STRONGHOLDS; Hope for wild pacific salmon from iLCP on Vimeo.

One of the major concerns with climate change relates to habitat changes for the plants and animals. Will aspen survive anywhere in the United States? What trees will be able to survive in Connecticut in 2050? 2100? Where will elk be able to survive in 2100?

Of course these aren’t easy predictions to make since each species has distinct environmental requirements. Even more troubling though is that many have complex relationships with other organisms, both beneficial and detrimental. Then there are the often complex food webs that each species is a member. some webs are resilient to loss of several species but others collapse with the loss of only one.

While sea temperatures are generally more stable than air temps in terrestrial systems, many of the marine animals have even tighter requirements for temperature. Even a change in just a few °C can prevent reproduction, reduce lifespans, or even cause death. That is the case with the Icelandic Scallop. In some recent experiments it was found that the scallops had a significantly higher mortality in temperatures above 12°C. Average summer sea surface temperatures off Iceland’s southern coast have been in excess of 10°C in recent years and have been rising. A +2°C change over the previous decades has brought the average summer sea surface temperature very near the scallop’s maximum threshold. While the scallops are still able to survive, there has been a marked increase in adult mortality.

Icelandic Scallop - Image from http://www.osl.gc.ca/guide_sp/en/invert/sp/c-islandica.html

Increasing temperature may not directly be the primary cause of the recent increases in mortality of the scallops, though it has been strongly implicated. In recent years, a protozoan parasite has affected much of the stock of C. islandica around Iceland. As with the scallop itself, many protozoan parasites have been found to have temperature thresholds and ideal temperature ranges. For instance Perkinsus atlanticus populations under controlled experiments did not grow, in temperatures of 5°C, grew slowly at 16°C, and grew quickly at 20°C and 26°C. It also failed to grow and died out after 4 days at an experimental temperature of 37°C. Similarly, two other protozoan parasites of interest on the Atlantic Coast are also temperature controlled: Parkinsus marinus, the cause of the disease dermo in oysters, requires temperatures above 25°C to thrive, Haplosporidium nelsoni, which causes MSX in oysters (although it can survive and multiply at temperatures of 5°C-25°C) requires temperatures above 20°C to infect a new oyster. Temperature is likely also a controlling factor in the spread of the protozoan infecting C. islandica.

While the Iceland Scallop is what instigated this post, the topic of climate change and its effect on marine animals, particularly fish, is one I have been thinking of a lot lately. In much the same way that the scallops are temperature limited, fish have ideal and survivable temperature ranges, and temperature can play a significant role on growth and reproductive success. Complicating the issue is that many of the fish have very specific habitat preferences or needs as well.

Atlantic Wolffish - Photo copyright Peter Auster from http://www.nurc.uconn.edu/bigmouthfishes/photos/SBNMS/content/neg7_large.html

Take for instance the Atlantic Wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) a species of increasing concern in the Gulf of Maine, if fact they are likely to be soon added to the Endangered Species Act. They are a wonderful (dare I say beautiful) fish with some great characteristics and a face only a mother, or a crazy marine biologist, could love! They feed mainly on molluscs, crustaceans and echinoderms using their huge canines. They are a large benthic fish, growing up to 5 feet and weighing up to 40 pounds.

They are also a slow growing and late maturing species. Growth and maturity varies with temperature fluctuations, but generally they are reproductively mature by 6 years or about 16 inches total length. Spawning pairs of male and female form in the spring with actual spawning period varying, possibly as a function of temperature. As with many species, reproductive success increases as females grow larger and older, producing both more eggs and more viable eggs (ranges from 5,000 to 12,000 eggs per season). The female lays her eggs in holes and around boulder reefs. The male then begins a fast, loses his teeth, and guards the eggs for four to nine months of egg incubation (again a function of temperature). Four to nine month fasting and guarding the eggs. Think about that one guys!

wolffish pair from CLF (credit: Jonathan Bird) on Vimeo.

One of the cool things about wolffish is the presence of anti-freeze in their body, which allows them to survive, even thrive, in extremely cold waters. In the wild they have been caught in trawl surveys in waters from -1.9°C to 14°C. In the laboratory they survived temperatures as high as 17°C, but feeding was strongly negatively correlated with the higher temperatures.

