SURG NEWS

 

The recent storms and rough weather has washed ashore various items of flotsam on local beaches. Red Rock locals, Marilyn and Rob found what is thought to be a spiny pipehorse, Syngnathus spinosissimus on the back beach last week. Rarely seen by divers due to their cryptic colouration and habit, they are sometimes caught by local prawn trawlers as by-catch. A deepwater species, known from at least 400m, this species is found from southern Queensland south across Bass Strait to southern Tasmania. It is also found in New Zealand where it is known as the Spiny Sea Dragon.

 

 

 

Christmas comes early for SURG!
The Solitary Islands Underwater Research Group Inc has been successful with a submission to Caring for Country for a grant – “Monitoring specified marine fish species –indicators of climate change”. This will involve a series of roving diver surveys keeping SURG members in the water for the next 12 – 18 months (completion June 2013) and will start with training programs late in January after the holiday season draws to a close.
The complete list of other successful organisations may be viewed by following the link http://www.nrm.gov.au/cag/cag-projects/2011-12/pubs/cag-11-12-all-projects.pdf

 

 

Snippets from the last SURG General Meeting for 2011- November 16

Plain sailing for marine life as climate warms (from: http://www.csiro.au/news/No-plain-sailing-for-marine-life.html)
Direct effects of climate warming on biodiversity pose a serious conservation challenge for marine life, according to new research published today in Science.
Marine life may need to relocate faster than land species as well as speed up alterations in the timing of major life cycle events. This challenges previous thinking that marine life in the ocean would respond more gradually than species on land because of slower warming in the oceans.“Analyses of global temperature found that the rate at which marine life needs to relocate is as fast, or in some places faster, than for land species. This is despite ocean warming being three times slower than land” says paper co-author, Dr Elvira Poloczanska from CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship.Dr Poloczanska said that globally, an increasing number of species are responding to climate change by changing their distributions and the timing of life cycle events such as breeding, spawning and migrations.She said that a one degree change in ocean temperature may mean that marine plants and animals will have to travel hundreds of kilometres to stay in their comfort zones. This can present major problems for marine organisms, particularly those that are unable to move long distances such as corals.This collaborative work was led by Dr Mike Burrows from the Scottish Association of Marine Science, UK, and Dr David Schoeman of the University of Ulster, UK, and is a product from the Marine Impacts Working Group at the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, California. Dr Poloczanska and Associate Professor Anthony J. Richardson from the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and the University of Queensland lead the working group.Writing in Science, the team considered two indicators to measure the pace of change in temperatures over the past 50 years: the shift in temperature across the landscape and seascape, and; the shift in temperature seasonality with warming.
“Analyses of global temperature found that the rate at which marine life needs to relocate is as fast, or in some places faster, than for land species”
Another of the paper’s co-authors, University of Queensland Associate Professor Anthony Richardson, explains that the rate at which marine life relocates depends not only on how much the temperature changes but also on how far a species needs to travel to reach its preferred temperature conditions.Marine species need to travel long distances to find a preferred temperature zone because temperature varies relatively little across much of the oceans compared to on land.“On the land in flat areas such as deserts, for example, animals and plants must relocate over long distances to find a change in temperature but in mountainous areas this change can be found in shorter distances. Marine animals and plants will have to travel long distances in many parts of the ocean, where temperature changes relatively little, to remain in their preferred temperature” Associate Professor Richardson said.“In warm areas such as the Equator, which is a marine biodiversity hotspot, marine life will have to travel very far to find a suitable temperature zone and we are concerned that threats to biodiversity may be high”The same applies for changes in timing for reproduction activities such as flowering, and breeding migrations.“The seasonal temperature cycle is relatively reduced in the ocean compared with land, so again this means that if a plant or animal wants to maintain its thermal environment and keep pace with warming, it will need to move its reproduction earlier in the year as much, or more, in the ocean than on land” Associate Professor Richardson said.The study also identifies patterns of climate change are not uniform, with regions warming and some even cooling at different rates. For example, large areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and shifts in the distribution of marine life away from polar regions are expected.“While organisms may respond to aspects of climate change other than temperature, we studied the global thermal environment because it is probably the most important variable controlling global distribution and timing of marine life” said Dr Poloczanska“Although we only looked at the ocean surface, and many marine species may live deeper, the majority of these ultimately rely on production at the sunlit ocean surface or have larval stages that disperse in shallower depths,” she said.

