about climate change solutions.
Below are some of the things we learned.
1. Climate experts aren’t all doom and gloom; they’re happy to offer solutions for “average” people. “Teach your children to be mindful of what they do. That waste causes problems. That they live in the context of a big world but that the world is made up of individual actions,” said marine ecologist Dr. Carl Safina.
“I would also add that ‘awareness’ is a key step forward. Talk about these issues with friends and families,” said Kansas State University grasslands ecologist Dr. Jesse Nippert, adding, “Engagement with others also has more relevance when it’s local – notice/record ‘small things’ in your community like changes in plant phenology (first flower, leaf drop), first freeze/thaw dates, rainfall amounts, etc….[C]itizen science has been a HUGE movement and source of invaluable data recording climate change.”
2. Some members of the public wish scientists would engage in more direct climate activism – and scientists have fascinating thoughts about that. “I am a believer that we all have things to contribute, and we do not all have to do the same things to be effective,” said Dr. Simone Alin, supervisory oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “I am glad people are marching in the streets to show how many people understand the problem and demand change. On the other hand, as a federal scientist, I have played a role in planning and implementing our regional, national, and international ocean acidification monitoring systems (with many, many great partners, from the policy world, academia, other gov’t agencies, tribal nations, industry, NGOs, etc.). In this capacity, others in my organization/field and I have had the opportunity to present our scientific findings to all of the above partners, all the way up to Congress, which has resulted in many positive outcomes.”
“I think we benefit more from mutually supporting each other and realizing we can be partners at the same table than from suggesting others aren’t doing enough because they are working through other channels,” she said.
3. The experts agree that modifying individual habits won’t be enough to combat climate change – we need to see big changes at the government level too. “We need both, to show our elected leaders we have skin in the game, but we need to demand that they take actions at the scale of their power,” said J. Drake Hamilton, senior policy director at Fresh Energy. “I have heard Congressmen crow about switching a few light bulbs — they need to sign into law comprehensive, market-based systems that put a limit/price on carbon pollution and internalize those external costs of climate.”
“The problem is too huge for the citizens to be making bottom-up changes; it is almost an imperative from the state/country to be leading the way,” said Dr. Nina Bednarsek, an ocean acidification scientist at the University of Washington and NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “Having said that, citizens’ responsibility is to try to make these changes on the local and state level by writing to their politicians and demanding more green approaches.”
4. Climate scientists have a sense of humor. When asked if the AMA participants had any “crazy ideas [for] promoting climate change,” Dr. Alin responded, “A cooking show from the future. Premise: now that we only have jellyfish in our oceans, what tasty treats can we make out of them anyway?”
She added, “More seriously, I have thought for a long time that we need some sort of mechanism/agency/organization to quantify the overall footprint of human actions on the environment….All of our consumption choices and actions (flying, driving) have a total environmental footprint, but I’m not aware of anyone or any organization that calculates this….Ideally it should be an international entity (UN I suppose) that would create evidence-based metrics to support the sustainability of various lifestyle choices and such. I say this in part as a consumer – it can be mind-boggling enough to go to the supermarket and pick out a cereal in our world of needlessly plentiful choices – how’s a person to make important decisions about bigger consumption choices?”
5. There is hope. Maybe. Asked if climate change is reversible, Dr. Bill Peterson, an oceanographer at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, had this to say: “We can only hope.”
Holthaus followed up on Dr. Peterson’s response, saying, “This is actually a pretty good answer from a scientific basis. There’s no way of knowing if future technology will be able to reliably and affordably remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so the best current approach is not to put it there in the first place.”
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on August 16, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on 5 Things We Learned From the ‘Point of No Return’ Climate Solutions AMA Tags: climate change
An image showing the positive / warm phase of a PDO and the negative / cold phase. The terms warm and cold refer to the temperature of water off the west coast of America. JPL/NASA
A new forecast out Thursday on the El Niño climate pattern shows it could be one of the strongest on record. And that could deliver much needed rain to Southern California and possibly northern parts of the state, too. But El Niños are usually fleeting, lasting only a year or two.
Now, evidence is building that a longer-term climate pattern — one that might bring years of rainy winters — could be forming in the Pacific well north of the equatorial waters that give rise to El Niño.