So temperature is a major factor on the wolffish, but so is habitat. Wolffish are most often found in rocky reefs or seaweed beds on hard substrate from 80m to 180m depths, but range as deep as 650m and can, on occasion, be found in coastal shallows. My most memorable dive in New England remains being about 3 feet away from a 4 foot wolffish in the cove just off Avery Point in late November.

Young wolffish keep to the deeper, colder part of their range where temperatures remain -1°C to 4°C. Only mature fish are found in shallower ranges and higher temperatures with an upper temperature limit of 10°C.

My thoughts recently have related mainly to mapping the current and potential future ranges of some of these animals using habitat suitability modeling techniques in geographic information systems (GIS), including especially ecological niche factor analysis (ENFA). Using what we know of their habitat requirements (for the wolffish: -1°C-10°C, boulder reefs for spawning, 80m-200m depth, and abundance of lobster, crab, urchin or molluscs) we can map the current optimal and sub-optimal ranges. It doesn’t mean they’ll be there, but it is where the potential for finding them should be highest, based on our understanding of their requirements. By altering the temperature and depth components to match forecasts based on climate change models, we can look ahead to forecast the likely range of the animals, and even the decade by decade march or retreat of suitable habitat.

An example of using mulitple habitat factors with multipliers to determine ecological niche. From http://www2.unil.ch/biomapper/

For some animals the outlook is pretty bleak. The combination of habitat requirements and temperature requirements will drive them completely out of the Gulf of Maine and potentially out of the Western Atlantic entirely. There are many fish that are at their breeding temperature limits in the Gulf of Maine already, including many commercially important species. Some marine animals are existing in virtual islands of suitable habitat formed by complexities of depth, substrate type and complexity, currents and temperature, among many other factors.

The challenge is to identify, for each species or community, which of these factors are most important for both the organism’s survival and our modeling efforts. Unfortunately, especially in the marine realm, there is still so much we don’t know about the ecological requirements of may of the animals and communities. Even mapping the seafloor at resolutions comparable to our maps of terrestrial areas continues to be challenge. It often surprises many people I talk to when they find out that almost all our knowledge of marine animal populations and habitat characteristics comes from commercial fisheries and from sample trawls by the NMFS. Most species that are not targets of fisheries or considered commercially important have not been studied extensively, if at all.

Trawler bringin up it's haul - from http://en.wikivisual.com/images/f/fb/Fish_on_Trawler.jpg

In the marine environment it is very challenging to accurately predict how communities will respond to warming waters and how individual species ranges will change, simply from lack of direct observation. We are getting better at using the important data we do have, and have identified proxies for the data we simply do not have, but we need more time in the water with ROV’s and DSV’s for direct observations, especially of the continental shelf and deep sea ecosystems.

Wolffish eating a sea urchin from CLF (credit: Jonathan Bird) on Vimeo.

References

Burreson, E., & Ford, S. (2004). A review of recent information on the Haplosporidia, with special reference
to Haplosporidium nelsoni (MSX disease) Aquating Living Resources, 17 (4), 499-517 DOI: 10.1051/alr:2004056

Hagen, N., & Mann, K.H. (1992). Functional response of the predators American lobster Homarus americanus (Milne-Edwards) and Atlantic wolffish Anarhichas lupus (L.) to increasing numbers of the green sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis (Müller) Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 159 (1), 89-112 DOI: 10.1016/0022-0981(92)90260-H

Jonasson, J., Thorarinsdottir, G., Eiriksson, H., & Marteinsdottir, G. (2004). Temperature tolerance of Iceland scallop, Chlamys islandica (O.F. Muller) under controlled experimental conditions Aquaculture Research, 35 (15), 1405-1414 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2109.2004.01159.x

King, M.J., Kao, M.H., Brown, J.A, & Fletcher, G.L. (1989). Lethal freezing temperatures of fish:
limitations to seapen culture in Atlantic Canada. Proc Ann Aquacult Assoc Can., 89 (3), 47-49

Ordás, M., & Figueras, A. (1998). In vitro culture of Perkinsus atlanticus, a parasite of the carpet shell clam Ruditapes decussatus Diseases of Aquatic Organisms, 33, 129-136 DOI: 10.3354/dao033129

One last awesome video of a wolffish!

Wolffish devouring a crab from CLF (credit: Jonathan Bird) on Vimeo.

Croak! Says the Sea Robin
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

Searobin

     by Johann Heupel

All my life I have struggled to overcome negative exposure to sharks. I think I have won, but it has been a long haul.

