Tag Archives: pacific

Leonardo DiCaprio gives $1 million to help island nation protect its oceans

by ArnetteSoderste Posted on March 19, 2016

Leonardo DiCaprio gives $1 million to help island nation protect its oceans

By on 19 Mar 2016commentsShare

From Shutter Island to Manatee Island, Leonardo DiCaprio keeps winning our hearts — and our climate-inclined minds.

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation recently granted $1 million to help the Seychelles islands protect their ocean territory — which makes up 99 percent of the country.

It’s part of a huge, unprecedented swap between the Pacific Island nation and foreign investor groups. The gist of the deal: The country of 115 tiny islands commits to protecting 154,000 square miles of its surrounding seas, and in return, its lenders agree to restructure $21.4 million of its debt. From Mashable:

In this case, instead of repaying debt at relatively high interest rates, the Seychelles government will redirect payments to a new, locally-run organization known as the Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust.

DiCaprio’s (ahem) titanic donation will go toward financing this swap, which was brokered by The Nature Conservancy and will result in the second-largest swath of protected waters in the West Indian Ocean. By protecting coral reefs and limiting damaging fishing practices, Seychelles is hoping it will encourage more resilient ecosystems — and in turn, a more robust economy for the ocean-dependent nation.

“We champion projects like this one across the globe that use cutting edge methods in conservation and environmental protection,” said DiCaprio in a press release. “This deal will enhance food security for the local people of Seychelles, help mitigate the effects of climate change on their low-lying island home, and protect the surrounding rich ocean ecosystems for future generations.”

All the more reason to lobby for a new holiday: Leonardo DiCapprecation Day!

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Leonardo DiCaprio gives $1 million to help island nation protect its oceans

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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

by VeraLNVsjwvas Posted on October 28, 2015

Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

By on 28 Oct 2015 6:33 amcommentsShare

As a general rule, climate hawks are not jumping for joy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new trade deal between the U.S. and some Asian and Pacific nations. On Tuesday, in an interview with Democracy Now!, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz gave them another reason to worry: He argued that certain provisions in the TPP would allow polluters to sue governments for setting carbon emission limits.

“This is a trade agreement that has all kinds of provisions intended to restrict regulations,” Stiglitz told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman.

As an example of the absurdity of these types of provisions, Stiglitz cited Philip Morris suing Uruguay in 2010 under a different treaty. Uruguay had implemented a regulation that required tobacco companies to append health warnings to cigarette cartons  — similar to what we have in the United States — and Philip Morris sued the country for a loss in expected profits. “In other words,” Stiglitz said, “the view is, they have the right to kill people, and if you want to take away that right, you have to pay them not to kill.”

The Columbia University economist warned that the TPP could spur similar litigation over climate regulations. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” argued Stiglitz. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”

Writing for Project Syndicate earlier this month, Stiglitz explained that corporate interests argue these types of provisions are “necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking.” But he calls that argument “nonsense,” especially in the case of regulations formulated to target industries whose “profits are made from causing public harm.”

Watch the Democracy Now! video:

Source:

Joseph Stiglitz: Under TPP, Polluters Could Sue U.S. For Setting Carbon Emissions Limits

, Democracy Now!.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

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3 Hurricanes Are Hitting the Pacific at the Same Time, and the View From Space Is Amazing

by CQYAidanaxaaivp Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are marveling at a particularly awesome view from orbit right now. This week marks the first time that three major hurricanes—dubbed Kilo, Ignacio, and Jimena—have been captured simultaneously churning across the Pacific Ocean, according to the United Kingdom’s Met Office. (The National Hurricane Center agrees.)

The storms are being fueled by warmer waters caused by this year’s El Niño, the global climate event that occurs every five to seven years, bringing drought to places like Australia, while heaping rain on the Western United States. The Met Office says temperature anomalies in this part of the world are currently at their highest since 1997-98.

According to the Met Office: “Hurricanes Kilo, Ignacio and Jimena were all at category 4 simultaneously in the Pacific east of the International Dateline—the first time three major hurricanes have been recorded at the same time in this region.” The Met Office says tropical cyclone activity across the northern hemisphere this year is about 200 percent above normal. Six hurricanes have crossed the central Pacific, more than in any other year on record, the agency says.

