Sea Snails on Acid

Twice a day the rocky Pacific coast traps seawater in pools as the tide rolls in and out. Compared to the ocean, the puddles are so small and innocuous that it seems nothing momentous could possibly be happening there, but there is. It turns out tiny black turban snails may be getting a buzz from the changing levels of acidity caused by ocean acidification. The scientists at Bodega Marine Lab looked closely at sea stars and snails to find out.

The underside of the purple sea star is covered in tiny delicate suction cups that make one wonder how it moves fast enough to be a voracious hunter, but it is. It’s the bully on the playground, a merciless predator. It can pry open mussel shells, turn its stomach inside out and wrap it around large prey, and digest its meal before even swallowing. It’s no wonder that when black turban snails sense the purple star’s arrival, they all flee to safety, crawling quickly up the side of a tide pool until the enemy leaves the water. Quickly for snails, that is.

Snails have always been good at running away from their primary predator – the purple sea star – until now. Brittany Jellison, a graduate student at University of California Davis, has found in a recent study that the snail’s dramatic response might be slowing down because of ocean acidification. Jellison modified tide pools to mimic ocean acidification conditions. Then she observed the snail’s response by measuring the path they took to safety. What she found when watching the snail was a trippy set of behaviors.

“Elevated carbon dioxide is a foreign substance in seawater, and snails are taking that foreign substance into their body, so yes, they in essence are on drugs,” said Brian Gaylord, a professor at UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab, where Jellison discovered that under ocean acidification conditions, snails didn’t immediately flee the pool to safety.

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  While most scientists studying the phenomenon are trying to understand how it effects a single species in a lab, Jellison’s work explores how ocean acidification effects multiple species interactions.

“I think what’s really important here is that she is moving beyond thinking about an individual species, and instead thinking about how the direct effects on individuals scale up when they are in nature and interacting with other species. That is the important part of it,” said Kristy Kroeker, Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California Santa Cruz.

Professor Philip Munday of James Cook University agrees. He studies how ocean acidification effects reef fish and their ability to adapt to a changing environment.

“Ecosystems are a whole combination of interactive species,” said Munday. “If we want to understand how ocean acidification is going to impact marine ecosystems we need to understand how it will impact with the really critical ecological interactions, such as predatory-prey interactions. That’s one of the really exciting things about Jellison’s work.”

Tide pools on the Pacific coast have natural fluctuations in acidity, and the black turban snail and other animals that live there have adapted to that. Jellison wondered if the snails would be tolerant to ocean acidification conditions as well, or if they would reach their tipping point, and no longer able to tolerate the changes.

To find out, Jellison made model tide pools in aquariums. So that the snails would feel most at home, she simulated the conditions of natural tide pools, with one exception. Jellison changed the levels of acidification in some of the pools to mimic the levels that are expected for rock pools under ocean acidification by the year 2100. Having some tide pools with normal conditions and some with future acidic conditions allowed her to compare the behavior of sober snails with snails on acid.

With the arena built, let the show begin. Clutching her camera, Jellison carefully lowered black turban snails into the tank. One by one the snails reacted to a chemical cue produced by the predator sea star. Jellison took photos every two minutes for a half hour, then analyzed them for the distance the snails traveled, where they moved, and most importantly, if they left the water and escaped to safety. In total, Jellison did two 5-day trials, created 32 aquariums, tested 32 snails, and took photos every two minutes for 28 minutes per snail.

Under normal conditions, the snails will run away and exit the water, a flight response that keeps them safe. Jellison found that in water with higher acidity the snails started to run away, but instead of moving to dry ground, they seemed to get confused, haphazardly meandering around the pool.

Ocean acidification’s ability to change the interactions between predators and prey can have far reaching consequences. Jellison and her team aren’t yet sure exactly why the snails act confused. They think it’s related to changes in the brain as the animal tries to maintain balanced brain chemistry, which is something they would like to understand further.

“I really love research and I especially love working with marine animals,” said Jellison, “but when I think about what my work is saying about the future it can be a little bit hard to take in. Most of the things we are finding is that the world is going to look very different form what we see today.”

In the meantime, Jellison continues this research out in the field, in a creative study that has her waking up at all hours to hike to the tide pools and observe snails – all to understand the cascading effects of ocean acidification on the ecosystem. “I have a lot of hope that we will move forward as a society and try to come up with solutions and actually make changes. It is having hope that is important,” said Jellison.

Ocean acidification may cross national boundaries, and reach all corners of the earth, but a glimpse into a puddle of seawater reveals an elaborate community, a tiny snail, and a big message.

Read the original post: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/sea-snails-on-acid/

‘The Blob’ Is Back: What Warm Ocean Mass Means for Weather, Wildlife

The blob is back.

Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather.

Earlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior.

The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem. But it is to blame for seriously disrupting the ocean food chain and for creating conditions that fed unprecedented algal blooms in the coastal Pacific.

With the Blob back in play again, what does it mean for the winter ahead? To find out, Water Deeply spoke with Nicholas Bond, a research meteorologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington’s state climatologist. In June 2014, Bond named this persistent weather phenomenon, and later wrote the first scientific paper characterizing it.

Water Deeply: What exactly is the Blob?

