Ocean science and conservation, like any human enterprise, is subject to its fair share of internal messiness from time to time.  As someone whose expertise and experience intersects several discrete domains (coral reefs, sharks, marine protected areas, and policy), I’ve witnessed plenty of dust-ups, arguments, and spats over the years.  And this week’s flurry of discussion instigated by a New York Times editorial on ocean protected areas is just the latest kerfuffle. In his op-ed, Bigger Is Not Better for Conservation, coral reef scientist and California Academy of Sciences curator, Dr Luiz Rocha, argues that large-scale, remote marine reserves are a disservice to ocean conservation.  It’s Dr Rocha’s perspectives, however, that seem more damaging.

Rocha’s argument hinges on four key points:

1. The current tally of big, remote marine reserves is in low-conflict, easy to protect (ie, low-hanging fruit) areas of the ocean where human reliance upon them is negligible and therefore government willingness to protect is strong;
2. There’s nothing worth protecting in these big, remote areas;
3. More important, smaller, near-shore ocean areas with high levels of human use are in dire need of protection;
4. Marine protected areas should be science-based (eg, protected zones should be guided by “sustainable catch limits” of commercially targeted species).

Let’s go one-by-one to see if any of these points hold water. [Note: For the sake of brevity, I’ll be using the acronym MPA frequently in this piece for “marine protected area,” but it will also serve as shorthand for “marine reserve,” “protected area,” “locally managed marine area,” or “marine managed area.”  I recognize that an MPA may not be managed or enforced, but let’s forego that technicality for the moment.]

POINT 1: “Big MPAs are easy and less consequential.”
As of today, there are approximately 20 large-scale protected areas across the ocean (ranging from tens-of-thousands to millions of square kilometers in protected area).  This includes a range from the Marianas Marine National Monument’s 16,400 square kilometers to the 1.15 million square kilometers of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawai’i.  These MPAs may consist of fully-protected, no-take (no fishing/extraction) designation to protection that still allows multiple uses.  According to the folks at MPA Atlas, there are approximately 15,000 small, coastal MPAs around the world.  Some of these, like Cordelia Banks off the island of Roatan in the Bay of Honduras, encompass only 17 square kilometers.  Many are even smaller.  Totaling all of the massive/remote and small/near-shore MPAs together gets us to approximately 2% of the ocean under some form of protection.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress, held in Hawai’i in September 2016, called for member nations to set aside “30% of each marine habitat” in “highly protected MPAs and other effective area-based conservation measures” by 2030, with the ultimate aim being ”a fully sustainable ocean, at least 30% of which has no extractive activities.”

For rhetorical effect, I’ll reiterate that as of March 23, 2018, only 2% of our global oceans is protected, and 2030 is only twelve years away.

As someone in the MPA biz, I can testify that there are at present a small handful of big, deep-pocketed, international NGOs working on big international MPAs: The Pew Charitable Trusts, Conservation International, Oceana, and National Geographic. These folks have the gravitas, influence, and resources to capture heads of state attention and convene forums necessary to get things done.  You can bitch all you want about the pros and cons, but this is the reality.  Alongside the big NGOs, there are tens-to-hundreds of small to medium-sized NGOs that are working simultaneously on everything from big/remote MPAs to smaller/near-shore MPAs.  Sometimes the big NGOs work in concert with the smaller ones.  Sometime not.  It’s all site dependent.

Having worked on everything from massive MPAs to tiny MPAs over my career, I can say that none of them were “easy wins.”  So-called “low hanging fruit” may represent a unique opportunity in time.  You may have a receptive government or local community that welcomes the process.  It’s always easier to work with the willing than the resistant.  But every MPA effort in which I’ve participated involved strategy, identifying champions, public consultations, negotiations, community organizing, building political will, battling nefarious characters, rebooting strategy, sweating-out votes, and of course finding funds to support all of this.  If there are “easy wins” out there, big or small, I sure would appreciate someone pointing me in that direction.

Protecting big/remote areas or smaller/near-shore areas is not an either/or game.  This is not a binary proposition of doing one or the other.  It’s a yes/also.  We need to protect small, not so small, medium, larger, big, bigger, and massive tracts of the ocean.  We need to protect what is easy to protect, and what is harder to protect.  We must gather every bit of low-hanging fruit, and plan to reach the currently out-of-reach fruit.  MPAs occupy a spectrum or continuum, and we need to be prepared to work with everything along that spectrum.  Some NGOs will have a mandate (and talent) for pursuing big swaths of ocean.  Others are more tuned to work on local needs.  But there is a lot of real estate between the biggest and smallest MPAs for organizations, individuals, and yes, even FUNDERS to find their niche.

POINT 2: “There’s nothing worth protecting.”
This is just wholesale wrong.  What is Rocha considering as “worth” protection?  Certainly, there are species whose entire life cycle may be captured by the boundaries of an MPA.  Other species may only spend a portion of their lives within the boundaries of protection.  Protected areas are designed to factor in these variables.  But not all MPAs are envisioned around biological significance alone.  The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary in North Carolina, the very first marine national monument designated by the United States in 1975, honors the historic significance of the shipwreck of the famed Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor.  Similarly, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument and the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, including the 110 seamounts, open waters, and all life in that area are considered biocultural resources and linked to the Hawaiian people through environmental kinship.

The ocean as a cultural seascape is vital to Hawaiian identity, their being, and essential dimension to their cognitive understanding of the world.  The ocean waters in Papahānaumokuākea were an ancient pathway for a voyaging sphere that occurred between this region and the main Hawaiian islands for over 400-500 years (ca. AD 1300-1800).  The practice of traditional wayfinding and voyaging—recently popularized in the film Moana and which is one of the most unique living traditions of the world—requires protection of the entire marine environment and open waters, not just the islands and reefs, because it relies on biological signs and natural phenomenon, such as winds, waves, currents, and the presence of marine life and birds at key moments and locations.

At the same time as Papahānaumokuākea was successfully expanded in 2016 by President Obama, the State of Hawai’i also supporting the establishment of small, coastal community-managed makai areas, driven by and for the community.  Yes, both can happen at the same time and using the same human capital, as many of the same people fought for both the small makai areas and the big Papahānaumokuākea effort.

POINT 3: “There are more important, smaller places to protect.”
Importance is relative and subjective.  It is place-driven and context-heavy.  What is important to someone in Brazil, might be less so to someone in Hawai’i.  So instead of casting stones at our neighbors, perhaps we should recognize that there are seriously limited resources, conservation bandwidth, and political will, and try to triage our priorities.  I recognize that the reality is that not all NGOs/organizations like to play-well together.  Furthermore, some places and approaches are simply not tenable due to practical considerations and political and social realities.  Again, this is a reality of modern conservation.  But as I mention above, effective MPAs do not occupy one half of a binary state.  It’s not either small or large.  Remote or near-shore.  Fully managed/enforced or paper parks/un-enforced.  Every single MPA in existence occupies a position somewhere along a continuum of effectiveness.  Even an un-managed, unfunded, and unenforced MPA is a work in progress along that continuum.

POINT 4: “They’re not science-based.”
Science should help inform MPA zoning and designation.  No questions or arguments here.  But the science needed may at times be incomplete or lacking.  Many decisions around the world, particularly in developing nations, on “sustainable catch limits” are not acted upon because data is deficient.  Should we be expected to wait for the science to be decided and settled (whatever that might mean) before action/conservation measures can be activated?  And science is but one arrow in our quiver that we should use to scope, establish, and manage MPAs.  The social sciences and economics are also driving MPA priorities and planning.