The view from space is incredible:

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says manmade global warming is likely to drive up the number of intense hurricanes like these around the world—despite a predicted overall drop in all types of weaker, tropical storms. By the end of the century, hurricanes will likely produce substantially higher rainfall—up to 20 percent more—than present-day hurricanes.

So far, Hawaii appears to be safe, and no humans are in the paths of destruction, allowing us to enjoy the spectacular view.

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3 Hurricanes Are Hitting the Pacific at the Same Time, and the View From Space Is Amazing

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Baby Sea Lions Are Dying

by Rodolfo5586 Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sea lions have been having a rough couple of years. In 2013, starving pups began washing up on California beaches by the hundreds. This year, the number of stranded sea lions has increased dramatically. And now, a giant toxic algal bloom is growing in the Pacific and poisoning sea lions’ sources of food. How bad has it gotten for these playful critters? We talked to wildlife experts to find out more about how much danger they’re in and what’s in store for their future:

What’s going on here? What’s causing sea lions to get so sick? An unusually warm pocket of water in the Pacific, dubbed “the blob,” has rocked the sea lions’ environment on the Pacific coast. The anchovies, hake, squid, and shell fish that sea lions eat have been moving farther away to find nutrient-rich cold waters. While adult sea lions have been adapting and going longer distances to find food, pups and yearlings don’t have the strength to swim far enough or dive deep enough. Instead, young sea lions have been washing up on shore. Often they are malnourished, dehydrated, and stranded from their mothers, who are searching for faraway food.

How unusual is the the current situation? Pup strandings happen every year when young sea lions start trying to feed themselves in late spring or early summer. But beginning in 2013, sea lion pups started washing up on shore in much greater numbers than usual, and as early as January—long before pups typically wean. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deemed the spike in sea lion deaths an “unusual mortality event.” This year, the number of stranded pups skyrocketed far above 2013 levels: During the first five months of 2015, more than 3,000 stranded sea lion pups washed up onto California beaches. That’s seven times the annual average over the past decade, and nearly three times as many as in 2013.

A sick sea lion on the shore of Playa del Ray beach in Los Angeles this past spring. Jonathan Alcorn/ZUMA

A sick sea lion lies on a beach in Moss Landing, California, earlier this year. Michael Yang/AP

Marine Mammal Center staff and volunteers rescue the sick sea lion. Michael Yang/AP

As a result, wildlife groups have been working overtime. During a typical year, the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, rescues between 500 and 700 stranded marine mammals along California’s coast. But according to Claire Simeone, a veterinarian at the center, during the past few years that number has dramatically increased, mostly due to the stranded sea lion pups. The center has rescued more than 1,500 young sea lions alone this year, although in recent weeks the pups finally stopped appearing (either because they’ve all been rescued or have already died at sea, according to Simeone). But with warm waters likely to remain, pups are expected to begin stranding again next season, as early as December.

The strandings represent a stark reversal in the fortunes of sea lions. After Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, the species thrived on the Pacific Coast. It was just six or seven years ago that sea lion populations began to show some signs of stress due to climate variability driving away prey, according to Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist at NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory. Now things have become far worse.

Will El Niño exacerbate the situation? Yes. With a strong El Niño system predicted to hit California later this year, warm waters are expected to persist and allow similar patterns to continue: Sea lions’ food will continue to migrate farther to find cold waters, and sea lions, especially the pups, will continue to struggle to find it.

I’ve heard about that giant toxic algal bloom. Is that affecting sea lions, too? Yes. As if their food sources swimming away wasn’t enough to deal with, a giant toxic algal bloom has been expanding in the Pacific since May. It’s poisoning much of the sea lions’ remaining food. The Marine Mammal Center has seen an increase in the number of sea lions washing up with amnesiac shellfish poisoning caused by exposure to domoic acid, a neurotoxin produced by the algal bloom. It’s made sea lions lethargic and can cause memory loss and seizures.

On Tuesday, yet another adult sea lion washed up onto a beach in Alameda county on the San Francisco Bay. The center attempted to rescue the animal, but it did not survive. No trauma was immediately visible on the critter’s body, which is being tested for domoic acid poisoning. (The test results won’t be available for months.)