 

 

 

October 30

 

SURG Diver, Ian Shaw, recently found and photographed a Pycnogonid (sea spider) at Korff's Island (known locally as Pig Island), situated just south of the entrance to Coffs Harbour. Pig is a known habitat for sea spiders with a complex substrate of corals, sponges, kelp and the necessary hydroids that harbour the sea spiders he was seeking. Small in size (this animal as pictured was a bundle about 10mm across) and cryptically hidden among the hydroids found in the kelp beds, they are not easy to find and most divers never see them unless they particularly seek them out. The photograph at right is the result of searching in surgey conditions in about 8m of water, and was notable for two reasons. Firstly the animal is carrying eggs, held suspended under the animals body. This fact was not noticeable on the dive and only upon examination of the photograph later were they seen, but more notable was the tiny parasitic mollusc attached to the egg mass. It is not known what species of mollusc it is as the specimen was not collected. To quote from the web pages of the Australasian Arachnological Society webpage "Ecologically, sea spiders are essentially marine benthic dwellers that occur from the shoreline to abyssal depths in all the seas around the world. They range in size from tiny midgets having leg spans of only 2 mm, to deep-sea giants with leg spans of up to 75 cm; the larger species are usually found at deeper habitats. Sea spiders are mostly epibenthic (that is they exist on the animals and plants attached to the substrate) and carnivorous, some species have been described in parasitic associations with hydroids, molluscs and echinoderms (Arnaud & Bamber 1987). The body of the sea spiders is always very reduced and sometimes appears to be only a connector between each pair of legs; thus, the digestive and reproductive organs have migrated to the legs. Most species have four body segments, each of them bearing a pair of walking legs. However, some deep-sea species can have five or six body segments and ten or twelve legs respectively ('polymerous forms' in Hedgpeth, 1947), which is a very unusual phenomenon in arthropods, and yet to be explained." In local waters sea spiders are likely to be found in any suitable habitat including the inshore reef areas where kelp forests are found. Pig is often the most productive dive site due to the concentration of likely habitat in a small area but it is sometimes difficult to dive due to its close proximity to shore, its small size and exposure to surge and swell and the reduced inshore water visibility.

 

Snippets from the General Meeting 19th October 2011

Freak wave probability higher than previously thought
________________________________________

Devastating freak waves the size of a 10-storey building can be more common than previously thought, say researchers.

The findings, by civil engineer Dr Alessandro Toffoli, of Swinburne University of Technology, and colleagues, have been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"They call them freak because they are not well understood," says Toffoli.
Freak waves are steep waves that can appear to come out of nowhere. They are hundreds of metres long and can be two to three times higher than the surrounding waves at the time.

They are rarely seen and were once considered a sailor's myth. "Ten, 20 years ago, mariners would say a ship was sunk by a rogue wave and no one would believe it," says Toffoli.

But since then evidence for their existence has been building. In 1995, a 26.5-metre high freak wave was recorded passing an oil platform in the North Sea, says Toffoli. The surrounding waves at that time had an average height of 10 metres.

Three years later a freak wave was involved in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race tragedy.

In 2001, European Space Agency satellites captured more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe more than 25 metres high during three weeks of data collection.

Little is known about what causes freak waves, but a number of theories and models have been developed to predict the probability of them occurring.
One theory suggests that 1 in 10,000 waves in a typical stormy sea would be a 'rogue' wave - as the researchers prefer to call them.

But this "linear" theory does not take into consideration the fact that waves can become unstable, says Toffoli. One wave can steal energy from surrounding waves and grow at their expense.

A more sophisticated theory does take this 'instability mechanism' into account and estimates 1 in every 1000 waves could be a rogue one.

Toffoli and colleagues have taken this theory one step further by including the fact that the probability of rogue waves increases when waves travelling in one direction meet a current travelling in the opposite direction.
Toffoli says this can happen at sea or near shore where there are strong tidal currents.

The greater the speed of the current and the waves, the larger the rogue wave will be. Toffoli says the latest model can be used to predict the probability of rogue waves under different conditions. "It will provide more accurate predictions in the areas where currents are located," says Toffoli.

When waves hit a current travelling in the opposite direction, the likelihood of rogue waves increases to 1 in every 300, says Toffoli.

