Oceans Evolving Backwards into Microbial Soup

by **StarmanSkye** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 11:31 pm

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse ... Oh, well; (Optimistic Fatalism reaffirmed) Starman ****** A Primeval Tide of Toxins Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This 'rise of slime,' as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people. By Kenneth R. Weiss Times Staff Writer July 30, 2006 <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,952130.story">www.latimes.com/news/loca...2130.story</a> Moreton Bay, Australia - The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos. "It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked." As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air. After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats. For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking publicly about their condition. When they finally did speak up, authorities dismissed their complaints - until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab. Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing. Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago. O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before. What was it doing in Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast? The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya Majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans. In many places - the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway - some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago. Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime." For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way. "Man marks the Earth with ruin," wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. "His control stops with the shore." Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man's capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary. But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas. The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water. Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients - the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes. Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen - fertilizer, essentially - than all the Earth's natural processes. Million of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day. These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria. At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check. The consequences are evident worldwide. Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call "rhubarb soup." Dead fish bob in the surf. If people get too close, their eyes burn and they have trouble breathing. On the southern coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, high tide leaves piles of green-brown algae that smell so foul condominium owners have hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning. On Florida's Gulf Coast, residents complain that harmful algae blooms have become bigger, more frequent and longer-lasting. Toxins from these red tides have killed hundreds of sea mammals and caused emergency rooms to fill up with coastal residents suffering respiratory distress. North of Venice, Italy, a sticky mixture of algae and bacteria collects on the Adriatic Sea in spring and summer. This white mucus washes ashore, fouling beaches, or congeals into submerged blobs, some bigger than a person. Along the Spanish coast, jellyfish swarm so thick that nets are strung to protect swimmers from their sting. Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for eons. They emerged from the primordial ooze and came to dominate ancient oceans that were mostly lifeless. Over time, higher forms of life gained supremacy. Now they are under siege. Like other scientists, Jackson, 63, was slow to perceive how this latest shift in the biological order was being reversed. He has spent a good part of his professional life underwater. Though he had seen firsthand that ocean habitats were deteriorating, he believed in the resilience of the seas, in their inexhaustible capacity to heal themselves. Then came the hurricane season of 1980. A Category 5 storm ripped through waters off the north coast of Jamaica, where Jackson had been studying corals since the late 1960s. A majestic stand of staghorn corals, known as "the Haystacks," was turned into rubble. Scientists gathered from around the world to examine the damage. They wrote a paper predicting that the corals would rebound quickly, as they had for thousands of years. "We were the best ecologists, working on what was the best-studied coral reef in the world, and we got it 100% wrong," Jackson recalled. The vividly colored reef, which had nurtured a wealth of fish species, never recovered. "Why did I get it wrong?" Jackson asked. He now sees that the quiet creep of environmental decay, occurring largely unnoticed over many years, has drastically altered the ocean. As tourist resorts sprouted along the Jamaican coast, sewage, fertilizer and other nutrients washed into the sea. Overfishing removed most of the grazing fish that kept algae under control. Warmer waters encouraged bacterial growth and further stressed the corals. For a time, these changes were masked by algae-eating sea urchins. But when disease greatly reduced their numbers, the reef was left defenseless. The corals were soon smothered by a carpet of algae and bacteria. Today, the reef is largely a boneyard of coral skeletons. Many of the same forces have wiped out 80% of the corals in the Caribbean, despoiled two-thirds of the estuaries in the United States and destroyed 75% of California's kelp forests, once prime habitat for fish. Jackson uses a homespun analogy to illustrate what is happening. The world's 6 billion inhabitants, he says, have failed to follow a homeowner's rule of thumb: Be careful what you dump in the swimming pool, and make sure the filter is working. "We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution," Jackson said, "a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria." The 55-foot commercial trawler working the Georgia coast sagged under the burden of a hefty catch. The cables pinged and groaned as if about to snap. Working the power winch, ropes and pulleys, Grovea Simpson hoisted the net and its dripping catch over the rear deck. With a tug on the trip-rope, the bulging sack unleashed its massive load. Plop. Splat. Whoosh. About 2,000 pounds of cannonball jellyfish slopped onto the deck. The jiggling, cantaloupe-size blobs ricocheted around the stern and slid down an opening into the boat's ice-filled hold. The deck was streaked with purple-brown contrails of slimy residue; a stinging, ammonia-like odor filled the air. "That's the smell of money," Simpson said, all smiles at the haul. "Jellyballs are thick today. Seven cents a pound. Yes, sir, we're making money." Simpson would never eat a jellyfish. But shrimp have grown scarce in these waters after decades of intensive trawling. So during the winter months when jellyfish swarm, he makes his living catching what he used to consider a messy nuisance clogging his nets. It's simple math. He can spend a week at sea scraping the ocean bottom for shrimp and be lucky to pocket $600 after paying for fuel, food, wages for crew and the boat owner's cut. Or, in a few hours of trawling for jellyfish, he can fill up the hold, be back in port the same day and clear twice as much. The jellyfish are processed at the dock in Darien, Ga., and exported to China and Japan, where spicy jellyfish salad and soup are delicacies. "Easy money," Simpson said. "They get so thick you can walk on them." Jellyfish populations are growing because they can. The fish that used to compete with them for food have become scarce because of overfishing. The sea turtles that once preyed on them are nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively. As their traditional catch declines, fishermen around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago. This is a logical step in a process that Daniel Pauly , a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, calls "fishing down the food web." Fishermen first went after the largest and most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod and grouper. When those stocks were depleted, they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain. "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," Pauly said. In California waters, for instance, three of the top five commercial catches are not even fish. They are squid, crabs and sea urchins. This is what remains of California's historic fishing industry, once known for the sardine fishery attached to Monterey's Cannery Row and the world's largest tuna fleet, based in San Diego, which brought American kitchens StarKist, Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea. Overfishing began centuries ago but accelerated dramatically after World War II, when new technologies armed industrial fleets with sonar, satellite data and global positioning systems, allowing them to track schools of fish and find their most remote habitats. The result is that the population of big fish has declined by 90% over the last 50 years. It's reached the point that the world's fishermen, though more numerous, working harder and sailing farther than ever, are catching fewer fish. The global catch has been declining since the late 1980s, an analysis by Pauly and colleague Reg Watson showed. The reduction isn't readily apparent in the fish markets of wealthy countries, where people are willing to pay high prices for exotic fare from distant oceans - slimeheads caught off New Zealand and marketed as orange roughy, or Patagonian toothfish, renamed Chilean sea bass. Now, both of those fish are becoming scarce. Fish farming also exacts a toll. The farmed stocks are fed tons of processed pellets made from ground-up menhaden, sardines and anchovies, which are harvested in great quantities. Dense schools of these small fish once swam the world's estuaries and coastal waters, inhaling plankton like swarming clouds of silvery vacuum cleaners. Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest estuary, used to be clear, its waters filtered every three days by piles of oysters so numerous that their reefs posed a hazard to navigation. All this has changed. There and in many other places, bacteria and algae run wild in the absence of the many mouths that once ate them. As the depletion of fish allows the lowest forms of life to run rampant, said Pauly, it is "transforming the oceans into a microbial soup." --snip-- See the rest@ <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,952130.story">www.latimes.com/news/loca...2130.story</a>