Where does climate change fit into all of this? There’s no established connection between human-caused climate change and the blob, the toxic algal bloom, or the coming El Niño. But experts warn that increased climate variability linked to global warming could make these sorts of events more frequent—and more intense—in the future. “With a changing climate and increasing temperatures, we are only going to see more of the same,” Simeone says. She adds that sensitive animals, such as sea lions, should be looked to as bellwethers for how the changing environment will affect animal life more broadly, including humans. “It’s important to listen to what they are telling us,” she says.

So what’s going to happen to the sea lions? Melin points out that sea lions live a long time, up to 30 years. Over the years, they amass knowledge about their environment, which helps them predict the location of food sources. Finding prey quickly is especially important for mothers who cannot be away from their pups for very long while they nurse and wean them. Events such as warm water bands and algal blooms are creating a particularly difficult challenge as they struggle to adjust to constantly changing conditions in the ocean. But while wildlife groups are making plans to take in more animals and train more volunteers for the coming year, Melin remains optimistic about sea lions’ ability to adapt. After decades of robust growth, she says, sea lions are far from endangered. “They are going to work it out,” she says.

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Baby Sea Lions Are Dying

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We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

by LeannaHan74323 Posted on August 24, 2015

We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

By on 24 Aug 2015commentsShare

That message in a bottle you tossed into the sea as a young rapscallion? Remember how you didn’t get a response? It’s because oceans aren’t the same thing as carrier pigeons. Instead of sending bottles bobbing merrily on their way across the Pacific, ocean currents tend to push bits of trash to convergence points in the ocean called garbage patches.

The video above shows a new data visualization from NASA illustrating the phenomenon. By mapping the paths of free-floating ocean buoys distributed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over a period of 35 years, scientists were able to verify the garbage patch effect, as well as the locations of the patches. Aside from providing these insights, the visualization is a win for science, because the researchers were able to lend some more validation to an ocean current model called ECCO2. When the group generated a cloud of particles — digital buoys — and ran the model, the particles ended up in the same spots as the physical buoys they’d been tracking.

There are probably more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean. The message in a bottle example might be a bit of red herring, though, since most of the plastic floating in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is thought to come in the form of microplastics smaller than a thumbtack, which are distributed throughout the water column at the rate of about one piece every two cubic meters of water. That said, a recent expedition gathering data on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch trawled up mostly medium to large-sized pieces of trash. Either way, there’s a lot of garbage out there. You’re better off sending a postcard.

Source:

Garbage Patch Visualization Experiment

, NASA.

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A Grist Special Series

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Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

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Warming waters are destroying your salmon burger

by GenevaTenison Posted on July 28, 2015

Spoiler Alert

Warming waters are destroying your salmon burger

By on 28 Jul 2015 4:52 pmcommentsShare

The Columbia River is many things: the fourth largest U.S. river by volume, the river that generates more hydroelectric power than any other in North America, and now, a mass salmon gravesite. Warming river water has killed or will kill more than 250,000 sockeye salmon this spawning season. Welcome to the latest installment of Spoiler Alerts, where climate change deflates all the balloons.

Al Jazeera America lays out the grisly details:

Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species and is wiping out at least half of this year’s return of 500,000 fish and by the end of the season that death toll could grow to as high as 400,000.

“We had a really big migration of sockeye,” Ritchie Graves of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told The Associated Press. “The thing that really hurts is we’re going to lose a majority of those fish.”

He said up to 80 percent of the population could ultimately perish.

One of the problems is that record low snowfall in the surrounding mountain ranges has resulted in little runoff that would normally cool the river. The fish, which start to experience stress around 68 degrees F, have been subjected to 70 degree waters since June, with some tributaries reaching 76 degrees. Which means you should wasabi up that Columbia River sashimi while you can — it might be going out of style. In addition to composing a healthy link in the Pacific Northwest ecosystem, Pacific domestic salmon made up about 80 metric tons of food for Americans annually between 2000 and 2004.

Not only are the effects of warming temperatures on the salmon population extreme, climatologists and animal scientists suggest that they’re an expected extreme. Al Jazeera America continues:

The devastation to the local sockeye salmon population is just one of climate change’s effects on wildlife and will “likely” reoccur intermittently over the next decade, James J. Anderson, a University of Washington fisheries scientist whose research focuses on the fish of the Columbia basin, told Al Jazeera.