The PDO game change
For the past several months, researchers have been tracking warmer temperatures in this northerly patch of ocean. And they’re beginning to question whether we’re about to see a switch in something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO.
Given the data, the PDO could be shifting from a cool phase to a warm one — a shift that could mean a wetter decade ahead for much of California. Still, the phenomenon could also turn out be a short-lived blip, not a years-long flip.
Unlike El Niño, which focuses on sea surface temperatures in a stretch of the Pacific near the equator, the PDO looks at water in the northern part of the ocean, from Hawaii all the way to Alaska.
According to research scientist Nathan Mantua with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the PDO has a warm phase and a cool phase, and each one can last anywhere from a few years to decades.
During the warm phase, waters along the coast of the western U.S. tend to heat up while the larger ocean about 200 miles off the coast cools down. During the cool phase these trends are reversed.
“When you have the warm pattern of the PDO, it tends to be wet in the southwest U.S. and northern Mexico,” he explained.
During those same years you are more likely to see drought in the Northern Rockies, Idaho, Eastern Washington, Western Montana and Southern British Columbia.
Likewise, the cool phase is linked to wetter periods up north but dry conditions in Southern California and neighboring states.
Mantua says the PDO has been mostly in a cool phase since 1998, coinciding with some of California’s driest years on record.
Climate scientist Bill Patzert with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory thinks it’s this PDO pattern that is responsible in large part for the severe drought in the region.
Long-term drought buster on the horizon?
However, since January of 2014, the PDO has been shifting into a warm mode.
Patzert thinks this could be the drought-buster the state has been hoping for.
“Perhaps in the long term, rooting for a [warm] PDO… is probably the most important thing for California and the American West,” he said.
“In the long run these decadal or multi-decade variations in the Pacific are really the key to sustaining California agriculture and California civilization,” Patzert said.
That may be true for Southern California, but it is less clear how a warm PDO will affect Northern California, said NOAA’s Nathan Mantua.
That’s because the northern part of the state is between the two regions that switch from wet and dry as the PDO shifts.
“Northern California sort of sits between the ends of this sort of north-south see-saw,” he said.
Still, he’s optimistic that a warm PDO is coming, since the major index predicting this pattern has been positive for 19 months.
But Mantua cautions that even such a strong signal can result in a warm PDO that only lasts a year or so.
“Beyond that, it’s going depend on what the winds do and the weather patterns,” he said.
Sometimes those can change rapidly and dramatically, bringing drought conditions anew to California.
Another wild card, according to JPL’s Patzert, is how climate change will affect the PDO and related weather patterns.
“As we move into the 21st Century, climate is shifting beneath our feet… nobody really understands what the impact will be,” he said.
For now, climate watchers will keep their eyes on the ocean for signals of the weather to come.
Hopeful Californians are looking to the Pacific this winter for an end to California’s most punishing drought on record.
The reason: what appears to be a monster El Niño in the making. The abnormally warm waters along the equator could mean a wet winter.
There are no guarantees, but there have been portents. On one Saturday in July, San Diego got more rain than it got the entire month of January.
That same month, ESPN broadcaster Dan Shulman broke the news to baseball fans from underneath a golf umbrella: “For the first time in 20 years, a game has been postponed because of rain here in Anaheim.”
You can thank Dolores for that, a hurricane that managed to make it farther north than normal. The intense Pacific hurricane season bears the fingerprints of El Niño, which is already getting hyped as a potential drought-buster.
“For this time of year, the El Niño is as strong as it’s ever been.”
Storms headed for the California coast run into the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, represented by the “H” in this graphic. (David Pierce/ KQED)
Strength in this case is measured by how much warmer surface temperatures are than normal, in the tropical Pacific. And this one looks to be about as strong as the legendary El Niño of 1997-98, which was the strongest on record, peaking at about 2.3 degrees Celsius above normal.
In the ocean, a spike of more than two degrees is like sticking a hot poker into the climate system. Pacific storms sucked up moisture from extremely warm equatorial waters and pretty much dumped it on California. San Francisco got double its normal rainfall that year.
Enter the Blob
But this time around, there are other things brewing in the Pacific: patches of freakishly warm water spread far and wide, up the California coast to the persistently warm vortex, hundreds of miles across, christened by climate scientists as “the Blob.”