by **Et in Arcadia ego** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 11:48 pm

Life was so much more simple when we were ameobas..I can harldy wait to get back to the good old days! <img src="http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/images/smiles/party.gif" style="border:0;"/> [starman, what's with the 1 sentance paragraphs?] ____________________ Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=etinarcadiaego@rigorousintuition>et in Arcadia ego</A> <IMG HEIGHT=10 WIDTH=10 SRC="http://www.sickle666.com/images/Arcadia.jpg" BORDER=0> at: 7/29/06 9:48 pm

by **rain** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 11:59 pm

"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first...but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways." Lewis Carroll - "Through the Looking Glass" <a href="http://www.stardrive.org/Sarmail9-27-00.shtml">www.stardrive.org/Sarmail9-27-00.shtml</a>

by **eroeoplier** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:36 am

My parents are retired in the Moreton Bay area. Their piece of paradise used to be a sand flat - 15 or so years ago, and for the preceding countless centuries - but these days it's seaweed (the normal stuff) as far as the eye can see. I attribute this to increased nutrients. And the fireweed sure does stink. A council worker lives near the beachfront and every afternoon in the warmer months he seems to stop at the esplanade to check for any fireweed. And the tractor and trucks seem to turn up soon after if there is any. Job creation *homo numb-skull* style. It might be the middle of winter down here, but its a sunny day and I sense it's warm enough for the fireweed to be ramping up production. In summer I've sat and watched near-olympic-pool-size rafts of it get blown onto the shore. The one desireable consequence of fireweed has been that the stench has kept the sleepy community sleepier that it would otherwise have been.

