Sustainable practice? From spinydogfish.org (photo by Sara Miribilio)

This week the U.S. Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery took another step towards becoming the second shark or ray fishery ever to earn a sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  The first was the Pacific spiny dogfish fishery, which turned out to be a decent call due to the fact that it would have very tightly controlled quotas and consist purely of hook-and-line vessels.  The Atlantic fishery, in contrast, encompasses all three fishing methods typically used to target groundfish on the U.S. East Coast.  Since my Master’s thesis focused on this population, the Northwest Atlantic spiny dogfish stock is near and dear to my heart, and I’ve been following this story as it’s progressed.  Earlier this week, MSC released the public comment draft report (available for your perusal here) of their assessment of the fishery.  I’ll spoil the ending for you: at this stage, MSC concludes that the U.S. Atlantic dogfishery meets the criteria to be certified as sustainable.  This is an interesting and somewhat surprising result for reasons involving both the dogfish themselves and the potential for bycatch.

First, a brief summary of how MSC goes about conducting its assessments.  Fisheries are judged based on three principles: 1 – sustainability of the fish stock, 2 – minimizing environmental impact, and 3 – effective management.  Broadly, principle 1 looks at the health of the target stock and how well it can handle fishing pressure.  Principle 2 is where issues like bycatch and other environmental impacts come into play, and the standards here probably receive the most criticism of any part of the MSC certification process.  Finally, principle 3 looks at the local management and whether it’s equipped to effectively set and enforce policies encouraging sustainable harvest.  Each of these principles is graded on a 0-100 scale, and if a fishery has an overall average of 80 or greater, it gets the coveted blue sticker.  Note that this means a fishery can score under 80 on one of those principles and still be certified if the overall average is high enough.  Because MSC can only be in so many places at once, it usually uses third party companies to conduct assessments.  For more detail on MSC’s standards and how they apply to spiny dogfish, check the interview with Moody Marine, Ltd’s Ian Scott, who headed up this particular assessment and was gracious enough to answer a few questions earlier in the process.

The spiny dogfish fishery, as assessed by MSC and Moody, is made up of gillnetters, longliners, and trawlers.  Each of these fisheries were assessed individually for both state and federal waters, but scored above 80 overall in all cases.  The breakdown of the scores is interesting, if not surprising.  Let’s look at it from each principle.

Principle 1 – Stock Health:  Since all methods involve the same species and stock, the scores for Principle 1 were universally 84.4.  This is a bit on the low end, which is not surprising for a long-lived, slow-growing, late-maturing species like spiny dogfish.  MSC acknowledges that the population is due for another dip from 2012-2017, as dogfish from the overfished years in the late 90s start hitting reproductive age.  However, they cite the generally cheery outlook for the stock provided by NMFS assessments and other scientific sources.  Effective management seems to have prevented a true stock collapse and set it well on the road to recover (more on that with Principle 3).  “Cautious optimism” is the tone for Atlantic dogfish management.

Principle 2 – Environmental Impacts: It shouldn’t be surprising that this is where the fishery gets its lowest marks, because all three fishing methods are problematic for environmental impact.  Gillnets scored the worst, barely passing at 80.3 in both state and federal waters.  Longlines scored the best in this category with 81.7 in both fishing areas, while trawls were the only method to differ between state and federal waters, earning 81.0 in federal waters and 80.7 in state waters.  All of these fishing methods have a long history of bycatch problems due to their indiscriminate nature.  Longlining, the best performer in Principle 2, is the focus of a protest movement against the MSC certification of Canadian swordfish.  In the case of trawling, habitat destruction from dragging the net across the bottom is just as much a concern as bycatch.  One of the big issues facing a sustianable dogfish fishery in this region is that dogfish tend to co-occur with other fish stocks that are in much worse shape, particularly Atlantic cod.  Hell, dogfish are still best-known as a pest bycatch species that keeps fishermen from catching cod.  Add in the issues with endangered species entanglement and it’s actually surprising that the scores weren’t lower for this category.

Principle 3 – Management Effectiveness: Fishermen may gripe about NOAA/NMFS and the Magnusen-Stevens Act, but the United States has one of the best-organized and equipped fisheries management systems in the world.  While far from perfect, at least our local management agencies put serious effort into keeping track of landings, assessing populations, and putting in place those conservation measures that make them so popular with fishermen.  Where European management bodies seem to need the international community to force them to do anything effective, the U.S. has a reputation for taking the initiative on fisheries issues.  With regard to spiny dogfish, the U.S. is currently the only country with an actual management plan in place.  Depending on your opinion of NOAA and the regional councils, the high grade (92.8) given to the management portion of this assessment is either a pat on the back for the U.S. or a commentary on just how screwed fish stock are in general.

Because of the barely-passing scores in the environmental impact principle, the U.S. Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery has passed the standards for MSC certification, but with conditions.  The MSC team states that annual audits will be conducted to determine if the fishery is still holding up its end of the sustainability bargain, and that the participants must put together an Action Plan for meeting the standards of sustainability.  Whether the MSC has much in the way of teeth in enforcing these standards is uncertain.

This is still just the first draft of the eventual certification, so the status of the fishery could change, but right now it looks like U.S. Atlantic spiny dogfish are on the way to sustainable status.  Fishermen hope this will lead to a higher market price and more of a local market for the species, and it will certainly be a great bargaining chip if dogfish come up for CITES listing again (U.S. fishermen stand to win out even if dogfish end up listed, and sustainability certification would really help.  More on that on a later date…).  However, there are still issues with stock health and serious issues with the environmental impact of the fishing methods.  The problems with environmental impact may be insurmountable.

In my opinion, certifying Atlantic dogfish is just a little premature, and I’d prefer the MSC wait and see what happens with the latest hiccup in the dogfish population that should be starting this year.  I also think the attempt to list all three main gear types is a bit of an overreach: the MSC’s case is probably best made for longlines.  I just don’t see all the issues with gillnets and trawls being addressed in time for the complete assessment.  I do think the certification of the dogfish fishery is a worthy goal and if done right could serve as a motivator to fish the species responsibly.

But I’m just one blogger.  What do you think?

A red wolf. Photo credit: DeLene Beland

The recently-released movie “The Grey” tells the story of a pack of wolves that hunts the survivors of a plane crash. In addition to both being the subject of inaccurate and negative media portrayals, wolves and sharks share many ecological similarities (sharks have been called “the wolves of the sea”). A panel of wolf scientists and conservation experts agreed to answer my questions about these animals and their thoughts on how “The Grey”  might impact their conservation.

Dr. Sylvia Fallon  is a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has worked for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Park Service.

DeLene Beland is an independent science writer whose work has been featured by the Charlotte Observer, Earth Magazine, and Wildlife in North Carolina. She blogs at Wild Muse, and  is the author of an upcoming book about wolves in the Eastern United States.

Cristina Eisenberg is a Ph.D. student at Oregon State University. Her dissertation focuses on the ecological effects of the loss of wolves from forest ecosystems.

WhySharksMatter: Why are wolves important? 

Delene Beland:  Oh boy, these questions encompass entire bodies of literature! I’ll try to answer as broadly as I can without getting too down in the weeds. Wolves matter a great deal to ecosystems, as Cristina poetically detailed in her book, The Wolf’s Tooth. And Sylvia too blogs about some of these interactions on the NRDC Switchboard blog. At the broadest level, they are thought to enact a top-down regulatory role in trophic levels (food webs) by directly affecting the behavior and feeding patterns of the herbivores they prey upon. This has been dubbed “the ecology of fear.” A deer or elk herd with wolves on its edges is much less likely to stay in one place and graze endlessly. Endless grazing causes habitat to lose resilience and function, because the plants and woody growth are hammered by over browsing and don’t have a chance to regrow. But when herbivores know they are at risk of falling prey they are more likely to graze on the move and shift their feeding patterns away from areas where there is high risk of a predator attack (such as the flat river bottom areas of Yellowstone), and not eat plants and shoots down to their nubs. Many plants do well when grazed upon, but too much grazing leads to stunted growth, outright death, or a lack of recruitment of future generations. And when herbivores overgraze an area, they are not just destroying the plants, they are also wiping out or altering habitat for other species too, such as songbirds, small mammals and even fish. There is literally an entire body of literature devoted to the ecological effects of wolves; this little summary is barley covering the basics!

But what I’ve written about so far is the wolf of science. I’d argue that another wolf exists. It’s a symbolic animal with different meanings for different social groups. You could ask one social group what wolves mean to them—let’s say livestock producers—and you may get a negative earful about how wolves are the worst thing to have ever walked the earth, and how the government forced these wretched animals on helpless communities. Then ask another social group–let’s say environmentalists—and you may get an earful about how wolves are the best species in the world because they make ecosystems healthy, embody the wild essence of wilderness, and are an umbrella species whose protection in turn protects vast landscapes. To some social groups, loving or hating wolves is like a litmus test as to whether you “belong.” In this way, being anti- or pro- wolf can actually help form community ties among people that may not otherwise agree on much. I don’t think wolves are inherently good or bad—just like I don’t think bears or cougars are inherently good or bad. I think it’s simply a matter of how we perceive the behavior and actions of these animals. And, unfortunately, wolves have a bad rap throughout history for being evil creatures. That sort of stigma casts a long shadow, and I think it still colors people’s perceptions of them today. Wolves have become wrapped up in symbology in a way that highlights the polarization of our social perceptions of them: evil symbols of government on the one hand, and ecological saviors symbolizing wilderness on the other. So they matter a lot in a social context. They’ve almost become indicators of political/philosophical allegiances, which I think is sad because it detracts the conversation from actual facts about them.

Why should we be concerned about wolves? Well, there are many reasons. Wolves are an evolutionary success. In the course of their natural history, they spread to every major continent except Antarctica and Australia. (I think that’s correct? Asia, Europe, northern Africa, North America, the Arctic, and the maned wolf (not a true wolf) is in South America while the dire wolf used to be there before it went extinct.) That’s a feat that pretty much no species other than man has achieved. I mean, we’re talking about a species that has adapted to sub-zero weather in the Arctic but also to the arid deserts of Mexico. Their plasticity and adaptability is amazing. Yet in North America, wolves were nearly wiped off the map of the lower-48 states in a geological blink of the eye. I’m not convinced we fully understand yet what our eradication actions did to this species in terms of the genetic diversity that was lost. (And it’s the same story in Europe.) There have definitely been a lot of advancements with reintroducing and recovering wolves, and the fact that we have them in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming is amazing. (I’m sure Sylvia has a lot to say about this.) But I think it’s important to pull back and look at the wide-angle view from history, to look at these gains in the context of what was previously lost: an entire half a continent’s worth of wolves. So I’m glad for the recent progress, but it is still but a small step in relation to the historic populations that were once here. So that’s one reason I’m concerned for wolves. Like large mammals and predators everywhere, they are simply dwindling from Earth.

Sylvia Fallon: DeLene has covered all the bases.  As a scientist at an environmental advocacy organization, my primary interest has been with the ecological role of wolves which, as with sharks, we have only recently really begun to recognize all of the numerous and complex ways these top predators affect their ecosystems.  For the most part we have been piecing these relationships together as we watch entire ecosystems unravel with the loss of top predators (as we have seen with the shark/skate/scallop situation, for example), but in the case of wolves in the Northern Rockies we have had a unique opportunity to watch the return of a top predator and the changes that the wolves have brought to the landscape has been nothing short of astonishing. DeLene seems to argue that there may not be anything inherently good or bad about wolves including the ecological role that they play, but from a biological standpoint we know that ecosystems with wolves are much more complex than ecosystems in which wolves have been removed and that complexity translates into greater productivity and overall resilience.  At a time when conservation biologists are struggling with how to best manage our wildlife and landscapes for maintaining ecosystem function (which benefits us all) in the face of stressors such as climate change, restoring the presence of top predators may be one strategy that could help.  However, restoring predators is something that is largely overlooked or even opposed due to another point that DeLene raises about the symbolism, myths and misinformation about wolves (and other predators) which is reflected in our complex history of persecuting predators.

Cristina Eisenberg:  My dissertation is specifically about why wolves matter. I quantify the effects of wolves via statistical analyses and multivariate models (240 of them), based on 4 years of field data I  collected, which involved walking a thousand miles per year in the northern Rockies (Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park), measuring the impacts of wolves. My master’s thesis was about the science, but also about the broader social/cultural aspect of these issues. Our relationship with wolves is so tangled. It has to do with our deepest fears.  Fears that are the subject of fairy tales and nightmares, but which don’t actually play out in reality, given my experience.

WhySharksMatter: Are wolves a threat to humans?

DeLene Beland:  Quite simply, no. But the thought of being attacked and eaten by a wolf dredges up humanity’s worst fears about becoming prey to wild animals. What fate is worse than to become meat? However, it’s important to keep in perspective the animals we view as “safe” that also cause harm on a regular basis. More than eight hundred thousand people in the United States seek treatment for domestic dog bites each year, and of these about sixteen die according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are two documented deaths of humans from wolves in North America, and I think the second one is somewhat controversial because it involved wolves that were clearly habituated to people. This second, most recent case, occurred in 2005 when Kenton Joel Carnegie set out for a walk from the mining surveyor’s camp where he worked in Saskatchewan and never returned. His partially eaten body was later found near to where several gray wolves had been spotted repeatedly feeding on human garbage. The coroner’s report attributed his death to wolves according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, although wolf researcher Paul Paquet disagreed and said the evidence pointed to a bear attack and then wolf scavenging. This was a case that very likely involved wolves that had become habituated to people. And any kind of habituated wild animal is dangerous, whether it’s a bear, alligator, coyote, wolf or even a raccoon. In a third case, an inconclusive case, a female jogger died in Alaska in 2010, possibly due to a bear or wolf attack, but the coroner’s report could not pin down which animal actually killed her. Gray wolves may have attacked and killed Candice Berner, a 4’-11” female, 32 years old, who was jogging in rural Alaska near Chignik Lake. But then again, a bear may have attacked her initially. Her autopsy was not conclusive for cause of death, but wolves did feed upon her after she died, according to the Anchorage Daily News. (It should be noted that it’s not unusual for wolves to steal a bear’s kill and vice versa.) Wolves, probably red wolves or it may have even been feral dogs, were also said to feed upon the bodies of the fallen after the Tuscarora Indian War in the 1700s.  But considering the several hundred years of history since European contact that we have written records for, the fact that there are but two confirmed cases of wolves killing humans reveals a remarkably sparse record—one that speaks more toward the fact that wolves rarely if ever kill people. For the average American, there is a much greater chance of being seriously injured in a car accident caused by deer darting across the road than there is a chance of having even an aggressive encounter with a wild wolf.