Finally…
I find an editorial like Rocha’s to be, quite frankly, dangerous.  Staking-out a claim on one side of a false dichotomy or constructing straw man arguments is the purview of graduate school.  I get it… Rocha would like to see more love shown to near shore/coral reef areas (including where he has worked in Brazil).  But what is the benefit to conservation as a whole to publish these half-baked propositions that large, remote MPAs are a waste of time in the pages of The New York Times and under the banner of an august and internationally recognized organization like the California Academy of Sciences?  We are not currently living in normal times, and this sort of rhetoric plays right into the hands of those keen to see less ocean protection, not more.

For the first time in US history, an administration is rolling back protections on national monuments, both land and sea.  Australia just this week has announced the possibility of cutting in half the protections for the Coral Seas MPA.  Conservation in one place in the ocean is not the enemy of conservation in another place.  And MPAs are not a binary switch of either big or small…  Local or remote…  Fully protected or not.  If we are going to get to the IUCN recommended target of 30% of our oceans under strong protection by 2030, we need to ramp up protections everywhere along the MPA continuum.  Yes/Also should become our mantra!  We must embrace a process of continuous improvement in our MPA work, not display a reflex of undercutting other conservation efforts.  And we need to keep our focus and attention on the real threats to a healthy ocean: over-fishing, illegal fishing, pollution, climate change, and lack of political will for action.

The post Embracing Yes/Also: Marine Protected Areas Are Not An Either/Or Proposition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

https://youtu.be/FuMxVu9F7XU?t=10s

Check out this incredible video of jellyfishing (aka ‘jellyballing’). The first part of the video, with the brown-colored jellyfish, is from the US state of Georgia, where jellyfishing is one of the state’s largest fisheries. The second part of the video, with the blue jellyfish, is from the Gulf of California, Mexico. And the third video, with the man and the net…well I’m not actually sure where that’s from. Possibly South America.

In all three cases the species being harvested is supposedly the ‘cannonball jellyfish’ Stomolophus meleagris. However, recent work done scientist Dr. Liza Gómez Daglio is shaking this idea up a bit: using DNA, she discovered there are at least six undescribed species of cannonball jelly, possibly more (paper).

We don’t actually know the species boundaries for all these different cannonball jellies, so it’s hard to say if some species are being fished more than others. Though the blue ones vs brown ones are clearly very different.

Regardless of species or color, nearly all of the jellyfish caught in the US are shipped overseas to Asian markets, where people enjoy jellyfish in a variety of different dishes. Personally, I find jellyfish to be a bit like eating chicken cartilage crossed with rubber bands. While it may be an acquired taste, clearly many people have it: a recent paper reports that “Japan has imported 5400–10000 tons of jellyfish products per year, valued at about 25.5 million US dollars, annually from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Myanmar” (paper).

Thousands of tons of jellyfish is a lot by any measure. But how many tons of jelly are caught in the Americas is harder to say. Scientists have no idea what impact, if any, jellyfishing has on jelly populations here in the US, particularly for undescribed cannonball species. In China, fisheries experts bump up the jelly population by ‘seeding’ wild jelly stocks with hundreds of millions of baby jellies each year. That’s right: China actually adds hundreds of millions of jellyfish to their coastal waters annually. Good jelly harvesting and culturing practices may help make their jellyfishery sustainable over the long term, while feeding demand for these crunchy, rubber band-esq invertebrates. With more information on the US cannonball species, perhaps we could develop similar conservation measures to help preserve and protect our local species, while also supporting local fisherman.

Regardless of how we protect our local species, I doubt jellyfish will become a popular snack here in the US anytime soon. While I’d love to catch jellyfish by the boatload, when it comes to eating jellyfish, my personal favorite is still the Swedish kind.

The post Jellyfish fishing: A multi-million dollar industry first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Threats of international boycotts. A conservation activism group’s boat burned in effigy. Government vehicles overturned by angry citizens. A cartel trafficking illegal wildlife goods worth thousands of dollars per kilo.

At the heart of this? An adorable porpoise – the vaquita, sometimes called the “panda of the sea.” It is the world’s most endangered marine mammal, occurring only in the Upper Gulf of California and threatened by bycatch in gillnets in local small-scale fisheries. Its fate is inextricably entangled (ah, bycatch puns) in a complex mess of human motivations and actions.

This high-profile conservation issue has drawn millions of dollars and decades of hard work by some of the world’s brightest and most dedicated minds. Yet we’ve reached a point where desperate, high-risk efforts to catch and keep vaquita in captivity is the only option for this species’ survival (here is a not particularly great, but widely read, piece in the NYT). How did this happen?

Well, one thing to consider is that there is a critically important group of players that are not represented in most media stories on this issue: the local communities. These include people now unable to feed their families, and worried about increasing rates of drug addiction and crime. People who feel disenfranchised and villified and misunderstood.  Numerous colleagues and I believe that this sector has been disregarded not only in media coverage, but also in decision-making, in a way that is ultimately counterproductive to conservation (not to mention human well-being).

My insights are based on a recent research project that I co-developed: “Stakeholder perspectives on the future of vaquita conservation.” With guidance from experts, my fantastic research team and I interviewed fishers and community members in San Felipe and El Golfo de Santa Clara, as well as conservation groups, researchers, and government agencies about their perceptions regarding vaquita conservation.

Given the heated nature of this topic, some fine print: These ideas do not necessarily represent the views of anyone besides me. This post presents a *very* simplified version of our project and the system. Our findings are based on what people chose to tell us – truths, deliberate non-truths, or inadvertent non-truths. Even though these might not be absolute fact, people’s perceptions are critically important.

The system

At the interface between small-scale fisheries and conservation, it is especially critical to understand the elements and interactions between human society and nature. So, what does the vaquita conservation system look like? Below is a (simplified) version of the entities involved:

At the heart of the system? The vaquita, local fisheries, and the illegal fishery for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladders sell at staggeringly high prices to Asian markets. This is run by cartels (one of my field assistants – somewhat jokingly – said, “Tara, please don’t get us killed”).

The infrastructure and economics of local communities, as well as the health and well-being of community members, heavily influence the feasibility of transitioning from a gillnet-based economy. The system includes how these fisheries and communities are managed, i.e. by government agencies (local and national), as well as conservation groups, and researchers who might be affiliated with government agencies, conservation groups, or academia.

These groups dynamics are complex. For example, fishers might belong to cooperatives, organized into federations.  The perspectives of a cooperative leader will differ from those of a fisher who works on a boat that someone else owns.  There are also independent fishers who do not belong to cooperatives. Furthermore, different priorities exist within the government agencies, researchers, and conservation groups.  Some focus more on fisheries, others more on vaquita conservation. This sets the stage for conflict not only among different stakeholder groups, but also within.

The “solution”

As an emergency effort to save this species, conservation groups pushed for a 2-year gillnet ban from 2015-2017. This ban was accompanied by a compensation scheme for fishers who would be losing their livelihood.  Additionally, social programs were promised to assist in transitioning to alternative livelihoods.  At the same time, trials were being run for “el chango ecologico,” a small, apparently environmentally-friendly, trawl. This vaquita-safe gear would be the proposed alternative gear for local fishers.  Additionally, enforcement efforts again the totoaba fishery were stepped up, by the Navy and Sea Shepherd.

This is my doodle rendition of the plan – with anticipated reduction of bycatch and totoaba fishing, recovery of the vaquita, and limited negative impacts (perhaps positive impacts) to local communities:

So…how did it go?