Nicholas Bond: It’s a large mass of water in the northeast Pacific Ocean that’s considerably warmer than usual. It doesn’t have any real sharply defined boundaries, but it’s an area that, at times, has stretched from Baja California up to the Bering Sea. At other times, it’s kinda shrunk back down. It’s been at least 1,000 miles (1,600km) across and, recently, quite deep.

Typically, it’s been something like2.7–3.6F (1.5–2C) warmer than normal. But there have been places where it’s been as much as 9F (5C) warmer. It’s waxed and waned, but it’s been that way since early 2014. The warmer-than-normal water extends down to something like 300m (1,000ft) below the surface. So that’s a huge volume of considerably warmer-than-normal water.

Water Deeply: Is it still out there?

Bond: Yeah. There was sort of a reinvigoration this past summer. The temperatures were moderating early in 2016, and then, at least in a large area south of Alaska and off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, it really warmed up again this past summer.

Water Deeply: What causes it?

Bond: A lot of it, almost all of it, is due to just the unusual weather patterns that have been occurring over the northeast Pacific during the past few years. They haven’t been the same patterns, but what really got it started was when a ridge of higher-than-normal sea-level pressure set up during the winter of 2013–14 over the northeast Pacific.

That was a very persistent and strong ridge of higher-than-normal pressure that kind of blocked the usual parade of storms across the Pacific. That meant less heat was drawn out of the ocean into the atmosphere than usual. It meant there was less cold water (from the deeper ocean) mixing near the surface part of the ocean. And also the unusual winds meant the upper-level currents in the ocean were a little bit different from usual.

Water Deeply: Is it unprecedented?

Bond: Yeah, certainly. In terms of the magnitude of anomalies in a lot of locations, we haven’t seen anything quite like this. I did a fairly careful study using the data that’s available, going back decades. There have been other periods with considerably warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the region. But they were never of the kind of geographic extent and magnitude we’ve seen with this recent event.

Water Deeply: What caused that persistent high pressure?

Bond: It became known as the “ridiculously resilient ridge.” There’s been a number of independent studies that have basically shown that much warmer than normal waters in the far western tropical Pacific, in the vicinity of New Guinea – and thunderstorms that those warm waters helped spawn – had this kind of ripple effect on the atmospheric-circulation weather patterns over much of the globe.

It set up this series of very large-scale high- and low-pressure centers, with the ridge over the coast of western North America, and then a trough of lower pressure over the northeastern part of North America.

Water Deeply: How did the Blob affect the drought in California?

Bond: That same ridge of high pressure basically blocked the storms. There was just a real lack of those regular storms. The warm water didn’t cause the unusual weather patterns. But those unusual weather patterns that brought the warm water also were a large cause of the drought in California.

It turned out that was the same case in the Pacific Northwest. Not quite the same extent, but we were looking at very low snowpack in mid-February 2014. Then there was enough of a shift that we actually had a pretty wet period there at the end of winter and got enough rain and snow to kind of tide us through the summer of 2014. But there weren’t enough (storms), and those didn’t extend far enough south for California to get relief.

But it gets kind of complicated. Once that warm water formed out there in a big way, it does tend to warm the air that’s passing over it. Once that water was warmed, it did help warm the air coming off the ocean. This was especially the case in the winter of 2014–15. It led to warmer air temperatures and higher snow levels. The freezing level was 1,000–2,000ft (300–600m) higher than usual in the mountains. So that certainly ended up being a real problem. We count on that snowpack coming out of winter to get us through the summer. But it fell as rain rather than snow during that 2014–15 winter.

Water Deeply: Is there a climate change connection here?

Bond: This is sometimes called a marine heat wave, and it’s a short-term kind of event. There is some evidence that long-term trends are favoring the patterns we’ve had over the past few years. But that’s a very small effect.

So it’s not due to global warming. But it does provide some hint, at least, of what it’s going to be like in future decades, in particular, with some of the impacts we’ve seen in the marine ecosystem. What we’ve had the past few years is something that is liable to be more the rule rather than the exception toward the middle of the century. So maybe this is kind of a little preview or something. So we’re trying to learn from it.

Water Deeply: How has the Blob affected ocean life?

Bond: The impacts were quite a few and widespread. At the bottom of the food chain, we saw a higher preponderance at the plankton level of subtropical species versus ones that are more adapted to cooler water.

That had repercussions all the way up the food chain – everything from the kind of suitable prey for salmon that was present and whether they were getting the food they need, to some real problems with fur seals and sea lions in California in particular. In the Gulf of Alaska we had what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has called a marine mammalmortality event last year. Seabirds are another one: There were some species with some very large mortalities, with lots more dead seabirdswashing up on the beaches.

One of the more alarming things is the harmful algal blooms. That was sort of way out there in terms of how far along the coast it stretched, how long it lasted, how high the toxin levels got. That was something that was really scary.

Water Deeply: How long will the Blob be with us?

Bond: That’s kind of the $64,000 question. We thought this whole event was winding down earlier this year, and then we’ve seen it rear its ugly head again in some locations.

Water Deeply: How will this affect our weather this coming winter?

