Gulf Spill’s Effects ‘May Not Be Seen for a Decade’

By Jason Palmer/Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Washington DC

In places the layer of oil and dead animals is 10cm thick

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill “devastated” life on and near the seafloor, a marine scientist has said.

Studies using a submersible found a layer, as much as 10cm thick in places, of dead animals and oil, said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia.

Knocking these animals out of the food chain will, in time, affect species relevant to fisheries.

She disputed an assessment by BP’s compensation fund that the Gulf of Mexico will recover by the end of 2012.

Oil slickMillions of barrels of oil spewed into the sea after a BP deepwater well ruptured in April 2010.

Assessments of the clean-up effort have focused on the surface oil, but much oil remains at depth.

Professor Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington that it may be a decade before the full effects on the Gulf are apparent.

She said they concluded the layers had been deposited between June and September 2010 after it was discovered that no sign of sealife from samples taken in May remained.

Professor Joye and her colleagues used the Alvin submersible to explore the bottom-most layer of the water around the well head, known as the benthos.

“The impact on the benthos was devastating,” she told BBC News.

“Filter-feeding organisms, invertebrate worms, corals, sea fans – all of those were substantially impacted – and by impacted, I mean essentially killed.

Read the rest at BBC News…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Whaling: Beginning of the End?

Richard Black | 12:36 UK time, Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Is this the beginning of the end for Japanese whaling in the Antarctic?

Clash between whaling ship and opponentClashes have been dramatic – enough to cause a U-turn?

That is the biggest question arising from Wednesday’s announcement in Tokyo that this season’s whaling programme was being suspended.

The Fisheries Agency (FAJ) hasn’t formally declared the season over, but it appears likely that the fleet will soon be on its way out of the Southern Ocean and back to harbour.

FAJ official Tatsuya Nakaoku blamed the suspension on harrassment by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has made life progressively more difficult for the whaling fleet each year by sending faster and better-equipped boats.

This season, it has regularly managed to park across the back of the Nisshin Maru factory ship, making it impossible to winch whales on board.

Read the rest at BBC News…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Japan Suspends Whale Hunt After Chase by Activists

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says their tactics in trying to stop Japan’s annual Antarctic whale hunt have been completely safe and not endangered anybody.

“There is nothing violent about what we are doing here,” Alex Cornelissen, Captain of the Sea Shepherd vessel “Bob Baker” told the BBC World Service via satellite phone.

Japan says it has suspended its whale hunt “for now” because of safety concerns, after Sea Shepherd activists chased the Nisshin Maru, the Japanese fleet’s mother ship.

Read the rest at BBC News…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Global Fish Consumption Hits Record High

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

The global consumption of fish has hit a record high, reaching an average of 17kg per person, a UN report has shown.

Fisheries and aquaculture supplied the world with about 145m tonnes in 2009, providing about 16% of the population’s animal protein intake.

The findings published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also stressed that the status of global fish stocks had not improved.

It said that about 32% were overexploited, depleted or recovering.

“That there has been no improvement in the status of stocks is a matter of great concern,” said Richard Grainger, one of the report’s authors and FAO senior fish expert.

Read the rest at BBC News…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

NOAA, Partners, Launch New Website Highlighting African-American Maritime Heritage

NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, in partnership with Murrain Associates, Inc., and the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS), today launched Voyage to Discovery, a new website and education initiative highlighting untold stories of African-Americans and the sea.

Read more of the NOAA News Release.

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

NOAA Investigations Into Mislabeling Seafood Protects Consumers and Fishermen

Seafood consumers and the law-abiding fishermen who catch that seafood gained a big victory last week when a complex NOAA Office of Law Enforcement investigation into conspiracy, misbranding and smuggling resulted in two guilty pleas in federal court.
Read more of the NOAA News Release.

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Cuba Oil Bid a Bad Idea, Florida Says

Florida lawmakers are seeking ways to stop Cuba from drilling for oil off its shores, including meeting with the Spanish firm working with Cuba.

BY LESLEY CLARK, Miami Herald

The rational approach is a direct dialogue between the U.S. and Cuba,” said David Guggenheim, a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation in Washington

WASHINGTON — With Cuba poised to drill for oil off its coast as early as this spring, Florida lawmakers are renewing efforts to block it, citing fears about damage to the state’s beaches in the event of a major oil spill.

Sarasota Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan has introduced legislation that would allow the U.S. Interior Department to deny U.S. oil and gas leases to companies involved in Cuba’s oil drilling operations. Sen. Bill Nelson plans to re-introduce legislation to pull the U.S. visas for executives of such companies. Nelson also is hoping to “outline our position” in a yet-to-be-scheduled meeting with officials from Spanish energy giant Repsol, which is working with Cuba.

Read the rest at MiamiHerald.com…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Hawaii: Massive Release of Sea Urchins Planned to Combat Invasive Seaweed on Coral Reefs (UnderwaterTimes.com)

Hawaii: Massive release of sea urchins planned to combat invasive seaweed on coral reefs. (UnderwaterTimes.com)
Ocean Today

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After the Oil Spill, Finding a Drop in the Ocean: New, Highly Sensitive Method Can Track Dispersant in Gulf of Mexico

In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April, marine chemist Elizabeth Kujawinski recognized that a technique she had developed for entirely different reasons could readily be adapted to track the chemical components of oil from the spill, as well as the dispersant used to try to clean it up.

Kujawinski brought into play a device with a powerful 7-tesla magnet (seven times stronger than the average MRI) and an intimidating name: a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer, or FT-ICR-MS. It can detect and measure vanishingly tiny amounts of an individual compound in a mixture containing tens of thousands of compounds.

Kujawinski spearheaded the grant proposal to install the FT-ICR-MS at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2007. Since then she and WHOI colleagues Melissa Kido Soule and Krista Longnecker have been using it to develop highly sensitive analytical methods to reveal the mishmash of organic matter, dissolved in seawater, that supplies food for marine microbes.

In research published online Jan. 26 in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T), Kujawinski and colleagues showed that the highly powerful mass spec and their method were also well suited to detect, measure, and definitively identify minute quantities of chemical compounds from the Deepwater Horizon spill, including a compound in the dispersant Corexit. The dispersant has been used often in small amounts on the ocean surface to break down oil clumps and make the oil easier to clean up. But never has so much been used before, and never before has the dispersant been released in the deep ocean.

Read the rest at Oceanus – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.

Shark Nations Failing on Conservation Pledges

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

The wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic and the Pew Environment Group say most of the main shark fishing nations do not manage fisheries well.

Ten years ago, governments agreed a global plan to conserve sharks.

An estimated 100 million sharks are killed each year, with nearly a third of species at risk of extinction.

Many fisheries target the fins for use in shark fin soup; and a number of countries, including the US, have recently passed measures aimed at regulating the trade.

Neither of the two countries catching the most sharks – Indonesia and India – has yet finalised national plans of action for protecting sharks.

Read the rest…

Note: Newswire stories are provided as a courtesy of OceanDoctor.org. Content of these articles is provided by external sources.