My earliest memory of sharks is from 1975. I was spending the night at a friend’s house. Across the street from his building was the base movie theater. All that Friday night we were scared witless by the constant screams we heard coming out of that theater during the three showings. We had seen the posters on the movie theater billboard and our imaginations filled in all the rest, which is not too hard for imaginative 7–year–olds. It would be years later before I actually saw the movie, which only reinforced my abject fear of sharks.

Fortunately, my folks exposed me to National Geographic and the Cousteau Society, so I was also exposed to sharks as amazing animals and important parts of the ecosystem. Yet, whenever we’d visit the coast and go swimming, in the back of my mind I would worry about the sharks. As an adult in the Caribbean, I was revisited by that fear when I began diving. I have to admit my greatest concern when I began diving was that I was entering their realm. I slowly got over that fear (mostly) as I got more dives under my belt, including several dives with reef and nurse sharks. Then came Somalia.

In Somalia there was a strict order not to swim in the beautiful waters around Mogadishu. I have to tell you it is VERY tempting to take a small dip in the water to escape the equatorial heat, especially when you’ve been riding convoys in full battle gear and are caked in sweat, dust, and dirt. A moment of wading in cool salt water to escape it all was very inviting. I wanted nothing more, but the order was there for a reason. In a little over a year 6 UNOSOM workers were bit by sharks in Mogadishu. Three died of their injuries. I knew Mogadishu was a unique place for the sharks. The area had become a rich hunting ground for them, thanks in part to a history of townspeople throwing carrion and refuse into the waters nearby. Eventually the UN installed a shark fence around the beaches at the airport. I wonder if it’s still there.

To the south in Kismayo, I did a couple dives with several sharks in the area. My job was to keep an eye out for sharks while the underwater specialists carried out their jobs. I was pretty scared, but I was young and dumb and diving with a bunch of seriously gung–ho types, so I wasn’t about to admit it. The funny thing is the sharks were there, but their behavior was very non-threatening, even the largest of them. They occasionally came into view, swam lazily at a distance, then receded back into the blue. They were not terribly interested in us or our activities.

I continue to dive, even in the “dive by touch” conditions that the locals call “high visibility” in Long Island Sound. I have studied sharks a bit more and the critical part that many sharks play as part of their ecosystem. Intellectually, I know that even as a diver and someone who works in the marine environment, I am less likely to be bitten by a shark than I am to be struck by lighting or electrocuted by my toaster. Yet, in the back of my mind, there is still a little kernel of concern. When I see the replica of the great white in the cafe on campus (caught just outside of Long Island Sound), or I hear of the juvenile great white found in the estuary near here, I find myself having to shake off that fear and refocus my thoughts.

I have been fortunate to see sharks up close in the wild and I realize that they are not the killing machines that the media often portrays them as. Even the Discovery Channel uses sensationalism and fear to sell their Shark Week. I haven’t watched Shark Week for several years, since I was disgusted by their inaccurate and sensationalistic portrayal of sharks the last time I did watch. Shark Week then was about 80% fear and sensationalism, 15% interesting factoids, and 5% conservation, proactive education, and recent science. The shame is that Shark Week could be a force for genuine education about shark conservation and the importance of sharks in the ecosystem.

I certainly hope that they have changed their portrayal of sharks, especially since the sharks are in desperate need of our help. Even Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, expressed his deep regret over having written Jaws after the damage it caused.

“Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today,” said Benchley, who also co-wrote the screenplay for “Jaws.” “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

Unfortunately, with shows such as “Deadly Waters” and “Sharkbite Summer” in the lineup, it doesn’t look likely. I could take a very optimistic view and hope that “Deadly Waters” is describing the terrible daily massacre of sharks for shark fin soup. Maybe “Sharkbite Summer” is about us putting the figurative bite on sharks. But as far as the Shark Week advertising and show titles go on the Discovery Channel website, the message is still all about fear.

I mean really, how far have we come in 34 years??

The 1975 film poster for Jaws

and 34 years later, the 'Web Poster' for Shark Week 2009

All you have to do is turn off the lights, the computers, the TV all the electric devices you can safely, for one hour. 60 minutes.

Last year we joined some 36 million Americans and turned out all the lights for an hour. We had a candlelight dinner and played scrabble by candlelight. It was a remarkably refreshing hour. An hour of family connectedness, an hour of calm and quiet.