Bond: The more prominent temperature anomalies are a little north of California. It’s all going to depend on the weather patterns. There are kind of borderline La Niña conditions now, which doesn’t tend to imply too much one way or another for Northern California. In the past, it probably has meant somewhat less precipitation than normal for Southern California. But we see a lot of exceptions there.

It’s kind of an admission of defeat, but it’s basically a crapshoot in terms of how much rain you get.

I think in terms of temperature, it’s not liable to be quite as warm as the past two winters, so that’s good, at least for the winter-sports folks. What falls in the mountains should be snow at the higher elevations. I think Northern California is liable to do OK. Southern California? Wow, that’s a tough one.

Read the original post: https://ww2.kqed.org/

Seafood’s new normal

Hog Island Oyster Co. employee Wilber Mejia pushes a bag of farmed oysters onto a boat during harvesting on Oct. 12. The bags are taken back to the company’s Marshall headquarters, where the bivalves are prepared for sale. Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

California’s coastal ecosystem — and the fisheries that depend on it — are in the grip of a huge disruption

In the shallow waters off Elk, in Mendocino County, a crew from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife dived recently to survey the area’s urchin and abalone populations. Instead of slipping beneath a canopy of leafy bull kelp, which normally darkens the ocean floor like a forest, they found a barren landscape like something out of “The Lorax.”

A single large abalone scaled a bare kelp stalk, hunting a scrap to eat, while urchins clustered atop stark gray stone that is normally striped in colorful seaweed.

“When the urchins are starving and are desperate, they will the leave the reef as bare rock,” said Cynthia Catton, an environmental scientist with Fish and Wildlife. Warm seawater has prevented the growth of kelp, the invertebrates’ main food source, so the urchins aren’t developing normally; the spiky shells of many are nearly empty. As a result, North Coast sea urchin divers have brought in only one-tenth of their normal haul this year.

The plight of urchins, abalones and the kelp forest is just one example of an extensive ongoing disruption of California’s coastal ecosystem — and the fisheries that depend on it — after several years of unusually warm ocean conditions and drought. Earlier this month, The Chronicle reported that scientists have discovered evidence in San Francisco Bay and its estuary of what is being called the planet’s sixth mass extinction, affecting species including chinook salmon and delta smelt.

Baby salmon are dying by the millions in drought-warmed rivers while en route to the ocean. Young oysters are being deformed or killed by ocean acidification. The Pacific sardine population has crashed, and both sardines and squid are migrating to unusual new places. And Dungeness crab was devastated last year by an unprecedented toxic algal bloom that delayed the opening of its season for four months.

The collapses are taking a financial toll on the state’s seafood industry. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released Wednesday showed the California fishing harvest decreased in value by $109 million between 2014 and 2015, or by 43 percent.

The impact has already been felt in Bay Area homes. This summer, chinook salmon sold for more than $35 per pound in some markets, about 50 percent higher than in previous years. The absence of Dungeness crab during the 2015 holidays jarred many locals, though the Bay Area’s favorite crustacean is still slated to return to tables on Nov. 15, when the 2016 commercial season is scheduled to begin.

More disturbing are signs that the recent changes to the Pacific Ocean could represent the new normal.

Chinook Salmon

The issues:

Drought and warm river conditions impede reproduction and salmon’s ability to make the journey from river to ocean and back again. Some runs of salmon face extinction.

Commercial season:

May through September and part of October

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The five-year drought has had a dramatic impact on this already challenged population of native fish. Salmon caught by local fishers outside of the Golden Gate are part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta system, which has four different seasonal spawning runs. The salmon that reach our markets are the fall and late-fall run, migrating from July to December and mid-October to December.

Most native salmon’s original spawning grounds have been disrupted by dams in the river system, so they are dependent on two factors: how much it rains and/or the amount of water that state officials decide to release into the river during drought. When the river water was too warm in 2014 and 2015, 95 percent of winter-run baby and juvenile salmon died.

Salmon take several years to mature, which means that during the last few salmon seasons the fish were born under traumatic conditions. The 2016 season, which just ended, was also hampered by the late crab season, which kept gear and crabbers out in the water later.

The Bay Institute, along with Natural Resources Defense Council and other organizations, has been working since 1998 to reconnect part of the San Joaquin River to San Francisco Bay that had been disconnected since the 1950s. When the restoration is complete, it could restore the runs of 30,000 spring and fall-run salmon every year.

Loss of salmon habitat in the Central Valley

Historic salmon spawning grounds in the Central Valley have been cut off by dams and other impassable barriers, making it difficult for adult salmon to lay eggs and for the babies to make their way to the ocean.

John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com    Source: The Bay Institute

“Weather and climate are two very closely related things that are difficult to tease apart. What is short-term variable weather versus long-term climate change?” said Toby Garfield, director of the Environmental Research Division at San Diego’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Southwest Fisheries Science Lab. “Almost any scientist you talk to would say, ‘Yes, the climate is changing, and we’re seeing a lot of variability.’”

But, Garfield added, “Most agencies are working very hard to understand what these changes are.”

