Phantom fishing nets endangering marine turtles in northern Australia

Huge quantities of discarded fishing nets killing marine turtles

January 2013. Australia's national science agency, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) scientists working with GhostNets Australia and Indigenous rangers are identifying hotspots where lost fishing nets are threatening marine biodiversity.

640,000 tonnes of fishing nets discarded every year
Worldwide, around 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is lost or discarded each year. These ‘ghostnets' can continue fishing for decades, entangling huge numbers of marine animals, including threatened and commercially valuable species.

Major problem
Ghostnets, originating mainly from fisheries in Asia and Australia, are a particular problem in Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria, where they can reach densities of up to three tonnes/km, among the highest recorded worldwide.

Impacting marine turtles
"Our research goes beyond discovering where ghostnet fishing is taking place, to actually estimating its impact on biodiversity, in particular on threatened marine turtles," Dr Denise Hardesty of CSIRO said.

"Using a model of ocean currents and data collected by Indigenous rangers on the number of ghostnets found during beach cleanups, we simulated the likely paths ghostnets take to get to their landing spots on beaches in the Gulf of Carpentaria," Dr Hardesty said.

Continued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/ghost-nets-australia.html

Iconic reef fish in danger of local extinctions due to overfishing

Latest IUCN Red List assessment finds parrotfish and surgeonfish facing heightened risk of localized extinction

July 2012. A recent study conducted for The IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM found that 86% of the populations of parrotfish and surgeonfish face a low risk of extinction globally, but they do face a heightened risk of extinction regionally-especially in areas like the Coral Triangle.

Of the species considered threatened, the Greenback Parrotfish (Scarus trispinosus) listed as Endangered, and the Bumphead Parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum), listed as Vulnerable, are both large-bodied, long-lived species that are experiencing significant population declines from intense fishing pressure. The Kapingamarangi Surgeonfish (Acanthurus chronixis), provisionally listed as Vulnerable, is only found in the Kapingamarangi Atoll, Caroline Islands, and is also exploited by subsistence fishers.

Globally safe 
"The good news is that globally these iconic reef fishes are doing well, despite the fact that they are facing intense fishing pressure and destruction of their coral reef habitat," says Mia Theresa Comeros, the study's lead author and Research Associate, IUCN Global Species Programme Marine Biodiversity Unit. "We need to be concerned, however, for the large-bodied groups of these fishes that perform important ecological roles on coral reef systems and highlight the importance of regional assessments in quantifying local threats to populations." 

Continued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/parrot-fish-endangered.html

Eating shark fin soup makes you stupid

70 - 100 million sharks killed every year - Completely unsustainable
April 2012. Shark fin soup is seen as a luxury and prestigious dish and is often served at weddings and banquets. Although it has no taste, it is desired for its texture - somewhat sinewy apparently. Shark fin soup was much prized by Chinese emperors, but as there were so few of these, it never threatened shark populations until many many more people became able to afford it. 

Unintended consequences - Scallop fishery collapse - Coral reef destruction - Sea grass disappearing
Unfortunately nowadays, many millions of people now eat the soup and consequently, sharks are being killed at a completely unsustainable rate. Whilst some foolish people may think - So what, who needs sharks? The answer is we all do. The almost complete disappearance of large sharks from the Eastern seaboard of the USA has led to a collapse of the once prolific and profitable scallop industry. Why? The absence of large sharks has seen numbers of rays, especially cow-nose rays, increase rapidly, and what do they eat? Scallops. (Now there are so few scallops, indications are that they will turn to clams and oysters.).

Similar effects have been shown to destroy coral reefs (fish that eat coral abound without shark predation) and sea grass beds (Dugong eat a lot more when there are no sharks about), and some key fish stocks are depleted when seal numbers increase. Thus the effects are widespread, and often unforeseen. Canada is often pilloried for killing seals, which they do partly to protect fish stocks - Yet if there were more sharks about this may well not be necessary.

Shark decline unsustainable
At these current rates, many large sharks may become extinct in many of the areas that they used to be found in in a few years' time. The trouble is that if this happens, as can be seen from the current butchery of rhinos and elephants, the price for shark fin will go up and so the few that there are will be even more persecuted.