Well, not as hoped:

Vaquita bycatch continues, with the population dropping to a downright grim 30 individuals. The illegal totoaba fishery continues (and possibly has increased). And conflict between communities and conservation groups has grown even more heated.

The compensation program was mismanaged such that many fishers are not receiving it; no social support programs materialized; and many community members reported serious degradation in community and individual well-being. There was mention of some fishers entering the illegal totoaba fishery as the only feasible livelihood option.

The alternative gear is widely rejected by fishers, who state that it difficult and costly to use, inefficient, and damaging to the environment (more on this in a recent paper by Aburto-Oropeza et al. in Conservation Letter, summarized here). There is a daunting level of distrust between various groups involved in these trials.

All of this occurs on a long-standing foundation of conflict between stakeholders (e.g., Cisneros-Montemayor and Vincent 2016) .  Some community members stated that the vaquita is a myth invented by conservationists; that bycatch does not occur in their gillnets; that data related to this are faked.  Even those with more moderate beliefs expressed dismay about the lack of communication and inclusion by researchers and conservation groups. However, researchers firmly and exasperatedly emphasized to me that they had tried to share their research and findings.  Clearly, there is a disconnect here. Even though information has been shared, it has not been effectively received – for whatever reason.

On a certain level, the solution to bycatch seems to be fairly simple: reduce the overlap between gillnets and the animals of concern. Of course, bycatch does not occur in isolation. Not to belabor the “bycatch pun” angle, but bycatch is generally tied up in complex systems of interconnected strings and knots. Any attempt to disentangle the situation will involve pulling on certain strings, which are connected to other strings and knots.  In other words, each action will introduce tensions to other parts of the system.  If these tensions are not anticipated and managed, the whole tangle might just become more intractable.

The ban added tension to an already-complicated series of intertwined knots. It pulled on the complex interconections between gillnet fisheries and community well-being, and at the particularly intractable knot linked to the totoaba fishery.  Without a series of effective, concerted efforts to untangle these knots, this added tension has only made these knots more tight.

Narratives

Problems are easier to think about in simple terms. A bad side, a victim, and a good side. Evil, greedy corporations despoiling the earth for their own gain make for a storyline with limited moral ambiguity. This is an easy way to communicate a problem to the broader public.

Unfortunately, many conservation problems simply do not fit into this narrative. They are the products of complex systems – they are “wicked problems” (see Jentoft and Chuenpagdee 2009 on how this term applies to fisheries and coastal management) They make our heads hurt and force us to consider tricky ethical dilemmas.

So, it’s not surprising when a complex problem like vaquita bycatch becomes oversimplified in media coverage. Narratives that thoughtfully share the community side of this story are rare. The considerable impacts of the gillnet ban on their incomes, health, and well-being have not been widely covered.  And though the NYT story and others convey otherwise, most of the fishers and community members we interviewed had positive perceptions of the vaquita – viewing it as a beautiful animal that had a right to exist, that was a part of their natural heritage. Their objections were to conservation approaches that harmed their communities, but they were generally supportive of the idea of conserving the vaquita.

Community members are tired of being villified. Many of them feel that their communities also suffer from the totoaba fishery and related influence of cartels; they feel attacked from all sides, by the cartels and by the conservationists. While some community members have engaged in aggressive protests, there are others who feel that these actions do not represent their community in a favorable light – yet these are the actions grabbing headlines.

A shift from the simple “bad guy, good guy” narrative could promote greater demand and support for holistic and, one imagines, more effective approaches. Some key recommendations from our interviewees include: truly effective communication about research methods and findings; inclusion of communities in research and decision-making, including the search for alternative gears other than the chango ecologico; cooperative, community-inclusive efforts to combat the totoaba fishery, improve infrastructure, and develop job training and alternative livelihoods; and broadening the focus of vaquita conservation to include other aspects of the ecosystem and the needs of communities, as articulately argued for in two recent papers (Cisneros-Montemayor and Vincent 2016; Aburto-Oropeza et al. 2017).

Of course, easier said than done. And it’s very easy to criticize as an outsider looking back on past actions. However, with greater demand for these types of solutions, I hope that there will be more research on how to meaningfully design and implement these recommendations rather than having them be the “ta-daaah, we’re finished here!” final section of reports and papers.

What now?

The solutions indicated by our research are long-term efforts to effect holistic change in the system. These are not last-ditch, emergency measures. So, while conservation and research groups mobilize to save this species through captivity, what else can be done?

You might have seen calls on social media to boycott seafood from Mexico. Supporting a boycott is a personal decision, and not necessarily a bad one. I would be loathe to support a market linked to vaquita bycatch. But I’d urge you to carefully think: what happens with this boycott? What strings does that pull on, and what tensions might be worsened? Would this spur the government toward more effective conservation action, toward more effectively controlling the totoaba trade? Are there plans to ensure that communities do not bear the burden of a problem that isn’t necessarily their fault? I’d like to see those calling for boycotts to also call for complementary efforts to work with communities as partners, rather than opponents.

What else can be done? There are at least two major opportunities:

1. Invest in long-term social and environmental sustainability in the Upper Gulf beyond vaquita conservation, and involved the community in a more open, participatory approach to developing and designing creative, appropriate solutions for greater social and environmental well-being;
2. Take these hard-earned lessons from the vaquita mess and apply them to similar conservation problems globally, that do not have the amount of publicity or funding that have been showered upon the vaquita. Unfortunately, marine mammal bycatch is a global issue, and we need to evaluate all attempts to solve this problem.

I was hoping to think of a humorous, catchy title for this post – for example, “Conservation at Cross Porpoises.” But that felt flippant in the face of this all-around depressing situation: a species will almost certainly soon be extinct in the wild, communities have suffered, scientists and conservationists have worked their hearts out, and the only obvious “bad guys” continue to reap the benefits from the illegal totoaba trade. My hope is that we can start to appreciate the complexity of these situations, and design strategies that match and adapt to this complexity for other cases.

—

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere “thank you” to all who participated in these interviews and to the communities of San Felipe and El Golfo de Santa Clara; to collaborator Samantha Young @ San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and research team Areli Hernandez and Veronica Vargas; to the Gulf of California Marine Program. Research funded by NSF SEES Fellowship and SeaWorld Busch Gardens Conservation Fund.

REFERENCES

Aburto-Oropeza O, López-Sagástegui C, Moreno-Báez M, et al. 2017. Endangered Species, Ecosystem Integrity, and Human Livelihoods: Species conservation humans ecosystems. Conserv Lett.

Cisneros-Montemayor AM and Vincent AC. 2016. Science, society, and flagship species: social and political history as keys to conservation outcomes in the Gulf of California. Ecol Soc 21.

Jentoft S and Chuenpagdee R. 2009. Fisheries and coastal governance as a wicked problem. Mar Policy 33: 553–60.

The post Beyond drug lords and conservationists: Who is missing in the coverage of the vaquita’s demise? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Allow me to explain by indulging me in a little experiment.

If you have Yelp or a similar restaurant-finding app, fire it up and do a search for “tuna poke” from your current location.  Go ahead… I’ll wait.

For the benefit of poke noobs, poke (pronounced POH-kay) is a traditional raw fish salad that is an important part of Hawaiian cuisine.  While various seafood can be used to prepare poke, by far the most common and most popular preparation uses tuna, primarily yellowtail or big-eye tuna.  While poke has been eaten for millennia by Polynesians, it was Hawaii chef Sam Choy (the “Godfather of Poke”) who really put the dish on the map for a global audience.  So much so that Business Insider claimed in early 2016 that, “poke will be the next big thing in fast food.”