Not hard to understand is the financial hit the state’s fisheries have taken. Last year’s Dungeness crab season, normally one of the most lucrative fisheries in the state, brought in $37 million, far less than the average $68 million over the previous five years. The chinook salmon harvest dropped by two-thirds between 2013 and 2015, cutting fishers’ earnings to $8 million from $22.7 million. Many in the industry think this year’s numbers will be worse.

John Eiserich closes up the boat he has docked at Pier 45 in San Francisco after his last chinook salmon trip of the season on Oct. 7. Santiago Mejia, Special to The Chronicle

The causes of these dramatic changes are complex and loosely interrelated. The combination of a strong El Niño weather pattern, which warmed ocean waters last year, and a persistent patch of warm water near Alaska, colloquially known as the Warm Blob, caused toxic algal blooms to spike and fish to migrate erratically.

The Blob — Garfield prefers “North Pacific Marine Heat Wave” — is in a zone of atmospheric high pressure that diverts the winter storms that normally help cool down the ocean. While it first appeared in 2014 and is not influencing California coastal water temperatures the way it did last year, it’s still an unusual phenomenon that can be self-perpetuating. The Blob’s staying power and the gradual rise of global ocean temperatures fuel concerns that there could be an eventual repeat of last year’s crab disaster.

“Temperature really impacts the growth of many of these species. They’ve evolved in a very specific temperature range and suddenly that’s getting out of whack,” said Garfield. “It’s really impacting their growth and development in ways that we’re just beginning to understand.”

Sardines and squid, two hallmarks of local seafood, usually spawn off of California, but as warm water pushed them north last year, both sardines and squid laid eggs near Oregon and even Alaska. In 2015, almost 3 million pounds of squid were harvested off Oregon, which hadn’t seen a big catch since the 1980s. Meanwhile, California’s squid harvest, normally the largest in the country and worth $73 million, dropped by 64 percent between 2014 and 2015.

John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com

Pacific sardines are in even greater decline. The population, which naturally fluctuates a great deal, is estimated at one-tenth of what it was in 2007, when the fishery was worth $8.2 million. Because of the decline, that fishery has been closed for the past two years, though the recent warm ocean temperatures have had an impact, too.

The overall situation is dire, so many scientists and fishers are taking aggressive steps to deal with the changes.

Hog Island Oyster Co. in Tomales Bay has been plagued by ocean acidification, caused as carbon is absorbed by the ocean — a result of climate change. This has limited the supply of seed stock the company needs to grow oysters.

Hog Island Oyster Co. employee Hector Molinero (foreground) watches as Wilber Mejia heads into the water to collect bags of oysters during harvesting in Marshall on Oct. 12. Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

“To us what’s scary is not just the change in ocean chemistry, it’s the rate of change,” said co-owner John Finger.

Because the problem will only worsen as more carbon is absorbed, Hog Island is building a hatchery to produce its own seed and breed oysters that Finger hopes can better withstand acidification.

“Unless you have your head in the sand, you realize this is going to get drastically worse,” said Finger. “We need to have more seed production in various places because we don’t know what the patterns are for this.”

The Golden Gate Salmon Association has been trucking baby salmon to the ocean rather than risk the fish dying on the perilous trip from their birthplace in the Sacramento River down to San Francisco Bay. A new study from the Bay Institute concluded that so little water is flowing through the bay and its estuary — because of diversions for urban and Central Valley farm use — that some salmon and other native species are facing extinction. By some estimates, 80 percent of California’s native freshwater fish species could be gone by 2100.

Salmon fishers and crabbers, meanwhile, are trying to adjust to the new seascape. Some are chartering their boats for recreational fishing while they wait for things to improve.

Somewhat ironically, with more squid moving north from its normal Southern California environs lately, Northern California has had some banner squid years. Earlier this month, Larry Collins of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association at Pier 45 had to show up at midnight several times to receive ton after ton of squid caught near the Farallon Islands or off Ocean Beach.

“There’s just miles of squid out there,” he said at the time.

Kelp loss in Northern California

Based on aerial photos taken at different sites on the North Coast, these images show a dramatic decrease in kelp forests, which sustain red urchin, abalone and thousands of other species. While 2008 was a good kelp year, the images from 2014 show effects of the Warm Blob, warm water conditions that caused a severe reduction in kelp.

Graphic artist: John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com

Developer: Emma O’Neill • eoneill@sfchronicle.com • @emmaruthoneill

Source: California Department of Fish and Wildlife

The California coast is part of what is normally one of the most productive fisheries in the world. Winds that run southward down the West Coast push surface water offshore, allowing deeper, nutrient-rich water to come up and feed seaweed and phytoplankton. That sets the food chain in motion for zooplankton, including krill, which in turn nourish an incredibly diverse ecosystem of marine mammals and larger fish like the chinook.

“Our salmon have some of the highest omega-3 content and best flavor of any salmon in the world,” said John McManus of the Golden Gate Salmon Association. “There’s a section of the population that recognizes that and is willing to pay for real, honest-to-god king salmon.”

In an opinion page article in The Chronicle in August, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Patricia Unterman of Hayes Street Grill argued for better protection of chinook salmon and rebuilding of its runs, citing its importance in the region’s culture.

“Every year, the return of salmon is eagerly anticipated by California fishermen, restaurants and the public,” they wrote.