“That is definitely the wildcard with this El Niño,” warns Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and an advisor to federal El Niño forecasters.
He says unlike in 1997, the Blob has been a fixture during the current drought. It’s essentially the sidekick of that “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” the stubborn bubble of high-pressure that’s been parked off the north coast for the past couple of years, diverting winter storms up and around California.
The “Blob” is associated with the persistent ridge of high pressure that has detoured the winter storm track around California. (NOAA)
“And so the question is, who wins in the battle of the Blob and the El Niño,” says Patzert, “and what impact that’ll have on rainfall on the West Coast of the U.S. this fall, into the winter.”
Patzert says if the Blob and its ridge dominate, we could wring less water out of this El Niño.
“What we’re having here is battling blobs!”
But not everyone’s on the edge of their seat.
“It doesn’t fit with my concept of how things work,” says Trenberth. On the contrary, he maintains, the presence of all this warm water — especially close to the coast — could mean heavier rains from the storms we do get.
A Mixed Blessing
“The potential in California for rains to be torrential this winter is quite high because of the warm water,” Trenberth says.
That’s because, as a general rule, the warmer the water, the more moisture gets picked up by the atmosphere and by any emerging storms.
Ocean waters near California have warmed further in recent weeks, and remain far above normal. (NOAA RTG)
“Those storms are apt to pick up moisture from any warm water that’s lying around all along the West Coast,” says Trenberth, “and it just feeds those storms.”
That would be both good and bad news. While the reservoirs refill, the rivers could easily overfill, causing flooding and landslides — much like in 1997-98. Trenberth will take that glass as half-full.
“The way things are shaping up it sure looks like an end to the drought to me,” he says, “depending on how you define the drought.”
Patzert agrees the current El Niño is looking like a monster — “Godzilla,” to use his favorite moniker. But he’s concerned the Blob and its ridge could become at least partial spoilers, blocking out storms from the northern Pacific, leaving the door open only for El Niño-driven storms from the tropics.
That could mean Southern California gets a soaking, but the northern part of the state — where most of the major reservoirs are — misses out.
“There is almost certainly going to be a dividing line,” says Stanford climate scientist Daniel Swain. “And it’s possible that dividing line could occur somewhere in Northern California.”
Patzert hopes that isn’t the case.
“If that happens, I’m definitely going to have to go into witness protection,” he frets, “because ‘my’ El Niño, the Great Wet Hope, will only deliver half the package.”
Whatever we get, it’s a package that won’t be delivered for at least three months, when California’s long-awaited “rainy” season is due.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on August 11, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on Possible Spoiler for El Niño: A ‘Battle of the Blobs’ Tags: Blob, El Nino
Walruses, like these in Alaska, are being forced ashore in record numbers. Corey Accardo/NOAA/AP
The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public’s attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren’t cut, “We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen’s study, said their new research doesn’t necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon “safe” level of climate change — “would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise.”
Hansen’s new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, “This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding.”
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still “unclear” whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren’t even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth’s biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. “It’s unbelievable,” Thomas told a local paper. “Whales are all over the place.”
Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented “haul out” of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that’s ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
Salmon on the brink of dying out. Michael Quinton/Newscom
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he’s been seeing this year is deeply troubling.Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn’t exist without salmon.But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.”You talk to fishermen, and they all say: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before,’ ” says Peterson. “So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ ”
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year’s, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven’t yet figured out precisely what’s behind them and why they happen when they do. It’s not a permanent change — the ocean’s temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
“The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature,” says Peterson, “but the main problem we’ve had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can’t keep up with it, and neither can the animals.” Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: “At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over.”
Pavement-melting heat waves in India. Harish Tyagi/EPA/Corbis
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean’s food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a “quite traumatic” impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it’s converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means “the whole food chain is going to be different.”
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we’re heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she’s trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren’t. The ancient data she studies shows “really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We’re talking less than a decade.”
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling “the blob” — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that’s thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what’s happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that’s persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” — weather patterns just aren’t supposed to last this long.
What’s increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world’s oceans, it’s not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world’s reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it’s also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it’s been blamed on accelerated beach erosion “almost as significant as some hurricane events.”