This figure assumes the waves are travelling in the same direction as each other but if the waves approaching the current are coming from different directions, the probability will be lower than this, he says. "As we're predicting rogue waves, that has safety implications for marine operations, but it can also help design practices, to properly account for the wave-load on structures," says Toffoli.

He says the research could also improve navigational software, which could suggest alternative routes for ships based on the likelihood of a rogue wave occurring.

Another expert in ocean wave modelling and physics says rogue waves are not only terrifying, but can split the hulls of ships, endangering lives and releasing dangerous cargo.

"It's serious stuff, especially for the insurance industry," says Dr Michael Banner, an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. Banner says it has long been known that currents - such as the Agulhas Current off the coast of Africa - affect the chances of rogue waves developing.

But he says this latest model is the most detailed to incorporate the role of currents in generating rogue waves. Organisations, such as the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, are moving towards the creation of likelihood maps of rogue waves that would be updated as the wind fields and the currents change, says Banner.

But he says it's challenging work because global models rely on average wave heights and don't have the resolution to predict individual extreme waves.
Also, says Banner, we still don't understand all the scenarios in which energy can be focused to create freak waves. "The capacity to make accurate forecasts is not there yet," he says.

"This clearly belongs to a class of problems that are non-linear and non-linearity brings in a huge number of opportunities for variance ... it's pretty hard to nail them all."

Penguins sniff out their mates
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Animal antics Penguins can sniff out the odour of lifelong mates, helping them reunite in crowded colonies, a new study has found.

The birds' highly attuned sense of smell also allows them to identify the scent of close kin to avoid inbreeding, say the researchers from the University of Chicago.

Some seabirds have previously been known to use their sense of smell to find food or locate nesting sites, but this is the first study to show how penguins use scent to discriminate between close relatives and strangers, they report in the journal PLoS ONE.

"Other animals do it, we do it, so why can't birds?" asks Jill Mateo, who worked on the research led by graduate student Heather Coffin.

"Their sense of smell can help them find their mates and perhaps choose their mates," says Mateo.

"Seafaring birds that travel long distances in the ocean use odours to find food and use odours to recognise nests, but we didn't know what odours or the extent to which they could use odours to recognise kin."

Researchers worked with 22 endangered Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldt) raised at Brookfield Zoo near Chicago.
The birds' behaviour was recorded as they examined scents emitted by oil from their preening glands. The gland near the bird's tail excretes oil used to keep them clean but also has an olfactory purpose.

In one experiment, penguins with mates preferred the comfort of their mates' scent over the scents of unfamiliar penguins. In another, penguins without mates spent twice as long investigating unfamiliar penguins' scents than those belonging to their close relatives.

"In all sorts of animals that we study, including human babies, novel odours, novel cues, are investigated longer than less-novel cues," says Mateo. She says scent is used by many species to attract mates, or to avoid mating with relatives.

Homing instinct
For Humboldt penguins, which nest on Peruvian cliffs and spend long periods foraging at sea, odour acts as an identifier when they return to colonies crowded with thousands of birds nesting in cracks and crevices.

"It's important for birds that live in large groups in the wild, like penguins, to know who their neighbours are so that they can find their nesting areas and also, through experience, know how to get along with the birds nearby," says animal behaviour expert Dr Jason Watters of the Chicago Zoological Society, which operates Brookfield Zoo.

"It could also be true that birds may be able to help zoo matchmakers in determining potential mates," says Watters.

"You could imagine that if (naturalists) were trying to reintroduce birds to an area, you could first treat the area with an odour the birds were familiar with. That would make them more likely to stay," he says.