Catton, the Fish and Wildlife scientist, is concerned both about the sustainability of local marine species like salmon and urchin, and the entire state fishery. Urchin divers usually augment their income with crabbing and salmon fishing, but as those are no longer lucrative, many divers are working construction instead, she said.

“Many of them have weathered a lot of these good times and bad times,” she said. “They say it’s a cycle. Kelp comes and kelp goes.”

What’s different this time, she said, is the kelp forests have never been quite this bare.

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Read the original article: http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/california-seafood-collapse/ 

‘Son of Blob’ springs to life in the Pacific

NOAA GRAPHIC – Satellite monitoring on Sept. 10 found a huge area of much warmer than normal surface temperatures in the Northeast Pacific Ocean.

LONG BEACH — The Blob, a news-making patch of unusually warm ocean surface water from late-2013 through autumn 2015, was reborn this month.

The ocean warmed quickly. As recently as July, “The northeast Pacific off our coast was slightly above normal, but nothing exceptional,” University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass noted Sunday on his popular blog.

By Sept. 10, some limited areas of the nearby Pacific were 5.4 to 7.2 degrees F above normal, Mass noted, while satellite monitoring shows an enormous zone of overall warmth extending west from the coasts of Washington and Oregon, north to Alaska.

News about the birth of this “Son of Blob” comes just as climate experts have officially declared this will not be a La Niña winter. The flip side of more-famous El Niño conditions that influenced the winter of 2015-16, La Niña is a pattern of unusually cold surface waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It tends to result in wetter and cooler winter conditions here in the Pacific Northwest.

On Sept. 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will issue its new 30- and 90-day long-range forecasts, and will try to determine how the Son of Blob will influence our weather in a winter with neutral El Niño/La Niña conditions. The short-term forecast for this week is for warm and generally pleasant late-summer weather on the coast, but critical fire weather conditions for parts of the interior.

The original Blob

A result of a persistent zone of high atmospheric pressure in our part of the Pacific, the original Blob created “highly unusual weather,” according to Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond.

Ocean conditions made their way onto dry land in the form of drought and record temperatures — “2015 was by far the warmest year we’ve had in the Cascades” and “Oct. 1, 2014 through September 2015 [was a time of] record warmth in much of the Northwest,” Bond said at the 2016 Pacific County Marine Science Conference in Long Beach on May 21. Widespread forest fires and possibly the largest documented seabird mortality event in world history were linked to the 2013-15 Blob.

Mass said Sunday that experimental modeling he conducted found a modest 1 to 2 degrees F increase in land temperatures from the Blob. But even that amount of additional warmth can have a noticeable impact on snowpack and other terrestrial conditions in the Pacific Northwest.

Read the original post: http://www.chinookobserver.com/

Ocean Slime Spreading Quickly Across the Earth

Toxic algae blooms, perhaps accelerated by ocean warming and other climate shifts, are spreading, poisoning marine life and people.

Even as thousands of sea lions were dying in California in 2015 because warm water altered the food web, dozens more were suffering seizures and death after being exposed to domoic acid following the biggest toxic algal bloom on record along the U.S. West Coast. Photograph by Gregory Bull, AP

By Craig Welch

PUBLISHED August 19, 2016

When sea lions suffered seizures and birds and porpoises started dying on the California coast last year, scientists weren’t entirely surprised. Toxic algae is known to harm marine mammals.

But when researchers found enormous amounts of toxin in a pelican that had been slurping anchovies, they decided to sample fresh-caught fish. To their surprise, they found toxins at such dangerous levels in anchovy meat that the state urged people to immediately stop eating them.

The algae bloom that blanketed the West Coast in 2015 was the most toxic one ever recorded in that region. But from the fjords of South America to the waters of the Arabian Sea, harmful blooms, perhaps accelerated by ocean warming and other shifts linked to climate change, are wreaking more havoc on ocean life and people. And many scientists project they will get worse.

“What emerged from last year’s event is just how little we really know about what these things can do,” says Raphael Kudela, a toxic algae expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

It’s been understood for decades, for example, that nutrients, such as fertilizer and livestock waste that flush off farms and into the Mississippi River, can fuel harmful blooms in the ocean, driving low-oxygen dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Such events have been on the rise around the world, as population centers boom and more nitrogen and other waste washes out to sea.

Some scientists suspect melting Himalayan ice from climate change is changing rain patterns enough to help reduce oxygen in the Arabian Sea, leading to massive green blooms of Noctiluca scintillans, a harmful algae that is threatening to transform the region’s marine food web. Photograph by NASA Earth Observatory

“There’s no question that we are seeing more harmful blooms in more places, that they are lasting longer, and we’re seeing new species in different areas,” says Pat Glibert, a phytoplankton expert at the University of Maryland. “These trends are real.”

But scientists also now see troubling evidence of harmful algae in places nearly devoid of people. They’re seeing blooms last longer and spread wider and become more toxic simply when waters warm. And some are finding that even in places overburdened by poor waste management, climate-related shifts in weather may already be exacerbating problems.

Fish kills stemming from harmful algal blooms are on the rise off the coast of Oman. Earlier this year, algae blooms suffocated millions of salmon in South America, enough to fill 14 Olympic swimming pools. Another bloom is a suspect in the death last year of more than 300 sei whales in Chile.