Fast forward to April 2017.  So how did your local tuna poke search go?  Allow me to share the results of my search from my home in Oakland, California:

Yelp apparently limits smartphone map results to a maximum of 20 locations per search presumably to avoid over-cluttering the screen.  But according to Yelp, I have at least 12 locations within easy walking distance where I can find tuna poke.  Some are mom&pop poke operations like “Poke Koma,” while others are mega-poke chains like “Poke Zone” (a wholly-owned subsidiary of “Poke Salad USA,” or “Ono Grill.”  Still others are sushi restaurants or sushi fast food retailers that advertize poke.  Maybe it’s just me, but I was amazed by how many poke retailers had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.  Granted, I live in the SF Bay Area, a proud foodie haven, but this poke bonanza was most definitely NOT the case just a year ago.  Tuna poke has really taken off.

Wondering if poke was booming across in San Francisco, I performed a few Yelp searches to check for patterns.  Here’s what I found:

San Francisco:
Again, the map search is limited to 20 results across the visible map area.  But tuna poke retailers can be found across the city, with a plethora of choices not surprisingly being concentrated in the downtown/financial and tourist-heavy neighborhoods.  But what if I drill down closer into a neighborhood?  Zooming in on The Castro, for instance, I can find another set of poke retailers who did not appear in the initial, broader scale search.

According to Yelp, I can find 17 retailers who carry tuna poke in The Castro alone.  Who knew there was so much fish eating happening in The Castro?

So let’s assume that the deeper, more selective geographical area you search for “tuna poke” on Yelp will return more unique options for procuring your poke.  But what does poke availability look like across the mainland US?  Here are my results…

Washington DC:

New York City:
With a drill down on south of 34th Street:

And from Tribeca to the Financial District:

Houston, Texas:

Minneapolis, Minnesota:

Anchorage, Alaska:

Portland, Maine:

And yes, even Fargo, North Dakota has poke according to Yelp:

Which raises an important point.  These are results of what Yelp reports as to the availability of tuna poke based on their users who have reviewed restaurants, posted photos, or restaurants who have advertised on their app that the menu includes tuna poke.  I would imagine that North Dakota readers may know of some great tuna poke spots in Fargo.  So take all of these results with a dose of context.

But it does indicate to me that tuna poke has gone from a specialty dish that required a holiday in Hawaii to enjoy to something that has been mainstreamed across the mainland.  This represents A LOT of tuna consumption.

But here’s the thing.  The Hawaii tuna poke brand identity that Chef Roy Choy and others have successfully built is one that conjures impressions of the freshest catch of the day (remember, you are eating raw fish) that is being harvested in Hawaii and shared with Aloha around the world.  When you eat poke, it’s supposed to evoke an image and a connection to Hawaii.

And this is where I smell a rat.
Take a peek at a Yelp search for tuna poke in Honolulu, Hawaii:

Again, the search is limited to 20 retailers, but not surprisingly Honolulu streets are lined with poke vendors from downtown to Diamond Head.  This is as one might expect at ground zero for tuna poke.

But in the motherland of poke, mass consumers of this dish (and by that I mean visitors and residents who eat poke regularly from high-volume retailers such as Safeway, Foodland, KTA Super Stores, and also numerous food courts that dot Waikiki as well as across the main islands) are NOT eating fresh-caught fish.  Volume tuna poke sellers are not buying their fish from small scale, sustainable, local fishermen (called pono fishermen) who fished that day but from the Honolulu Fish Auction Block.  The mass-market poke retailers are sourcing deep-frozen tuna (often treated with carbon monoxide gas in order to retain color) that were caught perhaps months ago by tuna longline fishermen, often from the waters of Micronesia or the Marshall Islands.

Very little of the premier quality tuna landed in Honolulu makes it’s way to Hawaii restaurants or poke retailers, but is destined for restaurants in Japan and other Asian markets where they fetch handsome prices.

So if the bulk of Hawaii poke eaten is sourced from long-ago frozen, carbon-monoxide color-stabilized tuna that was caught on longlining vessels, what do you suppose mainland tuna poke vendors are selling?

Make no mistake… I love poke.  It’s delicious, simple, satisfying in a way that is hard to describe, and I do truly feel (as much as a white dude can without sounding culturally appropriative) a connection to a Polynesian tradition.   Why I find the proliferation of mass-market tuna poke so alarming is that it’s coming at a steep series of costs to the ocean as well as to sustainable local fishermen.  First, there’s the reality that longline fishing, where miles of mainline are deployed with thousands of baited hook sets, is the absolute antithesis of sustainable, pono fishing.  The tally of bycatch and discards from tuna longline fishing is staggering, and it means that you carve a very deep impact on long-term ocean health with each serving of tuna poke that is sourced in this manner.

Secondly, in embracing mass-produced tuna poke we miss the fact that truly sustainable tuna poke is indeed possible.  Each of the Hawaiian Islands has communities and networks of local pono fishermen who use handlines and practice traditional methods to bring their catch to market.  Contrast this with the Hawaii commercial tuna longline industry that uses mostly foreign workers who work for slave wages and who cannot even step off their ships.  Of course pono fishing cannot supply mass global demands.  But that, in essence, is what makes this type of fishing pono (or correct/righteous/sustainable) in the first place.  Perhaps some food is simply not suited for globalization.

Finally, this explosion in tuna poke further stokes the mythology that our oceans are an inexhaustible source of food, irrespective of the fishing effort or methods.  This isn’t conjecture… this is free market reality.  If there is demand for a resource, there will always be a group seeking to exploit it.  Case in point, the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council (WESPAC) is now urging President Donald Trump to remove fishing prohibitions within the Pacific marine monuments created by Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama and re-establish the councils’ supervision of the fisheries.  Why would a quota-based fishery that meets it’s federally determined quota every year be trying to open fishing once again in fully-protected marine reserves?  Simply put, it’s greed.  But it’s greed that is fueled by consumer demand, and cheap/affordable tuna is a big part of that.

Perhaps tuna poke will, like the cronut, fade away once the next food trend appears.  Or perhaps we will hit peak poke before that.  My crystal ball is hard to read.  Tuna has the dinstinction of being incredibly ono (Hawaiian for “delicious”).  That’s a good thing.  Now, if we can just try harder to also make sure it’s pono.

The post Peak Poke? (Or, Our Choices Have Consequences) first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If I asked you to picture a predator, weighing over 2 tonnes¹ and capable of travelling the distance of a marathon every day², what would it look like? Would you imagine sleek shapes, immense power or maybe terrifying teeth? What if it could also dive >840m deep³, swarm in huge numbers⁴ and produce over 300 million offspring⁵? Such a creature sounds like the stuff of nightmares, spawning thousands of B movies where people fear to tread water… introducing the ocean sunfish!

Oceanic oddballs

These crazy-looking creatures have hit the headlines again and for good reason… just look at it. The bizarre shape, the enormous size, the permanently surprised expression; sunfish are simply swimming clickbait! Firstly in 2015 Boston Man broke the internet with his idea of catching a ‘baby whale’ (*spoiler, it’s a sunfish) and now a hilarious rant about the “biggest joke played on earth” has gone viral, again with sunfish as the butt (or should that be swimming head?) of the joke. But what is it about these oceanic oddballs that inspires such outbursts?

Well, even someone who studies sunfish for a living like me has to admit they are pretty weird, both to look at and in their habits, but that is precisely why I find them so fascinating. So what do we really know about this strange species? Alongside the jokes, Scout Burns’ comic rant made some pretty fishy claims about sunfish and the scientists who study them, so I feel it’s time for someone to stand up for the funny-looking fish and bite back.