September 18th 2011. SURG members along with the Nambucca Aboriginal Land Council and the National Marine Science Centre (SCU) conducted a cleanup of a small section of the Nambucca River. SURG member Elaine Kwee travelled from Sydney to take part and the following article and photographs were kindly supplied by her. Elaine apologises for the water spots on the photos, they were taken using her underwater camera.
Garbage in, Garbage out It’s a windy day. A plastic bag has just whipped over my garden, flown over the fence and will land in the harbour. One day hopefully, some underwater divers will pick it up. Or, an unlucky turtle may ingest it. Or it could be fished out of a bird’s tummy autopsied by the marine parks rangers at pristine Lord Howe. On these three counts, I’ve been there. There are some big statistics you can download from Underwater Volunteers of NSW (UVNSW)’s website – look for the marine debris protocol link: - 6.4 million tonnes of debris reach the world’s oceans each year, ~ 8 million items enter the sea every day. - Plastics consistently comprise 60 to 80% of total debris recorded. Hence, marine debris clean-ups are a great way for us to do our bit for the oceans. We’ve done many before, PADI’s Project AWARE and Clean Up Australia Day come to mind. In fact, just last Sunday 17th September 2011, it was Project AWARE’s International Clean Up Day. Solitary Islands Underwater Research Group (SURG) organised a cleanup of a small length of Nambucca River in support of the Nambucca Aboriginal Land Council. Some local divers from Nambucca pitched in, and myself from Sydney.
	Chelsea and Dave from Nambucca Aboriginal Land Council
But just how effective are our cleanup efforts? Those statistics I just reeled off, too many zeroes. So let’s humanise things. At Nambucca Heads, the volunteer divers numbered 11 and there were a few landside volunteers. We hauled up 4 shopping trolleys and about 2 tonnes of garbage, and that was counted as a spectacular day’s haul. If 300 groups around the world hauled in 2 tonnes each on 17 September, that makes 600 tonnes. If we had 4 cleanup days a year, that makes it 2400 tonnes a year. What was that number again entering our oceans...6.4 million tonnes of debris. So, global clean-ups by divers hardly make a dent. Now, the plastics. I won't add to the literature on turtles and the plastic gyres. If you can, watch an excellent movie-doco called Bag It. The point it drives home is this. It’s not how we throw our rubbish, but what rubbish we create in the first place. Our culture of usage and waste of SINGLE USE plastics must change. Debris surveys are now more often than not conducted with clean-ups. I have oft wondered whether and where the data is used, and after scrutinising Project Aware’s website and in-depth questioning of UVNSW’s protocols, this the best way to think about it. We are just starting to collect information that would help us understand where marine debris emanates, where it ends up, how much there is and impacts. The ideal is to have a comprehensively networked database over area and time so that we can piece together a picture. Right now, we can only lay a voluntary patchwork of data sets that will be piecemeal to start with.
	Some of the rubbish collected
But (a) we can standardise the protocols so that the data can be collaborative and (b) hope that enough groups conduct these surveys so that the data jigsaw pieces can start to form a picture. Project AWARE does this on a global level, but I personally have the sense that the data goes down the black hole as there is no iterative engagement. UVNSW’s project scale is less expansive geographically, but with its emphasis on scientific rigour and feedback analysis to the volunteer groups, gives more of a sense of co-ownership of the objective, which is, a scientifically valid analysis of trends in debris accumulation that can be used for targeted source reduction programs.
Back to diving. We turned up at 930 am for a half hour training, to dive with high tide at 1030 am. Four transects were laid, two end to end at 2m depth and two similarly at 4-6 m. Transect length was 25m, 2.5m wide corridor on each side of the transect, a coverage of 125 sq m per transect. Transects should not overlap and once direction is instructed, stick to it!The slates and meshbag were one between two divers, since wax-paper printed datasheets were limited. This presented a logistical issue – will it be one buddy per transect corridor, criss-crossing the line with each piece of rubbish to fill the mesh bag and enter the data? Or two buddies doing each corridor together taking twice the time? Either way is fine. If each buddy had a meshbag or sack and own slate, that would be more efficient, so if URG is doing this in October, there is time for preparation (Colin’s madly looking for waxed paper!) One thing particular about the UVNSW datasheet. It distinguishes between different types of fishing line. Line. Lead. Hook. Line with hook. Line with lead. Line with hook and lead. Data veracity is the main reason why buddies should not share a dataslate since unravelling a tangle of line, it’s not easy to discern lead, hooks etc in that mess, let alone waving it in front of your buddy and being sure he/she’s entered the correct data of hook, lead etc. Sometimes it takes two to unravel a huge entangled multitude of lines and it is different to be scientifically rigorous about how many lines have been tangled up! I asked SURG’s Bob Edgar why the hair-splitting distinctions. These protocols were adapted from internationally used protocols and the distinctions enable an analytical breakdown of materials (eg metal versus plastics) that is part of the monitoring.
	Diver conducting debris survey
Bottles are a special breed. The rule is, don’t remove things that have become a habitat for marine life, bottles being exemplary. The interesting thing is after time underwater, all bottles become the same, opaque brown. So you can't tell if there is marine life inside, even if you empty out all sand and squint inside because, of course, the cryptic critter would be hanging on for dear life in the inky blackness within. The pragmatic course is a final, vigorous shake ala stubborn ketchup bottle, then into the mesh bag. Items encrusted in coralline should be noted but not removed. Coralline encrustment can be red, yellow, even white and not just the green/purple I associate with substrate formation. Wood, while noted as debris, tended to stay underwater because of size limitations in the mesh bag. Most pieces were too big to remove and in any event, were biodegradable. Mesh bags filled fast and heavy and the Aboriginal Land Council had a boat for us to pop up and empty out the bags before they got too heavy to safely lift. This should be factored into logistics as well, shore dives usually allow only one big lug out and we don’t want to be using our BCDs as airlifts. Tools for the trade include: - Gloves - Knife/garden shears - Lengths of rope 3-4 m to haul heavy items out (you need a boat for this). Knot practice with reefknot/double hitch will be useful - Extra weight if diving in shallows
	Divers that took part in the cleanup
Being in the shallows meant air consumption could be stretched to over an hour, so warm gear is essential. Vis, if limited, can be exacerbated by silt so frog kicking and optimal buoyancy is helpful, although sawing and pulling tangled line will stir up a storm! That glorious sunny day in Nambuccca had water temperatures over 20 degrees and we were instantly sunbaked on surfacing. Here’s a happy team after the collaborative effort, looking forward to their après dive of burger and chips!