In the north, blooms are on the rise in places like Greenland, where some scientists suspect the shift is actually melting ice. Just this year, scientists showed that domoic acid from toxic algae was showing up in walrus, bowhead whales, beluga, and fur seals in Alaska’s Arctic, where such algae species weren’t believed to be common.

“We expect to see conditions that are conducive for harmful algal blooms to happen more and more often,” says Mark Wells, with the University of Maine. “We’ve got some pretty good ideas about what will happen, but there will be surprises, and those surprises can be quite radical.”

Kathi Lefebvre, a toxic algae expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, collects krill that died en masse along a beach near Homer, Alaska. Tests later showed the dead zooplankton were loaded with toxins associated with a harmful algal blooms.
 Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic

The Birth of a Bloom

If you look at seawater under a microscope, what you see may resemble a weird alphabet soup: tiny photosynthetic organisms that can resemble stacks of slender Lincoln logs, stubby mushrooms, balloons, segmented worms, or mini wagon wheels. Some float about in currents; others propel themselves through the water column. As conditions change, the environment can become perfect for one or two to take over. Suddenly these algae may bloom.

“Every organism on this planet has its ideal temperature,” says Chris Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook University “In a given water body, as it gets warmer, that’s going to favor the growth of some over others, and in some cases the harmful ones will do better.”

Algae is essential for life, but some species and some blooms can trigger serious harm. Some poison the air people breathe or change the color of the sea. Some accumulate in fish and shellfish, causing seizures, stomach illnesses, even death for the birds, marine mammals, and humans that eat them. Some blooms are so thick that when they finally die they use up oxygen needed by other animals, and leave rafts of dead eels, fish, and crabs in their wake.

In 2015, as a blob of warm water along the U.S. West Coast was breaking temperature records, regular sampling showed that dangerous levels of the biotoxin domoic acid from the algae Pseudo-nitzschia was building up in shellfish. Short-term harvest closures for razor clams and crab aren’t uncommon because while domoic acid doesn’t hurt shellfish, it can cause seizures and death in people who eat infected creatures.

While scientists knew domoic acid accumulates in the head and guts of fish—which are often consumed whole by marine mammals and birds—researchers rarely find these water-soluble toxins in the parts of fish that humans eat. And where most blooms last for weeks, this one dragged on for months. And while most are localized, this one covered vast areas of sea from Santa Barbara to Alaska. So when Kudela and his crew started testing, they found trace amounts of the toxin in the meat of rockfish, halibut, lingcod, and nearly every fish they tested. In anchovies it was far beyond what regulators consider safe.

“Before, even when the fish were toxic, they (regulators) were saying ‘Decapitate it and gut it and it will be fine,’ ” Kudela says. “It definitely raises new questions, like ‘Should we be monitoring things like flatfish on a more routine basis? and ‘Are we really prepared for what’s coming?’ ”

The algae Pseudo-nitzschia, which produces the toxic domoic acid, was collected along the U.S. West Coast in 2015 during the largest, longest-lasting and most toxic algal bloom on record. Domoic acid can cause seizures, other neurological problems and even death in birds, marine mammals and humans. Photograph by NOAA Fisheries/AP

While the heat that drove this massive bloom may or may not be linked to climate change, scientists say a warming climate will make marine heat waves more common in the future.

And climate change isn’t just about temperature. It will also change how storms and melting ice add moisture to the marine world, make the oceans more corrosive, and alter the mixing of deep cold waters with light-filled seas at the surface. All of that can and will affect how harmful algae grow.

It’s just not always easy to see how.

Tracking Changes in the Arabian Sea

Joaquim Goes, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory has been trying to track climate’s role in transforming one of the world’s rapidly changing marine environments, the Arabian Sea.

In the early 2000s, scientists documented blooms of shimmering bioluminescent Noctiluca scintillans, a beautiful green algae that can make the sea light up and sparkle. Now it shows up every year, in ever larger densities and covering more area.

“Globally, I’ve studied lots of ocean basins, and here the change is just massive—this one species is just taking over,” Goes says.

While it’s clear that rising use of fertilizers and massive population growth without corresponding wastewater treatment in places like Mumbai and Karachi are helping fuel this massive change, Goes and some others think that is not the only factor. Rapid melt of Himalayan glaciers is altering monsoon patterns, he says, intensifying them and helping reduce oxygen levels in surface waters, making them more conducive to Noctiluca. That, in turn, is changing what lives there and what they eat.

“Think of it as looking at a forest and over a period of about a decade, all the species have changed,” says Glibert, at Maryland. “The type of algae that grows at the base of the food web set the trajectory for what’s growing at the top of the food web.”

After toxic algae was believed to have helped kill dozens of fin and humpback whales in the Gulf of Alaska in 2015, scientists raced to respond to other whale strandings, including this orca, which washed up dead near Petersburg, Alaska, in October. An investigation later showed it likely died of natural causes.
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic

Goes fears these changes ultimately could spell disaster for that region’s fisheries, which provide tens of millions of dollars and help support life for 120 million people.

