Epilogue to ESPM 1011 Blog

Throughout this blog I’ve talked about a myriad of issues from overfishing to oils spills, light, noise, trash and chemical pollution and acidification. What do all of these issues have in common?

They’re all caused by humans.

Mankind is single-handedly destroying the ocean, leaving millions of marine animals dead and destroying their habitat so that there is no chance that they have any way to crawl their way back from the precipice of extinction.

In order to right this wrong, we need to change our ways very fast. Reduce consumption. Research new, sustainable technologies that can reduce or remove the effects of so many harmful practices, and change the law to make it easier to do all of these things. We need to drastically change how we live, and quick, or our oceans, and maybe even our planet, may not last long enough for another generation to truly see it.

Oil Spills

You’ve probably heard of oil spills before. You’ve probably seen the aftermath on tv. Penguins covered in goo, fish washed up on the beach, oil executives apologizing over and over and over again.

But what are the real effects of oil spills in the ocean? How do they happen? And are they entirely preventable to begin with?

To begin with, in order to have an oil spill, you have to have some way that oil is being transported in large quantities, which can be things like an oil tanker carrying upwards of 84 million gallons of oil, or an offshore oil rig that can produce over 1 million gallons of crude oil per day.

When a tanker is compromised, like when the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, the effects can be drastic. Over 11 million gallons were spilled onto 1,300 miles of Alaskan Coast, with the number of birds, fish and marine mammals killed numbering the hundreds of thousands. These spills also have large economic impacts on the human inhabitants of the affected areas, as many depend on marine resources to produce their livelihoods. After the oil spill, the salmon and herring fisheries in the Prince William Sound collapsed, causing roughly 2.8 billion dollars in damages to the local economies.

Even 12 years later in 2001 oil pockets were still being found on beaches along the Prince William Sound.

How could this have been prevented? Well, for one, the Captain of the boat should not have been drunk while going through an area known to be hard to navigate. Reports say that he was incapable of driving the boat himself and had a member of the crew that was not at all licensed to drive the boat take it through this rougher area.

I am not going to claim that all oil spills are caused by this kind of negligence, but there are more than just this case of situations being poorly handled and the effects are multiplied because of it. If we are going to keep using oil we need to make sure we are producing it safely in a way that doesn’t have a risk of poisoning everything around it.

Oceanic Noise Pollution

How loud do you think a boat hauling cargo containers across the ocean is? To a human, it’s manageable, as long as they stay in the parts of the ship that noise. For the surrounding wildlife however, it can be insufferable whenever a ship passes even within a few miles. You see, because of the much higher density of water,  sound carriers much farther underwater than it does in air, and depending on the temperature and pressure of the water, sound waves in water can travel up to 800 times farther than the same sound traveling through air. This noise can be caused by anything from freight ships to recreational boats, as well as energy exploration attempts like looking for oil reserves below the ocean floor, which detonate large explosions all around the ocean floor.

This can be an issue because there are a variety of underwater critters than rely on their ability to hear to perform a variety of critical tasks in their day to day lives. Whales, for example, depend on their ability to hear to communicate and orient themselves over long distances. When the noise from human activities disrupt this communication system they’re ability to protect themselves and even to find a mate and reproduce becomes drastically reduced.

According to Christopher Clark, a researcher at Cornell University, “Many whale feeding grounds and migratory routes occur along shallow coastlines, which are now some of the noisiest, most heavily impacted habitats. If females can no longer hear the singing males through the smog of sound, they lose breeding opportunities and choices. If whales can’t hear from other whales that have found a really good patch of food, they lose opportunities to feed.”

This issue is exacerbated by the numerous other challenges faced by marine life today. If we cannot reduce even the amount of noise we produce doing mundane tasks like moving cargo from one place to another, how can we hope to do something along the lines of cleaning up the great Pacific garbage patch?

Oceanic Dead Zones

When we apply chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers to plants where does it go? Obviously, some of it is absorbed by plants, but happens to the excess that doesn’t make it into a plant?

They get absorbed by the soil and move through the groundwater, eventually making into rivers and lakes, and sometimes even as far as the ocean. In all of these places, the added chemicals can have a drastic impact on the local environment.

In the Gulf of Mexico for example, when those chemicals reach the ocean it causes a ‘deadzone’ about the size of New Jersey at almost 9,000 square miles and stretches all the way from the Mississippi River delta to the Louisiana-Texas border.

Why is a dead zone bad? Because, as the name suggests, everything within this zone tends to die. This is caused by the chemicals in certain fertilizers and other products encouraging massive algal blooms to occur in the region, which as it decomposes, uses up all the available oxygen in the area's water, resulting in the suffocation of fish, plants and other marine life living in the region.

This can affect local businesses by reducing the amount of fish and shrimp they can catch and reducing the growth and recovery rate of the species they are catching, which as I discussed in the first blog can lead to massive negative consequences for both the marine populations and the people catching them for food.  

Obviously, this is a huge environmental issue, but it would take not just government action, but a huge shift in practices in how we grow and produce crops to change the number of chemicals that end up in your oceans and other bodies of water.