Cristina Eisenberg: Not once, in the hundreds of chance meetings I had with wolves, did one behave aggressively toward me. Indeed, they were curious about me, and often snuck up behind me, stole my field equipment, and then brought it back a day or two later slightly chewed and covered with wolf drool and wolf fur. This from a creature who can easily bite through steel. These were not habituated wolves, and I made no effort to approach them or encourage them. Sometimes the wolves would take naps near us while we worked. Other times they would visit with their pups.

I raised my kids in a cabin in the wolves, in a place that wolves recolonized in the 1990s. Our cabin backs up to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. Our daughters would camp out in the woods when they were 9 and 10. The wolves would visit in the night, in the mid-summer, and have their pups with them. Our daughters found the sound of the pack teaching their pups to howl comforting. We never felt threatened by them.

WhySharksMatter: What are some current conservation challenges facing wolves?

Sylvia Fallon:  In the US, gray wolves used to be found across most of the country and numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  By the 1930s, however, wolves had been all but exterminated from the lower 48 except for a small population that hung on in the woods of Minnesota.  Now, 80 years later and 40 years after the Endangered Species Act was passed, only two populations of gray wolves exist -  one in the Great Lakes region (MN, WI, MI) that numbers in the several thousands and one in the Northern Rocky Mountains (ID, MT, WY) that numbers around 2000 with a handful of wolves beginning to establish in WA and OR.  There is also a small and struggling population of 58 Mexican gray wolves in NM and AZ.  Although recovery efforts continue for the Mexican wolf, the other two populations of gray wolves have recently been removed from the endangered species list (with the exception of Wyoming which is proposed for delisting) and it is clear that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is ready to declare wolves recovered in the US despite the fact that they still only represent a small fraction of their historic numbers and range. While wolves are still technically considered endangered in the rest of the country, the US Fish and Wildlife Service plans on declaring the rest of this historical range as “unrealistic and unnecessary” for recovery.

The biggest conservation issue facing wolves has always been public opposition –  primarily from the livestock industry  and sportsmen’ s communities. Now that wolves have been removed from the endangered species list there is intense public pressure on the states to reduce the wolf population through hunting, trapping and other forms of removal.  Both state and federal regulations on wolves have shown themselves to be influenced much more by politics than by science.  So the challenges for conserving wolves are largely about building public tolerance and acceptance and promoting non-lethal conflict prevention practices to reduce conflicts between wolves and livestock and support coexistence.

Cristina Eisenberg: It is impossible to have 250,000 wolves ever again in the lower 48 coterminous United States, due to the human footprint. When there were 250,000 wolves, the human population was several orders of magnitude lower than it is today. Our challenge lies in figuring out, using best science, how many wolves are enough to ensure the ecological benefits that can accrue from their presence, then coming up with a higher number than that to ensure that stochastic effects (e.g., disease, light winters) that can negatively impact wolf populations, are accounted for. In the Northern Rockies, many conservation biologists feel that a wolf population of 10,000 would be adequate to allow for wolf expansion into areas not populated by humans, to ensure ecological effectiveness (ability to drive a trophic cascade), and to be sufficiently resilient to stochastic effects.

DeLene Beland:  I am concerned because their fate is lashed firmly to our politics. Biologically, wolves are doing just fine. But when we institute hunts and policies that allow them to be shot or trapped or whatnot, it’s a huge detriment to their social ecology. When wolves are shot randomly, there is a somewhat unknown effect upon their pack mates. Some studies show there is an additive effect, meaning that when a wolf dies from a hunter’s bullet, more than that one felled wolf’s fate is affected. That wolf’s mate may now be unable to provide adequately for all their pups, putting the whole pack’s fate at risk. Or, a neighboring pack may sense one of the breeders is now missing, and attack or take over the territory–expelling or killing the packmates that are left. It’s like a butterfly effect really, and I don’t think we as a society have given nearly enough thought to how our policies (hunts especially) can affect wolves at the population level. I’m sure the others will have more to say about this.

WhySharksMatter: Do you believe that “The Grey” will negatively impact wolves, as “Jaws” negatively impacted sharks?

Cristina Eisenberg: I think The Grey could set back carnivore conservation by much in some circles. There are many lay persons who are on the fence about predators. This film, given Liam Neeson’s charisma, could tip them to the wrong side.

Sylvia Fallon:  Basically I don’t think that The Grey is harmless fiction – I think it feeds into our already present fear of wolves and perpetuates misinformation about wolves as people-killers.  That’s a real setback for wolves  whose main obstacle continues to be public perception and it’s a setback the conservation community that has worked for decades to dispel these types of myths.

As a mom and a wildlife biologist, I am sensitive to the villainization of wolves and “the wild” which pervades children’s literature and is exemplified in the most ubiquitous of stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, Peter and the wolf, and the Three Little Pigs.  This idea of the ‘big bad wolf’ is ingrained in us at a young age.  These stories instill a sense of fear and distrust of wolves and “The Grey” is like a souped up, modern day version of these fairy tales – for adults.  What the makers of “The Grey” may not realize is that the fear that these stories elicit while also perpetuating the false characterization of wolves as people-killers has real consequences for wolves.   As DeLene points out, wolves are biologically very successful and can survive in all kinds of settings – their only real problem so far has been people. In a matter of only a few decades we were able to almost entirely eliminate wolves from the lower 48.  And one of the biggest struggles with restoring wolves has been public resistance which is largely based on this type of fear and misguided belief that wolves mean harm to people.

Of course that doesn’t mean that wolves don’t harm other things that people care about such as livestock – but statistically wolves account for a very small fraction of livestock losses and fortunately there are a number of options for non-lethal conflict-prevention that are being adopted by more and more ranchers demonstrating that coexistence between wolves and livestock is possible. Still, wolves continue to face a lot of opposition and  restoring wolves successfully requires building public acceptance and tolerance by breaking down misinformation and fear – not feeding it, as “The Grey” does.

DeLene Beland: As a kid, my family vacationed in Key West, Fla. every August where we caught lobsters by skin diving. I remember watching Jaws one year before our summer vacation, and for the two weeks we dove I was petrified each time we slipped into the ocean. Never mind that I’d been diving for five years already and had never even seen a shark in the sleughs and reefs we visited! This little anecdote speaks to the power of myth and suggestion and how it can overrule or short-circuit what we otherwise know to be true. For people who know a little about gray wolves, the move The Grey will surely cause them to at least question what they think they know about wolf behavior. For people who know nothing about gray wolves, I worry what this movie will do to their perspective. Will they accept the misinformation about wolf behavior as true? I don’t know. And for people who are already opposed to wolves, I fear this movie simply reinforces what they think they know: that wolves are bad, evil creatures hell bent on hurting people.

When you begin talking about wolf attacks, facts don’t matter much to some people. The wolf that stalks people in the woods for food is the wolf of legend and myth. The idea of dying at the actions of a pack of wolves is such a frightening thing, such a horrifying thought, that we as a society have pinned this awful expectation upon them. The fact that they are social animals who exhibit cooperation and even strategy in their hunting behaviors worsens the fear of a coordinated attack upon a person, in many people’s minds. It is this fear, legend and myth that the movie, The Grey plays upon. It makes zero attempt to illustrate wolves displaying natural behavior. Instead, it plays on old tropes about how we expect wolves to behave.

Right now, wolves need advocates like Sylvia and Cristina fighting for them, not Hollywood fighting against them. So in the end, I do fear that The Grey will harm the public’s perception of what wolves are all about or perhaps influence some folks to take sides against wolf recovery. But it’s great that conservationists and communicators like you, David, are interested in exposing the difference between what we know about wolves versus how they are portrayed in this movie.

There are so many myths and oodles of misinformation pinned to wolves. Movies like The Grey simply propagate fears of behavior that is largely non-existent (stalking people in the woods with the intent to murder them). When you enter the realm of the wolf, you enter a realm where people argue over the basics of what constitutes a fact. It’s sad, but true. I hope that science can help dispel some of the misinformation, but that will take a lot of time (and a shift in our culture toward one that values and accepts science… but that’s another story).

In Here Be Monsters, Michael Finkel tells the story of three teenagers from the tiny Pacific Island of Tokelau who, on a dare, stole a relative’s boat and tried to sail to a neighboring island. After less than a week, they ran out of both gas and provisions and found themselves floating, helplessly, through the Pacific Ocean. They would be rescued 50 days later. Through interviews with the three boys, their family, friends, and maritime professionals, Finkel recreates those 50 days.

What began as a liquor fueled adventure quickly turned into a struggle for survival. Each day takes the boys further from home and hope for rescue. With no fishing gear, they had no way to acquire food. In the entire 2 months they had nothing to eat but a few dozen coconuts and a few fingerlings that washed into the boat – a small, open craft that provided no shelter and constantly flooded. Near the end, they briefly flirted with violence and discussed the last option of those stranded at sea.

Finkel estimates that in all the annals of survival at sea, the ordeal of these three boys is dwarfed only by the crew of the whaleship Essex. While there have been those set adrift longer, in harsher seas, none were as poorly prepared as these three, who had no supplies, no practical knowledge of the open ocean, and little fishing experience. That they survived at all is a testament to the resilience of the human body.

If Here Be Monsters is a testament to the resilience of youth, than Fatal Voyage, by John Hooper, is a testament to how quickly experience, mixed with hubris, can become fatal. Hooper provides the first (though certainly not the last, and probably not the authoritative) account of the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that, earlier this year, struck rocks off the coast of Giglio and sank, though not before the captain managed to steer it into a shallow bank, a maneuver that likely saved hundreds of lives and would be the sole note of praise for the now-disgraced Captain Schettino.

Hooper pulls together the personal accounts of several guests and crew members to recreate the events leading up to the wreck and the frantic hours when panicked guests and an unguided crew coordinated an evacuation of a ship that, listing heavily to one side, had already been abandoned by its captain. Even with so much chaos and confusion, the crew still managed to evacuate thousands of passengers in the span of a few hours. Not everyone made it out, and while Hooper highlights a few that survived inside the sideways vessels – a crewmember with a broken leg trapped in the dining room who survived off waterlogged rations and a couple trapped in their stateroom sharing a lifejacket for warmth – there were, at the time of Fatal Voyage’s printing, 17 casualties.

Fatal Voyage paints a picture of a disaster on a titanic scale. The wreck of the Concordia is the largest maritime disaster in Italy’s history. That so many made it out alive is a testament to both the skill of the crew and the singular decision of the captain to save the ship, after his own poor judgment drove the Costa Concordia aground and before he totally and completely lost his mind.

And finally there’s Shipwrecked, an autobiographical tale by Mishka Shubaly about his time aboard the Breath – a home-built sailboat – and its eventual grounding in the Bahamas. Shubaly, a young man who seems proud of his poor decision making skills joins a group of much older and experienced sailors. A series of unfortunate mechanical failures leaves the Breath without adequate steering and, in the night, strikes a jagged outcropping and becomes stuck. The crew abandons ship, makes it to shore, and, in the spirit of recreational boaters the world over, proceeds to get drunk on salvaged wine before passing out on the beach.

When they awake in the morning, Shubaly sets off across the beach to find help at a town they think to be 25-miles away. What follows is one of the most surreal survival stories I’ve ever encountered. It is not that it is a terribly compelling story, or that Shubaly overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but rather, that with the verve of a maudlin and self-obsessed parody of Werner Herzog, Shubaly recounts his journey, which took less than one day, in which he, still hung over, drinks all of his water, carries around a donkey skull, drinks his own urine, and is discovered by a team of sea turtle biologists. His companions, have, by this point, already been rescued.

For reasons unknown, Shubaly dwells on how terrified he is of sharks and inelegantly attempts to tie his struggle for survival against impossible odds to the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.

Here Be Monsters shows us that some people can survive the harshest conditions by sheer force of will. Fatal Voyage shows us that no level of experience can compensate for hubris. Shipwrecked reminds us that some people really shouldn’t be allowed near the water. But the overarching message in all of these stories is that the ocean is more powerful than any of us, and can change everything without warning.

Empowered by the same energy behind many urban agriculture efforts – the push for local food, for a connection between city dwellers and their dinner, and the urge to make use of abandoned city land – Ellis began down the very much unpaved path for urban aquaculture. But unlike the pioneers of community farming and backyard chickens, aquaculture has no precedents and is unclearly defined in the legal world. In 1959, the NC General Assembly declared aquaculture a form of agriculture, which is exempt from zoning regulations. This is reflected even in the language of what many aquaculturists call themselves – farmers – and their operations – fish farms. So at the state level, there should be nothing standing in the way of a few tilapia ponds in Charlotte. Wrong.

Ellis fought city planners who attempted to fit his plans into the closest urban analog they could find – swimming pools and equine barns. Large quantities of water in Charlotte must be swimming pools, right? And should you call the roof over their head a ‘fish barn’, then you have to tangle with horse regulations in the city. The city officials didn’t have the same hands-off attitude of the state.

City water is also chlorinated for the health of human residents of Charlotte. But tilapia would require dechlorination, mostly done chemically. So Ellis decided to drill a well on city property. This is something that is becoming more and more common for a variety of social reasons, so no one really raised an eyebrow at this. But when attempting to get a contract for effluent wastewater, only a city the size of Charlotte could comfortably accomodate the extra flow. If someone in a smaller town wants to use that process, they may be faced with upgrading the city municipal water facilities or installing private water treatment.