Thus far, the creatures that most seem to like to eat this algae are jellyfish and sea-centipede-like creatures known as salps. Those, in turn, are eaten by animals that can thrive in low-oxygen environments, namely sea turtles and squid. Landings of squid already are on the rise in places like Oman, Goes says, while tuna and grouper catches are down. And the low-oxygen environment itself can have acute effects. Just last fall, low-oxygen water along the coast of Oman killed fish for hundreds of kilometers.

Complex Ocean Physics

Still, it’s not always obvious what the trends really show or how all these pieces fit together.

Charles Trick, with the University of Western Ontario, says the physics of ocean environments are so complicated that climate change is likely to worsen algal blooms in a select few places, but not necessarily as a general rule. He is skeptical about climate impacts on blooms in the Arabian Sea, for example, but believes environments like the U.S. West Coast are prime for more massive blooms.

“Everything in this field is controversial,” Trick says. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm to challenge the big questions, but not a lot of data.”

What information there is often isn’t so clear. Kathi Lefebvre, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, has been the one tracking the domoic acid in hundreds of marine mammals in Alaska. The discovery in walrus, bowhead, and other Arctic mammals was a surprise, but it’s not clear if it’s part of a new trend—or simply the way things have always been. No one had ever checked before, so there is no past for Lefebvre to compare to.

“It’s a weird thing—we saw domoic acid in every species we looked at, so they are all being exposed to it,” she says. But domoic acid in high doses sometimes leads to seizure and death, which had never been documented in the Arctic. Has it happened all along, but the region is so sparsely populated that no one noticed? Or are these blooms moving north and still building, potentially responding to warming waters and melting ice?

“It’s pretty clear that if you change temperature, light availability and nutrients, that can absolutely change an ecosystem,” Lefebvre says. “But is it just starting? Is it getting worse? Is it the same as always? I have no idea.”

Read the original post: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/toxic-algae/

The Blob That Cooked the Pacific

‘The Blob’ overshadows El Nino

El Niño exerted powerful effects around the globe in the last year, eroding California beaches; driving drought in northern South America, Africa and Asia; and bringing record rain to the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southern South America. In the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast, however, the California Current Ecosystem was already unsettled by an unusual pattern of warming popularly known as “The Blob.”

New research based on ocean models and near real-time data from autonomous gliders indicates that the “The Blob” and El Niño together strongly depressed productivity off the West Coast, with The Blob driving most of the impact.

The research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by scientists from NOAA Fisheries, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California, Santa Cruz is among the first to assess the marine effects of the 2015-2016 El Niño off the West Coast of the United States.

“Last year there was a lot of speculation about the consequences of ‘The Blob’ and El Niño battling it out off the U.S. West Coast,” said lead author Michael Jacox, of UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “We found that off California El Niño turned out to be much weaker than expected, The Blob continued to be a dominant force, and the two of them together had strongly negative impacts on marine productivity.”

“Now, both The Blob and El Niño are on their way out, but in their wake lies a heavily disrupted ecosystem,” Jacox said.

Unusually warm ocean temperatures that took on the name, The Blob, began affecting waters off the West Coast in late 2013. Warm conditions – whether driven by the Blob or El Niño – slow the flow of nutrients from the deep ocean, reducing the productivity of coastal ecosystems. Temperatures close to 3 degrees C (5 degrees F) above average also led to sightings of warm-water species far to the north of their typical range and likely contributed to the largest harmful algal bloom ever recorded on the West Coast last year.

 Wintertime temperature anomalies off the US west coast during the strong El Niños of 1997-98 and 2015-16. In 1997-98 warming was strongest near the coast, consistent with effects of El Niño. In 2015-16, warming was more uniform and widespread, consistent with pre-existing warming known as ‘the Blob.’ Credit: Michael Jacox

 

“These past years have been extremely unusual off the California coast, with humpback whales closer to shore, pelagic red crabs washing up on the beaches of central California, and sportfish in higher numbers in southern California,” said Elliott Hazen of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, a coauthor of the paper. “This paper reveals how broad scale warming influences the biology directly off our shores.”

The research paper describes real-time monitoring of the California Current Ecosystem with the latest technology, including autonomous gliders that track undersea conditions along the West Coast. “This work reflects technological advances that now let us rapidly assess the effects of major climate disruptions and project their impacts on the ecosystem,” Jacox said.

Separate but related research recently published in Scientific Reports identifies the optimal conditions for productivity in the California Current off the West Coast, which will help assess the future effects of climate change or climate variability such as El Niño. The research was authored by the same scientists at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries.

“Wind has a ‘goldilocks effect’ on productivity in the California Current,” Hazen said. “If wind is too weak, nutrients limit productivity, and if wind is too strong, productivity is moved offshore or lost to the deep ocean. Understanding how wind and nutrients drive productivity provides context for events like the Blob and El Niño, so we can better understand how the ecosystem is likely to respond.”

Both papers emphasize the importance of closely monitoring West Coast marine ecosystems for the impacts of a changing climate. Although the tropical signals of El Niño were strong, the drivers – called “teleconnections” – that usually carry the El Niño pattern from the tropics to the West Coast were not as effective as in previous strong El Niños.

