"Humboldt Squid... Thriving-Thanks to Ocean Dead Zones"

From Scientific American:

Although many of the Pacific Ocean's big species are floundering, one large creature of the deep seems to be flourishing. The Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas, also known as jumbo squid, owing to its sizable nature) has been steadily expanding its population and range: whereas sightings north of San Diego were rare 10 years ago, the squid are now found as far north as Alaska.

Many researchers attribute the squid's recent success to the very climate, current and oxygen-level changes that have been hurting populations of other species in the diverse California Current.

"I find their adaptability and their perfection in dealing with anything nature throws at them to be a remarkable feature," says William Gilly, a professor of biology at Stanford University whose lab has spearheaded much of the U.S. work on Humboldt squid. "They're able to explore and take advantage of new environments that are compromised in any way." And they can move quickly, says John Field, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Center, adding: "They're capable of very large migration patterns." Gilly's group recorded one squid that was tagged in Monterey, Calif., and last detected around Mexico 17 days later.

Humboldt squid are formidable predators, reaching about two meters in length and 50 kilograms, dwarfing the 30-centimeter-long California market squid (Loligo opalescens) that often end up as calamari. (Despite their outsize nickname, however, jumbo squid are not the largest cephalopod in the seas—that honor goes to the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, rare specimens of which have measured more than five times the size of most Humboldt squid.) But their impressive size is just one of the things about these squid that keep divers, fishers and scientists fascinated.

Despite their often-unnerving abundance recently in coastal waters and commercial fisheries alike, little is known about the lives of these prodigious creatures of the deep.

Although these large squid are thought to live for only a year or two, they emerge from an egg measuring about one millimeter long. To sustain such rapid growth they appear to have nearly endless appetites.

A growing mass of these hungry squid could have a large impact on some fish stocks, especially those that are already faltering.

"They can eat pretty much all they want," Gilly says, noting that researchers have found a range of meals inside the squid, ranging from tiny krill to 40-centimeter-long hake—and even some salmon remains. Humboldts have even been known to eat each other.

"Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans..."

Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas — in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans — appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.

"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson , an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.

In some spots, such as off the Southern California coast, oxygen levels have dropped roughly 20 percent over the past 25 years. Elsewhere, scientists say, oxygen levels might have declined by one-third over 50 years.

"The real surprise is how this has become the new norm," said Jack Barth , an oceanography professor at Oregon State University . "We are seeing it year after year."

Barth and others say the changes are consistent with current climate-change models. Previous studies have found that the oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

"If the Earth continues to warm, the expectation is we will have lower and lower oxygen levels," said Francis Chan , a marine researcher at Oregon State .

As ocean temperatures rise, the warmer water on the surface acts as a cap, which interferes with the natural circulation that normally allows deeper waters that are already oxygen-depleted to reach the surface. It's on the surface where ocean waters are recharged with oxygen from the air.

Commonly, ocean "dead zones" have been linked to agricultural runoff and other pollution coming down major rivers such as the Mississippi or the Columbia . One of the largest of the 400 or so ocean dead zones is in the Gulf of Mexico , near the mouth of the Mississippi.

However, scientists now say that some of these areas, including those off the Northwest, apparently are linked to broader changes in ocean oxygen levels.

The Pacific waters off Washington and Oregon face a double whammy as a result of ocean circulation.

Scientists have long known of a natural low-oxygen zone perched in the deeper water off the Northwest's continental shelf.

During the summer, northerly winds aided by the Earth's rotation drive surface water away from the shore. This action sucks oxygen-poor water to the surface in a process called upwelling.

Though the water that's pulled up from the depths is poor in oxygen, it's rich in nutrients, which fertilize phytoplankton. These microscopic organisms form the bottom of one of the richest ocean food chains in the world. As they die, however, they sink and start to decay. The decaying process uses oxygen, which depletes the oxygen levels even more.

Southerly winds reverse the process in what's known as down-welling.

Changes in the wind and ocean circulation since 2002 have disrupted what had been a delicate balance between upwelling and down-welling. Scientists now are discovering expanding low-oxygen zones near shore.

"It is consistent with models of global warming, but the time frame is too short to know whether it is a trend or a weather phenomenon," Johnson said.

Others were slightly more definitive, quicker to link the lower oxygen levels to global warming rather than to such weather phenomena as El Nino or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a shift in the weather that occurs every 20 to 30 years in the northern oceans.

"It's a large disturbance in the ecosystem that could have huge biological changes," said Steve Bograd , an oceanographer at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Southern California.

Bograd has been studying oxygen levels in the California Current, which runs along the West Coast from the Canadian border to Baja California and, some scientists think, eventually could be affected by climate change.

So far, the worst hypoxic zone off the Northwest coast was found in 2006. It covered nearly 1,200 square miles off Newport, Ore. , and according to Barth it was so close to shore you could hit it with a baseball. The zone covered 80 percent of the water column and lasted for an abnormally long four months...

Some species, such as jellyfish, will like the lower-oxygen water. Jumbo squid, usually found off Mexico and Central America , can survive as oxygen levels decrease and now are found as far north as Alaska .

"Dead Zone Diet"

By KERRY TRUEMAN / Huffingtonpost


Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I've got some bad news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna, for you.

Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans, "killing large swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage," according to Scientific American.

It's Agribiz vs. Aquabiz, and at the moment, the farmers are beating the waders off of the fishermen. Scientific American notes that "there are now 405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s." And once a marine habitat falls victim to hypoxia, i.e. oxygen deficiency, the outlook is grim:

Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine. Fertilizer contains large amounts of nitrogen, and it runs off of agricultural fields in water and into rivers, and eventually into oceans.

This fertilizer runoff, instead of contributing to more corn or wheat, feeds massive algae blooms in the coastal oceans. This algae, in turn, dies and sinks to the bottom where it is consumed by microbes, which consume oxygen in the process. More algae means more oxygen-burning, and thereby less oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive flight by those fish, crustaceans and other ocean-dwellers able to relocate as well as the mass death of immobile creatures, such as clams or other bottom-dwellers. And that's when the microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments take over, forming vast bacterial mats that produce hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.

How fitting! More toxic gas from the same chemical companies who gave the world Agent Orange. Except that in this case, it's an unwelcome by-product. Oops! Sorry 'bout that!

But don't worry, Monsanto and DuPont are on the job. They've come up with a great new biotech solution to the mess they've made of our oceans; "NUE" crops, as in "nitrogen use efficiency." These NUE crops are engineered to have roots that absorb more nitrogen, reportedly allowing farmers to "produce the same yield with half as much fertilizer."

I've got a better idea. Why don't we stop looking to the same corporations who have screwed up our environment to fix things? As Prince Charles told the Telegraph the other day, the multinational companies promoting the use of GM crops are conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong." Charles has predictably been labeled a luddite for daring to challenge "a system that is fundamentally flawed," as Grist puts it. But it's the Better-Living-Through-Biotech crowd who's just too blinkered to see the Big Picture -- you know, the one where all their brilliant breakthroughs come back to bite us on the ass.

There's the Roundup-resistant strain of super weeds Monsanto's helped create, for example, and let's not forget another great Monsanto innovation, Posilac, aka rBST, the bovine growth hormone designed to wring more milk out of our dairy cows. Unfortunately for Monsanto, cows are not sponges but, in fact, living, breathing creatures whose bodies aren't equipped to cope with the stepped-up production induced by artificial hormones.

Consumer rejection of rBST-tainted dairy products finally forced Monsanto to admit that it's looking to dump Posilac, but you can bet they've got any number of equally ill-conceived "breakthroughs" in the pipeline that promise to solve all the world's food crises. In fact, the Agribiz apologists will tell you that industrial agriculture is our only hope.

But as Frances Moore Lappé wrote on Huffington Post last week, the notion that we should be looking to Agribiz to feed the world is pernicious propaganda spread with the aid -- sometimes unwitting -- of a lazy and uninformed media. The story that's not getting out is the fact that farmers all over the world are finding new ways -- and reviving old ones -- to produce food without destroying our soil and water. As Lappé notes:

On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They're succeeding: The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent.

"400-Plus Coastal Zones Are Dying"

From thedailygreen.com

The world is getting familiar with the carbon cycle and how pumping carbon that's been buried for millions of years into the atmosphere causes some global problems. Well, get ready to learn about nitrogen.

Like carbon, the nitrogen cycle is all out of whack. In this case, the origins are similar. Instead of burning petroleum or coal, nitrogen comes from natural gas transformed into ammonia fertilizer and used to grow crops; what doesn't absorb into the soil runs off into streams, which flow into rivers, which flow to the ocean, where the nitrogen fuels "dead zones" – areas where nitrogen (and phosphorus) fertilizes so much algae growth that it absorbs enough oxygen to make the water inhospitable to fish and other marine life. Jellyfish are about the only thing that thrives in these conditions; corals certainly do not.

There are other causes of dead zones; human sewage, inadequately treated, is another, as is the fallout from burning fossil fuels and certain industrial processes. Dead zones, which start as "eutrophic" zones (that is, over-rich with fertilizers), and end up as "hypoxic" areas (that is, short of oxygen), often shrink and grow with the seasons.


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The World Resources Institute recently mapped the world's dead zones and found a whopping 415 eutrophic zones, including 169 that are known to be hypoxic and another 169 that probably are. The researchers believe the number is much higher, since only the United States and the European Union do an adequate job of counting and reporting problem coastal areas. China and other fast-growing Asian economies are likely polluting their coasts, but the problem hasn't been documented, the researchers say.

As the map shows, a mere 13 eutrophic zones are in recovery – a particularly sorry tally considering scientists have long known the causes and have long since identified solutions to the problem. The Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico are two examples close to home of systems whose dead zones are well documented, but not greatly improved, even despite millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on the problem. (The Gulf of Mexico dead zone threatened to grow bigger than ever in 2007, as farmers buoyed by ethanol subsidies planted a near-record crop of corn, leading to a flood of fertilizer down the Mississippi.)

"Our findings highlight the dramatic growth of areas receiving the endflows of nitrogen and phosphorus created by agriculture, increasing industry, fossil fuel combustion, and population growth," Mindy Selman, one of the researchers, wrote. "More than 1,000 scientists estimated, in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, that, as a result of human activities over the past 50 years, the flux of nitrogen has doubled over natural values while the flux of phosphorus has tripled."