by **DireStrike** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:46 am

I know it's fashionable on this board to talk about "their" depopulation plans... but... am I the only person who sees shit like this and thinks "overpopulation"?

by **Et in Arcadia ego** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:55 am

Not at all. We're definately over-populated, but I only think that term is applicable because of poor resource/recycling management. I think *most* of us take our lifestyles for granted and don't appreciate or recognize the bleed we instigate on nature. ____________________ Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.

by **DireStrike** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:03 am

I worry if it's even possible to improve our lifestyles and thus fix the problem. It seems like every time society or technology makes a leap that frees up some resources, they're quickly reconsumed by either the rich seeking to exploit something and profit, or the masses expanding their population size. Or both together, is perhaps the most accurate description of the problem. And how will it stop?

by **yesferatu** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:27 am

Fewer Fish Leads to Jellyfish Explosion By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 10 July 2006 12:00 pm ET Nature abhors a vacuum. Wipe out one creature, and another will move in. Mammals leveraged this principle when the reign of dinosaurs ended. Now in a smaller way, jellyfish are taking over. In a region off the west coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, heavy fishing in recent decades has depleted fish stocks while leading to increased numbers of jellyfish. Now with some hard data in hand, scientists are calling it a jellyfish explosion. In fact the jellyfish are so numerous in the study area that they now represent more biomass than all the fish combined. Their numbers, ironically, are beginning to "significantly interfere with fishing operations," the researchers report in the July 12 issue of the journal Current Biology. Andrew Brierley of the University of St. Andrews and colleagues used echosounders and trawl nets to find out what's in the water along the Namibian shelf, between the borders of Angola and South Africa. Sardines and anchovies were once abundant. The total biomass of jellyfish in the region is now estimated to be more than three times that of fish. Similar increases in jellyfish biomass are occurring in many locations around the world, the scientists note. Overfishing and climate change might both contribute to the phenomenon. Jellyfish have few predators, the scientists say, so if fish are depleted and nutrients are available, the jellyfish do quite well. Meanwhile, a study last year found that jellyfish are invading the globe by hitchhiking from ocean to ocean aboard ships.>> <a href="http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060710_jellyfish_explosion.html">www.livescience.com/animalworld/060710_jellyfish_explosion.html</a>

by **eroeoplier** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:56 am

In the rich countries population growth has stabilized - this, to cut a long story short, is because children have switched from being a net economic asset to being a net liability. When a child goes from being able to contribute to the family income from the age of 6, to being a drain on the family income (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars) until the age of 26, you naturally are gonna have less of them. Therein lies the answer to all of our problems. You have to develop communities so that everyone's economic circumstances are comfortable. So that they don't have to send their children out to work. When children are an economic asset, it makes sense to have 10 of them instead of 2. The Malthusian thesis is a self fulfilling prophecy if you deprive people of what is rightfully theirs at the outset. Put 10% of the current global military budget to good use and the population problem will solve itself. The advanced industrial ecocide problem will require an additional change in outlook.

by **bvonahsen** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 2:25 am

Gaia has decided to reboot. This fireweed sounds better than pepper spray and how long do you think it will take for the millitary to weaponize it?

by **StarmanSkye** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 2:39 am

Et in Arcadia sed: "Life was so much more simple when we were ameobas..I can harldy wait to get back to the good old days!" **** Good One! --and-- "[starman, what's with the 1 sentance paragraphs?]" The paragraphs (even the one-sentence ones) are formatted as original -- I just edited to clear and tighten-up the annoying sentence line-breaks that too-often happens when I copy-paste an article to the EZ Board forum; If it didn't happen, I might have included the whole article instead. ( ; Starman

Oceans Evolving Backwards into Microbial Soup

Oceans Evolving Backwards into Microbial Soup

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