 

Summary of Debris collected - Collated by Bob Edgar

Four replicate belt transects of dimensions 25m x 5m were assessed for marine debris at a site adjacent to the RSL Club in the Nambucca River estuary, i.e. a total of 500m2 was surveyed. Any debris observed was noted and then removed. The tables below summarise the data collected.
In addition to the debris lying within these transects divers roamed randomly throughout the general area collecting and removing debris items. These additional items were not quantified.
A total of 310 items were recorded. This represents a density of 0.62 items/m2. Items worthy of note that weren’t observed in the transects but were observed in the roaming surveys were shopping trolleys, a child’s scooter, a street sign attached to its metal pole and numerous large slabs of concrete.

Debris Composition	Count of Debris Material Category
Aluminium	3
Ceramic	7
Cloth	2
Concrete	2
Glass	118
Metal	20
Mixed	110
Other	14
Plastic	31
Rubber	2
Wood	1
Grand total	310

 

 

15th September 2011 Recent sitings of a Bluefish, Girella cyanea, at South West Solitary, further corroborate sightings made by Kevin Buhler at North Solitary Island in March this year, (see photo at right). The pair of Bluefish, swimming with silver drummer, Kyphosus sydneyanus, were found in about 4 metres of water in the surge zone adjacent to the island. A protected species in NSW they are commonly seen at Lord Howe Island, Kermadec Islands and New Zealand (see species index PISC0277) but confirmed sightings off the mainland coast are rare.

 

 

Clean up takes place in Coffs International Marina

SURG members participated in a cleanup of the Coffs Harbour Marina on Saturday 3rd September. The clean up is part of an ongoing program of activities by Coffs Harbour International Marina to improve the marina environment and continue its commitment to providing a clean, green and safe environment for marina users and local marine wildlife alike.

The cleanup was the last stage of an audit of the environment in the Coffs Marina, which included debris surveys and surveys of all wildlife using the marina waters and surrounds, including fish, molluscs and plant life, birds and reptiles (turtles).

SURG members, along with other divers and above water support from Jetty Dive, recovered over 200kg of rubbish from the areas under the finger wharves and along the breakwalls. As expected there were a number of shopping trolleys, fishing rods and line, plastic bags, bottles and cans, but the haul also included lengths of pvc pipe and conduit, a steel framed plastic chair and a very soggy foam mattress.

The rubbish was transported to the Coffs Harbour tip, courtesy of the Coffs Council who waived tipping fees, and Jetty Dive, who donated the trailer and manhours.

Funding for the project was provided by the Northern Rivers Catchment Management Authority and the project was managed by Anissa Lawrence of TierraMar Consulting based in Sydney.

 

	Bagging up rubbish from the Coffs Marina
Retrieving one of the shopping trolleys
	Divers after the morning dive briefing at Jetty Dive

 

 

 

Photo inventory continues to build

The species list in fish now totals over 270 thanks to input from Steve Smith and Bob Edgar. Recent dives at South West and Split Solitary Islands as well as several dives in the estuary and river at Red Rock have yielded species that were previously lacking, including a great photo of a mangrove jack, taken at Jewfish Point in about 5 metres of water.

