coelenterates
Warming oceans may make ‘Nemo’ harder to find.
Heat bleaches sea anemones, too, causing the iconic clownfish to stop laying eggs. Here’s how.
Like coral reefs, sea anemones—with their flashy, tentacle-like polyps that waggle and wave in vibrant reds, greens, pinks, and yellows—provide homes and hiding spots for dozens of fish species, most memorably the orange clownfish made famous in Finding Nemo. Also like coral, rising water temperatures associated with climate change can severely weaken these anemones, causing them to expel the tiny symbionts that keep them alive and lend them color, a process known as bleaching.
That, it turns out, is just where trouble starts.
When anemones bleach, Nemo and pals get stressed out and simply stop laying eggs, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. And scientists suspect that pattern may hold for untold numbers of other fish nurtured by either corals or anemones.
In other words, the mere stress associated with bleaching may be enough by itself to drive down many fish populations.
And, of course, bleaching no longer happens by itself.
Scientists also working with baby clownfish already have shown that shifts in ocean chemistry as the seas absorb excess carbon-dioxide—a process known as ocean acidification—can be unusually deadly. It scrambles juvenile fishes' brains, hampering their ability to see, hear, and smell. All that causes confusion, often leading them to swim toward—rather than away from—predators. The end result: they die far more often.
While few if any longterm studies have yet looked at just how bleaching and acidification may work in concert, scientists say they certainly aren't likely to somehow cancel each other out.
"Both bleaching and acidification are really stressful events separately," says Danielle Dixson, with the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, who spent years researching clownfish and acidification, but wasn't part of the new bleaching study. "I can't imagine that when they both happen it's going to somehow be any less stressful." (Learn how breeding aquarium fish can help reefs.)
THE CRITICAL ROLE OF HORMONES
The most recent research began when an ocean heat wave washed across French Polynesia in 2015 and 2016. A team of scientists tracked 30 different species of anemones in a lagoon off the island of Moorea. That warmth didn't just cripple corals. For more than four months, it attacked and bleached roughly half of those sea anemones. So scientists sampled the fish living among these overheated anemones and compared them with fish living in healthy ones nearby.
The release of hormones is known to affect how everything from sea birds to marine iguanas weather the rapid upheaval associated with climate change. That's true for fish, too.
The team found that the creatures associated with bleached anemones were chronically stressed, showing high levels of cortisol in their blood, says study co-author Suzanne Mills, with the Center for Insular Research and Observatory of the Environment in French Polynesia. Reproductive hormones dropped in both males and females. Fish pairs from bleached anemones spawned less and ultimately produced far fewer viable young.
That could have longterm implications that could ripple through entire marine systems.
"The cascading effects of bleaching at the community and ecosystem levels will, and may have already, played an important role in population impacts," Mills says.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Mills and her co-authors figured out that of 464 coastal fish species in French Polynesia, 56—about 12 percent—depend on species susceptible to bleaching for food or shelter from predators.
"If these species suffer even a fraction of the impact found for anemone fish, then a short-lived bleaching event could decrease the reproductive output of at least 12 percent of species," the study authors wrote. Ecosystem-wide impacts "may be considerable."
Dixson says Mills' findings are "really, really solid." And while they may not be terribly surprising to marine scientists, it should be an eye-opener for the public.
And, of course, that's only one part of the equation.
"Unfortunately, we're never going to have a world where the oceans are acidifying but not warming," Dixson says. "And all of the data suggests that won't be good."
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Jellyfish seek Italy's warming seas. Can't beat 'em? Eat 'em.
While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters.
MARINA di GINOSA, Italy — As a small boat loaded with wet suits, lab equipment and empty coolers drifted into the warm turquoise sea, Stefano Piraino looked back at the sunbathers on the beach and explained why none of them set foot in the water.
“They know the jellyfish are here,” said Dr. Piraino, a professor of zoology at the University of Salento.
While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters.
Climate change is making the waters warmer for longer, allowing the creatures to breed gelatinous generation after gelatinous generation.
The jellyfish population explosion has blossomed for years, but got a special boost since 2015 with the broadening of the Suez Canal, which opened up an aquatic superhighway for invasive species to the Mediterranean.