Would Ellis do it again? Yes, under the right circumstances. Plus, thanks to him, Charlotte is familiar with aquaculture. It’ll be easier the next time around.

Ellis’ operation is commercial in scale and provides tilapia to restaurants, farmer’s markets, and the Charlotte locovores. Another popular option for the home grower is aquaponics. Basically, connect your fish poop to your hydroponics, and you’ve got the idea. We’re back to the idea of a designed ecosystem, where the wastes of one part of the system feed the needs of the other. Aquaponics are popular systems for the hobby productionist growing food for their family. From what I could tell from Chris Mullins’ presentation at the conference, there’s myriad ways to set up your aquaponics system depending on how big you want it to be and how much capital you have to invest. From the smallest – literally connecting the family fish tank to a bed of vermiculite with lettuces planted – to the larges – a large greenhouse full of tomatoes with a large standard aquaculture tank-full of tilapia feeding the production. He suggested www.growingpower.org as a good place for more good resources for urban aquaponics ideas. The sky’s the limit.

A few countries in particular made their influence known several times: Denmark, Chile, and Canada. Though these have prominent roles in the global capture fisheries as well, their particular geology gave them a head start on salmon that is expanding over into other types of aquaculture.

According to Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries, they are expecting advances in saltwater breeding and reduction of environmental impacts of aquaculture to further expand their industry in the coming years. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, Denmark is already the sixth largest exporter of seafood products, mostly of freshwater farmed trout and trout roe, which have a century of history in the country.

Chile’s start in aquaculture began with Atlantic salmon in the wrong hemisphere – that is, they brought salmon from Norway down to the similar ecosystem of the Chilean coast, jumping the barrier of warm equatorial water that prevented the salmon from doing so naturally. They’ve added bivalves and the seagrass Grassilaria to the portfolio. According to the FAO, they export most of their aquaculture products and growth is currently halted due to environmental concern from the grand salmon experiment.

Aquaculture in Canada is much more highly organized, with several professional organizations such as the Aquaculture Association and the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance. They trace their aquaculture back to stocking programs of trout and oysters in the 1950′s (FAO fact sheet), but it is now mostly comprised of salmon. Future expansions will focus on cod, halibut, and haddock. Our connection to Canadian fisheries is likely due to proximity, because though highly organized, they represent only .3% of the world’s aquaculture production.

Either way, the connection to these countries is through aquaculture technology. We share UV sterilization technology, water quality testing, feed formulations, and other demands. Our producers play on the same stage at the world seafood expos such as the one in Boston, where our American Prawn Cooperative recently had a display. The biggest international news of late is that China is crossing the boundary this year from a net exporter of seafood to a net importer. Our connections to Denmark, Chile, and Canada through networking in the global seafood expos might help North Carolina seafood explode on the global market to meet this new demand. But then again, maybe we’ll let the big producers bear the heavy burden and keep North Carolinian seafood to ourselves, the pride of our land and sea. Only the future will tell.

This is exactly when you have to stop thinking of these operations as just a tank of fish. They are nestled in the surrounding ecosystem, full of naturally occuring algae – some good and some bad. For eastern North Carolina, both the wind and the tide might carry in some future algae blooms to your tanks, which are well-stocked with nutrient-rich fish poop to feed it. Instead, as NC Aquaculture Conference speaker DE Brune puts it, you have to think of your tanks and ponds as “designed ecosystems”.

Dr. Brune told his scientific story as a personal travelogue as he moved through school and then several professorships across the country. Each place and set of people added something to his story. A great way of thinking about the development of aquaculture, I overheard many subsequent conversations praising the storytelling style and the content of those lessons – the trials and tribulations with algae, but also the great potential for algae to be a productive member of the aquaculture family.

Brine shrimp, nature's energy converter; ambystoma.de

After concluding “this lab data is not useful to growing algae in the field at all”, Dr. Brune has spent a career committed to making his experiments relevant to the size of commercial operations – sometimes to the chagrin of the university’s administration. His emphasis for this is only rivaled by his commitment for using biological means of algae harvesting rather than the more engineered mechanical approaches. “Why not use a critter that spent millions of years figuring out how to convert algae” he asked, referring to brine shrimp or “sea monkeys” as you may have known them as a child.

Brune put up a slide showing two beakers – one full of bright green algae, the other full of brown feathery brine shrimp. It took 15 minutes to get from one state to the other, and then the relevant oils for biofuels can easily be extracted from the shrimp. This is the alternative he proposes to the traditional filtering that involves boiling and extracting with large quantities of hexane – at a huge energy expense and exposure to toxin for employees.

Growing algae on purpose takes skill and careful manipulation, however, a process Brune called “controlled eutrophication”. A system full of algae can quickly flip over the threshold from healthy green to brown nitrifying bacteria, and seemingly “always in the middle of the night”. More seriously, the aeration demand goes up before any visible signs show up, so growers have to be ready to pounce on problems the minute they arise.

ei.lehigh.edu

Part of the interest in growing algae is in the hopes of harnessing their photosynthesis to capture CO2 from traditional power plants, turning it into liquid fuel. By Brune’s calculations, a relatively small 50 MW plant would require 2000 acres of algae in order to capture all of the carbon released. Not to mention algae only grows during daylight hours, but power plants continue burning fossil fuels through the night.

Instead, algae might fit better as part of a diversified aquaculture economy. The algae produce oxygen for the fish – and if the right kind is cultivated from the ambient environment, make them taste better – then can be harvested for fish feed and biofuel production. These last two byproducts could potentially make up 30% and 10% of the operation’s revenue, respectively, with the fish themselves making up the remaining 60%. He also suggests tilapia in the mix to take care of solids that make their way to the bottom of the tank. In a truly designed ecosystem, all the parts serve a purpose and could make the farm some money. That’s the goal, at least. Check in with Dr. Brune after this coming summer to see if his current test farm can live up to the challenge.

Day 1

We met with Chris and James early on Friday.  Chris has a long history working with Dr. Rulifson, and knows the waters around Hatteras like no other.  James, his mate, is a fellow dirty Yankee.  The water was flat calm and the air was an unseasonable mid-50s.  Dogfish normally prefer cooler water, so would they be offshore at the edge of the acoustic array or right up on the beach?

There aren't too many days off of Hatteras that look like this. Especially in February.

We set out gillnets with mesh size small enough to snag the 20-inch juvenile dogfish we were looking for, without getting piles of smaller fish.  The warm weather combined with the natural geography of Cape Hatteras meant that we kept finding highly localized temperature zones, but the water temperature stayed mostly in the mid to low-50s (extremely warm for February, even in the Carolinas).  This seemed to be driving bait: birds and dolphins were seen working up schools of fish so often that eventually we just started taking them for granted as part of the background.  False albacore were also spotted chopping at the surface.

Andrea checking the water temperature and depth with a CTD. The water was a surprisingly tolerable 55 F.

Setting the net in the sun.

The unusual water temperatures lead to some unusual catches, but no dogfish until we found them practically in the surf zone in 17 feet of water.  Not to say there weren’t other sharks farther from the beach.

Not sure what this little guy is. It's definitely not a blue or lady crab but definitely part of the swimming crab family (Portunidae). Maybe one of you arthropod fans out there can help?

Atlantic sharpnose shark (Rhizoprionodon terraenovae). Unusual for this time of year, but not unheard of. We caught some of these south of Cape Hatteras during my field work.

A juvenile blacktip shark (Carcharhinus limbatus). A shark that really shouldn't be here this time of year.

I’m considering doing something coastal shark-related for my PhD dissertation, so I was pretty happy to observe and take data on the other sharks.  However, we didn’t find the spiny dags until the very last station, and even then only got something like 11 of them, none of which were juveniles.  Still, we were able to get some size, sex, and maturity data from the dogfish, which is still helpful to Andrea’s work.

On a linguist side-note, I learned that Outer Banks fishermen group sharks into two broad groups: “dogs” (smooth and spiny dogfish) and “biters” (everything else with teeth).  Some of the species have their own nicknames; sharpnose sharks are “white-dotters” for their white spots, while sandbar sharks are “elbow biters” for their ability to twist around and grab a handler’s arm while being held by the tail.  This system isn’t perfect, since spiny dogfish can be pretty formidable biters themselves.

The weather started to get a little more grim as we headed back to the dock.

Day 2

The weather got a lot uglier on Saturday.  Wind was gusting in from the Northwest, but we were able to work along the beach on the south side of the Cape Hatteras hook and stay out of the worst of it.  The changing weather seemed to whip everything into a frenzy: it was impossible to turn around without seeing dolphins and diving birds, and some humpback whales even showed up (of course I was working at the time these things were happening, so no pictures to prove it).  This time we got into the dogfish, and got some other noteworthy catches along the way.  Note that there are no actual dogfish pictures, because when they showed up they appeared in numbers, keeping me from having the time to pause and snap a picture.  Again, we couldn’t seem to find any juveniles, but did get enough data from the mature males and females to potentially help describe any differences in sex distribution.

Menhaden were among the forage species being worked up by the local predators. This one was covered in parasites. Those red "strings" are the streamers of parasitic copepods.

These harvest fish (or star butters, as Chris and James called them) are warm-water relatives of butterfish. Another species that probably shouldn't be in NC waters in February, but here they were coming up in the same nets as spiny dogfish.

We were mobbed by pelicans, gannets, and gulls for most of the day. Very few released menhaden made it past this armada. They gave the dogfish wide berth though.

Evidence of dogfish predation. Note how clean the bites are. The ocean is a violent place.

No idea what this crab is (some kind of spider crab?), but it looks like a Dr. Seuss character. Therefore, awesome.

Once the weather started looking like this, we headed back in. Also, I've stayed in one of those beach houses.

Chris warned Andrea and I to head back as soon as we got all our stuff off the boat, and it turned out to be good advice.  A couple hours after we left, Rt. 12 (literally the only road from Hatteras to the mainland) was closed for overwash.  It may not have bee a totally successful trip, but it was certainly interesting.  And it was good to get a couple days of fresh air and fish slime.

This past Friday on the banks of the Neuse in New Bern, NC, people interested in aquaculture in the region gathered to discuss the future. The group packed the ballroom in the Hilton with scientists, extension agents, interested citizens, and of course – producers. The afternoon before some attendees had the chance to visit farms in the area firsthand, one of which I’ve previously written about (White Rock Fish Farm). Friday held talks on the science, economics, and policies of aquaculture. Saturday morning wrapped up with freshwater and saltwater workshops tackling the details of growing fish. Parallel to the whole event was a trade show exhibiting the myriad food options available, water quality testing technology, cages and nets, greenhouses, and contacts for state programs. Friday night, there was proper celebration of aquaculture in the form of the Aquafood festival showcasing products from around the state. Take home message from the event? I left wanting to put a tank in my small Beaufort yard alongside the goats, chickens, and vegetable garden.

The conference lent me appreciation of the men and women who produce an increasingly large portion of the national and global seafood supply. The speakers and attendees shared a language that blended ecology, economics, and food policy. Conversations in the hallways shifted quickly from stress hormones in fish to desired changes in the upcoming Farm Bill reauthorization. Aquaculturists sit on the divide between agriculture and fisheries as well as between new science and practiced expertise – and like many interdisciplinary topics, participants are expected to be experts in all of the above.

Aquaculture in North Carolina is very much still in its infancy when compared to capture fisheries or salmon programs and the message of the conference was very much one of research and development. All kinds of people are trying new things and this was the place to share successes and failures – mostly successes. As the keynote speaker, Travis Larkin, said in his lunchtime talk – the global marketplace, poised to bring more out of this country than in – creates a demand for both reliable supplies of fish for the growing global middle class and fresh, local, and sustainable seafood for the domestic market. There’s options for people to jump in the production line at all scales.

A few consistent themes emerged out of both the talks and the trade show indicating hurdles to development of aquaculture both in North Carolina and for the country:

- Consumer demand for fish-meal free feed. Most of the fish we like having for dinner are carnivores by nature and therefore require animal proteins derived largely from wild-caught fish while growing – especially in the juvenile stages. Although some studies show that hybrid striped bass and catfish can eat soy-derived food for most of their lives, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are still critical in the early stages, usually in the form of brine shrimp and copepods supplemented with the necessary nutrients. This is one of the biggest ethical dilemmas in the aquaculture world right now, so for the moment we can sum up the trade show representatives’ take on this by the need to think about which species we cultivate. Some do much better than others at eating down the food chain.

- Disease. The keynote speaker mentioned this as one of the biggest challenges facing the growing aquaculture industry and I head many comments later expressing appreciation that someone had finally included disease in that list. Each species grown has its own set of worries that is also dependent on climate and connectivity to other populations, but most every kind of aquacultured species has its threat. And as researchers at NC State have recently become well aware of, vaccinating thousands of fingerling trout through injections is  not a feasible way to protect a crop, but there’s often no better answer.

- Risk Mitigation. This came as no surprise as many of the growers were still repairing their farms after Hurricane Irene last August. One researcher put a satellite photo of Irene in his presentation – with his research station in Aurora, NC, visible through the eye of the hurricane while the rest of the state was covered with Irene’s clouds. The region stayed underwater for months after. Row-crop farmers in the area could cash in on crop insurance, but seafood is not an insurable crop. Though weather is the most recent example, the relatively recent droughts of 2007 and 2008, diseases migrating down from the Chesapeake Bay, and snap cold freezes have all led to similar disastrous results. A few cooperatives are banding together to support one another in times of hardship through market-share and the main discussion at the North Carolina Aquaculture Association business meeting at the end of the day reviewed federal assistance programs of all sorts.

Perhaps the most exciting to see at the conference, however, was not the talks themselves. A group of three contractors out of Miami traveled to the conference hoping to “take a class in 3 days” as they considered moving out of the suffering contracting business and into aquaculture development in South Florida’s estuaries. Students from Carteret and Brunswick community colleges were also there absorbing ideas and networking. A man at my lunch table was hoping to learn a few tricks of the trade before starting a small tilapia operation, joining Durham’s booming local food movement. There were lots of familiar faces from the industry and academia, but it’s these faces you don’t often find at conferences like this. The hope that aquaculture can move out of its infancy into a prominent feature of North Carolina’s landscape and economy.