Ocean Acidification

The carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere from our cars, factories and powerplants doesn’t just affect our oceans by raising temperatures and melting ice caps, it also increases the overall acidity of our ocean water.

As the levels of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere, they do as well in the ocean. The chemical reactions caused by this increase in CO2 leads to an increase of hydrogen ions in seawater which then leads to a drop in the water’s pH level. Since the start of industrial carbon emissions in the mid 1800s, the ocean’s pH level has dropped 0.1, which may not sound like much, but since pH is measured logarithmically, that is a 30% increase in ocean water acidity.

Why does this matter? Well, it decreases the amount of carbonate ions in ocean water, which are essential to the formation of calcium carbonate, a material that ocean organics use to build the hard parts of their bodies, such as shells, and corals use to form their skeletal structures.

Ocean water acidity can affect the creatures living in it a number of ways. Pteropods tested in waters with the acidity predicted for the year 2100 had their shells dissolved within 2 months of living in that environment. Corals lack the calcium carbonate essential for their growth, so newer coral growth is slowed and old corals are corroded. This will also leave coral reefs more open to erosion, as the backbone that forms the reed starts to shrink. Fish are also affected by an increased acidity. Certain fish species lose the ability to distinguish friendly fish from predators in lower pH waters, and clownfish cannot determine the difference between an anemone and mangrove forests in water with higher acidity.

The insane amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes more than just a changing climate, and the effects on the oceans will be unable to be easily changed.

Light Pollution and Sea Turtles

Imagine for a moment that you’re a baby sea turtle. You’ve just hatched out of your egg, spent almost a week digging through sand, and you finally break through the surface. Everything in your being is telling you to frantically dash towards a bright light as fast as you can.

But wait.

Which light are you supposed to go towards? There are bright lights surrounding you. You choose the one you think is brightest and start your mad dash to what is hopefully the sea. But the sea never comes. The beach gets brighter and brighter and soon the birds arrive, grabbing other turtles on the beach. As the day goes on and you still haven’t reached the water you start to feel weaker, and weaker and weaker.

And then the light starts to fade, and you no longer see light in any direction.

It is estimated that only 1 in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings make it to adulthood, and this problem is amplified when they can’t even make it into the ocean after hatching. When they first hatch, sea turtles use the light of the moon reflected off the horizon to guide them into the water, as it is naturally the brightest thing they can see when first emerging from their shells. However, when humans develop beachfront properties like resorts, condos, restaurants, etc, they are creating a source of light brighter than the moon’s.

This leads to the confusion of hatchling turtles as to what direction they’re supposed to be crawling towards. Hatchlings already get to the ocean in very low numbers, as birds and other predators catch them as they make their way to the water. When the turtles get confused and start heading in the wrong direction, the chances of them ever making it to the ocean are unlikely, as they are more likely to get caught by predators, or if they last long enough, die of dehydration.

Humans, however, are helping to reduce their impacts. During nesting seasons many areas in turtle rich coastal regions have blackouts along coastlines to not only help the young turtles get to the sea, but also to encourage the older turtles to nest their, as bright lights will often drive them away. Humans also physically help to get sea turtle hatchlings into the ocean by forming barriers to guide them into the water while protecting them from predators.

As sea turtle populations plummet, we need to take a multitude of steps to ensure that they are still able to sustain populations through younger turtles surviving to adulthood while also preserving their natural breeding grounds and encouraging growth among the most damaged species.

Trash Island

Keeping with the current trend of “Dangers to the ocean caused by overpopulation and mismanagement”, let's talk about trash island!

The great pacific garbage patch, more affectionately known as trash island, is a mass of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing eighty thousand tonnes and spanning an area twice the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Contrary to the more popular name, trash island is not actually a new landmass that people can go and walk around on, but actually phlegm of semi-dissolved plastics ranging from half a millimeter to more durable plastic pallets and crates.

And this plastic doesn’t just stay at the top of the water. Much of it sinks down below, some of it reaching as far down as five meters below the surface. This is because as plastic sits out in the middle of the ocean, it has almost non stop exposure to things like the sun, the motion of waves, and temperature changes. The microplastics that are caused by this deterioration have a large impact on ocean life. Animals that hunt and feed in the areas that trash island covers can confuse the stray plastics for food. This consumption of plastics in smaller animals then bioaccumulates in the organisms that prey on them. “For example, sea turtles by-caught in fisheries operating within and around the patch can have up to 74% (by dry weight) of their diets composed of ocean plastics. Laysan albatross chicks from Kure Atoll and Oahu Island have around 45% of their wet mass composed of plastics from surface waters of the GPGP.” (The Ocean Cleanup, What is the great Pacific garbage patch). Obviously, consuming that much plastic is not a part of marine animals’ well-balanced diet and can lead to a multitude of health issues, even death.

Animals can also get entangled in these plastics, and if they are unable to free themselves it often results in their death.