The jellyfish invasion has now reached the point where there may be little do but find a way to live with huge numbers of them, say scientists like Mr. Piraino.
Jellyfish are still treated, literally, like trash. The European Commission’s research and innovation branch recently considered jellyfish blooms, along with aquatic debris and pollution, a form of litter that posed “huge and increasing problems in the oceans, seas and coasts.”
The Rhizostoma pulmo, sometimes called the barrel jellyfish, spotted here off the shores of Apulia, southern Italy. It can sting and its numbers have blossomed along with other species in the Mediterranean. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The commission made funds available for researchers with innovative methods to clean the waters. Dr. Piraino and his team have answered the call.
Convinced that climate change and overfishing will force Italians to adapt, as they once did to other foreign intruders, like the tomato, his team has launched the Go Jelly project, which roughly boils down to, if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.
The study, which officially gets underway in January, will attempt to show that the enormous and increasing jellyfish biomasses can be the inexhaustible Jell-O of the sea.
While overfishing, warmer seas and pollution may wipe out ocean predators, they are allowing jellyfish to thrive — and reproduction comes easily enough to jellyfish.
They can be self-reproducing hermaphrodites, clone themselves, lay up to 45,000 eggs a day, sprout from polyps, and split in two. When a power plant in Japan tried to solve its jellyfish problem with a grinder, they only exponentially increased their problem.
“You can’t reduce their number,” said Dr. Piraino, adding that you can hope only to contain them.
To protect bathers from stinging species, Dr. Piraino has led several European Union-funded jellyfish studies, (“I ran JellyRisk,” he said) set up a global jellyfish spotting campaign, and protected beaches from inedible poisonous jellyfish with state-of-the-art, jellyfish-proof netting.
The problem is bigger than Italy. More than 30 million euros of tourism revenue is lost a year along Israel’s Mediterranean shore.
“Imagine a biomass the size of the world’s largest oil tanker cruising along the coast,” Dr. Piraino said.
In 2013, outbreaks of jellyfish forced the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in Sweden. In the Irish Sea, they decimated salmon fisheries.
In Sicily, where a young Dr. Piraino first came head to soft-bodied head with his life’s work (“it was not a positive first contact”), they have clogged fishing nets and colonized beaches.
Dr. Piraino has plumbed the mysteries of the creature, more than half-a-billion years old, for its possible uses. Those include the potential to fight tumors, and also using collagen-heavy species as a source for more voluptuous lips.
Then, there is food.
Antonella Leone is a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, and since about two months ago, Dr. Piraino’s wife. At their wedding this summer, the couple celebrated with a tiered cake dripping with confectionary jellyfish.
A leader of the Go Jelly project, she thinks that Italians, with their zeal for locally sourced regional ingredients, might just find a taste for jellyfish.
Others already have. The Japanese serve them sashimi style in strips with soy sauce, and the Chinese have eaten them for a millennium.
In 2015, a European Union regulation streamlined the application process for countries outside the bloc that wanted to market foods traditionally not eaten in Europe — like an Asian species of jellyfish — if they proved to pose no risk and had been consumed safely in that foreign country for more than 25 years.
Marco Nuzzo prepared jellyfish at Lo Scacciapensieri restaurant in Lecce, for an experimental cooking session. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, also removes bureaucratic impediments faced by European proponents of homegrown so-called novel foods, including those who favor eating the Mediterranean jellyfish.
But the Italian Health Ministry said that since no member state had a tradition of eating jellyfish and since the local species appeared biologically distinct from their edible Asian cousins with different toxicity levels and variations in stinging cells, the ministry said all the standard European research and safety-control tests needed to remain in force before a Mediterranean jellyfish could ever appear as a wild-caught delicacy in markets or on restaurant menus.
It was for such research that Dr. Leone slipped on her diving fins.
“Look, it’s enormous,” she said as she spotted one species, a pulsating violet-rimmed Rhizostoma pulmo — a.k.a. barrel jellyfish — drifting like a submerged plastic bag.
She dived into the jellyfish-infested waters and returned with nets full of violet globules.