We’ll be doing the same tonight, the only things left running will be the phones and the fish pump. We hope you’ll join us at 8:30pm local time for a candlelight dinner, or a picnic under the stars, or whatever electricity lite activity you want to do. Please.

Johann: I got a picture of some trees along the entry to the woods. Someone has been busy!

We all needed a family outing where we felt like we were getting away, at least for a few hours. We decided to go to Pequot Woods Park and check out the trails there. Johann and I had just gone there with some friends from the homeschooling group, but our trip there was cut short when the boy fell into the pond. We followed them home so he could change clothes and did something else together, which was a nice afternoon, but we still wanted to go back to the woods.

Eric: Tammy at the end of the path, except it wasn’t the end of the path just two days before, when the pond was still covered in ice. Unfortunately none of us had on waterproof hiking boots (since none of us own them) so, crossing would be a bit more challenging this time.

We also wanted the opportunity to walk the trails at a slower pace, so we could see signs of animals, maybe even spot some, and have time to notice things like moss, lichen, fungus, interesting tree roots or rock formations. Too many people rush through and don’t notice anything.

Johann: In the shadows there was a lot of fuzzy moss carpets.

Johann: I thought the blanket of moss on these tree roots looked like a moss sandwich.

---

Johann: I’ve been studying about molluscs a lot lately, and I have found a new one – the tree clam. Ha ha.
I liked how these fungi looked like clam shells and Mommy thought they look like a fairy ladder going up the tree. I agree.

Eric: In this area that is so marked by the glacial processes that formed the coast of Long Island Sound, a sight like this is not unusual, but it still makes me stop.

Eric: Johann shooting the fungi growing under a fallen tree.

Johann: These fungi reminded me of chips or conch shells from the color and the way they rolled up.

---

Johann:Whooo, Whooo, Whooooo is there with that big camera?

Eric: With the melt-off and the beaver’s industry the low spot along the pond edge became the new brook course. I love the power of water. It finds its way always. You can see from the left and right edges of the image that it is moving pretty swiftly too.

---

If we could have gotten further away from civilization, I think it would have been more relaxing. The background noise of cars speeding by on the highway made it hard for me to completely relax, but I did feel more rejuvenated when we got home. We decided we need to invest in good hiking boots for the whole family so that we can do a lot of hiking while we are still here.

Eric: Interestingly, this beaver lodge is not in the middle of the pond, but hard up against the shore.

Eric: This was the best we could get of the beaver. At this point it was really too dark to get a good shot of it, but I figured a grainy shot was better than nothing!

Dr. McClain over at Deep Sea News recently published a very readable open access paper at PLoS ONE about the potential connectedness of seamounts and nearby habitats. I love that the paper was highly accessible, both in the writing and the fact that anyone can download it from PLoS One and read it for free, especially since, in the case of Davidson Seamount and Monterey Canyon, there are significant implications on management policies, if the goal is to protect and preserve the diversity within the canyon.

A Little Closer to Home

Tim Shank and his lab have been doing a lot of work on connectivity, including genetic analysis, among and between the seamounts of the North Atlantic, especially the New England Seamounts and the Corner Rise Seamounts. Though I haven’t seen any papers yet (I believe Walter Cho is working on this for his Ph.D.) what I have been exposed to is that they are finding connectivity between seamounts and seamount areas, but it is a complex situation with very different connectivity from one species to the next, one depth to the next and one region to the next. Connectivity factors likely include reproduction and recruitment strategies, bathymetry, depth, habitat availability, and hydrodynamics (regional and local).

So Why Should We Care?

Ultimately understanding how these deep sea ecosystems are interconnected is critical for conservation and management of marine resources, including potentially many commercially important species (and the deep sea cephalopods who lay egg capsules on the deep corals, thank you very much!). It needs to be studied further to understand the extent of the connectivity. Connectivity studies have a significant number of challenges though, not the least of which is the seemingly simple task of identifying the interaction time and space scales of the relevant processes. In part these define the boundaries of populations. Identifying all the species using traditional morphological taxonomy and molecular techniques, can be a herculean task as well.

Unfortunately, the seamounts are also being impacted by deep sea fishing. Trawling across the mounts can remove entire communities of slow growing deep sea corals and the complex communities they support, potentially causing a significant effect on the deep sea coral community connectivity as well.