For the rest of this week, I will write about a few of the issues I learned about at the conference in more detail. For now, I will leave you with the same  mouth-watering experience I left the conference with: the tastes and smells of the Aquafood festival. Conference organizers bribed us away from the setup with a keg of beer and some networking opportunities, but around the designated time, the crowd started to slowly move toward the ballroom, where we were met immediately with the smell of roasted oysters and clams. Should you not be distracted by those, there were four other tables boasting options from around the state. “Gone fishing” held flounder and pasta, “Catfish Four Ways” included 2 types of fried, 2 broiled, and delicious hushpuppies, the cajun station had crawfish gumbo, beans and rice, and spiced broiled tilapia, and the “Fresh Catch” table offered chili prawns and smoked trout. The applause offered to the chefs and the empty serving trays said it all.

Image taken from the South Florida shark fishing club online forum. Photographer undisclosed. I have blocked out the angler's face to protect his identity

Update: The angler who originally caught the shark has responded. Please see below.

On February 5th, while standing on a beach in Miami,  a fisherman caught a 14 foot great hammerhead shark. According to his account, ”we had it beached within an hour of hooking it. The fish weighed too much her girth was huge. Just the 2 of us wasn’t enough to get it out of the water….We snapped some pictures with our dying camera, measured it at 170 inches and spent the next hour walking back and forth with HER reviving her…it swam off slow and steady”

While this might appear to be a simple case of catch-and-release recreational fishing, it is not. My lab and I are  supporters of sustainable catch and release fishing.  However, it is important to note that since January 1, 2012, great hammerheads (an IUCN Red List Endangered species) have been a protected species in Florida state waters and have additional legal protections. The Florida code indicates that:

“(1) No person shall harvest, possess, land, purchase, sell, or exchange any or any part of these species:
…(k) Great hammerhead – Sphyrna mokarran.

…(3) “Harvest” means the catching or taking of a marine organism by any means whatsoever, followed by a reduction of such organism to possession. Marine organisms that are caught but immediately returned to the water free, alive, and unharmed are not harvested”

…(5) “Land,” when used in connection with the harvest of marine organisms, means the physical act of bringing the harvested organism ashore”  Florida code section 68B-44  (Emphasis mine)

In this incident, the shark was brought ashore. We can infer from the statement “the fish weighed too much her girth was huge. Just the 2 of us wasn’t enough to get it out of the water” that the fisherman attempted to pull it all the way out of the water, but was unable to do so (an important legal distinction) . Instead, he ended up beaching it, bringing it so far out that it could not move or breathe. The angler did not immediately release the animal. According to the angler’s account, it was measured and photographed prior to the attempt to resuscitate it. The shark was not released alive and unharmed. By the angler’s own admission, it took over an hour of resuscitation before the animal was able to even swim away slowly.

As Mike points out, there is a bit of ambiguity in this law concerning the words “landed” and “immediately”. Fortunately, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has a best practices guide  that clarifies the laws. Though it only references tarpon and grouper, I have been assured by colleagues at the FWC that it is broadly applicable to all saltwater fishes.

“Fish must be immediately released for several reasons. For example, there is no allowable harvest of goliath grouper and Nassau grouper in Florida…..When a fish isn’t allowed to be harvested, it must immediately be returned to the water free, alive, and unharmed. However, if a fish is allowed to be taken at a certain size limit, it’s okay to temporarily possess it to measure it, as long as it is measured immediately after removing it from the water, and the fish is then immediately returned to the water free, alive, and unharmed if it is not a legal-size fish….It is okay to take a picture of a fish that is not allowed to be harvested while it’s in the process of being released, but it still must be let go immediately and should not be held in lengthy poses just for the purpose of taking the picture. And it is never legal to hold on to or tow a fish that is not allowed to be harvested to a place to weigh or measure it ” FWC Saltwater fish best practices guide. (emphasis mine)

It is not legal to hold on to a fish that’s not allowed to be harvested just to measure it, which is what happened in this case according to the angler’s account. It is legal to photograph a restricted species as it is being released, which should occur immediately, but it is not legal to hold onto it just to photograph it. The photos show the angler posing with his catch, not the process of releasing it.

A call for leniency

As Chuck Bangley points out, “a surf fisherman caught a large, endangered, legally protected shark but also followed the best release practices he was aware of and showed some respect for the animal…. [he] seems to rather like the fish he’s angling, and therefore not a big part of the problem with hammerhead conservation. This particular fisherman likely made an honest mistake and, while the violation of the law certainly needs to be addressed, I hope they don’t come down too hard on [him].”

Bangley makes a good point- the angler made a good faith effort to release the animal unharmed. Personally, I’m more interested in using this incident as a teaching opportunity to promote more sustainable fishing practices for the future than in demonizing a young fishermen who wasn’t aware of the current laws and followed the best practices of which he was aware.

In the first eleven pages of comments on the South Florida shark fishing club online forum about this hammerhead, no one pointed out that the great hammerhead is a protected species in Florida waters. Clearly, more education about this issue is needed.

Samantha Whitcraft of Shark Savers, an organization that helped get the new FWC hammerhead protections passed, agrees. “From what we understand from this particular case, the fishermen ‘tried’ to execute a live catch & release; unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the shark survived but it does mean there is potential for education on how to do it better, especially given that the new FWC rule that protects hammerheads in Florida waters calls for education on this very subject.”

A teachable moment

“Great hammerhead sharks are listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. They’ve suffered an estimated 80% population decline in the last 25 years. Their populations simply cannot sustain heavy fishing pressure. Large females, such as the one caught in this incident, are particularly critical if the population of great hammerheads is to recover,” said Dr. Neil Hammerschlag* , the Director of the University of Miami’s RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program.

According to Austin Gallagher*, a Ph.D. student in the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program, “catch and release fishing relies upon the assumption that the captured fish survives when it is released.” Gallagher, a supporter of sustainable catch and release fishing who writes a column for Coastal Angler magazine, recently concluded a two year project focusing on how local species of sharks (including great hammerheads) respond to the stress of fishing and “fighting” a fisherman.

In his professional opinion, this great hammerhead shark did not survive this encounter. Gallagher said “You can tell that the animal is very rigid–almost like a rigor mortis.  Hammerheads almost always stiffen up when they are dead or dying (moribund). The fact that it is listing to its side and rigid corroborates this. An animal can still swim away and die afterwards. We have seen this as well by using certain telemetry devices such as satellite transmitters that record post-release behavior….Walking an animal for a long period of time is indicative of the physiological consequences of stress. You may be able to get an animal swimming for a brief moment, but it certainly does not guarantee survival. This is a massive animal–the metabolic demands for even for basic swimming of a super predator are large, let alone after being angled and brought to shore for an extended period of time.”

According to Gallagher, “species, not individuals, show the most obvious differences with how they respond to stress. Hammerheads fight so rigorously that they become exhausted, their blood becomes acidic and loaded with carbon dioxide. Our data shows that this acts like a lethal cocktail for the animal.The hammerhead reacts so strongly to being hooked that the exercise of fighting becomes too much for the animal’s body to take. In this sense, the fight becomes anaerobic–fighting without proper oxygen. Hammerheads have very small mouths, which limits the amount of oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide release. At the same time, lactic acid builds up in the blood–a by-product of anaerobic exercise. We have measured disturbing concentrations of all of these parameters in hammerheads, even after fight times of less than 20 minutes. Mortality can happen in many ways–the animal can die of exhaustion minutes, days, and weeks after a release. But the animal can also become preyed upon by another shark that notices the change in swimming speed or behavior.”

Law enforcement’s reaction

We asked Melissa Recks, the FWC regional biologist for South Florida, for an official statement regarding this incident.

“Our division of law enforcement and our legal staff have reviewed this incident, and there’s not enough information in the pictures that a clear violation has occurred. Our educational staff is working on reaching out to shark anglers to clarify the best practices for handling prohibited species to ensure their survival,” she said.

Best practices

This incident likely resulted in the death of an endangered species. Future conservation-minded anglers who wish the ensure the survival of endangered great hammerheads should be aware that these animals absolutely cannot withstand a prolonged fight or being restrained for more than a few minutes. Fighting the animal to restrain it so that the hook can be removed is worse for the animal’s survival than merely cutting the line (which should be done as close to the hook as possible to minimize the amount of the line that the shark drags).

I politely and respectfully suggested this to the South Florida shark fishing club here, and the club’s President, William Fundora, replied:

“WE HAVE FIRST HAND EXPIERIENCE OVER 4 DECADES OF PRACTICING OUR SPORT AND NOT EVERY HAMMERHEAD WILL REACT THE SAME AFTER A PROLONGED FIGHT SOME WILL NEED WALKING AND RIGHTFULLY SO UNLESS YOU SUGGEST WE LET THE SHARK SINK AND DIE WHICH WOULD NOT BE GOOD POLICY FOR ANY FISH ANYWHERE.AGAIN WHEN WE FISH WE HAVE VERY LITTLE CONTROL AS TO WHAT SPECIES OF SHARK BITES OUR BAIT.WE OFTEN CATCH OTHER PROTECTED SPECIES….WE BELIEVE AND KNOW FROM OUR EXPIERIENCE THAT THE BEST RELEASE PRACTICE IS TO WALK AN EXHAUSTED SHARK UNTIL REGAINS IT’S STRENGTH AND SWIMS AWAY…YOU WANT SHARKS TO BE CUT LOOSE TO FLOUDER TO THE BOTTOM WIRE RIG AND STRONG LINE TRAILING AND YOU CALL “latest best practices” ??THINK WHAT YOU ARE SUGGESTING HERE DAVID.”

William, what I am suggesting is based on scientific data. Anglers, even experienced and conservation-minded anglers, can’t know what happens to the sharks after is swims away, and to assume that an animal survived because it swam away is not supported by scientific data.

Scientists can (and in many cases, do) know what happens to a shark after it swims away, thanks to telemetry data and stress physiology research. After a prolonged fight, great hammerhead sharks typically do not survive for long, even if they swim away. They don’t recover from stress as well as other shark species on a physiological level.

Walking the sharks to resuscitate is slightly better than “letting them sink” (which is not at all what I, or anyone else, suggested), as this process very slightly improves their ability to survive, at least in the short term. However, it is far better not to fight them for so long that they need to be resuscitated in the first place.  As soon as you identify the animal on the other end of your line as a scalloped or great hammerhead shark, cut the line with as little line attached to the shark as possible. This will maximize the shark’s chance of survival.  Also, it’s not just me saying this. The FWC best practices guide makes the exact same point:

“Anglers should also use common sense when releasing fish. Sometimes it’s better to safely handle a fish to carefully remove the hook so it can be released, and other times it’s best to cut the line as close to the hook as possible while the fish is in the water – especially if it’s large or agitated” (emphasis mine). Note that great hammerheads are both large and agitated.

Although the angler followed the best methods he was aware of and demonstrated a good-faith effort to respect the ocean and its creatures, by not following established best practices, a rare adult female member of an endangered species almost certainly died. This is a problem in of itself, and it has the potential to become a much bigger problem if not corrected.

I have invited members of the South Florida shark fishing club, fisheries managers, conservationists, and shark scientists to discuss this incident on this blog post. We all want the same thing, we all want there to be lots of fish (including sharks) in the ocean for a long time. It is my sincere hope that this incident, rather than turning into a shouting match between conservationists and anglers, can become a point of discussion about best practices for future sustainable use of marine resources. I also hope that it will draw attention to the rarely discussed practice of land-based shark fishing.

*As regular readers know, I am also a Ph.D. student in the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program. Dr. Neil Hammerschlag is my major adviser, and Austin Gallagher is a senior graduate student in my lab. We believe that fishermen have the right to fish, but that fishing should be done in a sustainable manner. Much of our research aims to better inform anglers so that they can continue to enjoy their sport while having a smaller impact on the marine environment.

Response from the Angler who caught the shark:

I would first like to address the author of this article. It is titled “Florida angler catches (and likely kills) Endangered great hammerhead shark”
… your addition of the words within the parenthesis automatically sets in a tone of bias towards one set of views and against me which I feel slightly threatened. The pen is mightier than the sword and a great speaker has the ability to sway public opinion whether it be good or bad.

The author also states “The shark was not released alive and unharmed. By the angler’s own admission, it took over an hour of resuscitation before the animal was able to even swim away slowly.” Again there is total bias and a wave of negativity thrown upon me (an angler whom which put in vigorous efforts in the release of such a magnificent creature).

In more specific details: I wrote in a different post about the efforts it took me and my friend to release this fish. I quote myself: “That shark was an intelligent creature and more than likely older than myself. I tend to respect my elders and help them out to the best of my abilities. I could tell that this shark was aching and was trying to curl up into a C shape in order to stretch and that it was under a load of stress. Dan and I worked quickly to photograph, clip away as much of the rigging as possible, and get the shark back into the water flow. The tide was incoming so we started by walking the shark against the tide which helped the flow of water throughout its gills. We repeated a few laps of walking back and forth with the shark. Our backs were severely aching from the sheer weight of this fish. Dan reminded me that from the extensive fight the shark had probably built up a ton of lactic acid within its muscles; so the second part of my plan was to get those muscles moving as best as I could, I held the shark by the hammer-like structure being careful not to poke it in the eye and I swayed its head back and forth, un-stiffening muscles and getting even more water flowing throughout the gills. Dan was responsibly swaying its tail and tail-end of the sharks body to also help release lactic acid and stiffness. The shark broke free from us 3-times but we quickly retrieved it and continued the walking process because I did not feel the animal was strong enough to survive at the moment. We ran into several spotted eagle rays and southern stingrays in the process (one of which I came within inches of stepping on… so please don’t tell me this process was not harmful to me.)”