Dishes to fishes and the meaning of life

One of my favourite suggestions from Scout’s blog is that sunfish are “big dumb idiot[s]” made when “God must have accidentally dropped [one] while washing dishes day and shrugged his shoulders” because they have “no purpose… every foot… wasted space”.. Well sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction; the fishes first evolved around 500 million years ago⁶ and despite their somewhat prehistoric appearance, the ocean sunfishes actually represent the new kids on the block (evolutionary speaking)! They appeared ‘only’ 50 million years ago, descended from pufferfish that left for a life in the open ocean⁷. Their strange shape actually represents cutting-edge evolutionary design, honed by selective pressures over millions of year to a life wandering the world’s oceans. As to their purpose, well this is a bigger question… the meaning of life has been debated for centuries from ancient philosophers to Monty Python (of course the answer is: 42). But roughly speaking, their “purpose” is the same as that of all life… simply to exist: to feed, grow, breathe, reproduce and die. Of course, having an interest in biology, we want to know a few more details than that! Which is why scientists (myself included) are trying to unravel the ecology of the sunfish a little further…

Why swim when you could fly?

Scout suggests “scientists even debate how [sunfish] move. They have little control… some say they must just push water out of their mouths for direction…They could use their back fin, except… it doesn’t f****** grow. It just continually folds in on itself.” The image of a giant sunfish blowing water like a kid blows bubbles is a great one! But sadly this simply isn’t the case, we know how they move and in quite a lot of detail. Rather than swim with a strong tail fin (like most sharks and tuna species), the ocean sunfish flaps its dorsal and anal fins like a penguins flippers⁸ to efficiently (if a little ungainly), fly through the water. The funny stumpy tail (or clavus) actually has a vital role to steer the fish, like a ship’s rudder (and for the record it grows like any other body part).

Scout quite rightly mentions that sunfish don’t have swim bladders; however it is not true that “that every fish has [one] to make sure it doesn’t just sink”. In fact, although it might sound strange, many fish don’t have swim bladders, including great white sharks, manta rays and white marlin. There are other ways to provide lift without the issues of containing air internally (which can cause problems with rapid changes in depth). Most fish without swim bladders, including sunfish, have large deposits of fatty lipids in their livers that provide buoyancy, so no swim bladder, no problem⁹.

Unfortunately it’s also not the case that sunfish “get stuck on top of the water… because without the whole swim bladder thing… the ocean pushes over the [fish]”. This idea sounds super funny as sunfish are often seen bobbing around at the surface, but unfortunately is untrue. Sunfish don’t actually need a swim bladder to remain upright (it’s not a life jacket); they are perfectly capable of swimming upright both at the surface and at depth. They “bask” at the sea surface¹⁰, which is a clever behaviour to increase their heat exchange, to communicate with birds for cleaning services and perhaps simply just to rest, before diving back into the depths.

Under pressure…

Of course being a huge fish, there is a certain amount of Hollywood pressure to be a tremendous toothy terror and Scout’s article sounded distinctly disappointed that despite being “so huge” sunfish are not even “decent predators”. Unless you are a prey item of course! The biological definition of a predator is ‘an animal that naturally preys on others’ and so sunfish are oceanic predators. But of course this particular predator poses little threat to people, unless you are unfortunate enough to stand under a breaching sunfish, in which case you may find yourself transformed into a pancake-ified version of a human being. But as a biologist, this doesn’t seem like the best method for classifying predators (although it might win you a Darwin Award).

Back to sunfish as predators, (an area a lot of researchers are working on), Scout says “They mostly only eat jellyfish because [it has] a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it’s so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive. Dumb.” Well, that’s the funny thing really –they really can survive on a crazy diet! Small sunfish (<1 m), eat a wider range of things than their larger cousins, with 40% of their diet made up of seafloor creatures including crustaceans, molluscs and even some fish species¹¹. When they come across gelatinous prey (siphonophores, pyrosomes, jellyfish etc.) the sunfish are surprisingly fussy and are careful to only eat the most calorific parts (no dieting here!) which means gonads… yum. Anything that requires more energy to find or digest than it provides -like jellyfish bell tissue- is rejected. By remaining fussy eaters within their ecological niche (where unsurprisingly, there is less competition), sunfish are able to survive where few others can, something biologists (myself included) are still trying to understand and explain.

Moving on from thinking of sunfish prey to sunfish as prey, and it’s hard to imagine this giant floating head being vulnerable to attack. However, sunfish start life in the plankton as tiny eggs <1 mm⁵. This puts them on the menu for almost every creature in the sea! As they grow, the number of predators able to cope with such an item decreases, but they have been found inside sharks¹² (not a pretty sight) and there is plenty of evidence of attacks by orca¹³ and sealions (although these might aggressive play behaviours, like a cat tormenting a mouse). The main threat to ocean sunfish, the super predator that kills 100,000’s each year is… you’ve guessed it: us. There are markets for sunfish meat across the Far East (Taiwan and Japan in particular¹⁴) and they are captured as unwanted bycatch by fisheries globally¹⁵. It is these enormous catch figures that have led to the ocean sunfish being classified as Vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN Red List.

However the future for this funny fish is becoming brighter; as more people become aware of the oceans weird and wonderful creatures, from funny rants and viral videos, more pressure is placed on governing bodies to reduce bycatch, combat climate change and alter unsustainable exploitation of the seas. Perhaps ranting and raving about strange species can be helpful for conservation, simply by raising awareness and creating a catalyst for change.

If you would like to read more fish facts or learn about the latest sunfish research please check out my twitter page @SunfishResearch or visit my blog sunfishresearch@wordpress.com

References

¹ Roach J (2003) World’s heaviest bony fish discovered? National Geographic. Available via http://news.nationalgeographic. com/news/2003/05/0513_030513_sunfish.html

² Nakamura, I., Goto, Y., & Sato, K. (2015) Ocean sunfish rewarm at the surface after deep excursions to forage for siphonophores. Journal of Animal Ecology, 84, 590-603.

³ Phillips, N.D., Harrod, C., Gates, A.R., Thys, T.M., & Houghton, J.D.R. (2015) Seeking the sun in deep, dark places: Mesopelagic sightings of ocean sunfishes (Molidae). Journal of Fish Biology, 87, 1118-1126.

⁴ Houghton JDR, Doyle TK, Davenport J, Hays GC (2006a) The ocean sunfish Mola mola: insights into distribution, abundance and behaviour in the Irish and Celtic Seas. J Mar Biol Assoc UK 86:1237–1243. doi:10.1017/ S002531540601424x

⁵ Gudger EW (1936) From atom to colossus. Nat Hist 38:26–30

⁶ Conway Morris S and Caron JB (2014) A primitive fish from the Cambrian of North America, Nature 512, 419–422

⁷ http://oceansunfish.org/evolution.php

⁸ Watanabe Y, Sato K (2008) Functional dorsoventral symmetry in relation to lift-based swimming in the ocean sunfish Mola mola. PLoS ONE 3:e3446. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0003446

⁹ Yancey PH, Lawrence-Berrey R, Douglas MD (1989) Adaptations in mesopelagic fishes. Mar Biol 103:453–459

¹⁰ Cartamil DP, Lowe CG (2004) Diel movement patterns of ocean sunfish Mola mola off southern California. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 266:245–253

¹¹ Syväranta, J., Harrod, C., Kubicek, L., Cappanera, V. & Houghton, J.D.R. (2012) Stable isotopes challenge the perception of ocean sunfish Mola mola as obligate jellyfish predators. Journal of Fish Biology, 80, 225-31.