According to Oceana.org - Scientists estimate that fishing has reduced large predatory fish populations worldwide by 90 percent over the past 50 to 100 years.

Sharks now represent the largest group of threatened marine species on the World Conservation Union's IUCN) Red List of threatened species. Yet only three of the 350 shark species - basking, whale and white - are protected from the pressures of international trade. The remaining species are ignored or seen as low priorities despite their vulnerability to overfishing and their important role in their ecosystems.

Continued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/shark-fin-soup.html

US Expedition Explores Mysterious Puerto Rican Reef

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico –  A 12-foot hammerhead shark, an undersea canyon that suddenly plunges 900 feet and an enormous orange-and-brown barrel sponge are only a few things in an unexplored Puerto Rican reef that U.S. scientists are using sonar and submersibles to explore.

"You could actually live in that thing it was so big," said Tim Battista, the expedition's chief scientist.

Perhaps more significant, however, is what they are not finding: brightly colored coral and many big fish, the absence of which signals a troubled ecosystem.

"We're not seeing those vibrant, rich coral communities that all of us love to see," Battista said.

In the three-week project that wraps up Saturday, Battista and other scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are mapping an area of 96 square miles (250 square kilometers). The results will help officials determine what sort of rules are needed to protect Puerto Rico's first officially designated marine corridor in the Northeast Great Reserve.

"There is very little information about what exists there now," Battista said. That is partly because the shelf is too deep for scuba diving.

While there are not as many native creatures as scientists had hoped to find, the reefs abound with an invading species, the lionfish. About 100 have been spotted per square acre, ecologist Chris Taylor said. The lionfish, which have no natural predators, have been gobbling up a variety of species and disrupting the balance of the reef ecosystems.

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/04/18/us-expedition-explores-mysterious-puerto-rican-reef/#ixzz1sfheHQCU

Fiji fishing experiment – It doesn’t take long to trash fish stocks

Fiji fishing fundraiser breaks the coral reef "bank"
March 2012. A protected coral reef in Fiji briefly opened for an intensive five-week fishing season was largely depleted of its fish populations and has been slow to recover, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the first study of its kind, conservationists with WCS's Marine Program examined the environmental impact of an intensive fishing event-conducted by three villages in 2008 to pay for both school and church fees and provincial levies-on a formerly protected reef system.

Commercial fish almost disappeared
Predictably, the research team found that the reef's populations of large-bodied, commercially valuable species (surgeonfish, parrotfish, snapper, grouper, etc.) were severely depleted during the harvest, which lasted for five weeks, and some species were fished out entirely (the target of 12,000 Fiji dollars was achieved in the first day, but the fishing continued). Other species, the team speculated, may have simply fled to an adjacent reef outside of the fishing area.

After returning a year later, the marine scientists recorded a significantly lower fish biomass (a tally of all species based on visual surveys) in the reef than the previous year before the harvest. The findings also suggested that fishers may have continued to fish even after the fishing ban was reinstated.

Fishing to pay bills
The idea for the study was prompted by an announcement from the residents of the three villages on Kia Island. Seeking to raise funds to pay for needed services and taxes, the villagers temporarily opened a coastal no-take zone with a goal of generating 12,000 Fiji dollars (approximately $7,500) in fish and sea cucumbers. WCS researchers had surveyed the reef sites just prior to the announced harvests.

"We realized this would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to directly assess the impacts of a huge harvest event in a coral reef normally closed to fishing," said Dr. Stacy Jupiter, lead author of the study. "Many studies have examined the vulnerability of reef systems to overfishing. In this instance, we had a baseline in what was a protected area, followed by a survey of the site one month into the harvest and then a year later to gather evidence of recovery."

Read on:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/fiji-reefs.html

Oceans Will Not Survive ‘Business as Usual’

BRUSSELS, Mar. 12, 2012 (IPS) - Our oceans face a grim outlook in the coming decades. Ocean acidification, loss of marine biodiversity, climate change, pollution and over-exploitation of resources all point to the urgent need for a new paradigm on caring for the earth’s oceans—"business as usual" is simply not an option anymore, experts say. 