Commenting on this remark: “It is not legal to hold on to a fish that’s not allowed to be harvested just to measure it, which is what happened in this case according to the angler’s account.” Of course I wanted a picture because that is my passion (to catch, photograph, and release big fish) and of course I measured it and did so speedily. There is nothing illegal about measuring a fish, please read the laws on harvesting snook, snapper, grouper, and other such fish which must be measured and is encouraged to send in data to the FWC for their studies. Also scientists that catch, tag, and release sharks “hold on to a fish that’s not allowed to be harvested” and they do measure it.

In “A call for leniency” I thank the author and Chuck Bangley for the needed support and seeing the situations more or less in my own shoes.

In “A teachable moment” I would like to say and think that I am not the heavy fishing pressure on the hammerhead population, I have only caught one in my entire life and I ensured its survival. I hope this “heavy fishing pressure” is referring to the legal and illegal long-line fishermen and I hope that that shady business can be ended completely.

To Austin Gallagher: You have made an educated response based upon the best of your knowledge and it is true that this fish was under a high level of stress, but I would like to point out that your statement about “Hammerheads have very small mouths, which limits the amount of oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide release” is not entirely accurate because most sharks do not actually use their mouths for breathing because they can get their oxygen with their mouths closed. Sharks flush water over their gills which is on the externals of the shark so the size of their mouth has little to nothing to do with their ability to breath.

Towards the people who have commented on this blog, I see different sides and I thank the people that understood that I am trying to conserve sharks and protect shark fishing rights and I tried my best and I am completely positive that that shark is swimming around at this very moment. To the other people who commented completely against me, that is your opinion but I believe your opinion may have changed if you were there to witness my situation and I hope that you could make the same decisions as I did rather than cutting the line, many yards away when we realized it was a hammerhead which was exhausted and in shallow water and probably would have had no chance of swimming away on its own, I chose to take the extra 5-10 minutes to bring this shark close enough to get as much of my rigging off of this shark without harming it and getting it into the current and assisting it in swimming, breathing, and relieving it of lactic acid build up so it had the chance to make a full recovery and break free from my iron grip and swim off steadily with what I believed was the certainty of its survival.

I want to apologize to our regular readers for stating something that should be incredibly obvious. Sharks in in no way connected to the global supply of atmospheric oxygen. If every single species of shark went extinct, there would be a variety of negative ecological effects, but a reduction in the global supply of atmospheric oxygen would not be among them. There is not a shred of scientific evidence supporting the idea that the loss of sharks would affect our oxygen supply- not a single scientific paper, not a single technical report. I’ve attended a dozen scientific conferences focusing on marine ecology or shark biology (including three international conferences) and I’ve never seen or heard of anyone presenting or even discussing this. To the best of my knowledge, not a single person who has authored a scientific paper or technical report supports this idea. Despite the complete lack of any kind of credible evidence, and despite many recent blog posts thoroughly debunking it (see here here here here here here and here ), this pseudoscience  just won’t die.

The premise of the sharks and oxygen claim is as follows:

A) Sharks, many of which are apex predators, are important in regulating marine food webs;
B) Phytoplankton, which create oxygen through photosynthesis, are in marine food webs;
C) Therefore, without sharks, phytoplankton populations will crash and we won’t have any more oxygen and we’ll all die.

A and B are reasonable enough- we know that under certain circumstances, apex predators can play important roles in structuring and regulating food webs, and we know that phytoplankton produce oxygen (though how much oxygen phytoplankton produces is another debate entirely). It’s part C of the sharks and oxygen claim that’s the problem.

This flawed leap in logic, like many other bits of pseudoscience, is loosely based on reality- specifically, the  concept of the “trophic cascade”. To explain a trophic cascade, consider a simple hypothetical food chain where grass is the primary producer, goats consume grass, and chupacabras consume goats. Trophic refers to “trophic level”, an alternative term for a step of a food chain. Grass would be trophic level 0, goats would be trophic level 1, and chupacabras would be trophic level 2. The cascade refers to ripple-like effects that travel throughout a food chain despite initially affecting only one level- for example, a change in chupacabra populations could eventually affect goat populations, which would eventually affect the grass.

One classic example of a marine trophic cascade comes from Estes et al. 1998. In the original kelp forest system, kelp provided habitat for countless species of fish. Sea urchins ate kelp, but their numbers were kept in check by sea otters. Once orca whales began preying upon sea otters, sea otter populations decreased. With fewer sea otters eating them, sea urchin populations increased- and ate all of the kelp.

Figure 1 from Estes et al. 1998. " (A) Changes in sea otter abundance over time at several islands in the Aleutian archipelago and concurrent changes in (B) sea urchin biomass, (C) grazing intensity, and (D) kelp density measured from kelp forests at Adak Island. Error bars in (B) and (C) indicate 1 SE. The proposed mechanisms of change are portrayed in the marginal cartoons—the one on the left shows how the kelp forest ecosystem was organized before the sea otter's decline and the one on the right shows how this ecosystem changed with the addition of killer whales as an apex predator. Heavy arrows represent strong trophic interactions; light arrows represent weak interactions."

A similar trophic cascade involving sharks was reported in Myers et al. 2007, though these conclusions are still considered controversial among the scientific community. According to this paper, in the Outer Banks, a decrease in shark populations led to an increase in the populations of these sharks’ prey (including cownose rays), and increased cownose ray populations led to a decrease in their prey (including scallops, which used to be the basis for an important coastal fishery).

Figure 1 from Heithaus et al. 2008, a review of shark ecosystem effects, referencing the Myers et al. 2007 conclusions. "The removal of marine predators can result in cascading effects through communities. As (a) catch rates of large sharks, such as blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus), declined during research surveys along the east coast of the United States, (b) cownose rays began to increase, leading to eventual declines in (c) catches of North Carolina bay scallops (Agropecten irradians). Population densities are expressed as proportions of the observed time series maximum. Trend lines are best fits from generalized linear (a,b) or additive models (c). In (b), filled symbols and line denote Delaware Bay surveys, and open symbols and dashed line are Pamlico Sound, NC, surveys. Field experiments confirmed that scallop declines resulted from increased ray predation [5

There have been numerous models and observational studies concerning the ecological effects that would result from the loss of apex predators (a partial list can be found in my sources below). Not a single one mentions even the remote possibility of a decline in the global supply of oxygen as a consequence of overfishing sharks. If you encounter someone promoting this (or any of a huge variety of pseudoscience claiming to be based on real science), ask them for a copy of the peer-reviewed scientific paper which supports it.

Technically speaking, just because no one has ever written about this phenomenon applying to sharks doesn’t, in of itself,  mean that it doesn’t apply to sharks.  However, there’s a very good reason why the loss of sharks won’t affect phytoplankton. Trophic cascades tend to occur in simple ecosystems. In the kelp forest, basically only one type of organism eats kelp from the base (sea urchins) and basically only one type of organism eats sea urchins (otters). Sharks fit into different ecosystems differently, and many of those ecosystem are quite complex, so the claim that the loss of sharks will have a uniform global effect is inaccurate at best.

Research from coral reef ecosystems shows than when predator/prey interactions are more  diffuse (for example, a system might have many herbivores, many secondary consumers, etc.) , trophic cascades don’t occur. Sharks may eat some herbivores, but they also eat animals that eat those herbivores, so the ecological effects would be less direct. Additionally, even if one prey species experiences “predation release”, other species with similar ecological niches are not affected in the same way.  In a complex ecosystem, sharks can be considered to be “trophically decoupled” from phytoplankton- their populations will not affect those of phytoplankton because the trophic relationships are diffuse and complex. Most marine ecosystems are quite complex, as seen below:

A cod-based food web in the North Atlantic, a region of the ocean with relatively FEW species. Image from David Lavigne, National Science and Engineering Research Council

In fact, emerging research in the field of fear ecology has shown that the most important effects resulting from the loss of sharks in an ecosystem may actually be indirect and related to behavior rather than population structure. In other words, sharks may exert more of an influence on an ecosystem by causing organisms in that system to alter their behavior to avoid being eaten. A great example of this comes from Dr. Mike Heithaus’ work in Australia. He found that animals like dolphins, sea turtles, and dugongs (relatives of manatees) will alter their preferred foraging ground during times of the year when large tiger sharks are present. They will forage in areas with less food but less chance of encountering a tiger shark.

Figure 2 from Heithaus et al. 2008. "Risk effects of tiger sharks on megagrazers in Shark Bay, Australia....Green turtles in good body condition (assumed to indicate a good energy state) shift to safe microhabitats with nutrient-poor seagrass when sharks are common"

Many species of sharks have been dangerously overharvested, resulting in alarmingly rapid and severe population declines. The loss of sharks can result in disruptions to the food web, resulting in ecological (and in many cases economic) problems. Conservationists are correct to be concerned about the loss of sharks and the effects this will have on our oceans, and we can and should work to protect these animals. However, sharks have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the global oxygen supply. There is absolutely no evidence in favor of this claim, and lots of evidence against it.

Spreading inaccurate claims in support of a worthy cause can only harm that cause by reducing credibility with the public and with policymakers. There are enough real reasons to protect sharks that we shouldn’t need to make up nonsense with no factual basis. I call on all responsible conservationists and advocates to stop perpetuating this pseudoscience.

Duffy, J. (2003). Biodiversity loss, trophic skew and ecosystem functioning Ecology Letters, 6 (8), 680-687 DOI: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00494.x

Estes, J. (1998). Killer Whale Predation on Sea Otters Linking Oceanic and Nearshore Ecosystems Science, 282 (5388), 473-476 DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5388.473

Frid, A., G. Baker, G., & M. Dill, L. (2008). Do shark declines create fear-released systems? Oikos, 117 (2), 191-201 DOI: 10.1111/j.2007.0030-1299.16134.x

Ferretti, F., Worm, B., Britten, G., Heithaus, M., & Lotze, H. (2010). Patterns and ecosystem consequences of shark declines in the ocean Ecology Letters DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01489.x

Heithaus, M., Frid, A., Wirsing, A., & Worm, B. (2008). Predicting ecological consequences of marine top predator declines Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23 (4), 202-210 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2008.01.003

Jennings, S., & Polunin, N. (1997). Impacts of predator depletion by fishing on the biomass and diversity of non-target reef fish communities Coral Reefs, 16 (2), 71-82 DOI: 10.1007/s003380050061

Laundre, J., Hernandez, L., & Ripple, W. (2010). The Landscape of Fear: Ecological Implications of Being Afraid~!2009-09-09~!2009-11-16~!2010-02-02~! The Open Ecology Journal, 3 (3), 1-7 DOI: 10.2174/1874213001003030001

Myers, R., Baum, J., Shepherd, T., Powers, S., & Peterson, C. (2007). Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean Science, 315 (5820), 1846-1850 DOI: 10.1126/science.1138657

Ritchie, E., & Johnson, C. (2009). Predator interactions, mesopredator release and biodiversity conservation Ecology Letters, 12 (9), 982-998 DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01347.x

Ruttenberg BI, Hamilton SL, Walsh SM, Donovan MK, Friedlander A, DeMartini E, Sala E, & Sandin SA (2011). Predator-induced demographic shifts in coral reef fish assemblages. PloS one, 6 (6) PMID: 21698165

Sergio, F., Caro, T., Brown, D., Clucas, B., Hunter, J., Ketchum, J., McHugh, K., & Hiraldo, F. (2008). Top Predators as Conservation Tools: Ecological Rationale, Assumptions, and Efficacy Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 39 (1), 1-19 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.39.110707.173545

Shepherd, T., & Myers, R. (2005). Direct and indirect fishery effects on small coastal elasmobranchs in the northern Gulf of Mexico Ecology Letters, 8 (10), 1095-1104 DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00807.x

Watch their answers below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AhPV5L3LnU

This ray-finned fish was my dinner last night. Photo by Andrew David Thaler

When Carl Sagan described our planet as a “pale blue dot” he was invoking the fact that, despite being called Earth, our world is mostly Ocean. The surface of the Earth is a little more than 70% water and the ocean accounts for 98-99% of our total biosphere–the volume of the planet that can support life. Most contemporary theories point to ocean ecosystems–like deep-sea hydrothermal vents–as the launching point for the emergence and evolution of life. Ocean processes dominate biological interactions, even among unwitting terrestrial actors. A new paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, revisits an old debate about the ocean biodiversity and challenges the notion the ray-finned fishes have a marine origin.

In Why are there so few fish in the sea? the authors begin with the seemingly innocuous question–why are there so many more species in terrestrial environments than in marine environments?  From there, they look at species counts, phylogenetic relationships, and diversification rates to determine the ancestral state of the most recent common ancestor of one fish class, Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fish. What they found was that, despite the vastly smaller habitat available for freshwater fish, the number of actinopterygian species found those ecosystems was roughly equivalent to the number of species found in marine systems. In both systems, the dominant groups are relative newcomers on the evolutionary stage, with superorder-level radiations happening between 111 – 150 million years ago.  Most surprising, the authors discovered that the most recent common ancestor of actinopterygians may have been a freshwater, not marine, fish. Ray-finned fishes may have invaded the ocean from lakes and rivers.

One claim that this paper most emphatically does not make is that fish evolved on land. While the term “terrestrial” is generally synonymous with land, in this paper it includes freshwater aquatic habitats–lakes, rivers, streams–that are (mostly) connected to marine systems. The authors used this framework to compare a group of fishes that occur in both marine and freshwater systems and use that comparison to provide a complementary perspective on the relationship between marine and true land-based ecosystems. This misinterpretation has led several news sources to run with variations on a misleading headline–”Most fish actually evolved on land, not the sea (now corrected)“. To be clear, all fish evolved in the ocean, but one recent class of bony fish may have originally radiated from freshwater ecosystems.

Headlines aside, I have a more fundamental problem with this paper, and that is the assumption that the authors establish as the intellectual motivation for their project. The paper is built around the observation that general biodiversity is greater in terrestrial ecosystems than in marine ecosystems, citing the ocean as containing only 15 – 20% of all species. I have two major problems with that argument. The first is that simple species counts are not necessarily the only, or the best, measure of biodiversity. The second is that it is very likely not true that terrestrial ecosystems have more species than marine ecosystems.