¹² Fergusson IK, Compagno LJ, Marks MA (2000) Predation by white sharks Carcharodon carcharias (Chondrichthyes: Lamnidae) upon chelonians, with new records from the Mediterranean Sea and a first record of the ocean sunfish Mola mola (Osteichthyes: Molidae) as stomach contents. Environ Biol Fish 58:447–453

¹³ Gladstone W (1988) Killer whale feeding observed underwater. J Mammal 69:629–630

¹⁴ Sagara K, Ozawa T (2002) Landing statistics of molids in four prefectures of Japan (in Japanese with English abstract). Mem Fac Fish Kagoshima Univ 51:27–33

¹⁵ Pope, E.C., Hays, G.C., Thys, T.M., Doyle, T.K., Sims, D.W., Queiroz, N., Hobson, V.J., Kubicek, L. & Houghton, J.D.R. (2010) The biology and ecology of the ocean sunfish Mola mola: A review of current knowledge and future research perspectives. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 20, 471-487.

The post Trolling in the deep: from raging rants to support of the strange first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In which Dr. Milton Love ruins the magic behind Finding Dory with Science, but we love him anyways.

TUNE IN HERE

The post Science Spoiler Alert: Finding Dory first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Another year of science closes, giving us pause to review those new species of sharks described in the scientific literature, bringing the total number of known shark species to 512. Perhaps it’s a hollow victory to have so many different species known at a time when sharks populations worldwide are either in decline or in a complete population tailspin. But as taxonomists continue to kick ass and give names, our knowledge of shark evolution, biogeography, and ecology continue to get richer. Meet the new sharks of 2015:

Ginglymostoma unami, the Pacific Nurse Shark
This isn’t really the brand-spankin’ new species you might think, but it has been known for well over a century. The Nurse Shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum) had a disjunct distribution between the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico and the eastern central Pacific oceans, meaning their range was divided into two separate populations. Like some nooks in the Ozarks, land barriers prevented gene flow, so the populations were both physically and genetically separated by a small spit of land called Central America. This team didn’t use genetic methods to test if the populations were distinct enough to be considered different species, but relied on a meristics, the process of compiling detailed measurements of the shark’s anatomy and comparing these values between the populations.  However, a 2012 paper on populations genetics of G. cirratum showed that the Pacific population was genetically quite unique, and divergent from any of the Atlantic populations. Since these two nurse shark populations had been separated by three million years, a few things can happen, like speciation. Indeed, their analysis showed that these two species are morphologically different enough to warrant giving the Pacific population its own scientific name. This name, G. unami, is an acronym of their alma mater, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Moral-Flores, L.F.D., E. Ramirez-Antonio, A. Angulo, and G. Perez-Ponce de Leon. 2015. Ginglymostoma unami sp. nov. (Chondrichthyes: Orectolobiformes: Ginglymostomatidae): una especie nueva de tiburón gata del Pacífico oriental tropical. Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 86 (2015) 48-58.

Scyliorhinus ugoi, Dark Speckled Catshark
Way down among Brazilians sharks once swam there in the millions, but overfishing took surely took a hefty toll, yet there are still new shark species to be found. Case in point: a new catshark that had long been swimming along most of the Brazilian coast but had been confused as other known species. Catsharks are a widespread, diverse, and somewhat confusing group of sharks. Differences in color, morphological changes between juveniles & adults, and sexual differences between males & females create difficulties in sorting out just how many species there are. Here, the authors use detailed meristic analysis to extract out a species that had been there all along, but the morphological features that delineate the species had not yet been defined.

SOARES, K.D.A. & GADIG, O.F.B. & GOMES, U.L. 2015. Scyliorhinus ugoi, a new species of catshark from Brazil (Chondrichthyes: Carcharhiniformes: Scyliorhinidae). Zootaxa, 3937 (2): 347-361.

Atelomycterus erdmanni, Spotted-belly Catshark

This sexy beast is one of the more colorful species of catsharks, and is one of several new species discovered from a larger taxonomic mess called the coral catsharks.  Using meristics, genetics, and biogeographical analyses, it turns out that the “coral catshark” represents several species, with this species as the newest. They don’t live in coral, so much as they crawl on and among coral reefs of Indonesia, using their pectoral and pelvic fins like tiny feet and walking like a more limber and agile salamander. Named after Mark Erdmann, a fish taxonomist who collected most of the known specimens, and was rewarded with this li’l shark bearing his name.

Fahmi & White, W.T.  2015. Atelomycterus erdmanni, a new species of catshark (Scyliorhinidae: Carcharhiniformes) from Indonesia. Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation 14: 14-27.

Bythaelurus tenuicephalus, Narrow-head Catshark
2015 also brought us two more catsharks, from the same genus, and both from the depths of the southwestern Indian Ocean. Hailing from the outer continental shelf of Mozambique and Tanzania comes the Narrow-headed catshark. The vast majority of sharks in recent years have been from the more remote pockets of Earth’s oceans, and in particular, from the deep oceans that have barely been explored. This species of Bythaelurus is a “dwarf”, a species that is sexually mature at a much smaller size than most other species in its genus.  The advantage of dwarfism might allow this species to breed at a younger age, thus increasing their overall lifetime reproductive output. Or it could be that being smaller simply means eating smaller prey that larger species of catsharks might miss. This sort of niche-partitioning may explain why there are so many different species of catsharks. The species name tenuicephalus means “narrow head”, a little less imaginative than some names, but descriptive nonetheless.

KASCHNER, C.J. & WEIGMANN, S. & THIEL, R. 2015. Bythaelurus tenuicephalus n. sp., a new deep-water catshark (Carcharhiniformes, Scyliorhinidae) from the western Indian Ocean. Zootaxa, 4013 (1): 120–138.

Bythaelurus naylori, Dusky Snout Catshark
Another year, another catshark on the list.  This species however, has quite an interesting story behind its capture.  Massive trawlers, towing huge nets and pulling up tons of fish aren’t new, but what is new is the trend for these huge vessels to move from depleted fishing grounds in the shallows, and into the relatively untapped fishery resources of the deep sea. In addition to the targeted commercial species that will earn them great sums of money when they return to port, these nets also catch and kill tons of other non-marketable species.  This is what ecologists call ‘by-catch’, but there is a sunny side to such needless destruction.  Commercial vessels are often the first to explore deep-sea zones, well ahead of research cruises that are difficult to fund and even more impossible to sustain over time. If you can get onto one of these factory trawlers, the bounty of the bycatch is yours, and what a paradise this is to shark researchers. Dave Ebert & Paul Clerkin of the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Lab got the invite to board one of these vessels as it sailed south from Mauritius, but with a small catch: they had to stay for the entire three month trawling season. If you haven’t ever had the displeasure of sailing the wild waves and howling winds where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, then you wouldn’t know that it makes The Deadliest Catch look like a Honolulu harbor cruise. Already hardened by the seas of the Gulf of Alaska, Paul made three of these cruises, collecting more than a dozen new species of skates, rays, sharks, and chimeras that will be published in future years. The species name naylori honors Gavin Naylor of the College of Charleston who, through genetic analysis, is compiling a more complete evolutionary history of extant shark species.

EBERT, D.A. & CLERKIN, P.J. 2015. A new species of deep-sea catshark (Scyliorhinidae: Bythaelurus) from the southwestern Indian Ocean. Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation 15:53-63.