My Tiny Personal Connection

This last year I have been working part time with video captured on several deep sea cruises to the New England Seamount Chain and the Corner Rise Seamounts. Much of the work has been producing support video and a DVD for a variety of presentations, which I can’t present here. I can, however, finally show one piece of the package I put together, which was the last piece we did to give to the funding partners.

Your Seamounts on Fishing

The Future?

While I loved deep sea biology and invert communities before, spending many hours scouring HD video of these invert communities helped really hook me on the idea of studying them long term. As I watched the communities of inverts on the screen I had so many questions about their distribution, their physiological adaptations, limitations on growth and distribution, recruitment triggers, etc… etc… etc. I would love to be able to study these communities, the larval distribution, development and recruitment for the communities and individual species, and the ecological and anthropogenic pressures on these communities.

(Yes, I would still also love to study cephalopods and larval development and ecology within the mangroves, still lot’s of wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night questions there too!)

Notes

All footage in the piece was taken on the 2005 Deep Atlantic Stepping Stones mission, but not necessarily from the same dive or on the same seamount. The final sequence is the result of an otter door impacting and dragging across a part of the Kükenthal Seamount. An otter-door is a large metal rudder that holds the trawl nets wide open.

There is more impact footage from the mission, including trash and meters upon meters of clean parallel lines cut through communities of coral and sponges where the rollers on the bottom of the net rolled through. The otter door impact zone, however, was the starkest example of clearing the communities from the seamount in the video I surveyed, devastating damage.

Sources and Further Reading

Peter J. Auster, Jon Moore, Kari B. Heinonen, Les Watling (2005). A habitat classification scheme for seamount landscapes: assessing the functional role of deep-water corals as fish habitat. Cold-Water Corals and Ecosystems, 761-769 DOI: 10.1007/3-540-27673-4_40

Craig R. McClain, Lonny Lundsten, Micki Ream, James Barry, Andrew DeVogelaere (2009). Endemicity, Biogeography, Composition, and Community Structure On a Northeast Pacific Seamount PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004141

Rhian Waller, Les Watling, Peter Auster, Timothy Shank (2007). Anthropogenic impacts on the Corner Rise seamounts, north-west Atlantic Ocean Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, 87 (05) DOI: 10.1017/S0025315407057785

Skull of the adult female and the fetus (colored baby blue)

Even though this ancestral whale has many adaptations, such seal-like bodies and a very powerful swimming tail, maybe even with flukes, and is well on the way to becoming a modern whale, they were still heavy boned and thus not for the open ocean. With the head first birthing position they would have returned to the shore to rest, mate, and give birth. But, like the modern sea lions and their relatives, the maiacetus body was no longer well adapted to life on land. As Ed put it, rather depressingly considering my talents and the economy, maiacetus innus was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, fully adapted to neither environment.

Artist’s conception of a male Maiacetus innus as it would have appeared in life, with skeleton reconstruction overlaid.
Credit: John Klausmeyer and Bonnie Miljour University of Michigan Museums of Natural History

Read more about this awesome find at: Not Exactly Rocket Science, The Loom, Laelaps and A Blog Around The Clock. This is such a wonderful discovery that each of the aforementioned blogs highlights a slightly different aspect of the discovery.

Here is a National Geographic Channel short video about the Rodhocetus balochistanensis, another protocetecean possibly a contemporary of maiacetus, discovered by the same team.

Of course along with ancient whales I have the opportunity to present another of my father’s images from Antarctica:

A pair of humpback whales feeding on krill in the Antarctic. I love the throat pleats visible in the whale that is feeding on it’s side.

Come a long way from maiacetus innus haven’t they? Amazing animals, even more so when you consider their evolutionary journey.

The humpback feeding picture above was taken where the northern most of the camera icons in this new Google Earth 5.0 (complete with ocean data!) screen shot. The other two camera icons are from the pictures in the previous post.

First up though is One of the Channels north of the circle. From the time stamp on the photo and the ships GPS track this should be Lamaire Channel.

In the Lamaire Channel

Screen shot from Google Earth of the Lamaire Channel and the photo location. Inset shows entire Antarctic Peninsula with main image area selected in yellow circle.

Along with the beautiful landscape Dad sent along a few animal photos including this beauty:

A pair of Humpback Whales feeding in the waters south of Anverse Island

The previous Lamaire Channel photo is the camera icon in the lower left corner, the humpback whales are the upper icon.

More to come later this week!