shellfish decline – Page 2 – Desdemona Despair

Two bird species that are extinct but not listed as such, for fear of committing the “Romeo Error”. Both species are still listed as Critically Endangered by IUCN because of the slim chance that one or more birds may still be alive. Such species are therefore not counted among extinct species, and vast sums of money are often spent in the vain hope that they will be found again. I Left: Eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis (Forster)), from Audubon (1827–1838: plate 208; Wikimedia Commons). Right: Bachman's warbler (Vermivora bachmani (Audubon)), from Audubon (1827–1838: plate 185 (detail); Creative Commons, Rawpixel). Graphic: Wikimedia Commons / Rawpixel

January 19, 2022

Earth on trajectory to Sixth Mass Extinction say biologists – “Including invertebrates is key to confirming that we are indeed witnessing the onset of the Sixth Mass Extinction in Earth’s history”

By Marcie Grabowski 14 January 2022 (UH News) – Mass biodiversity extinction events caused by extreme natural phenomena have marked the history of life on Earth five times. Today, many experts warn that a Sixth Mass Extinction crisis is underway, this time entirely caused by human activities. A comprehensive assessment of evidence of this ongoing […]

Banner from the WWF web site on 29 December 2021 showing more than 40,000 species are threatened with extinction, comprising 28 percent of all assessed species. Graphic: WWF

December 30, 2021

WWF: Looming mass extinction could be biggest since the dinosaurs – “One million species could go extinct within the next decade, which would be the largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age”

29 December 2021 (DW) – Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn’t been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its “Winners and Losers of 2021,” an annual […]

Dead oysters in a commercial oyster bed that were killed by the record heat wave in British Columbia in 2021. When Judy Hicks headed to the beach on 2 July 2021, she discovered that many of her oysters had cracked-open shells, indicating they’d died during the heat wave. From 25 June 2021 to 1 July 2021, during B.C.’s unprecedented “heat dome” that caused hundreds of human fatalities, record-breaking temperatures are estimated to have killed more than one billion sea animals. Photo: Judy Hicks / The Tyee

August 22, 2021

BC’s shellfish farmers struggle after record heatwave decimates oysters – “I have been in this industry for 36 years, and I have never seen a mortality rate like this”

By Vaishnavi Dandekar 5 Aug 2021 (The Tyee) – Judy Hicks, a commercial shellfish grower in Okeover Inlet, B.C., started her day early on July 2. Weather forecasts had predicted that temperatures would reach the mid-20s that day — after hitting the mid-to-high 30s earlier that week — and Hicks wanted to avoid the heat. […]

Thousands of dead mussels are seen at the waterline in British Columbia, killed by the deadly heatwave 2021. More than one billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from the record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures. Photo: Christopher Harley / The Guardian

July 18, 2021

Heat dome probably killed 1 billion marine animals on Canada coast in 2021 – “A lot of species are not going to be able to keep up with the pace of change”

By Leyland Cecco 8 July 2021 TORONTO (The Guardian) – More than one billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures. The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures […]

Aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning after an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, off the southeast tip of Louisiana, 21 April 2010. Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever. Photo: Gerald Herbert / AP Photo

April 19, 2020

10 years after BP spill: Oil drilled deeper; rules relaxed – “I’m concerned that in the industry, the lessons aren’t fully learned — that we’re tending to backslide”

By Kevin Mcgill and Matthew Brown 18 April 2020 NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters, where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever. Industry leaders and […]

The Blue Acceleration: global trends in human exploitation of ocean resources. Graphic: Jouffray, et al., 2020 / One Earth

February 26, 2020

The “blue acceleration”: Study shows humans’ surging incursions into the sea

By Grace Dungey 13 February 2020 (Mongabay) – Humanity has depended on the ocean for millennia. Today, however, the rush to the sea is occurring with unprecedented diversity and intensity, propelled by population growth and demand for diminishing terrestrial resources. A study published in January in the new journal One Earth analyzed 50 years of data on 18 kinds […]

Spatial distribution of global surface ocean pHT (total hydrogen scale, annually averaged) in past (1770), present (2000) and future (2100) under the IPCC RCP8.5 scenario. Graphic: Jiang, et al., 2020 / Nature Scientific Reports

February 17, 2020

Graph of the Day: The Future of Ocean Acidification

18 December 2019 (NOAA) – New research by NOAA, the University of Maryland, and international partners published in Nature Scientific Reports shows that the changing chemistry of seawater has implications for continued greenhouse gas absorption. The ocean has been playing an important role in helping slow down global climate change by removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide […]

Sea surface temperatures off the coast of Tasmania on November 23, 2010-2017. Data: Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). Graphic: The Sydney Morning Herald

February 2, 2020

Empty nets and tropical fish in Tasmania as climate change hits Southern Ocean

By Royce Millar and Chris Vedelago 31 January 2020 (The Sydney Morning Herald) – Rising temperatures and climate change have been blamed for the failure of stocks of some of the most popular eating fish in Australia’s Southern Ocean to recover from declines despite more than a decade of protection. The troubling findings come as […]

External carapace and pereopod exoskeleton of the Dungeness crab megalopae (a) in its undamaged form (b, c) and with dissolution presence ranging from mild (Stage 1; d) to severe (Stage 2; e, f) patterns showing similarity in the structural damages (g) or exposed crystals (h). Indicated is the scale of the measurements (μm). The undamaged megalopae originated from the offshore or northwards habitats characterized by low ∆Ωcal,60 vertical gradients, while the most severely affected megalopae came from the nearshore or coastal habitats with steep ∆Ωcal,60 conditions. Photo: Bednaršek, et al., 2020 / Science of The Total Environment

February 2, 2020

Dungeness crab larvae already showing effects of coastal acidification – “We found dissolution impacts to the crab larvae that were not expected to occur until much later in this century”

23 January 2020 (NOAA) – A new NOAA-funded study has documented for the first time that ocean acidification along the US Pacific Northwest coast is impacting the shells and sensory organs of some young Dungeness crab, a prized crustacean that supports the most valuable fishery on the West Coast. Analysis of samples collected during a […]

Map showing 2014-2018 global temperature change, compared with 1880-1899 temperatures. Data: Berkeley Earth. Graphic: The Washington Post

September 17, 2019

Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

By Chris Mooney and John Muyskens 11 September 2019 LA CORONILLA, Uruguay (The Washington Post) – The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory. It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a […]