The extreme rate of acidification – the term used to describe the decrease in ocean pH levels caused by man-made CO2 emissions – has happened before, Carol Turley of Plymouth Marine Laboratory said, a claim that might have been comforting if she hadn’t been referring to the time when dinosaurs died out. 

This is a "huge environmental crisis," she told attendees at an information session at European Parliament this month, addressing challenges and solutions for the world’s oceans months ahead of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, slated to be held in Brazil in June. 

Turley joked that she’s often called the "acid queen" because of her bleak message, though the plight of more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface is not in the least bit humorous. 

Each year, the ocean absorbs roughly 26 percent of total CO2 emissions, which have increased by 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, according to the International Ocean Acidification Reference User Group. 

Ocean acidification affects marine life with calcium carbonate skeletons and shells, making them sensitive to even small changes in acidity. Acidification also reduces the availability of calcium for plankton and shelled species, which constitute the base of the entire marine food chain, creating a disastrous domino affect that could wipe out entire ecosystems. 

"[The] earth system is truly under the influence of man," said Wendy Watson-Wright, assistant director general and executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). 

The oceans could be 150 percent more acidic by 2100, she added. This means drastic decreases in yields from fisheries, and mass extinction of marine life. 

The world is currently losing natural resources at a rate humans haven’t even begun to describe, she said. 


Read on:  http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107042

Old and new knowledge combine to protect Fiji's fish

Efforts to protect precious marine biodiversity by combining science and local knowledge are difficult but can work, reports Naomi Antony.

Along the coastline of Fiji, threatened fishing communities have been combining the ancient and the new in their fight to conserve precious marine resources.

Together with traditions remembered from centuries ago and community approaches to marine management, they are harnessing modern science to regain their livelihoods, and contribute to international efforts to safeguard the oceans.

But finding a balance between the local and the scientific has proved tricky. Without science, communities risk pursuing practices that have little long-term impact. But too much science can trample on a community's way of doing things — destroying the morale that lies at the heart of local conservation.


Read more:  http://www.environmental-expert.com/articles/old-and-new-knowledge-combine-to-protect-fiji-s-fish-281478

Seas around Canna rich in unusual marine wildlife

Largest area of fan mussels in UK

February 2012: The seas around the island of Canna on the west coast of Scotland are unusually rich in marine wildlife, according to a report published by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).

A survey carried out by marine biologists from SNH and Marine Scotland in 2010 revealed species and habitats of high conservation value in the Sound of Canna, a steep sided channel that runs between the islands of Canna and Rum. The underwater landscape of rock walls, glacial moraines, boulder piles and sheltered areas of mud and sand provide a wide variety of wildlife habitats.

An area of rare fan mussels, first spotted in 2009, has now been confirmed as the largest in UK waters. With well over a hundred mussels covering more than 170 hectares, it was much bigger than originally expected. Once common around Britain's coasts, only a handful of scattered individuals have been recorded in the past 20 years, making them one of the UK's most endangered shellfish.

'We are surprised and excited by what we found'Northern feather stars, an animal with several feather-like arms used for swimming and catching food, were found on deep sediment at both entrances to the channel. Burrowed mud, an internationally important habitat that is home to burrowing animals and the nationally scarce sea pen, covers much of the seabed.

And excellent examples of northern sea fan and deep sponge communities were found on the cliffs around the nearby island of Sanday, on deep rock outcrops and on the floor of the Sound.

Laura Clark, SNH's project manager for the Canna survey said: ‘Until the discovery of the fan mussels during a routine survey a couple of years ago, the Sound of Canna attracted relatively little attention from marine biologists.

'It's great to see this huge variety of marine life in such a small area'‘What we found when we returned to survey the area in detail surprised and excited everyone involved, particularly the extent of the fan mussel bed. It was great to find such a huge variety of marine life in such a small area.'