The problem only gets worse as we continue to dump more and more trash into the oceans, and as more of the world industrialized and start contributing to the issue, the already industrialized parts do nothing to slow their input of trash into the great Pacific garbage patch. If this continues, trash island will grow and grow, and if nothing is done to stop it the Pacific ocean may one day just be one big piece of plastic.

The Dangers of Trawling

Overharvesting isn’t the only threat commercial fishing poses to marine ecosystems. One of the systems of catching fish is called ‘trawling’. Trawling is when large nets, often hundreds of feet wide, are dragged behind a boat across the ocean floor scraping up everything in its path. It is all destroyed, whether it be coral, seagrass forests or any other marine habitat that fish rely on for safety, food, and breeding1. Coral that has been around for hundreds of years, housing and sustaining entire underwater ecosystems, is essentially wiped out in less than a day in exchange for a one-time haul of a few thousand pounds of fish2. “According to the National Academy of Sciences, bottom trawling reduces the complexity, productivity, and biodiversity of benthic habitats--damage is most severe in areas with corals and sponges. When disturbed by bottom trawling, as much as 90 percent of a coral colony perishes, and up to two-thirds of sponges are damaged.” (Oceana, Bottom Trawling).

Bottom trawling is not just a cause of fish population decline because of the issues brought up in my first post, but also because it destroys the area in which fish live and breed, further reducing their ability to replenish their population and hastening the path towards a population collapse like the one seen in the Atlantic Northwest fishery.

But wait, there's more!

Trawling is also one of the biggest causes of bycatch in use today. Bycatch is when something that wasn’t supposed to be caught in your net, such as sea turtles, gets caught in your net. It’s a lot like in those TV shows where someone goes fishing and a boot gets stuck to their line instead of a fish, except instead of a boot its dozens of dead sharks and turtles3. Overall bycatch may account for about 40% of the world’s total catch by weight4, but within certain industries the difference between the amount of specified creature they catch and the amount of bycatch is staggering. Shrimp fishing, for example, can sometimes bring in as much as 20 pounds of bycatch for every pound of shrimp caught5. Trawling is not only a threat to fish caught for commercial fishing, but also things such as sea turtles, of which many species are now endangered, and sharks, which are also seeing a massive global population decline for a number of reasons including bycatch6.

Over Fishing

Since the dawn of civilization humans have relied on fish as a reliable and consistent source of protein1, however with the massive global population growth we’ve seen over the past hundred years the demand for fish and other ocean-based food sources has increased at an unprecedented rate with 4.3 billion people, over half the world’s population, requiring it as a significant portion of their nutritional health2. This increase in demand has led to the harvesting of 100-130 million tons of fish and other ocean creatures every year3.

To compare, that's over 8 million school buses worth of fish.

Now, taking that much fish out of the ocean wouldn’t be that big of a deal if fish could replenish their populations as fast as we were harvesting them. Unfortunately, they cannot.

In the mid 20th century Canada had one of the world’s largest cod fisheries. Every year the Atlantic Northwest cod fishery would produce hundreds of thousands of tons of cod alone, but starting in 1975 the yearly catch started to shrink. New demands and technology had allowed the fishermen to harvest more and more fish, and combined with the effects that some of the new technologies had on cod breeding grounds, and the fish were not able to reproduce as fast as they were being caught. Over the next 17 years, the fishery continued to decline, showing lower and lower yields until finally, in 1992 the entire system collapsed. Fishing in the area halted for 15 years while the fishery recouped, but even now there isn’t any substantial commercial fishing in the area4.

The cod population in the Atlantic Northwest fishery not only suffered a complete collapse in population, but also went through a number of biological changes as well. Because the cod were being caught before they were able to reach maturity they began having to breed and reproduce much sooner in their life cycle. The adult cod also stayed at a much smaller mass for longer periods of time5, which in turn required that fishermen catch more fish to get the same weight of fish, only furthering the difficulties of the cod to maintain a sustainable population.

The fish weren’t the only ones affected. 42,000 people whose livelihood depended on the fishing industry lost their jobs because of the gross mismanagement of the fisheries resources. Environmental protections were considered after the start of the decline in yields, but because no action was taken the fisheries weren’t just depleted, but the entire fishing industry in Newfoundland was demolished4.

Sustainable commercial fishing is a reality, but smart management has to be put in place to maintain stable populations and ensure that fish populations don’t drop below a point of no return.

ESPM 1011 Blog Prologue

What percentage of people live their whole lives without seeing the ocean? I don’t just mean looking at it from the beach, I mean really seeing it. Snorkeling with dolphins or rays. SCUBA diving on a reef. Even just swimming in an area full of marine life you don’t see just looking off at the horizon from a dock.

All of these people live their entire lives without realizing what is affected by all our actions they see on the news. Oil spills, acidification, overfishing. All things we do that harm the marine environment are either just glossed over and barely examined by the majority of the populace.

In this blog, I will be examining and explaining many of the things humans do that damage our planet’s oceans and all the animals and plants living in them. Many of these topics you’ve probably heard about before, but either don’t have a solid understanding of humanity’s contributions or haven’t seen the full effects on not just the environment, but the current and future effects the issues have on the human race.