Steve has also supplied a number of photos for the Prosobranchs, some recent, some from his archives, which will swell the number of species to over 70 when they are eventually uploaded.

Any members with species photos of animals taken in or adjacent to the SIMP that they consider may be suitable and are not already listed are urged to send them to Ian Shaw. The main thing we are looking for is a clear, sharp photograph of the animal showing its features or characteristics. Ideally a jpg around 4 or 500kb after cropping (if any) is a good start.

 

Snippets from Project officers report 17th August 2011

How the world's biggest mouth evolved

An Australian palaeontologist has figured out a missing step in the evolution of giant filter-feeding mouths characteristic of blue whales. Dr Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria in Melbourne reports his argument in today's issue of Biology Letters.

"You could fit an average garden-variety kombi van in the mouth of a blue whale," says Fitzgerald, adding that blue whales are the largest animal ever known to inhabit the earth.
They have no teeth but, like other such whales, live on a diet of krill and other marine organisms that they filter out from seawater, using bristles on the roof of their mouths, called baleen.

Central to this baleen whale filter-feeding system is a cavernous mouth with a wide upper jaw and an elastic lower jaw that can open up wide to allow more than the whale's own bodyweight in sea water to enter in one gulp.
"[Modern baleen whales] have extremely mobile lower jaws, which is quite frankly bizarre because no other mammals have that sort of specialisation," says Fitzgerald.

This elastic lower jaw, in which the left and right hand sides are able to stretch apart, was until now believed to be a feature of all baleen whales, even fossil ones.

Scientists have long wondered how ancestral baleen whales, which used their teeth to catch large prey (like killer whales do) evolved into toothless filter feeders.

"This is a huge evolutionary jump," says Fitzgerald.

He now believes he has found the evolutionary missing link in the story.

Missing link

Fitzgerald has found the first fossil evidence of a toothed baleen whale that has no elastic lower jaw.

The newly-described jaw belonged to a tiny 25 million-year-old primitive baleen whale called Janjucetus hunderi, which was at most just three metres long, the size of a bottlenose dolphin.

"This is the clearest evidence yet that the earliest baleen whales could not filter feed and that's interesting because it had previously been thought that all baleen whales were filter feeders," says Fitzgerald.

He first analysed and named this creature in 2006, but at that stage he only had an incomplete lower jaw.

Fitzgerald then came across missing lower jaw bones in the collection of an amateur fossil hunter, by the name of Brian Crichton, who originally found them in the 1970s on a beach near Torquay in Victoria.

These new bones showed that the two halves of the lower jaw bone in Janjucetus hunderi were fused, and unable to open up to allow filter feeding.
Yet, Fitzgerald had previously found the animal had evolved another feature thought to be essential for the filter feeding - a wide upper jaw that creates a large space inside the mouth.

This begged the question: why then did this toothed whale evolve a wide upper jaw?

Fitzgerald finds a clue in the mouths of modern dolphins, which also lack an elastic lower jaw. Those with really wide upper jaws feed by sucking in large individual prey, he says.

"They generate a vacuum [helped by the wide upper jaw] and hoover up fish and squid, sucking them in through a relatively small opening at the front of their mouths," says Fitzgerald.

"I argue that the big mouth of baleen whales possibly originally evolved to enhance the ability to generate suction."

He says it would be less of an evolutionary leap to go from baleen whales that catch large prey with their teeth to those that suction feed, than directly to those that filter feed of lots on tiny organisms.

After being decimated by past whaling the numbers of blue whales remain low with only about 10,000 individuals left, mainly in the Southern Ocean, says Fitzgerald.

Although they are now protected, he says they remain under threat due to changes in the ocean ecosystem that may affect levels of krill.

Pesticide punished reef gets 'moderate' health report

About 28,000 kilograms of pesticides enter the Great Barrier Reef annually, a new report shows. The overall health and water quality of the reef has been rated as moderate in the federal and Queensland governments' first report card into the reef's health. The report is based on 2008 to 2009 data and does not include the effects of Cyclone Yasi and Queensland's floods.

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke said it's an important step to monitoring the impact of runoff and sediment on the reef.

The report found 14 million tonnes of sediment from human activities wash into the world's largest coral reef every year.
The greatest amount of sediment comes from cattle farms in the Burdekin and Fitzroy regions in central and north Queensland.