Biblical floods in Turkey. Ali Atmaca/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study’s authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails’ shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled “cauliflower” or “sandpaper.” A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world’s top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an “effectively irreversible” change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world’s oceans.
“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous.”
Thanks to the pressure we’re putting on the planet’s ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here’s what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the “Great Dying,” when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered “Great Dying” took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans’ most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. “Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today,” Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she’s seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world’s marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: “A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good indicator of change.”
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: “This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?”
Alin’s frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins “heightened the whole issue,” she says. “I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed.”
Katharine Hayhoe speaks about climate change to students and faculty at Wayland Baptist University in 2011. Geoffrey McAllister/Chicago Tribune/MCT/Getty
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she’s already planning her exit strategy: “If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don’t have an exit strategy. . . . So that’s who I’m here trying to help.”
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That’s because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that’s also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children’s Trust, a legal advocacy organization that’s filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn’t just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it’s also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that’s enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Research by Rebecca Asch, a recent graduate of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, shows a strong correlation between warmer ocean temperatures and changes in the timing of fish reproduction.
Climate variability has changed the seasonal cycle of larvae production by fishes in the California Current. Such shifts in seasonal, biological processes are known as phenology. Changes in phenology are studied by scientists as a key way to assess the effects of climate change on a species.
There have been extensive studies on the phenology of terrestrial (land) species, but comparatively few studies on how climate variability affects seasonal behavior of marine species. Existing studies indicate that changes in seasonal cycles are occurring earlier in most terrestrial ecosystems. Climate change may cause the phenology of marine animals to change more rapidly than terrestrial species.
Unseasonably warm ocean temperatures may also affect migration patterns, bringing several marine species usually found in regions closer to the Equator closer to Southern California. In February, a pod of false killer whales were seen from the Scripps Pier; this was the first time these whales have been seen north of central Baja California.
Asch studied the larval stages of 43 fish species that were collected off the Southern California coast between 1951 and 2008. The research used the larval fishes from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), a unique data set that has been consistently collected and maintained for over 60 years; it is among the oldest and most complete datasets of its type.
The data showed that many fish species spawned earlier, other species showed no long-term change in spawning cycles, and a few species spawned later. Many of the species with no long-term changes in spawning show variations in spawning between years, indicating that the changes in their spawning cycles may have occurred due to factors other than climate change, such as naturally occurring climate variability.
Asch’s findings may also be useful for fisheries management. “The fishes are reacting to climate change and it will be important for any fisheries management with a seasonal component to adapt their practices to avoid mismanagement,” she said.
The Southern California Current is an example of an Eastern Boundary Current Upwelling (EBCU) ecosystem. These ecosystems account for over twenty percent of global fish catch. If the California Current is representative of other EBCU ecosystems, similar changes in fish phenology to ones observed by Asch could be occurring around the world.
A change in the time of year when fish reproduce can affect their overall ecology. Generally, fish reproduce during seasons when there is an abundance of zooplankton and/or when upwelling is minimal. This behavior maximizes the survival of larvae and prevents larvae from being swept into unfavorable habitats by currents. Unlike fishes, zooplankton have not exhibited continuous changes in phenology over the 60-year period of the CalCOFI program. Over time, this “mismatch” between the seasonality of larvae and zooplankton could cause fish species to potentially spawn during less than ideal periods for larvae survival.
The study was funded by California Sea Grant, NOAA’s Nancy Foster Scholarship Program, NSF IGERT Grant, the San Diego ACRS Foundation, and the Nippon Foundation.
A breeding male bald eagle is shown landing at the west end on Santa Catalina Island, Calif. – P. Sharpe
“Doing very well! Thanks for checking,” the bald eagles of California’s Channel Islands might well say to recent inquiries by researchers about their well-being.
The iconic birds were erased from the Channel Islands completely in the 1960s thanks to hunters, egg collectors, and the poisoning of their environment by the insecticide DDT.
But they have been reintroduced to the islands over the last three 35 years, and scientists writing in the latest issue of the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications wanted to compare the eagles’ modern diet with that of the historical eagle population. Understanding how a habitat has changed between disappearance and reintroduction, they stress, is critical to gauging a species’ chance of thriving in an ancestral location.
