Lakshadweep corals on verge of extinction

NDTV.com – Vishnu Som

Friday, March 21, 2008 (Lakshadweep)

Tigers are not the only critically endangered species, India’s stunning coral formations stand squarely at cross roads, threatened by a rise in sea water temperatures caused by global warming.

In Lakshadweep’s Bangaram island, the terrain has white rubble, a graveyard of dead coral.

The death of live corals in the Arabian Sea could have an impact on the survival of the Lakshadweep islands because coral reefs act as natural breakwaters which minimise the impact of waves from powerful storms such as cyclones and typhoons.

Besides, live coral reefs support an estimated twenty-five per cent of all marine life, with over 4,000 species of fish alone.

So why is the coral in the Lakshadweep chain dying out?

The answer is global warming, which affects ocean biology and ocean biology in turn influences our climate and if either don’t work then we all suffer.

In fact, there is already clear-cut evidence of how a rise in sea water temperatures can be catastrophic for India’s coral reef. In 1998, a temporary change in the climate of the Pacific Ocean linked to the El Nino effect devastated corals in the Arabian Sea.

For Mitali Kakar who has been diving in these waters for sixteen years, the death of the stunning coral treasures in the Lakshadweep chain is a wake-up call. The islanders can do very little to control global warming but its critical to protect what remains of the coral reef.

”There are very few coral atolls left in the world and they are here in India but they may not be around for much longer and we have to protect them. They act as thermometers of the ocean and are very fragile,” said Mitali Kakar, Reefwatch Marine Conservation.

So is it all over then for India’s corals? Is this a basket case?

Fortunately, no. While some of the coral reefs around the islands have been reduced to rubble, there are remarkable signs of recovery elsewhere.

A lot of young coral can be seen which has shown the resilience to survive the rise in sea water temperatures so far. Apart from this, the local fishermen hunt for Tuna in deeper waters and do not depend on fishing off the reef for their survival.

The lesser the human presence, the greater the possibility of coral recovery in these islands.

The year 2008 is the international year of the reef, an opportunity to highlight the importance of corals, which are living organisms and have evolved over 200 to 300 million years.

The Maldives-Chago-Lakshadweep chain of islands in the Arabian Sea is the largest coral atoll system in the world, a system that stands squarely at a crossroads.

Ice Seals Candidates for Endangered List

 Associated Press – Dan Joling

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A federal agency said Wednesday it will consider listing four species of ice seals as endangered, a move hailed by the environmental group that pushed for it as government recognition that Arctic marine life is threatened by global warming.

The National Marine Fisheries Service accepted a petition seeking threatened or endangered status for ribbon seals, which have been losing habitat as sea ice recedes. The agency also expanded the status review to include ringed, spotted and bearded seals.

“While the four species of ice seals in Alaska all utilize various types of sea ice habitats, they use the ice in different ways,” said Doug Mecum, acting administrator for the Alaska Region, in the announcement. “Therefore, careful status reviews of each species is warranted.”

Shaye Wolf, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity and the lead author of the listing petition, said the agency’s action came as a surprise, given that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is two and a half months overdue on a final decision to list polar bears.

Last summer, Arctic ice shrank to an area that was 27 percent smaller than the previous record. In September, a series of reports from the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that as much as two-thirds of the polar bear population could disappear by mid-century because of the loss of summer sea ice attributed to climate change.

“The science is really clear that all of the seals are threatened by global warming by the loss of sea ice, and they all need protection,” Wolf said.

Wolf’s California-based group contends that in a warming Arctic, remaining winter sea ice will be thinner and unlikely to last long enough for ribbon seals to finish rearing their pups.

Federal officials have nine months to complete a full status review of ribbon seals. If agency officials propose listing ribbon seals as threatened or endangered, they would have a year to collect additional data and public testimony before the deadline for a final decision.

Listing a species would trigger a recovery plan that could address U.S. causes of global warming or other activity that could hurt the seals, such as offshore oil and gas development.

Ribbon seals during summer and fall live in water and feed on fish, squid and crustaceans in the Bering and Chukchi seas. From March through June, ribbon seals rely on loose pack ice in the Bering and Okhotsk seas for reproduction and molting.

Ribbon seals birth and nurse pups exclusively on sea ice. Newborn ribbon seals have a coat of soft, white hair that provides insulation until they grow a thick layer of blubber. Pups can survive submersion in icy water only after they’ve formed the blubber layer.

Ringed seals are the smallest and most numerous of the seals that thrive off Alaska’s coasts and are the primary prey of polar bears. Ringed seals can survive in completely ice-covered waters by digging out breathing holes.

Those breathing holes eventually get covered by drifting snow and female ringed seals dig out lairs within drifts to give birth and nurse pups on sea ice. Like ribbon seals, ringed seal pups cannot survive in cold water until they’ve grown a layer of blubber.

Bearded seals are the largest of Alaska’s seals, weighing up to 750 pounds. Another prey of polar bears, they also are hunted by residents of western Alaska coastal villages for food and hides.

Spotted seals can reach weights of 270 pounds and bear young on drifting pack ice.