“The larger problem is that the climate is changing faster than our ability to comprehend the magnitude of the problem,” he said. “Warmer rivers and salmon die-offs can be added to the many events that individually may be random, but which together reveal a rapidly changing world.”

This rapidly changing world has made for a bad month for animals and the climate. The sockeye news follows reports of climate-induced bee deaths and climate change culpability in the extinction of woolly mammoths.

When asked about the salmon deaths, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North told Reuters, “We’ve never had mortalities at this scale.” When the effects of climate change start sounding like a war zone, we’ve got a problem.

Source:
In hot water: Columbia’s sockeye salmon face mass die-off

, Al Jazeera America.

Thousands of salmon die in hotter-than-usual Northwest rivers

, Reuters.

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Warming waters are destroying your salmon burger

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Thirsty birds are dying all over California — thanks, climate change

by KareemBerg Posted on July 17, 2015

spoiler alert!

Thirsty birds are dying all over California — thanks, climate change

By on 17 Jul 2015commentsShare

You know that historic and disastrous drought currently turning California into one big heap of straw? You know how it’s probably being exacerbated by climate change? And indicative of the conditions that will become more common as the climate continues to warm?

As if that weren’t bad enough on its own, there’s more: All those hot and dry conditions mean that climate change is basically flipping the bird to birds, which are in serious trouble as they make their long migrations over parched California. Yup — welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where climate change is always a jerk.

Here’s the gruesome scene from National Geographic:

Along the 4,000-mile-long Pacific flyway — one of four main routes in North America for migrating birds — up to six million ducks, geese, and swans wing south every year to find warmth after raising young in the rich habitats of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. They are joined by millions of shorebirds, songbirds, and seabirds, including the ultimate endurance winner, the arctic tern.

But California’s drought has dried up its wetlands. Many insects, fish, and plants are gone. As a result, some migrating birds have died or been depleted of so much energy that they have trouble reproducing. Thousands of ducks and geese, crowded onto parched rivers and marshes, are felled by botulism and cholera, which race through their feeding grounds.

So many birds rely on California as they make the trek down from summer homes in Alaska that the litany of threatened species reads like a birder’s wishlist: long-billed dowitchers, sandhill cranes, tricolored blackbirds, cinnamon teal, tundra swans, snow geese, Western sandpipers, northern shovelers, Wilson’s phalaropes. I don’t know what half those things are and I’m still sad. Just think how bummed all those retirees with binoculars and a lot of time on their hands are going to be.

Even the birds that survive the migration this year may be pretty ragged by the next time they get to their breeding grounds. With little food and not enough water, many may not breed at all (we’ve all been there):

“The birds will see there’s no water and will fly to where water is. Now there’s one less refuge and pressure on the other refuges. When they fly back to breeding territory in Alaska and Canada, they’re not in good shape. If they’re weak, they’re susceptible to disease. Some may not breed,” [Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge manager] Frisk says.

And that’s bad news for birders, too:

Along the coastal part of the Pacific flyway, on the last day of April, Josiah Clark, a champion birder, pedaled 130 miles, from the Santa Cruz Mountains to San Francisco Bay, in 24 hours with a fellow birder, Rob Furrow. They saw 187 species, setting a Northern Hemisphere record for a birding-on-bicycle competition. But the vegetation looked dry like June instead of wet like spring, Clark says.

They saw cinnamon teal and hummingbirds near the coast rather than inland, and western sandpipers and dunlins were switching to kelp flies on the beach instead of insects in a flooded meadow. “It shows their resilience,” Clark says. “Those birds that don’t figure it out are not going to pass on their genes,” which ultimately can determine evolutionary success or failure.

If birding-on-bicycle was a thing you ever wanted to do, sorry — now climate change is ruining that, too.

Source:
Birds Are Dying As Drought Ravages Avian Highways

, National Geographic.

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Thirsty birds are dying all over California — thanks, climate change

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Things were looking grim for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—Obama’s controversial trade deal—after House Democrats turned on the president earlier this month and struck down a major provision in the “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), a bill that would enable the president to complete trade-deal negotiations and present trade accords to Congress for an up-or-down vote with no amendments. But, in a stunning turnaround, the Senate voted 60-37 today to end debate on the fast-track legislation, a clear indication that it will pass and clear the way for Obama’s trade deal to move forward.