But the majority of the 28,000 kilograms of pesticide runoff comes from the Mackay and Whitsunday sugarcane farming region in north Queensland.

The report comes as cane growers win an additional six weeks to convince the national regulator they should be able to continue to use the weed-killing pesticide Diuron.

The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority was to have suspended the use of Diuron this week, after an extensive review, because of its effects on waterways.
But the authority has postponed the decision until after September 30 to allow the industry time to make a case for the pesticide's use.

The Queensland government is investing $175 million over five years to implement a reef plan, including $50 million to implement reef protection laws and research. The first report card is part of an agreement between the state and commonwealth to coordinate actions to reduce runoff of sediment, fertilisers and pesticides from broad-scale agriculture.

"Many landholders are working to improve land management practices to reduce impacts on the reef and the Gillard government is supporting them to make these changes," Mr Burke said.

 

Snippets from the Project Officers Report July 20th 2011

Seaweed may fuel future energy demands. Aquatic biorefinery Kelp and other seaweed could be biofuels of the future, avoiding competition with food crops for land and scarce freshwater resources, say researchers.

Researchers gathered at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Glasgow, Scotland heard how fast-growing cultivated kelp forests attached to offshore wind farms could provide the biofuels of the future.
So far, the process is not economical, but rising oil prices, or the possibility of first extracting higher-value products from the seaweed, such as food additives, could change that.
"We've got a lot of seaweed growing out in the sea and we're not really using it. It's not taking up land. It's not food which could also be eaten," says Jessica Adams of Aberystwyth University in Wales.
"They grow very fast," says Yannick Lerat of the Technical Research Center on Seaweed in Pleubian, France. "The amount of organic matter you can produce per year per surface is about 10 times higher than you can find in croplands without GM organisms."
"There is no need to use freshwater," he says. "Freshwater in some parts of the world is becoming really a tricky resource."
Easier to convert than land-based crops
As with land plants, the carbohydrates in the tissues of seaweed can be converted in various ways to fuels. They can be burned via a process known as pyrolysis to make oil; fermented with bacteria into ethanol; or converted into methane via anaerobic digestion.
Because seaweed is buoyed by water, it does not need to make the woody compound lignin to help it stand up against gravity, like land plants do in growing their stalks and trunks.
Gnarly lignin resists degradation, a key obstacle in bringing terrestrial biofuels made from biomass like corn stalks or tree crops to market. This makes seaweed easier to convert to fuels, say researchers.
"There are issues with harvesting it from the wild for it to be sustainable," says Michele Stanley of the Scottish Association of Marine Sciences, who is a leader of a program investigating fuels from seaweed. "We would support cultivation."
Simpler, cheaper cultivation needed
In Norway, wild kelp is harvested on a five-year rotation for production and sale of alginates -- used as stabilisers and emulsifiers in foods, among other things. Wild harvest would not be feasible for the quantities needed for biofuels, says Stanley.
Pål Bakken, founder and head of Norwegian company Seaweed Energy Solutions AS, is working to develop better methods for cultivation.
His company has patented devices for growing kelp in sheets anchored to the seafloor at a single point, which allows the sheets to flow with the wave action, simulating a more natural growth environment.
This should allow simpler, cheaper cultivation and harvesting, he says, eliminating the tangly, multi-anchored rope systems of traditional Asian seaweed culture and perhaps making deeper waters available for cultivation.
Like land plants, kelp needs sufficient nutrients to grow, so it would need nitrogen fertiliser to grow in open water far from coastal nutrient sources.
But cultivated kelp could be a useful way to clean up waters full of nutrient runoff. For example, Norway's salmon farming releases enough nitrogen to support 9 million tonnes of kelp, says Bakken.
Making it commercially viable
It is still unclear how the economics of seaweed biofuels shake out, according to experts. Stanley is investigating the question and hopes to have an answer in the next couple of years.
"There is no way this would be competitive on day one," says Bakken. "Incentives will be important in the beginning."
Lerat says oil prices will need to be somewhere around US$300 (AU$321) a barrel before it's economical, but he and others say extracting higher value chemicals first could change the equation.
"The more valuable things you can get out, the better," Adams said.
Indeed, the idea of the 'biorefinery', analogous to the petrochemical refinery where high-value petrochemicals are taken out of crude oil before fuel is refined, is a popular vision of the future for terrestrial and marine biofuels alike.
Components of bioplastics, nutritional supplements, protein for fish food or even the phosphorus-laden ash from seaweed could be possible profit-turners. The remaining, carbohydrate-rich biomass could be fermented or digested to ethanol and methane for fuel.
Bakken notes that the available area for cultivation could be "almost unlimited and believes seaweed can make "a very large contribution" to the liquid fuels industry. His company claims that about 3.7 tonnes of kelp are needed to produce a barrel of ethanol.
Current global production is about 15 million metric tons, largely for alginate and food, and mostly in China and Japan. In a release from last year, Bakken's company reported that using 0.05 percent of Europe's coastal areas to cultivate kelp could supply 4.7 per cent of the 2008 global ethanol production.
Thinking blue
For now, the crop would be seasonal. Adams presented his work at the meeting, noting that carbohydrate levels in kelp on the Welsh coast rise tenfold from their wintertime lows to 35 to 40 per cent in July, a finding that others have agreed with.
Seaweed crops would likely be bred for desirable attributes over time, including a longer cultivation season. Researchers agree that prudence would be needed in what species were introduced where, to avoid problems with species invasions.
"I think this is really big," says Bakken. "It's not only the seaweed. It's the shift toward thinking 'blue.' We are so land-based. I think this will open up all kinds of industries related to the sea. It's finally beginning now."