As a tortoise, moving like a shadow in the water, arrived for its favorite slippery snack, Dr. Piraino explained how the changing climate will force people to follow the lead of the turtle or, more specifically, the Italian fisherman who once told him he liked to fry jellyfish and hungered for jellyfish ragu.
On deck, Lorena Basso, another climate researcher who has a grant to study the sexual distribution of jellyfish, used a scalpel and scissors to separate the animal’s bell-shaped umbrella from its tentacles, which glistened in the sun like dripping, translucent cauliflower.
“What she is doing now is taking the gonads of the jellyfish,” Dr. Piraino explained before calling out to his wife. “Antonella. Get me the one with the colored gonads.”
Back on board, Dr. Leone patiently held a jellyfish above a jar, draining it of its stinging mucous, with gloved hands that seemed slimed by innumerous sneezes.
“Would you like to taste it?” Dr. Piraino asked.
Once at their headquarters in the baroque city of Lecce, Dr. Leone put on a lab coat and experimented with ways to conserve the jellyfish.
Freshly prepared jellyfish. The European Union has eased a ban on so-called novel foods not traditionally eaten in member states. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
She prepared to freeze dry and vacuum pack them and asked a colleague to pull a species from the barrel. He put his hand in but came up empty.
“What are you,” she asked, “scared?”
The next morning, a restaurant near the university in Lecce became a test kitchen.
As the defrosting jellyfish seemed to reanimate under the faucet’s running water, the restaurant’s chef asked if he should salt the boiling water. Dr. Leone told him it would not be necessary. He asked how to cut the tentacles from the cap.
“Like a mushroom,” Dr. Piraino explained.
They boiled the first batch for a few minutes to remove its water and destroy its stinging cells. The chef, with a dubious, hesitant expression, sliced the boiled jellyfish, now cerebral in appearance with a deeper purple hue.
Another cook then slid the slices through a flour batter and dropped them in a fryer. Once plated, they broke free of their casing and insolently stuck out like purple tongues.
Dr. Piraino cut a piece that he said was full of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
“It’s great,” he said, as it slipped out of his hand.
The chef marinated a piece in garlic and basil for the grill. He prepared another on a bed of arugula next to a sweet fig to balance out what everyone agreed was an intense saltiness.
At the end of the tasting, there were several untouched specimens on the table. Dr. Leone packed the foodstuff of the globally warmed future into a jellyfish doggy bag.
“It’s for my colleagues,” she said. “They are a little skeptical.”
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In an acidified ocean, box jellyfish will gobble up all the food.
As the oceans become more acidic, box jellyfish may start eating a lot more. Their greedy appetites could have a huge impact on marine ecosystems.
By Christie Wilcox
As the oceans become more acidic, box jellyfish may start eating a lot more. Their greedy appetites could have a huge impact on marine ecosystems.
Some of the carbon dioxide we release is dissolving in the oceans, where it becomes carbonic acid – making the oceans less alkaline and more acidic. Scientists are scrambling to identify which species will be most impacted.
They are particularly concerned about organisms that play pivotal roles in marine food webs, because if they disappear, entire ecosystems may collapse.
Copepods are particularly critical. These tiny crustaceans are the most abundant animal on earth by mass. They swarm in vast numbers in some regions of the ocean, where larger animals feast on them.
What happens to copepods affects all that depend on them, “which is pretty much everything,” says Edd Hammill of Utah State University in Logan.
Previous studies have found copepods may be fairly resistant to ocean acidification. However, these have largely focused on single species, so community-level effects may have been missed.
To find out, Hammill and his colleagues collected zooplankton and one of their gelatinous predators, the box jellyfish Carybdea rastoni, from the waters around Australia. They kept the plankton in tanks containing either ambient seawater or seawater acidified at levels predicted for 2100, then added box jellyfish to half of the tanks. After 10 days, they counted what survived.
Both acidification and box jellyfish reduced the number of copepods, but both together caused 27% more deaths than the sum of the two individually. The jellyfish were eating more: they gobbled up nearly 37% of copepods in the ambient seawater tanks, but almost 83% in the acidified water.