“Not all El Niños evolve in the same way in the tropics, nor are their impacts the same off our coast,” said Steven Bograd, a research scientist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and coauthor of both papers. “Local conditions, in this case from the Blob, can modulate the way our ecosystem responds to these large scale climate events.”

Explore further: ‘Warm blob’ in Pacific Ocean linked to weird weather across the US

More information: Michael G. Jacox et al, Impacts of the 2015-2016 El Niño on the California Current System: Early assessment and comparison to past events, Geophysical Research Letters (2016). DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069716

Read the original post: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-blob-overshadows-el-nino.html

Ocean Acidification Affects Predator-Prey Response Acidic Waters Dull Snails’ Ability to Escape from Predatory Sea Stars

Black turban snails escape predation by sea stars by crawling out of tide pools. Experiments at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Laboratory show that the snails lose this escape response as waters become more acidic, a consequence of climate change. Photo: Brittany Jellison

Ocean Acidification Affects Predator-Prey Response | UC Davis

Peru Sets Summer Anchovy Fishing Quota at 1.8 Million Metric Tons

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM  – June 17, 2016

Peru’s Ministry of Production announced a July 1 start date to commercial anchovy fishing under a 1.8 million metric ton quota.

The quota was based on a final stock assessment of the fishery published by IMARPE that found the biomass at 7.28 million metric tons as of June 15. That figure was roughly 65 percent higher from the biomass at the beginning of May and 14 percent above the historical average between 1994 and 2015.

The fishing season will official get underway on July 1 and will run until the quota is fished or until the stock enters its reproductive cycle sometime in the winter months.

However, a week of exploratory fishing was approved to start this Saturday, June 18, which will run through Saturday, June 25.

“The results found by IMARPE are excellent news. It is evident that the 2015-2016 El Niño event has already ended and that its effects on the stock of anchoveta have been less harmful than the Child 1997-1998 “, said Minister of Production, Piero Ghezzi.

Water conditions for the anchovy stock have substantially improved since there was a 200% increase in cold water areas while salinity levels were down from the first measurement.

“Once again it has been demonstrated that the current changing conditions of the Peruvian sea require an adaptive and flexible policy, which means making decisions based on more than one measurement and a much thinner sea conditions observation. That’s what we’ve done responsibly,” the minister added.

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Why the ocean water along the Central Coast turned cold

As most beachgoers will tell you, the seawater temperatures along the Central Coast have turned downright cold.

In fact, the harbor seals and sea lions seem to want to spend more time on the rocks and beaches. My children, Chloe and Sean, are using thicker wetsuits.

So why is the seawater so cold?

Strong to gale-force northwesterly winds have produced greater amounts of upwelling along the coastline.

As the northwesterly winds blow parallel to our coastline, the friction of the wind causes ocean surface water to move. Because of the Coriolis effect, the surface water flows to the right, or offshore.

This, in turn, causes upwelling along the coast as cold, clear and nutrient-rich water rises to the surface along the immediate shoreline.

Farther away, another factor may help to keep seawater temperatures at normal or below normal: It’s called El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The latest surface seawater temperature (SST) data from the central equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean called Niño 3.4 indicates this past “Godzilla” El Niño has died. Region 3.4 is the standard for classifying El Niño (warmer-than-normal SST) and La Niña (cooler-than-normal SST) events. The fortunetelling SST cycles in Niño 3.4 are categorized by the amount they deviate from the average SST. In other words, an anomaly.

A weak El Niño is classified as an SST anomaly between 0.5 and 0.9 degrees Celsius, a moderate El Niño is an anomaly of 1.0 to 1.4 degrees Celsius and a strong El Niño ranges from 1.5 to 1.9 degrees Celsius. A very strong El Niño anomaly is anything above 2.0 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a very rare event indeed.

Last winter’s temperatures reached a little over 3 degrees Celsius, one of the strongest on record.

William Patzert, a respected climatologist with Caltech’s NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said, “Unfortunately, its effects weren’t as great as the 1997-98 El Niño. That cycle produced huge amounts of rain and snow. This year’s El Niño was no Godzilla, more of a gecko as far as impacts were concerned along the Central Coast.”

For reasons we really don’t understand, pressure areas change places at irregular intervals over the equatorial Pacific. This is part of the broader El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern.

During a La Niña phase, high pressure builds in the eastern equatorial Pacific, while low pressure develops to the west, producing a stronger equatorial pressure gradient. Almost like a car rolling downhill, the easterly trade winds strengthen, causing upwelling off the coastlines of Peru and Ecuador and lowering sea surface temperatures throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean.

The latest model runs from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Service indicate that we will go into a La Niña cycle by July and remain in this cycle through early 2017.

The good news is that upwelling brings nutrients to the surface waters off the coast, allowing fish populations living in these waters to thrive. The bad news is this condition often shifts the storm track farther north into the Pacific Northwest, leaving the Central Coast high and dry with below-average rainfall.

However, there have been periods of heavy rain during neutral conditions (“El Nothing”) and La Niña cycles. An atmospheric river (Pineapple Express) could develop over the Central Coast during winter and produce copious amounts of rain along the Central Coast, regardless of ENSO.

Otherwise, chances are, we will probably see another year of below-average rainfall. Only time will tell the story.

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