Seth Newsome, of the University of New Mexico; Paul Collins, of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; and Peter Sharpe, of the Institute for Wildlife Studies authored the study.
In 2010 and 2011, the trio examined the diets of the eagles and found the animals were indeed thriving, albeit from different dietary staples.
In the northern islands, the researchers found the eagles were eating much as they had before disappearing: they were feasting on seabirds.
Meanwhile, on the more southerly Santa Catalina Island, the eagles were, it turned out, eating primarily fish.
“Generally speaking,” explained Newsome in a release, “the northern islands are much more pristine, and a larger fraction of their coastlines includes areas where fishing is strongly regulated or banned.”
But Santa Catalina, Newsome noted, “has a larger human footprint, especially in the form of recreational fishing.”
The team thinks the eagles on Santa Catalina have figured out that the wisest thing to do when hungry is to look for the humans in the boats. “We believe that the differences in diversity of fish consumed by eagles in these two areas is actually a product of recreational fishing, and that eagles on Santa Catalina have learned to follow recreational fishing boats and scavenge discards thrown overboard,” said Newsome.
While none of this thriving-on-seabirds news is terribly welcome if you’re a seabird, it nonetheless indicates something good. The researchers say the northern islands eagles’ abundant consumption of them shows that efforts to conserve seabirds in the area have been a boost to the whole ecosystem.
“Preserving diversity is wonderful,” Newsome said. “But you need to preserve diversity at all levels in the food chain. At present, such intact, fully-functioning food webs are relatively rare in the United States, but to see that happen in a place like the Channel Islands that is adjacent to an area with one of the highest human population densities in the U.S. (southern California) is exciting.”
These encouraging findings about the resurgent eagles come just days after news broke that the bald eagle population had expanded its reach to five of the eight Channel Islands, nesting on an island, San Clemente, that had not seen a nesting pair of bald eagles in more than half a century.
The water in the Monterey Bay, including off Marina State Beach, has been a turquoise color in the past few days because of the presence of coccolithophores, a single-celled phytoplankton that develops scales that reflect the sun. (Vern Fisher – Monterey Herald)
Monterey >> Our corner of the sea is turning a brighter shade of blue.
An odd and little-understood ocean phenomenon is taking place on Monterey Bay right now, and you may have noticed it: the waters are turning an almost tropical turquoise color. Derived from an abundance of a harmless microorganism, the colorful blooms are usually found in the open sea.
But Monterey Bay’s is the second bloom along the California coast in a month. It is due to the presence of coccolithophores, a single-celled phytoplankton that develops hubcap-shaped limestone scales that reflect the sun, turning the water pastel colored.
“The optics of the water when one gets coccolithophores blooms, it looks like this,” said Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, a biological oceanographer with UC Santa Barbara, noting how odd it is to see a bloom along the shore. “This is really unusual.”
The organisms shed their scales in the water, with the phenomenon usually occurring in northern seas. When you have billions of them, they can impact huge stretches of the open sea, a visual that can be bizarre and stunning in its intensity.
“The blooms are so bright you have to wear sunglasses,” Iglesias-Rodriguez said.
In fact, coccolithophores are responsible for something most people are familiar with: the White Cliffs of Dover, along the English Channel. The striking white cliff faces were created from sediment filled with the organism’s discarded scales.
The first bloom showed up last month in the Santa Barbara Channel. Iglesias-Rodriguez said she is researching why it happened there, including whether the recent oil spill is a factor.
But late last week, it started showing up in Monterey Bay. Satellite data shows the waters from Point Pinos in the south to Natural Bridges State Beach in the north colored a vibrant hue.
Iglesias-Rodriguez is in touch with colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in the hopes of comparing water samples. She said she can only find one unofficial record of the phenomenon occurring off Santa Barbara, dating to the 1990s.
“We are trying to figure out: Why now?” she said.
Coccolithophores seem to thrive when other phytoplankton cannot, particularly when marine phosphorous levels are low. They typically bloom in early summer.
“This would be the right time for them,” Iglesias-Rodriguez said.
This image from Saturday was created using data from NASA’s AQUA satellite, with help from biological oceanographer John Ryan at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The turquoise water is created by the presence of a microorganism. (Courtesy MBARI)