What we talk about when we talk about biodiversity

Biodiversity is one of many metrics we use to measure the health of an ecosystem. In general, it can loosely be defined as the degree of variation among organisms in a given region. One way to measure that variation is to count the number of species in a given region. This is Species Richness. You could also count the number of species, but than weight that by how many individuals of each species occur in the region. Species with more numerous individuals have a greater impact on the region than relatively rare species (though rare species can be important regulators of ecologic function, too). This is Species Abundance. These are relatively simple metrics to calculate, and they provide a simple, easy to compare baseline for biodiversity.

Many species, low diversity (ploink = arbitrary unit of genetic diversity)

Few species, high diversity (ploink = arbitrary unit of genetic diversity)

Richness and abundance are not the whole story. Biodiversity is a measure of variation among organisms within a region, and variation is not solely reflected by species-count. Take a look at these two phylogenetic trees. The one on the left shows a group of 10 species that are all fairly closely related to each other. The other shows only two species, but they are much more distantly related to each other. To put it another way, would you find more diversity at your family reunion having cocktails with 50 first cousins or on a 12-person jury in New York City?

Yes, number of species matters, but when discussing biodiversity we need to also consider the degree of variation among species (and, for that matter, the degree of variation within species). Evolution is a continuous, fluid process, and what are not yet species today may become species tomorrow. Conversely, what is a group of closely related species with overlapping ecologic functions today may become a single dominant species that out-competes the others tomorrow.

If we look at global animal biodiversity at the highest taxonomic level, we find that, broadly speaking, there are approximately 35 animal phyla. This number varies with new discoveries and may be significantly higher or lower depending on whether the person defining phyla is a lumper or a splitter, but 35 is commonly recognized as a reasonable current estimate for the total number of animal phyla. Of those, Acoelomorpha, Brachipoda, Bryozoa, Chaetognatha, Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Cycliophora, Echinodermata, Entoprocta, Gastrotricha, Gnathostomulida, Hemichordata, Kinorhyncha, Loricifera, Orthonectida, Phoronida, Placozoa, Porifera, Priapulida, Rhombozoa, and Xenoturbella are either exclusively marine, or mostly marine with some freshwater groups. That’s 21 phyla, or 60% of all known animal evolutionary biodiversity, that calls the oceans its home. In contrast there is only a single phylum (Onychophora) that occurs exclusively on land. Perhaps that better question is “why is there so little evolutionary biodiversity on land?”

But is it NumberWang?

So, what if we assume that species richness is the metric we want to use for global biodiversity? If that is the case, then are there really more species on land than in the ocean? Even within this paper, the authors argue that Actinopterygians account for 96% of all fish and roughly 50% of all vertebrates. Half of all vertebrates are subsumed by this one class of fish! So, without even including sharks and other elasmobranchs, lobe finned fish, jawless fish, chimeras, and a host of other vertebrates, we’ve already accounted for half of all vertebrates. Add those other groups in, which, remarkably, still only consist of 4% of all fishes, and we’re slightly over half of all vertebrates that aren’t terrestrial. But that is only a tiny portion of the diversity of life.

So where does this idea that 75 – 85% of all species are terrestrial come from? For animals, the short answer is insects, perhaps the most specious class of animals, with an estimated 6 to 10 million different species, account for almost half of all known species on Earth. Looking at all eukaryotic organisms, plants hold their own at almost 19% of all known species. Those are some pretty big numbers, but let’s take a step back and look at who’s doing the describing, counting, and cataloging. Terrestrial organisms, that live, work, and play largely in the terrestrial world, are responsible for the catalog of life on earth. This means that, in our exploration of the natural world, there is a profound sampling bias towards terrestrial species.

How profound is this bias? Last year an entire kingdom, Cryptomycota, was discovered that is almost exclusively found in aquatic environments. In general, fungi are almost universally regarded in these diversity estimates as being exclusively terrestrial, but dozens of new papers (including one by me) are finding new fungal species in marine systems. The recently completed Census of Marine Life cataloged 250,000 marine species, and estimates that there are at least another 750,000 to go. This would practically match the current counts for insects and plants, and with a potential for upwards of 10 million marine species, dwarf all other estimates. And that’s without including the estimated 1 billion marine microbes. Those numbers also don’t include the oft-forgotten freshwater ecosystems, which the paper under discussion demonstrated hold half of all ray-finned fish, among many others.

Overall, the land is looking like a pretty lonely place to be.

Let’s get back to the Evolution River Show

Ok, so I didn’t like the framework this paper was built around, but what about the study itself? The findings of Vega and Wiens are pretty cool and, while counter intuitive, make evolutionary and ecologic sense. Freshwater systems, being physically isolated from each other by land and having greater temporal variability should drive more rapid diversification than relatively stable open ocean ocean ecosystems. When connectivity is high, like it is for mobile, pelagic species, you would expect rates of genetic differentiation to be lower. What they found was, despite the total available habitat being much lower in freshwater than marine ecosystems, the number of species and the rate of speciation was roughly equivalent. This means that factors other than freshwater/marine ecosystem are driving speciation.

The more surprising finding was that the basal members of the actinopterygian are all derived from freshwater systems, suggesting that 96% of fish can trace their evolutionary ancestry back to a freshwater ancestor. Only after diversifying did the actinopterygians than radiate back into the open ocean.

It is unfortunate that the authors hung an otherwise very solid study on the framework of “why there are so few marine species” because that first principle shapes their attempts to interpret their data. Assuming that freshwater ecosystems are an appropriate proxy for terrestrial ecosystems when comparing freshwater and marine species, the data indicate not that there are fewer species in marine systems, but that there are roughly equal numbers of marine and terrestrial species, at least when talking about vertebrates. Ecologic factors could drive the original invasion of freshwater systems by proto-actinopterygians. Freshwater ecosystems would have been an unoccupied niche, free of some of the largest and fiercest marine predators to ever live (including that 300-million year old mainstay, the shark). By occupying a niche that effectively excluded the dominant aquatic predators, actinopterygians could have diversified until they filled that niche, before radiating back out into the ocean, but that is entirely speculative on my part.

Overall, Why are there so few fish in the sea? presents a fascinating case study in evolution that suffers from a terra-centric view of biodiversity.

Carrete Vega, G., & Wiens, J. (2012). Why are there so few fish in the sea? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.0075

Too many dogfish caught too fast? Photo by B. Sanders (spinydogfish.org)

Chalk this up as yet another example of me missing the boat on something I should really be posting.  Earlier, I posted on the recent dramatic increase in the spiny dogfish quota, then the closure of the fishery in North Carolina a mere three months later.  It turns out that NMFS quietly closed the entire Atlantic dogfish fishery four days later.  Distracted by Science Online and general grad school tomfoolery, I totally missed it.  Thankfully Shark Year Magazine was on it, picking up my slack.

After a concerted effort by commercial fishermen to raise the dogfish quota, it was fished out in three months.  The closure comes before the time of peak dogfish abundance in Virginia and North Carolina waters, and well short of the end of the season (the dogfish fishery runs from April-May).  The closure of this fishery is noteworthy for a couple reasons.

Spiny dogfish are a contentious fishery to manage.  The slow growth and late maturity of female dogfish makes it easy to fish out adults of this species before they ever have a chance to reproduce, and this is compounded by the fact that females are the largest individuals and therefore the most valuable to fishermen.  However, the sheer unpopularity of spiny dogfish among fishermen means that the motivation for fishing the species is often not commerce, but pest control.  It’s tough to sell dogfish conservation to commercial fishermen.  The quick closure of the Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery is likely due to one of two possibilities, which lie on the extremes of the debate:

1 – The conservationists are right: the increased quota was too much, too soon and the dogfish population has not recovered to a level that can sustain that much fishing.

2 – The fishermen are right: even the increased quota is too low to allow fishermen to make dogfish fishing worth their while, and the quick closure shows how much managers have underestimated the stock.

Whichever way the cause for the fishery closure swings, something obviously went wrong in the management process.  Fishermen are already irate at news from NOAA/NMFS delivering a nasty surprise for the Atlantic cod fishery, and their credibility may be in question here too.  The huge amount of uncertainty inherent in fisheries science does create situations that shock managers and fishermen alike.  However, quotas are set by the regional fishery management councils, and are subject to the influence of politics as much as science.  Fishermen have seats on these councils (as they should), so quotas are usually the result of negotiation between scientists and the needs of the industry.  Imperfect science, a compromised quota, or a little of both lead to this situation.

Another angle on this story is the fact that the Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery is still under sustainability assessment by the Marine Stewardship Council (a story I’ve been following for a little while).  This puts the MSC in a tough position: if they classify the fishery as sustainable after such a quick closure, it throws their whole selection process into doubt.  Like NMFS, the MSC has had its share of controversy.

Of course all of these issues are ultimate the result of trying to count and eat a resource we can’t even see 90% of the time.  Hey, if fisheries management was easy, everyone would be doing it.

If this blog were a spiny dogfish, it would be somewhere in the 40 cm range in length, and would be swimming around in deep water along the continental shelf break.  Its diet would be made up mostly of krill and other deepwater invertebrates, but it may begin to dabble in eating smaller fish.  If this dogfish were female, it would still be looking at another 10 years before reaching reproductive maturity.

Thanks to all the readers, commenters, and Twitter followers who have helped motivate me to keep this blog going.  You all keep me from getting distracted and wandering off.  Here’s to another two years.

The first question whenever animals are observed getting into groups is why.  With fishes, the motivation is often protection through safety in numbers, though this logic breaks down for predatory fishes, especially those with as few natural predators as sharks.  Moving around in groups may also increase the efficiency of finding food; an aggregation of sharks is a lot more noses in the water sniffing out blood, and if one finds food all might share in the spoils.  This theory can be problematic because hunting in groups also increases competition for food within the group, and piles of ecology papers have been written reconciling the costs and benefits of pack hunting.  There is also the chance that the fish are in a group by sheer chance, clustering around shelter or a particularly productive feeding area.

Lemon sharks (Negaprion brevirostris) are a popular species to conduct behavior studies on due to their general hardiness in experimental conditions, and the fact that researching them guarantees you get to work in a field site as nice as Bimini.  Guttridge et al. (2009) conducted an elegant experiment at general shark research badass Samuel Gruber‘s field lab in the Bahamas (he’s part of the “et al.”) designed to determine if lemons actively seek out other sharks to hang out with or if they group based on some non-social motivation (food, habitat, etc.).  They did this by setting up an enclosure in which the test shark (an age-1 or age-2-3 lemon shark pup) is place in the center, with a side enclosure containing other lemon sharks at one side and an empty enclosure at the other.  They then measured how much time the shark spent in different areas of the enclosure.  In some trials the lemon sharks in the side enclosure were replaced with nurse sharks (Ginglymostoma cirratum) to see if the test shark preferred the company of its own species or if any shark common to the area would do.

The setup for the behavior experiment in Guttridge et al. (2009). From the original paper.

The results of this experiment demonstrated some interesting aspects of social behavior in sharks.  First, the test sharks spent most of their time at the side of the enclosure with the other sharks, but only if the sharks in that area were other lemons.  The lemon shark pups were attracted to the presence of other lemon sharks.  This was only the case for the age-2-3 sharks, however.  Age-1 sharks showed no particular preference for the parts of the enclosure nearest the other sharks.  The authors hypothesized that newborn lemon sharks are more concerned with environmental conditions when picking habitat, while older sharks (presumably higher on the food chain) group together for social reasons.  Sharks like being with other sharks, and are able to tell the difference between species.

Blacktip reef shark communities in a section of reef in Moorea, French Polynesia. Note subcommunities in the large blue community. From Mourier et al. (2011).

According to a new paper (the one referenced by Jason Goldman), sharks can not only recognize their own species, but other individual sharks.  Mourier et al. (2011) showed this by photographing blacktip reef sharks in a section of reef in Moorea, French Polynesia.  This allowed the researchers to identify individual sharks based on color patterns, scarring, and other visual clues.  By matching the photos up with the geographical locations where they were taken, Mourier et al. (2011) showed that individual sharks would associate with the same other individuals regularly, and were able to extrapolate that data out to form a map of the shark communities on the reef.  Even more interesting, one of the communities appears to be made up of two or more sub-communities.  The take home message – blacktip reef sharks apparently make friends with other sharks, and can form communities with smaller “neighborhoods.”

Lesser spotted dogfish. Cute little buggers, aren't they? From oceaneyephoto.com.

So sharks not only recognize their own species, but also individuals, and show preference for spending time with the same individuals on a regular basis.  The motivation for shark aggregations, at least in the case of lemon and blacktip reef sharks, appears to be primarily social.  But why would such a behavior evolve?  Jacoby et al. (2010) kept male and female lesser spotted dogfish (Scyliorhinus canicula, actually a catshark) in captivity and observed their interactions.  Like the blacktip reef shark study, they found that catsharks would associate with the same individuals on a regular basis, and appeared to be more relaxed in the presence of familiar sharks.  Females associated with strange sharks were more agitated in the presence of males.  The authors suggested from these results that female catsharks may band together to resist the attentions of males, a good idea given how rough shark courtship can be.

All of these studies point towards sharks being able to form complex social bonds, all the way to the point of recognizing and associating with other individuals of the same species.  All three species in these studies are relatively sedentary species, showing high site fidelity and short migrations.  It would be interesting to see if these same behavioral patterns would show up in more highly migratory species, but some of these species do show highly social behavior (i.e. spiny dogfish, hammerheads, great whites).  In any case, sharks seem to be capable of socializing just as much as the scientists who study them.