Groups including the Center for Biological Diversity sued Fish and Wildlife this month for missing its January deadline for a final decision on polar bears.

The conservation groups claim the Bush administration has purposely delayed a decision because a polar bear listing would focus scrutiny on outer continental shelf oil and natural gas leases in polar bear habitat off Alaska’s coast.

They also say a polar bear recovery plan required under the law would trigger agency review of new sources of greenhouse gases that contribute to warming.

On the Net:

• National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska: http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/
• Center for Biological Diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/
• Alaska Wildlife Notebook: http://www.adfg.state.ak.us/pubs/notebook/marine/rib-seal.php

Shark species face extinction amid overfishing and appetite for fins

ALOK JHA – THE GUARDIAN

Nine more species of shark are to be added to the endangered list as scientists warn that oceans are being emptied of the fish by overfishing and finning.

The scalloped hammerhead shark, which has declined by 99% over the past 30 years in some parts of the world, is particularly vulnerable and will be declared globally endangered on the World Conservation Union (IUCN) list.

“Sharks are definitely at the top of the list for marine fishes that could go extinct in our lifetimes,” said Julia Baum of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and a member of IUCN shark specialist group. “If we carry on the way that we are, we’re looking at a really high risk of extinction for some of these shark species within the next few decades.”

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston yesterday, Baum said that in addition to the scalloped hammerhead, other shark species that will be added to the revised IUCN endangered list later this year are the smooth hammerhead, shortfin mako, common thresher, big-eye thresher, silky, tiger, bull and dusky. There are already 126 species of shark on the IUCN’s list.

“The perception has been that really wide-ranging species can’t become endangered because if they are threatened in one area, surely they’ll be fine in another area,” said Baum. “But fisheries now cover all corners of the earth and they’re intense enough that these species are being threatened everywhere.”

Recent studies have shown that all shark populations in the north-west Atlantic Ocean have declined by an average of 50% since the early 1970s.

Shark numbers can become depleted very quickly because they take a long time to mature – 16 years in the case of a scalloped hammerhead. Their fins are highly prized in China and can fetch up to £140 a kilogram. Until recently the eating of shark fin was a delicacy restricted to the rich in China, said Baum, but as the country’s middle class has grown in the past 25 years, so has the market for shark fins.

Excessive fishing has caused a 90% decline in shark populations across the world’s oceans and up to 99% along the US east coast, which are some of the best-managed waters in the world, according to Baum.

The decline in predators such as sharks can have devastating consequences for the local marine ecology.

In a case study published last year, Baum found that a major decline in the numbers of predatory sharks in the north Atlantic after 2000 had allowed populations of the sharks’ prey, cownose rays, to explode. The rays in turn decimated the bay scallop populations around North Carolina. “There was a fishery for bay scallops in North Carolina that lasted over a century uninterrupted and it was closed down in 2004 because of cownose rays.”

Fishing for sharks in international waters is unrestricted, but Baum supports a recent UN resolution calling for immediate limits on catching sharks and a ban on shark finning.

Sonja Fordham, of the Shark Alliance, a coalition of 50 scientific and conservation groups, said: “People think these wide-ranging, fast sharks are resilient to fishing; however, this shows this is not the case. Concerned citizens can really help by making their fisheries ministers aware that they support conservation measures such as catch limits.”

Some conservation efforts for sharks will focus on newly identified hotspots where sharks congregate during migrations. Peter Klimley of the University of California, Davis, found that scalloped hammerhead sharks migrate along fixed “superhighways” in the oceans, speeding between a series of “stepping stone” sites near coastal islands ranging from Mexico to Ecuador.

“Hammerhead sharks are not evenly dispersed throughout the seas, but concentrated at seamounts and offshore islands,” he said. “Hence, enforcing reserves around these areas will go far in protecting these species and will provide the public with places for viewing sharks in their habitat.”

One site between Hawaii and Mexico attracts so many sharks it has become known among scientists as “the white shark cafe”, Klimley says.

“We started calling it the cafe because that is where you might go to have a snack or maybe just to ‘see and be seen’. We are not sure which,” said Salvador Jorgensen, a researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

“Once they leave the cafe they return year after year to the same exact spot along the coast, just as you might return to a favourite fishing hole.”

Critically Endangered Porpoise May Be Doomed To Extinction

 Science Daily – Press Release

ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2008) — An international research team, including biologists from NOAA’s Fisheries Service, reported in the scientific journal Conservation Biology, that the estimated population of vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, is likely two years away from reaching such low levels that their rate to extinction will increase and possibly be irreversible. Scientists believe only about 150 vaquita remain.

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The research team, led by Armando Jaramillo, Instituto Nacional de Ecología, Mexico, included researchers Barbara Taylor, NOAA’s Fisheries Service, and Randy Reeves Reeves, Chair of the Cestacean Specialist Group, IUCN — the World Conservation Union.

The group assessed the number of vaquita based on past estimates of abundance and deaths in fishing nets together with current fishing effort. Approximately 30 vaquita drown each year in the Gulf of California when they become entangled in nets set for fish and shrimp.