The survey is one of several which have taken place around Scotland since 2010, to better understand the distribution and quality of marine wildlife in Scottish waters. They are part of an extensive programme of work carried out by Marine Scotland, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), SNH and Historic Scotland. The information gathered will be used to advise Scottish Ministers on potential locations for marine protected areas, helping Scotland meet international commitments to create a network of sites in Scottish waters.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/canna-marine.html

Researcher Finds Surprisingly Low Fish Biodiversity in the Earth's Oceans

John J. Wiens studied the relative paucity of species diversity in the oceans in an upcoming paper in the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society

Newswise — STONY BROOK, N.Y., Embargoed for release on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 7pm EST – A Stony Brook University researcher has found that, contrary to popular belief, there are not plenty of fish in the sea.

In an article entitled “Why are there so few fish in the sea?,” published on-line this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, John J. Wiens, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, addresses why the oceans contain only 15-25 percent of all of Earth's species even though they cover about 70 percent of Earth’s surface.

Dr. Wiens and student Greta Carrete Vega examined the evolutionary and ecological causes of the low species numbers of marine environments by studying the biodiversity of ray-finned fish, the most species rich group of marine vertebrates, containing 96 percent of all fish species. They performed analyses using evolutionary trees based on molecular data and fossils, and using a large database on the habitats of nearly all living fish species.

The study found a surprising difference in diversity between freshwater and saltwater habitats.

“There are more fish species in freshwater than in saltwater habitats, despite the much greater area and volume of the oceans,” he said, noting that freshwater environments occupy only about 2 percent of the Earth’s surface. “More remarkably, our results suggest that most marine fish alive today are descended from freshwater ancestors (even though fish and animals in general first evolved in the oceans).”

The authors hypothesized that extinctions in marine habitats, hundreds of millions of years ago, may help explain the low present-day diversity of marine fish.

“Our results suggest that ancient extinctions in the marine environment may have wiped out the earliest ray-finned fishes living in the oceans, that the oceans were then recolonized from freshwater habitats, and that most marine fish species living today are descended from that recolonization (leaving less time for biodiversity to build up in the oceans),” he said. “This pattern of ancient extinction and more recent recolonization may help explain why the oceans are now so species-poor, even for fish.” 

http://www.newswise.com/articles/stony-brook-university-researcher-finds-surprisingly-low-fish-biodiversity-in-the-earth-s-oceans

Shark sanctuary declared in eastern Indonesia

JAKARTA — Indonesia has declared a vast sanctuary for sharks, turtles and manta rays in a region known as one of the world's richest sources of marine biodiversity, officials and conservationists said Tuesday.


The sanctuary covers 46,000 square kilometres (17,760 square miles) of waters around the Raja Ampat islands in eastern Indonesia, part of the so-called Coral Triangle region of Southeast Asia.

Sharks, manta rays, mobulas, dugongs and turtles are fully protected within the sanctuary, and destructive practices including reef bombing and the aquarium fish trade are banned, local officials said.

"Sharks, as apex predators, play a vital role in regulating the health of important commercial fish species, population balance, and coral reefs," conservation group Shark Savers and the Misool Eco Resort, which are supporting the sanctuary, said in a statement.

"Despite this importance, up to 73 million sharks are killed annually with some shark populations declining by as much as 90 percent, mostly for shark fin soup.

"In Raja Ampat, three fourths of its shark species are threatened with local extinction."

Peter Knights, executive director of US-based conservation group WildAid which is backing the project, said: "It?s tragic that so much of Raja Ampat?s biological treasure is destined for consumers who are unaware of the impact.

"Sharks are being killed for their fins, mantas are being killed for their gills, and rare reef fish are being caught for aquariums," he said.

Raja Ampat marine and fishery office head Yohanis Bercmans Rahawaryn could not provide figures on shark numbers in the area, but said their numbers had "dropped steadily in the past few years".

"Divers rarely find big sharks around Raja Ampat. That's the main indicator," he said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ien0iGs35IASdRlJuBZjCJfm80Yg?docId=CNG.d2b96042d79e62832e6348438c194968.21