References

Guttridge, T., Gruber, S., Gledhill, K., Croft, D., Sims, D., & Krause, J. (2009). Social preferences of juvenile lemon sharks, Negaprion brevirostris Animal Behaviour, 78 (2), 543-548 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.06.009

Jacoby, D., Busawon, D., & Sims, D. (2010). Sex and social networking: the influence of male presence on social structure of female shark groups Behavioral Ecology, 21 (4), 808-818 DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arq061

Mourier, J., Vercelloni, J., & Planes, S. (2011). Evidence of social communities in a spatially structured network of a free-ranging shark species Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.11.008

Good times. From scio12.com.

I’ve officially survived my first Science Online, and returned mostly intact.   This gathering of scientists, journalists, bloggers, and others came together in Raleigh from Wednesday to Saturday, and created one of the most unique conference experiences I’ve had so far.  Never have I seen such a diverse group of people have so much in common.  Never have I felt that sitting on Twitter while someone is giving a presentation was absolutely vital.  Never have I heard so many references to duck genitalia.

One of the things I try to do here is provide good coverage of the conferences I attend.  I’m going to try to do justice to Science Online, but there was quite a bit going on, both online and in the physical world.  The #scio12 hashtag is still pumping out tweets, so be sure to check there for the inevitable flood of recap posts with different perspectives from mine.  Some names may be changed to protect the not-so-innocent.  On with the recap.

Rather than take my usual path and recap sessions I attended in chronological order, I’m going to arrange this recap by the overall theme of what I learned.  Here goes:

Tips, Tricks, and Tools of the Trade – The one overarching trait of everyone at Science Online is that everyone in attendance is some combination of scientist and communicator.  Therefore many of the sessions involved improving and targeting the communication of science.  These ranged from equipment and techniques to make writing easier to the most effective use of humor to communicate complex ideas.

The most technical session I attended was probably the one moderated by Brian Switek, Maryn McKenna, and David Dobbs, which discussed strategies for paring down those huge piles of data, quotes, and literature into one cohesive book.  I kind of wish I’d gone to this before starting on my thesis (I’d probably have actually finished in May).  David Shiffman’s session on social media as a conservation tool was about half technical tips on how to get such a thing started, and half frank discussion of the role of scientists as advocates (more on that later).  Two other sessions dealt with humor: Brain Mallow and John Rennie lead a discussion about the use of humor to communicate science, while David Manly and Dr. Rubidium used clips from Mel Brooks movies to illustrate some very serious advice about how to keep your communication style from getting stale.  On a more serious note, Janet returned with Holly Bik to chat about how to deal with institutional resistance to blogging and other social media.  I lucked out in that my advisor actually likes using the internet to get science out there (and because he reads this, I should also add that he’s the greatest advisor ever) but in other places bloggers have been less fortunate.  There were some neat tricks I learned from this session, such as saying you’re a writer for Scientific American (or whatever blog network you may be on) or listing yourself as the “editor of a website” (your blog) on your CV.  I’ve been keeping all of this advice in mind as I write this post, and will be factoring it in as this little blog hopefully continues to get larger, older, and more dangerous.

Communication is Complicated – Getting the technical stuff down is all well and good, but the media world is a wild place, and science communicators need to know the lay of the land and be ready for the dangers.  This was touched on a little during David’s session, which turned to a conversation about the balance between advocating good science and pushing for a better world.  It may be tempting to not report a piece of data that doesn’t necessarily fit your stance, but you and everyone else advocating for the same goal will lose all credibility in the process.  As scientists, we are obligated to report the truth, dammit.  A similar session by Amy Freitag and Janet Stemwedel dealt with the use and ethics of citizen science, and in that case credibility is all about how well you treat your citizen scientists.

What complicates communication is that it involves other people.  Scientist communicators can’t get by on simply lecturing to a passive audience, and the audience can be an unpredictable beast.  The internet is prowled by roving packs of trolls devoted to derailing conversations about anything that might be somewhat controversial, including such compulsory science topics as climate change, vaccines, and anything, anything related to sex.  Kate Clancy and SciCurious lead a session on writing risky topics (some of which can take you by surprise, thanks to some internet dwellers’ tendency to be offended by anything), and how to deal with problem commenters, personal attacks, and even the occasional stalker.  Overall, the idea is to keep the conversation going, including participants you don’t agree with, as long as the whole thing stays civil.  Of course, the trolls can get nasty, and are particularly problematic for women in science.  There’s a disturbing amount of old-school misogyny still kicking around in the sciences, and Kate came back to take it on with Christie Wilcox.  Because the internet is a huge, relatively anonymous place, it can be tough to tell whether this situation is getting better.  Worse, the old strategy of “not feeding the trolls” doesn’t work when the trolls are organized (often swarming posts on their topic of choice).  Women (or any minority, for that matter) can also be benevolently “othered” (i.e. “isn’t it nice that you’re a woman in engineering”) usually in misguided attempts to look more diverse.  The best thing the average person can do is just be a decent internet citizen and not condone the actions of a few insecure assholes.

The most contentious relationship of all can occur when communication science goes through the press.  Scientists and journalists can have a very dysfunctional relationship, with scientists paranoid about their results being twisted for the sake of the story, while journalists don’t want to have to simply parrot everything said by the scientists.  Miriam Goldstein and Craig McClain, both from Deep Sea News, ran a session on just that, and this topic was revisited during the closing plenary panel.  At times I was seriously concerned that these often-heated discussions would end in a West Side Story-style street fight, with scientists and journalists advancing menacingly towards each other from across the room while snapping.  The only major breakthrough seemed to occur at one of the many after-parties, during which some of the journalists’ minds were blown by the revelation that scientists working at universities often don’t get to look at the press releases about their own research (way to go, Christie).  Further proof that alcohol can solve anything.

The Social Science – At any conference, it’s great to meet your research idols and see them as “real people,” and it’s just as good to meet new and exciting people.  This was my first Science Online, but I’m perversely proud of the reputation those in the oceanic blogosphere have built at this event, and that I was able to help this time.  I’m talking about the infamous DSNsuite.  And really, it’s a valuable service, because it continues the conversations started during the day into an arena where people can relax and be a little ridiculous.  Not everything in this section will involve the DSNsuite, but I’ll make sure to be discrete with names to protect professional reputations.  Basically, here’s a very incomplete list of funny stuff that happened at Science Online:

- One respected researcher attempted to power-lift another respected researcher for a photo op, resulting in an unfortunate but all-to-predictable tumble.  After hitting the ground, respected researcher B got up, brushed themselves off, and left for a bit like a cat that doesn’t stick the landing and wanders off to contemplate how in pain it really is.  This being Science Online, the unfortunate tumbler quickly found an actual medical doctor to make sure they were okay.

- The second day of the conference, a mysterious Twitter feed calling itself Science Online is On It appeared (same concept as the amusing The NY Times is On It), and took it upon itself to make sure no one at the conference was taking themselves too seriously.  As if to really drive this point home, ScioOnIt made its first appearance, within minutes of the session on women bloggers in science ending, by asking for people to tweet in their favorite Science Online hotties.  ScioOnIt would continue to be occasionally funny for the rest of the conference (and is still going right now).  Full disclosure: at one point I was publicly declared a bigger science hottie than PZ Myers by this source (so it can’t be all bad?).

- Thanks to a recent expansion in their distribution, I got to introduce the science bloggers to Narragansett beer.  You’re welcome.

- The food and social situation at this conference was great.  Three free square meals a day, plus unlimited beverages at the socials.  Why can’t every conference do this?  Also, the opening banquet at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences was fantastic.

- Several of the ocean bloggers and a few innocent bystanders engaged in a discussion about how we’d like to see a tuna-safe dolphin fishery.

- Everyone is really friendly at this conference.  The keynote speaker, Mireya Mayor, hung out for most of the week, making her the coolest keynote speaker ever.  I also had the opportunity to meet some of my science communication heroes, including the minds behind Out of Context Science and SeaMonster, and some very smart people with some very cool ideas, including some from outside my discipline.

- The Open Mic Night (headed up by ocean blogger/sea shanty slinger/my hotel roommate Kevin Zelnio) was a blast, featuring out-of-tune sea shanties, Johnny Cash sing-alongs, and a science-themed version of “Bust a Move.”  If anyone has video of any of this, please send it along.

- The storytelling session from The Monti was highly entertaining, including some romantic advice from Bug Girl.  Apparently something called revenge crabs exists.  Ew.  Also, I commiserated with MC Jeff Polish, who looked and sounded exactly like Ray Romano, that I felt his pain since I look like Dan Akroyd.

There’s a lot more I could put up here and I may be editing more into this post in the very near future.  For now, I hope this little recap has adequately portrayed this epic conference.  If I’ve missed your favorite moment, by all means recap it in the comments.  Now if you don’t mind, I’ve still got sleep to catch up on to make up for Science Online.

Edits – 12:30, Jan 24th.  I forgot a whole bunch of stuff, so the recap has been considerably expanded.  I blame Science Online withdrawal.

Scio12.com

Later this week I’ll be journeying to Raleigh, North Carolina for Science Online 2012, a celebration of all things science on the internet.  Rather than the traditional “see a bunch of talks” format that I’m used to at conferences, Science Online is composed of a series of discussion sessions, with the presenters as moderators rather than, well, presenters.  The full agenda can be seen here, and includes such diverse topics as cybersecurity, writing for popular magazines, dealing with journalists, blogging for conservation, the state of women in science blogging, figuring out your audience, and more.  Audience members are encouraged to join the discussion in each session, and I’m looking forward to seeing that in action.

The extracurricular activities are pretty slick too.  The lab and museum tours include the Duke Lemur Center, several of the Triangle-area labs and museums, and even a visit to a tattoo parlor well-known for producing awesome science-themed designs.  Also, there will be an open mic, which I will be playing at (I’m thinking a short set of ocean-themed punk/alternative songs, since traditional sea shanties will be well-covered already.  Any song suggestions welcome).

As with previous conferences, I will do what I can supplying regular updates here and on the Twitter feed, so stay tuned (Science Online is, as you might guess, pretty encouraging of live-blogging the sessions).  Look for the #scio12 hashtag.  For those who are n00bz like me, here’s a helpful guide.  Looking forward to meeting some of the people I’ve been reading.

The discovery of deep-sea dwelling extremeophiles is a fascinating tale to share. One of the earliest discoveries in this field was the discovery of Giant Tubeworms, Riftia pachyptila by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, using their deep-sea diving submersible, Alvin. Here we relieve the history of this momentous discovery.

Alvin Sets Sail

Alvin on one of its dives. Photo courtesy of Mark Spear, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In 1977, a small team of marine biologists in the Pacific Ocean made a discovery that would change the world forever. Oceanography could not be any less like the cruise industry and conditions inside the underwater pod, Alvin were uncomfortable and cramped. But suddenly the sight of a previously unknown life form made it look like the greatest place on earth. Manning the pod that day were scientists Jack Corliss and Kathy Crane who were intending to navigate to the deepest part of this part of the ocean to see if they could answer some basic questions about the ocean’s chemical make-up and issues surrounding its temperature. They navigated the mother ship to an are of the Galapagos Rift in the eastern Pacific. Crane stayed onboard the ship, while Corliss, an Oregon State University geologist, climbed into the Alvin and began his descent into the deep. Crane, a graduate of the Scripps Institute of Iceanography was searching for ‘hydrothermal vents‘, underwater fissures in the earths crust that emit geothermally heated water.

Strange Sight

The team had spotted something anomalous that looked like clam shells on the imaging equipment, but thought little of it, joking that the shells had probably been thrown overboard by the Navy after a clam feast.  But as Corliss got closer, he peered through the gloom to find that the clams were not only alive, but huge in size. Some were well over a foot long. Other life forms were living nearby, such as mussels and anemones, in an environment so inhospitable that no scientist had even considered it possible for life to exist. Corliss and his colleagues were amazed and delicately collected samples of all life forms they could see for further analysis. They named the area “The Garden of Eden“.

Giant worms

Giant tube worms, (Riftia pachyptila)...Source Unknown

Corliss noticed, as he was collecting samples, a sea of worm-like creatures, white in color but with beautiful red-tipped plumes. They moved about in the water like plants, swaying and undulating, intrigued by the life-form, he took  a sample. When the alvin surfaced, the team contacted Woods Hole to show biologists there what they had found. It was only then that they realized that they had come across a previously unknown life-form in the giant worms, one that was capable of surviving on pure hydrogen sulfide.

How on Earth do they Survive on Hydrogen Sulfide?

The team was delighted to have made such an amazing discovery and biologists at the Institute and all over the world began experimenting on the worms to try and find out how they managed to live in such a hostile environment that was totally devoid of light. The answer is that these tube-worms that can grow up to seven feet long live by a process called ‘chemosynthesis‘, which is the process of using bacteria to synthesize hydrogen sulfide, creating carbon compounds that the worms feed on. The bacteria that live inside the worms account for half the worms body weight. The worms have no digestive tract but use their red feather-like plumes to gather hydrogen sulfide from the geothermally heated water being emitted from the hydrothermal vents. Some oxygen is used in their respiration process, this they find dissolved in the water  which was filtered down from the surface of the sea where light aids the production of oxygen.

New Frontiers

The discovery of life in such an extreme environment led to a new frontier in biological science and soon the Galapagos Rift was swarming with big name scientific institutions, all keen to be at the forefront of the new research area. Now the study of extremeophiles  is popular amongst students and research scientists alike, but it all started with the Alvin and the Garden of Eden.

Video file

Follow this link to see the BBC video of tube worms in their natural habitat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Giant_tube_worm#p004htvq

Further reading

Woods hole oceanographic institution – Giant worms

Starting off all the way at the top, NOAA Fisheries Administrator Eric Schwaab announced that the goal of having a management plan for all federally managed fisheries has been met.  Previously, some data poor or primarily bycatch fisheries had no set catch limits of management plans.  Now there is theoretically at least some accountability for any species landed in the U.S.  Some of these fisheries remain data-poor, and fishery complexes are still a problem in cases where life history varies among the target species, but there is now a framework to potentially manage everything.  As Amy at Southern Fried Science points out, this announcement also has the distinction of being one of the few truly bipartisan government actions in the past few years.  And this one doesn’t even involve indefinite detention of American citizens.  There will be kinks to work out and bumps in the road, but this is quite the milestone.