Fast-track legislation is nothing new. This type of authority has been granted to every president since Gerald Ford. But what makes it controversial is that it paves the way for negotiations to continue on the secretive and sweeping trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which have been met with heavy criticism from both liberal advocacy groups and Republicans who are concerned with granting the executive more power.

House Democrats nearly derailed the fast-track legislation earlier this month when they helped to vote down a measure, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, that had been appended to the bill. By knocking down the TAA, a program widely supported by Democrats, House Dems gambled that their Senate counterparts would balk at passing the fast-track bill without the assistance program. But on Tuesday they lost that bet, when 13 Senate Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues to end debate on the TAA-less fast-track bill, which is expected to come to a final vote tomorrow. (The assistance program has been attached to another, more popular trade bill that will be voted on later this week.)

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

by EleanorZavala Posted on May 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared on Wired and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Later this week, a single-seat, solar-powered plane with a wingspan longer than that of a Boeing 747 will take off from Nanjing, China, headed for Honolulu. For a normal passenger jet, that’s about a 12-hour flight. Solar Impulse 2, the 5,000-pound plane powered by nothing but sunshine, will take five days.

This is by far the hardest part of the plane’s journey around the world, which started in Abu Dhabi last month, and should finish there in August. Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg have been working up to this for 12 years, and they’re fully aware of how trying it will be.

“If we are optimistic, we will say that we’ve done six legs out of 12,” Piccard says. “And if we are pessimistic, we will say have have traveled 8,000 kilometers out of 35,000.”

Which is to say, things are going according to plan, but there’s much left to do, including the flight to Honolulu, then a 3,000-mile leap over the rest of the Pacific to Phoenix, Arizona.

The trick to staying aloft for days at a time is straightforward. The solar panels that cover the wings and fuselage of Solar Impulse 2 charge four extra-efficient batteries, which power the 17.4-horsepower motors. You charge up when the sun’s out and cruise at up to 28,000 feet. At night, you drop to about 5,000 feet, converting altitude into distance.

There are two factors that make the Pacific crossing especially challenging: The ocean’s size and the pokey speed of the plane (try 20 to 90 mph) mean each pilot will need to spend four or five days and nights aloft to reach land, in a cockpit that resembles a tube hotel in miniature. The second problem is the weather: Solar Impulse 2 needs pretty specific conditions to takeoff, cruise, and land—and that all needs to be planned out five days in advance.

André Borschberg has spent 72 hours at a time in a simulator to prepare for this flight. Niels Ackermann/Rezo.ch/Solar Impulse

Borschberg is scheduled to take off from Nanjin on May 7, at the earliest. If the flight goes as expected, he will take five days to make the trip to Honolulu. Then Piccard will make the four-day trip to Phoenix.

Pilot Preparation

It doesn’t sound like much fun: There’s no walking around, or even standing up in, the 135-cubic foot cockpit. The cabin is neither heated nor pressurized, though it is insulated.

To get used to the cramped conditions, the pilots have spent long stretches in a simulator. They use meditation, breathing exercises, and whatever yoga they can manage to keep their bodies and minds feeling as fresh as possible.

Piccard and Borschberg will sleep in 20 minute stretches (the aircraft has autopilot functions and there’s not much to collide with over the Pacific), six to eight times a day. It’s hardly a good night’s rest, but it’s enough to get by, and the seat fully reclines. They have an alarm set to wake them up, but their bodies have gotten used to the routine, and don’t really need it, Piccard says. “It’s very interesting how the human mind can adapt to this type of new situation.”

The grub sounds pretty good, especially for air travel: Nestlé made special meals that can survive temperatures from -4 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s mushroom risotto, chicken with rice, and potatoes with cream and cheese. “It’s very nice,” Piccard says. The toilet, FYI, is built into the seat.

It may seem difficult to stay focused when you’ve seen nothing but ocean for days on end, but it’s not a major concern to the pilots. “There’s quite a lot of things to do,” Borschberg says. More importantly, they’ve been working up to this for more than a decade. They’re jazzed.