And lastly….
Etmopterus benchleyi, Ninja Lanternshark
If you haven’t already seen this sassy new deepsea shark that went viral late last year, check it out here, and here, and here. That makes six new sharks for 2015, but new species will be discovered and described in 2016, so check back next year.
VÁSQUEZ, V.E. & EBERT, D.A. & LONG, D.J. 2015. Etmopterus benchleyi n. sp., a new lanternshark (Squaliformes: Etmopteridae) from the central eastern Pacific Ocean: Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation; 17: 43-55.

The post Meet the New Sharks of 2015 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sub-Neritic Gentrification

For November we will be doing some deep thinking about deep-sea mollusks in an attempt to understand the complex history and adaptations of these animals living in the depths of our oceans. Biodiversity of today’s marine snails can be traced to several different ecological and environmental phenomena, but in the Deep-Water Helmet Shell Galeodea keyteri, it is likely a case of adaptive radiation exploring new realms. The Helmet Shells (Cassidae) are a speciose group of large, shallow-water tropical and temperate marine snails that range among the intertidal coral rubble and sand flats to offshore muds, but as this evolutionarily successful group of gastropods continued to diversity into different niches, several species moved into deep-water to establish new ways of living. At these depths staying alive presents serious challenges with an extremely cold, low oxygen, nutrient-poor, and high-pressure environment, so some deep-water species trended to smaller, slow-growing physiologies like as a way to successfully conserve energy and resources. Since the dark depths lack sunlight needed for algae to grow, most species of deep-sea mollusks are either scavengers or predators, with little resources for vegetarians to survive. Like all Helmet Shells, Galeodea keyteri is a carnivore, specializing on starfish, brittle stars, and urchins. Catching their slow-moving prey with a muscular foot, glands in the proboscis secrete a fluid rich in acids that dissolve the echinoderm’s calcium-carbonate skeletons, while a radula drills into the weakened parts of the body to extract nutrients from their internal organs. A tough environment requires innovative strategies and hardy adaptations for a species to survive. Ain’t natural selection grand?

Molluscan Methuselah

While some species of deepwater mollusks are derived from shallow-water taxa that extended into and adapted within deep ocean ecosystems, other taxa of marine mollusks are taxonomic geezers with a much longer history. The Slit Snails (Pleuorotomariidae) are perhaps the oldest still-living lineage of marine snails, extending back in the fossil record more than 500 million years. Named because of its long slit at the aperture allowing for extension of their respiratory siphon, they were abundant in the shallow reefs throughout the world. Between the Late Cretaceous (ca. 90 million years ago) and the middle Eocene (ca. 40 million years ago) is when most modern lineages of shallow-water reef-living gastropods originated and diversified, and also the time when slit shells seem to disappear from that same fossil record. Among paleontologists and malacologists, the general hypothesis is that these modern taxa somehow out-competed the slit shells for food, or perhaps were more adapted to changing marine climates or fluctuating sea levels of the time, forcing the slit shells into progressively deeper and deeper water. This type of ecological displacement and bathymetric submergence has been seen in many other deep-sea groups, including corals, crinoids, brachiopods, and fishes. Today, slit shells are found in depths exceeding 3,000 meters, living the hi-life eating sponges in a cold, dark, lonely, nutrient-poor world.

Die-Hardest

As far as the origins of deep-sea gastropods go, we’ve visited two scenarios: new lineages of shallow-water snails radiating into deeper waters, and those formerly shallow-water taxa that have been out-competed in the shallows and forced into deeper, less productive habitats. But there’s a third group of deep-water snails that are so tough, so extreme that they can live in shallow and deep water. Here is the Checkered Hairsnail (Trichotropis cancellaria; Capulidae), the James Bond, the Bruce Willis, and the Rock all coiled up into one extreme snail that ranges from the intertidal zone to depths of nearly 2,000 ft. (600m). Is it true grit or it’s hard-boiled soul that make it impervious to the relentless cold, pressure, and darkness of the deep sea? Their broad range is more likely the result of two things: (1) a wide and variable physiology that can tolerate the extremes of shallow to deep; and (2) its broad diet that it can obtain at any depth. You see, the Checkered Hairsnail is a suspension-feeder, meaning it feeds on the decomposing bits of animal debris suspended in the water, which it traps by sticky mucous, and that kind of detritus is found in all habitats. However, it’s a sneaky critter. When the floating slurry of decomposition becomes scarce, they will parasitize tube worms by inserting their proboscis down the mouth of the worm and pumping out the contents of the worm’s stomach. Evolution: the weirder the better.

Slo-Mo Snail
Shallow-water gastropods live the good life. Warm water, a sunny sea rich in oxygen, and plenty of food provides them the metabolism to live fast, grow big, and die young, relatively speaking, of course. The flipside in the deep sea is a life of constant near-freezing cold, little available food, and water suffocatingly sparse in oxygen. This shell of the Catalina Turrid (Antiplanes catalinae, Pseudomelatomidae) who lives at depths of up to 4800 ft (1460 m), tells its story of life in this harsh realm. Growth lines, which indicate the increase and cessation of shell development, are seen as wide bands often far apart in curving spire of fast-growing shallow-water shells. In this species, the growth lines are close and compact, showing very slow growth and likely a long life. Their low metabolism provides little extra energy for their minimal growth and reproduction, so these snails probably take the developmental route of the tortoise over the hare. This shell tells another and more concerning story. Once only collected during deep-ocean trawls by research vessels, this species was prized by collectors as a rarity and an oddity. With commercial fisheries abandoning over-exploited fishing grounds along the shallower coasts, fishing has gone into the deep ocean to tap into those fragile resources. This specimen was taken as unintentional bycatch by a deep-water shrimp trawler, and though it wasn’t the target of the fisheries, the sparse populations of these slow-growing snails cannot sustain even the modest impact by commercial fisheries

Post-Docs Please Enquire

The curse of working with deep-sea gastropods is how few specimens are in museum collections, and what very little is known about them. That too is the siren’s call of opportunity in deep-sea malacological research. The Japanese Pagoda Shell (Columbarium pagoda, Turridae) has been known to science for close to 200 years, based on relatively few well-documented specimens in museums and private collections scattered throughout the world, yet virtually nothing is known about their ecology. Diet, trophic niche, age, growth rates, reproduction, population structure, predators, parasites, physiology, ecological associations, movements – none of that has been adequately documented. If all mysteries in the ocean were solved, there would be no jobs for future under-paid post-docs or over-worked assistant professors. Those with grant funding, a modicum of workaholism, and access to deep-sea technology could pioneer new directions into a richer ecological understanding of the deep ocean’s marine mollusks. That siren’s call can just as easily dash unfeasible projects on the rocks of financial destitution and lead to deep regret of one’s research program and entrée into a life of constant self-medication and personal validation. These mysteries await the bold, but favor the wise.

The post Malacology Monthly: Going Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

2. One Fish. Two Fish. Red Fish… No Fish.

3. Snow Caps Cones for Everyone.

4. Too Many Lionfish on the Dance Floor.

5. I See Deadzones.

6. No Escape from Plastic Monstas.

7. Where Have All the Coral Reefs Gone and Where are all the Cod?

8. Goodness Gracious, Great Plumes of Oil…and Mercury…and all that other crap we put in the sea.

9. I’m all alone and there’s no zooxanthellae inside me.

10. Fin.

The post 10 Reasons Why the Ocean’s Struggle is Real first appeared on Deep Sea News.

as judged within our own moralistic anthropomorphism, the links between dolphins and drugs are the most widespread and least know.