RI Department of Environmental Management

Scaling down to state level, my old home state of Rhode Island has a gap in fisheries management that is leading to potential big problems for the state’s fishermen and marine environment.  According to this thorough summary and call to action at The Dented Bucket, pair-trawlers, huge fishing vessels targeting entire schools of Atlantic herring, are allowed to operate within the 3-mile boundary of Rhode Island’s state waters.  This includes an apparent “hot spot” that is actually inside Narragansett Bay, where these large vessels can be a major disruption to the smaller fishing vessels typically found within state waters.  What’s more, this spot is at the mouth of the Narrow River, an estuary that leads up to Gilbert Stuart Brook, one of the state’s major herring runs (and the site of a fish ladder popular with area schools).  J.P. is calling for rational action to convince the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to ban these bulls in the China shop (from out of state, no less) until a better management strategy can be developed.  Unfortunately I’m no longer a Rhode Island resident and can’t get more directly involved than spreading the word, but if you are a citizen of the Ocean State start talking to your friendly neighborhood DEM official.

North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries

We end our fisheries management news update at my new home, where the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries has issued a proclamation closing that state’s spiny dogfish fishery north of Browns Inlet and cutting the daily limit for vessels fishing south of the inlet to 500 lbs.  Browns Inlet is south of Bogue Inlet and Morehead City, and this proclamation effectively closes the dogfish fishery in North Carolina.  Dogfish can be fairly common south of Cape Hatteras to Cape Lookout, and during the winter can be found as far south as Georgia on a regular basis, but the vast majority of the population inhabits waters north of Cape Lookout.  Even if dogfish can be found in the open area, the daily catch limit has still be dramatically reduced.  This comes frighteningly close on the heels of a 50% hike in the dogfish quota (after a proposed 75% hike, yikes), which only happened in late November.  Were rosy projections of the health of the dogfish stock overblown, leading to managers having to scramble to keep fishing mortality down?  Or is this an artifact of fewer dogfish migrating into North Carolina waters due to a warmer than average winter?  It will be interesting to see the reactions of other states in the fishery.  If other states (particularly Massachusetts and Virginia) close their fisheries early like North Carolina, it may mean that the dogfish stock wasn’t ready for increased quotas.  Of course some will still argue that there are too many.

Catch limits and herring trawlers and dogfish, oh my.  Lots going on in fisheries management lately.

Determining the age of a fish generally involves finding some hard part of the body that grows incrementally with the fish.  Usually these structures produce growth rings, similar to those on a tree stump.  In bony fish, the otolith is usually used to determine age (and can also be used to find out all kinds of other neat stuff).  Sharks, having cartilaginous skeletons, have very few hard parts that reliably lay down annual growth rings.  Usually the vertebrae are used, but in Squaloid sharks the spines have also been found to lay down growth rings.  But which method works better?

Dorsal fin spines from Atlantic and Pacific spiny dogfish with growth rings highlighted. From marinebiodiversity.ca.

In spiny dogfish, the rear dorsal spine is used for ageing due to being longer and usually in better shape than the spine on the first dorsal fin.  Since spines are external structures, they’re a lot more convenient to get at than vertebrae, but are also exposed to the elements, where growth rings can be obscured by the wear and tear of living in the ocean.  Equations to compensate for spine wear have been developed by researchers working on Pacific spiny dogfish, and the same principles have been applied to the Atlantic species.  The classic paper by Nammack et al. (1985) established the growth curves and determined the ages at maturity for male and female dogfish using a combination of dorsal spines and observations of the reproductive organs.  Nammack et al. (1985) estimated that Atlantic spiny dogfish live to about 40 years and reach a maximum length of 79.9 cm for males and 100.5 cm for females.  These findings have persisted ever since, and this paper remains the main cited source when references dogfish age and growth in the Atlantic.

Around the mid to late-80s, spiny dogfish came under significant fishing pressure and showed signs of population decline by the late 90s.  When fish are subject to intense fishing pressure, the population often shows a response called Lee’s Phenomenon, in which fish apparently mature at younger ages and smaller sizes.  This is the result of selectively removing the slower-growing, larger individuals through fishing and is significant changes in the age and growth schedule are a sign of overfishing.  The most recent growth curve (Nammack et al. 1985) was generated before overfishing of spiny dogfish, there was a need for an updated curve to reflect possible changes.

Bubley et al. (2011) sought to do just that, while also checking to see if dorsal fin spines really are the best way to find out how old a dogfish is.  To do this, they checked age estimates based on vertebral rings against those from dorsal spines.  What they found was that worn dorsal spines tended to overestimate the age of the dogfish in this study, estimating a slightly smaller size at a given age.  This may be a result of the equations used to compensate for dorsal spine wear (the general idea is that larger individuals have more worn-out spines), which may lead to overestimating size at a given age.

Spiny dogfish vertebral section, with growth rings highlighted. From Bubley et al. 2011.

Interestingly, the growth curve generated by Bubley et al. (2011) showed a higher growth rate for spiny dogfish, but only for females.  In the spiny dogfish fishery, females are selectively targeted due to being larger and heavier than the males.  The increased growth rate for females may be a response to the loss of slower-growing individuals to the fishery, and may be evidence of Lee’s Phenomenon, though the authors noted that their study was not designed to determine the cause of any change in growth parameters.  Also, though the maximum size for females was comparable to that found by Nammack et al. (1985), the maximum male size was considerably larger, at 94.23 cm.

So what have we learned from Bubley et al. (2011)?  First, that it’s important to keep your age and growth calculations up to date, especially when dealing with a species subjected to fishing pressure.  Second, make sure the ageing method is the best for the task at hand: spines may be more convenient, but the wear and necessary fudging of the calculation to compensate make them less accurate than vertebrae.  The observed differences in female growth rate and maximum male size may be a result of fishing pressure or may simply be an artifact of the different method, but are certainly worth noting.  With a species like spiny dogfish that requires careful management, you definitely want to make sure you’re not doing it wrong.

References

Bubley, W., Kneebone, J., Sulikowski, J., & Tsang, P. (2011). Reassessment of spiny dogfish Squalus acanthias age and growth using vertebrae and dorsal-fin spines Journal of Fish Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1095-8649.2011.03171.x

Nammack, M. F., Musick, J. A., & Colvocoresses, J. A. (1985). Life History of Spiny Dogfish off the Northeastern United States Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, 114, 367-376

Coincidentally the Moth Week corresponds with the Lepidopterists’ Society National Meeting being held this year in Denver, Colorado.  Naturally, everyone will be headed out at night to look for moths.  If you’re in Denver and want to see what it is we do, please get a hold of me, I will probably be attending the meeting this year.

chomp

This subspecies was originally described in 1998 by the late, great George T. Austin as L. heteronea rutila.  Given however that rutila more or less = rutilus, it was later determined rutila was actually unavailable and the subspecies name was changed to austin in honor of George.

male Lycaena heteroena austin (Lycaenidae)

female Lycaena heteroena austin

Of particular note was a wonderful talk given by the acclaimed bug blogger, Bug Girl!  It was wonderful to meet her in person and hear about her own experiences as a blogger.  I encourage you to watch the draft of her talk yourself, if you haven’t already!

The authors traveled to 46 localities across the Japanese archipelago and collected all 16 known endemic species, a few new species, and quite possibly a new genus.  Finding these moths in the wild is not all that difficult if you know how to find the habitat and how not to fall off slippery rocks; but once you do find the spot the moths can be abundant.  Micropterigidae are unsurprisingly associated with their bryophytes, which occur in moist habitats along streams and rivers.  The very nature of a minute and slow moving animal in isolated pockets lends itself to allopatric speciation.  Many microlepidoptera barely fly off of their host plant and even when they do they are not known for long distance dispersal.  While the majority of genera and species are completely isolated across Japan there are a few instances where the genus Paramartyria occurs within populations of Issikiomartyria.  While it is unknown precisely how these species might partition their host resources it is very likely to be a temporal difference in life-cycles.  Here in California there is a vastly confusing complex of Apodemia butterflies that comprise a handful of species and (of course) subspecies that are partitioned on the same plant by spring and fall breeding seasons.

Impressively, every micropterigid collected as larvae were found only on the Conocephalum conicum species of liverwort, in spite of there being up to fourteen other bryophyte species available in the same habitat.  It had been long understood that the Asian Micropterigidae fed on liverworts, but the extent of their host specificity had never been quantified.  Feeding behavior appears to be the same across all of the surveyed species, with caterpillars grazing along the top of the bryophytes consuming the upper tissue layers.

Phylogenetic analysis of the COI, 18S and EF-1α genes generated highly congruent trees using multiple analytical methods.  It appears that the endemic Japanese genera and the Conocephalum feeding strategy form a well supported monophyletic clade (in green).  In short, the radiation of the host-specific Micropterigidae coincide with the separation, uplift, and isolation of the Japanese landmass roughly 20 million years ago.  It could not have been difficult to propose the hypothesis that the diversity of the Japanese Micropterigidae could only be as old as the island itself; and it’s also an accepted fact today that allopatric speciation happens more commonly than once thought.  But quantifying these theories and explaining how and why this happens is exactly what science is about.

Literature Cited

Imada Y, Kawakita A, & Kato M (2011). Allopatric distribution and diversification without niche shift in a bryophyte-feeding basal moth lineage (Lepidoptera: Micropterigidae). Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 278 (1721), 3026-33 PMID: 21367790

Scoble, MJ. (1992). The Lepidoptera: Form, function, and diversity. Oxford Univ. Press.

Here is a short interview with me in a really hot tent with lots of kids (who must have given me this cold I now have).  Perhaps my wild estimate of a possible 15,000 species in the US is on the high side, but it’s not impossible.

Maroga setiotricha (Xyloryctidae)

Another huge Australian “microlep”, (probably) Maroga setiotricha: Xylorictidae – measuring in at 60mm.  With wings like this they must make formidable fliers. According to the Xyloryctinae Moths of Australia blog the larvae are stem borers into Acacia sp. (Mimosaceae).  This specimen was collected in November of 1962 by Ed Ross in Canoona, Queensland.

or better yet Research Blogging meets BET:Uncut. Essentially we’ll be taking a look at Sex, Dating, and Relationships as depicted in popular culture and hip hop music and pointing out how examples of evolutionary biology principles at play. To start things out, I gave the students an introduction to

Mate Choice & Mate Competition as explained by Roxanne, Roxanne: UTFO (video, lyrics)

Cheating and Extra-pair copulation as explained by OPP: Naughty by Nature (video, lyrics)

Heighten Female reproductive signaling corresponding to menstrual cycle i.e. The 2007 research paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior Journal “Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?” as explained byMake It Rain (NSFW) Travis Porter (video, lyrics) or Fat Joe & Lil Wayne (video, lyrics). But really, this mash-up of science & hip hop wasn’t even hard. This paper was screaming to be explained with a rap song.

There is no assigned textbook for the course because I haven’t come across a text that I think is ideal for general audiences including undergraduate students. I will be drawing heavily from some great books.
Sexual Selection by Malte Andersson, 1994 Princeton University Press
Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior by Bobbi Low, 2001 Princeton University Press
Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture edited by Paul Abramson & Steven Pinkerton, 1995, University of Chicago Press

A little more about my class is below. Anyone interested in auditing my class? I bet something like this is just the thing NESCent is looking for.

***********************

Course Title: Senior Seminar: Sexual Selection – The Birds, The Bees & Beats

Course Description: This senior seminar examines the evolutionary concept of sexual selection in the context of behavioral ecology using popular culture references of hip hop music and videos. Students will read and summarize primary and secondary literature to explore primary concepts of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology.

Course Philosophy: This course broadly exposes students to evolutionary and behavioral ecological processes that promote the vast diversity of sexual and reproductive behaviors of humans and animals. The course deliberately blurs the line of objectivity and inserts human as both the observer and subject alongside that of other mammals, birds, insects and other vertebrates species. By allowing students to examine modern human behavior – including their own – it is my hope that they can fully understand and comprehend the role of evolutionary processes in general, and on human sexual behavior, in particular. The curriculum aims to challenge upper-division undergraduate students by creatively asking them to answer these questions:
1. What drives individuals to mate/reproduce?
2. How have humans and animals achieved mating/reproductive success?
3. How do we, humans, express our ‘sexually selected’ behavior in pop culture and hip hop media?

Course Outline: Students are required to lead weekly discussions that dissect scientific papers on topics related to mate choice, mate competition, courtship, sexual dimorphism, mating strategies, alternate mating tactics and all of the other highlights of sexual selection. Like conventional seminar courses students will have to reference scientific literature and write papers, but this course allows them to creatively apply these concepts using multiple media outlets.

Course topics

SEX

• Male/female differences Secondary sex characteristics/ Reproductive signaling
• Coitus/Orgasm/Sexual Pleasure
• Attraction/attractivity

DATING

• Courtship strategies
• Intrasexual selection
• Intersexual selection/Mate choice & Sexual Conflict
• Resource holding potential
• Reproductive capacity (female)
• Alternative mating strategies
• Sperm competition

RELATIONSHIPS & PARENTING

• Monogamy vs. everything else
• Everything else: Promiscuity, Polygamy, Polyandry, Polyamory
• Cheating/EPC/EPF

Presentations: Each week a student leads a discussion of a course topic based on required readings. Additional papers can also be shared (but be sure to designate which is the required paper). Presenters and students will discuss the papers, including offering music/video or other pop culture examples to share related to the topic.

Writing Assignments: Reading and comprehending scientific literature is a very important skill. These assignments are designed to help students delve more deeply into topics as well as interact with primary and secondary literature. Students will write a synopsis of the hypotheses and research trends related to this topic. Summarize the evolutionary concept and thoroughly explain the concept through a hip hop/pop culture lens and also include original sources of research, too. Both scientific and media reference should be included.

Article orginally posted at The Urban Scientist on The Scientific American Blog Network.