Vaquita are found only in a small area of productive, shallow water in the northernmost Gulf of California. They are listed as endangered species by the United States and Mexico and critically endangered by the World Conservation Union.

Researchers cite worrisome parallels between vaquita and the baiji, a freshwater dolphin in the Yangtze River, which was recently declared likely to be extinct; primarily from entanglement in fishing gear.

Adapted from materials provided by NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Mediterranean Sharks and Rays in Danger of Extinction

The Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network

A report released today by the IUCN Shark Specialist Group (SSG) and the IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation reveals that the region has the highest percentage of such species assessed as Threatened in the world, due primarily to overfishing through targeted and incidental fisheries.

SSACN is a member of the Shark Alliance which is repeating its call for a strong Plan of Action to improve the status of European sharks and rays in response to new IUCN findings.

European Union (EU) resource managers, are developing an overdue Plan of Action for the conservation and management of sharks. The European Commission is expected to propose the first EU limits for porbeagle shark, identified by IUCN as “Critically Endangered” off Europe, by the end of November for consideration by EU Fisheries Ministers in December.

The report deemed 42% (30 species) of these species Threatened, of which 18% are Critically Endangered, 11% Endangered and 13% Vulnerable. Another 18% (13 species) were assessed as Near Threatened while a lack of information led to 26% (18 species) being classified as Data Deficient. Only 14% (10 species) are considered to be of Least Concern.

The Scottish Government should do something to address the £4.7 million worth of sharks were landed in Scotland.

Never before have the EU’s Mediterranean countries had more reason or opportunity to safeguard the region’s beleaguered sharks and rays.

USA. Scientists call for Lower Snake Dam removal to help endangered Orcas

BYM Marine Environment News

Leading Northwest scientists and orca advocates are urging NOAA Fisheries to consider removal of the four lower Snake River dams in order to protect endangered Puget Sound orca populations that need Columbia-Snake River salmon as a critical food source.

“Restoring Columbia River Chinook salmon is the single most important thing we can do to ensure the future survival of the Southern Resident Community of killer whales,” said Dr. Rich Osborne, research associate with The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, WA. “We cannot hope to restore the killer whale population without also restoring the salmon upon which these whales have depended for thousands of years. Their futures are intricately linked.”

The comments from the six prominent orca scientists, delivered in a letter to Northwest members of Congress and NOAA regional administrator Robert Lohn, came in response to the Oct. 31 release of a new draft Biological Opinion from NOAA Fisheries for Columbia-Snake River salmon management. Salmon advocates say the new plan, the result of a court-ordered rewrite of an earlier, illegal 2004 federal salmon plan, fails to do enough to recover imperiled salmon in the seven-state Columbia-Snake river basin, and ignores altogether the four dams on the lower Snake River that do the most harm to these fish.

“History will not be very forgiving of the resource managers who failed in their responsibilities to these icons of the Pacific Northwest, Chinook and orca,” said Ken Balcomb, senior scientist with the Center for Whale Research.

“The draft plan relies heavily on actions that science and time have proven will not restore these fish to the levels necessary for self-sustaining populations of salmon, or abundant enough to provide a healthy food resource for these killers whales,” said Dr. David Bain, a killer whale biologist at Friday Harbor Labs. “Not only are salmon from the Columbia River an important historic food source, recovered abundant salmon in this river are an indispensable requirement for the future recovery of Southern Residents.”

“The new Federal salmon plan for the Columbia and Snake rivers is no better than previous plans in providing access to the basin’s best remaining salmon habitat in the upper reaches of the Snake River,” said Howard Garrett, co-founder of the Orca Network. “The resulting declining salmon runs have a very real impact on the 88 endangered southern resident orcas that depend on these fish, as they have for centuries. As the salmon disappear, the orcas go hungry.”

“The best science tells us,” Garrett added, “that to revitalize Snake River salmon, we’ll need to bypass the dams that block fish passage, and that dam removal, combined with a variety of economic investments, will bring benefits to upriver communities in eastern Washington as well as to Puget Sound.”

The Columbia and Snake River Basin was once the world’s most productive salmon watershed, with tens of millions of fish returning annually. Today, returns hover near 1% of those historic levels. More than 200 large dams on the basin’s rivers are the major cause of this crisis, with 13 populations now listed under the Endangered Species Act, and four directly impacted by the lower Snake River dams. Yet, the Columbia-Snake Basin still holds more acres of pristine salmon habitat than any watershed in the lower 48 states.

It is this opportunity, notes Kathy Fletcher, executive director of People For Puget Sound, that we must take advantage of, if we hope to protect and restore these two iconic Northwest species whose fates are inexorably intertwined.

“Our leaders must look for solutions not only in Puget Sound, but also in the rivers that bring the salmon to the sea throughout the Northwest,” Fletcher said. “The great salmon rivers like the Columbia and Snake can once again produce the healthy runs of Chinook, on which our majestic orcas feed, but only if we recover salmon habitat. We must act quickly to restore clean water, abundant, sustainable salmon populations, and a safe home for orcas. The scientists tell us there is no time to waste.”