1) Dolphins as Recreational Drug Abusers?
Two years back, a sensational yet possibly important finding was released via the internet of observations that Bottlenose Dolphins caught and tortured small pufferfish into releasing Tetrodotoxins. This intensely powerful poison protects these fish from predators, and can kill anything that eats them, including sushi

connoisseurs seeking the thrill of fugu, the elusive and expensively-prepared raw pufferfish. Theoretically, low non-fatal doses of the toxins were providing a high for the dolphins that they actively sought to score mind-bending bliss. What became apparent is that this ‘discovery’ was merely an observation loaded with assumption within no framework of actual scientific research, and more importantly, it became a marketing ploy for an upcoming television program on dolphins. Despite this behavioral interpretation being untested and unproven, the hilarity of stoned dolphins caused the blogosphere to erupt with sweeping generalizations of recreational drug use among dolphins, and fears that gangs of pufferfish-toking dolphins might terrorize your favorite Club Med, added to our list of grievances against them.

2) Dolphins as Victims of Drug Abuse?
2014’s BBC exposé about neuroscientist John C. Lilly and his systematic dosing of LSD and Ketamine to captive Bottlenose Dolphins made lot of people lose their scat in a big way. How could – and why would – someone send dolphins on an acid trip? It’s not like they are Peter Fonda or anything. While the 1960’s were the heyday for oceanographic expeditions and marine science, it was also the golden age of harebrained

hippie pseudoscience, and it just made perfect sense to slip drugs to dolphins to better understand their ‘consciousness’. Lilly’s intent was to develop a method of communication between man and dolphin, whether dolphins wanted to or not didn’t really figure into his scheme. Of course, it never worked. Despite a flurry of recent articles about Lily’s work, none of it was ever really secret, and I even heard about Lilly’s dolphin drug den from a professor when I was a teenager taking a marine mammalogy course at my local community college way back in 1984. What shut down his project wasn’t outrage from the public or other scientists, but a combination of lack of funding (well after NASA pulled out), the lack of any tangible peer-reviewed research, Lilly’s own accelerating drug use, mortality of his captive strung-out dolphins, and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act that prevented Lilly’s kind of direct abuse to dolphins. Nothing came out of Lilly’s dolphin dosing experiments, but years later, video game creator Ed Annunziata was so entranced by Lilly’s increasingly fanciful and paranoid writings, particularly about the possibility that humans and dolphins might be able to communicate with aliens, that he developed Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin.

3) Dolphins and Drug-Fueled Raves?
I’ve seen dolphin shows at marine life parks, and while they are pretty damned ace at diving through flaming hoops, they are still lousy dancers, so what are they doing at raves? Sadly, from a great-idea-gone-horribly-wrong debacle involving a rave in the Swiss amusement park Connyland, we now know that raves and dolphins definitely do not mix.

Even the greenest novice of dolphin fun-facts knows they have an incredibly sensitive and complex ability to receive and process sound, so what idiot green-lighted six hours of high-decibel disco thump thump thumping next to a dolphin tank? This is the type of deafening sonic warfare we used to torture dictators (I’m looking at you Manuel Noriega!), so nobody should have been too surprised when two of the dolphins went belly-up the next day. One was dead, the second would die a few days later. The real surprise wasn’t that they died from the ear-blasting dance music, but that a the toxicology report from the necropsy found them to have high concentrations of Buprenorphin, a synthetic heroin popular at raves, likely slipped to them by a raver, possibly to better understand their ‘consciousness’, which deteriorated into unconsciousness and death by drowning. As with any murder mystery, fingers were pointed at other culprits who were later cleared of wrongdoing.

The only thing even more unfathomable than dolphins tripping their lights out during a Swiss rave is this question: what the hell are dolphins even doing in Switzerland in the first place? My initial thought was so they could be closer to all the offshore banking (sorry), but in reality, wherever some city leader or chamber of commerce officer hatches a plan to build a municipal aquarium as a tourist draw or potential cash-cow, it means there will be dolphins, even in the Alps. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, many dolphins do not adjust well to captivity so far from the sea and away from members of their own pod, so socially-dysfunctional behaviors like aggression and anxiety can be treated with drugs like Valium, used to ameliorate the same mental disorders in humans.  As some have asserted, these drugs can be potentially be overused in captive animals, and may ultimately hasten the death of dolphins in captivity.

In an even more ironic twist, several of the most widespread and dangerous drugs at raves are Blue Dolphin, White Dolphin, and Pink Dolphin, basically cheap derivations of opiates, methylamphetamines, or methamphetamines, each pill embossed with a tiny dolphin. To take that irony to the third degree is the drug Dolophine, a type of methadone that is used as a pharmaceutical therapy to wean users off of opiate-based rave drugs. When a doctor is administering Dolophine as a treatment for an addiction to Blue Dolphin, they can use the treatment tracking system called DoLPhIn, the Database of all Pharmaceutical Inventions, to better manage their care.

4) Dolphins and Mexican Drug Cartels?
Earlier this year, May 24th, a 66 pound load of cocaine with an estimated street value exceeding $3.5 million US, washed ashore on a Galveston, Texas beach. Bootleggers dumping their load to evade capture or erase the evidence isn’t new, but this one was particularly interesting. Each of the 1 kilo packages were wrapped in black plastic and stamped with a white dolphin – the logo of the notoriously violent Gulf Cartel. Beach combing for drugs seems to be the new pastime for coastal law enforcement as these types of discoveries

happen virtually on a weekly basis. You would think that dolphins could make use of these parcels (they have a blow-hole after all), but it is morphologically impossible for dolphins to ingest cocaine in the usual manner, and toxicology sampling from live and dead-stranded dolphins from the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean have yet to show any level of discarded cocaine in their system.  With ramped-up enforcement by U.S. and Mexican authorities, moving large quantities of drugs from Mexico is getting costlier and more difficult, so a loss like this batch of cocaine can be a big financial hit to the cartels. Since drugs are becoming less of a guaranteed money-maker, cartels are diversifying, putting money and effort into everything from extorting lime growers to illegal tuna fishing. Mexico and several other Latin American countries have been trying for decades to make their legal tuna fleet abide by ‘dolphin safe’ regulations or face a ban on their fish from US canneries, but cartel-backed tuna boats follow none of these regulations and kill hundreds of dolphins in tuna nets with impunity while easily moving their product with well-honed business skills of violence, bribery, corruption, and intimidation. Moreover, these same fishing boats are often used in the transport of cocaine and marijuana, with the tuna odor effectively thwarting drug-sniffing dogs.

5) Dolphins as Anti-Drug Enforcers or Junkie Athletes?
On the front line of the high-seas War on Drugs is The Dolphin, an 87-foot US Coast Guard cutter that has made record drug seizures in recent years in the drug-running hot-zone between south Florida and the Caribbean. The Dolphin’s crew intercepts drug cartel’s cocaine-packed speedboats blasting across the Caribbean from Colombia and dilapidated tuna boats stocked with bales of marijuana from the Dominican Republic, and each year they confiscate tons – literally tons – of drugs, but much more still makes its way to the shores of Miami.  And here, one type of dolphin in particular has an intense hunger for drugs – the Miami Dolphin. With their long-running parade of current and former players failing drug tests, caught carrying or dealing drugs, and even keeling-over from drug-related deaths, this team far out competes any pufferfish-toking dolphin gang, any time, in any ocean.

The post Dolphins and Drugs – The Shocking Connections first appeared on Deep Sea News.