 

Thursday, July 21st 2011

The AGM was held last night and the office bearers for the coming year were elected. The executive remains largely unchanged, Bob Edgar is President and Project Officer, Lindy Powells becomes Vice President and Susan Gibbs remains as Treasurer with Neil Vaughan as Dive Expedition Officer. Ian Shaw has been elected Secretary with Charlie Bellemore remaining as Social Secretary.

Updates to the Species Index have been ongoing, with several fish species added over the past few days. While not known as a prime dive site, the Red Rock Estuary is a worthwhile diversion with inhabitants not normally seen at the more popular dive sites, and while relatively small is a repository for juveniles of many species, including butterflyfish, surgeonfish and some cod species. The latest addition to the website, the Oyster Blenny Omobranchus anolius (see below) was present in numbers in both juvenile and adult forms. The estuary looks particularly healthy at present with good sized schools of bream and blackfish as well as herring and mullet and occasional dusky flathead.

Wednesday, July 13th 2011

SURG members conducted a series of surveys at the Coffs Harbour Marina over the past week. Last Saturday, 9 members conducted Marine Debris surveys under the finger wharves and around the perimeter of the inner harbour, establishing the amount of debris present, with the possible removal planned for a later stage. At the same time, videos were taken of pilings throughout the finger wharf complex, allowing assessment of growth on the pilings, and to establish any presence of introduced pest species of alga, molluscs or echinoderms. On the following Tuesday, 3 members conducted fish species surveys through the same area, and today Baited Remote Underwater Videos (BRUV's) were deployed in the inner and outer harbour.

The debris surveys revealed a total of 271 items, in seven categories (glass, plastic, rubber, fiberglass, cloth, metal and paper), and included several shopping trolleys, ropes, steel pipe and a drum. The larger items were extensively encrusted and are now providing shelter for a variety of animals including two species of puffer fish and various crustaceans.

The fish surveys revealed over 39 species of fish from 26 families, indicating a wide range of diversity. As well, other families, including molluscs, sea grasses and algaes, marine mammals and bird life were recorded. Of particular interest, two specimens of the Sargassum Fish, Histrio histrio were found, one dead on the surface, the other very much alive and subsequently photographed (see PISC 0263 in the species index), and several mating Blue Swimmer Crabs were recorded.

Unfortunately by today the underwater visibility had decreased and the BRUV's results were not as we would have hoped. Confirmation sightings of several species were obtained however, and, interestingly, one of the BRUV's outside the inner harbour revealed the caudal fin of a small shark and an eagle ray.

A full report including analysis of the results will be forwarded to the Consultants, TierraMar Consulting, who are working with the Marina Management company to establish a complete environmental management plan for the Marina and surrounds. SURG members donated their time on a volunteer basis, in conjunction with local dive operator, Jetty Dive, who provided tank fills and logistical support. TierraMar Consulting is working closely with the Northern Rivers Catchment Management Authority who provided the funding for the overall project and it is hoped a further series of surveys will be done in the summer to obtain indications of seasonal variations.