Of course, they’ve got to be ready for things to go wrong. In the event of a sudden catastrophe, like an engine or battery fire, they’ve trained for bailing. If cloudy weather stops the panels from charging the batteries adequately, Piccard and Borschberg will take their time putting on the dry suit, preparing the parachute, alerting mission control, and switching on an emergency beacon. “You get out very peacefully,” Piccard says.

The cockpit of Solar Impulse 2 resembles a tube hotel, in miniature. Solar Impulse/Pizzolante

They key in any situation is getting away from the plane—there’s a serious risk of electrocution when you fly a pile of electronics and batteries into the ocean. Then you settle into your life raft, because you’re thousands of miles from land, and major shipping lanes, it may take two or three days to be picked up.

The Weather Game

There’s a lot to take into account, says team meteorologist Luc Trullemans. Routes are decided using radar and satellite data, and flight simulations. Equipment from engineering consultancy Altran and a team mathematician lend a hand. Cloudy skies mean the solar panels can’t recharge the batteries. Wind conditions are crucial: Tailwinds are best, and the team will tolerate cross tailwinds up to 45 degrees (90 degrees would be blow fully sideways). Headwinds are a problem for a plane with limited power: Between Myanmar and Chongqing, China, Piccard found himself flying backwards at one point.

The six legs of the Solar Impulse 2 journey already completed have been relatively short affairs, between 15 and 20 hours. That’s not so tricky to plan, because at the time of takeoff, you have an excellent idea of what the weather will look like for the whole flight.

All that gets way more difficult now, because the team can’t predict the weather with the accuracy it wants more than three days in advance. “We must be 100 percent certain with our weather forecasts for the first three days of the flight and of course, the takeoff conditions,” says Trullemans. After that, the route can always be changed … on the fly … but major deviations are best avoided. The plan is to keep a sharp eye on coming conditions. The pilot can fly to the north or south to avoid a cold front, for example.

Beyond that, you hope for the best: Tailwinds, clear skies, and no need to inflate that life raft.

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

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Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

by BrittanGibson Posted on March 11, 2015

Sorry, Sardines

Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

By on 11 Mar 2015commentsShare

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The Pew Charitable Trusts

What do you see in that picture above? Squids. Whales. Sharks. Salmon. Some form of mysterious seabird with fashion-forward water wings (gonna guess a murre). Do you know what we don’t talk about? That delicious bait ball in the center that keeps all your precious charismatic megafauna ALIVE. I’m talking sardines: Nature’s real heroes.

I say this for reasons that go beyond how they taste on a bed of kale with piquillo peppers and cucumber and a shit-ton of squeezed lemon. Pacific sardines and their protein-rich, sexy-sounding bait balls are a foundation for both the Pacific food web and a vibrant West Coast fishery. But maybe not for long: Scientists’ project sardine stocks will fall from 2007’s height of 1.4 million metric tons to under 150,000 metric tons by July 1 of this year. That’s enough to potentially close the fishery and seriously imperil all those whales and sharks — which, by the way, don’t taste half as good when grilled to crisp perfection with a crème brûlée torch. Here’s more from Pew:

If the new assessment holds up to scientific review, fishery managers should follow through in April on their harvest guideline protocols and suspend fishing on sardines for the 2015 season. Doing so would give the population a chance to recover as ocean conditions improve.

The sardine fishery has historically been a major source of revenue for California’s commercial fishing fleet, dating back to the era chronicled in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece Cannery Row in 1945. Still, it would not be fair to blame the current collapse on fishing.

We’re not exactly sure why this saintly, smelly fish is in serious decline. Some scientists blame a naturally occurring climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which flushes colder, nutrient-rich water along the West Coast (good for squid, bad for sardines). But this ongoing crash has fishermen and biologists alarmed. In the short term, some charismatic megafauna might be fine switching to abundant anchovies. But the sardine bust will eventually have negative impacts on their populations anyway — and on my salads, where anchovies are a piss-poor stand-in for the one true baitfish, at least as far as this charismatic megafauna is concerned.

Source:
Bad News on the West Coast: Pacific Sardines Are Collapsing

, Pew Trusts.

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Pacific sardines are crashing — bad news for whales and my salad

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