Hammill thinks the copepods were weakened by the acidified water and that the jellyfish took advantage, but can’t rule out other possibilities. “It could be the jellies are being negatively affected by the acidified water and are needing more prey to get along,” he says.
“It is a simple and clever experiment with some intriguing results,” says Nyssa Silbiger of California State University, Northridge. It highlights the critical need to better understand community dynamics in response to changing environmental conditions, she says.
“If these results do translate to the global oceans, even just a little, it could have potentially dramatic and cascading effects on the ocean food web,” Silbiger says.
Other jellyfish are likely to respond similarly to acidified water, says Hammill.
He plans to look at the Arctic ecosystem next. “It’s the most productive and one of the largest ecosystems [in] the world,” he says. If the same pattern occurs, it “could be a really big deal”.
Journal reference: Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13849
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Is climate change bringing more deadly stingers to Coast?
An increase in stingers, including members of the deadly irukandji family, will be the focus of a new study looking to identify the effects of climate change on the Sunshine Coast's marine life.
AN INCREASE in stingers, including members of the deadly irukandji family, will be the focus of a new study looking to identify the effects of climate change on the Coast's marine life.
Cr Jenny McKay said a nine per cent increase in the amount of stingers on the Coast had driven a $25,000 funding allocation in the environment levy program for the climate migration study.
"What this report will do will give us greater clarity around it," Cr McKay said.
"There is a lot of information, but there is nothing like putting all of that information together and then having a clearer picture of what really is happening and whether it is a part of global warming or what is actually happening and why the nine per cent increase in stingers."
She wasn't sure when the study would be started or completed but hoped it might be done before summer.
Cr Tim Dwyer questioned council officers during Thursday's meeting about the likelihood of irukandji migration to the Sunshine Coast.
He referred to the work of biologist and jellyfish expert Dr Lisa-Ann Gershwin, who has previously said there was little or no evidence of north-to-south movement of irukandji.
But the officer said there were a range of conflicting opinions among experts on the matter.
Cr Dwyer asked that the council work with northern regional councils including Noosa, Gympie and Fraser Coast to share the cost and workload of addressing the issue.
Cr Greg Rogerson spoke of other aspects of the environment levy program, particularly the management of weeds along roadside verges.
He said he wanted the council to work with the Department of Transport and Main Roads to ensure funding was forthcoming to contain pest plants like giant rats tail.
The environment levy was adopted with a unanimous vote.
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Underwater cypress forest from ice age reveals its secrets.
Deep beneath the waves, miles from the coast of Alabama, lies a primeval underwater forest, a grove of giant cypress trees so fresh that their trunks still ooze sap when they're cut.
Deep beneath the waves, miles from the coast of Alabama, lies a primeval underwater forest, a grove of giant cypress trees so fresh that their trunks still ooze sap when they're cut.
Most of the ancient giants, now covered with sea anemones and schooling fish, last grew roughly 50,000 years ago, making this underwater forest the oldest of its kind anywhere in the world.
Its location kept hidden by scuba divers who hoped to protect the ancient grove, the underwater forest is slowly giving up its secrets to scientists. Many of those secrets are being revealed in a new documentary, called "The Underwater Forest." The program, which is now available for viewing on YouTube, will air on July 23 and 24 on Alabama Public Television.
The dramatic changes that this forest underwent during a volatile period of climate change may also hold clues for Earth's climate future, experts said.
Amazing discovery
Several years ago, scuba-dive-shop owner Chas Broughton discovered the bald cypress forest more than a dozen miles (20 kilometers) from Mobile, Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico, about 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the ocean's surface. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sandy, barren seafloor, was a watery world blanketed with sea sponges, schooling fish, octopuses and crabs. When Broughton took a closer look, he found a grove of massive tree stumps overlooking a meandering, ancient riverbed carved into the seafloor. Like a coral reef, the ancient trees had become home for thousands of different sea creatures.
"It was quite magnificent," Broughton said in the documentary.
In 2012, Broughton disclosed the existence of the site to Ben Raines, an environmental journalist for a local Alabama news site AL.com, but swore him to secrecy on the trees' precise location.
Mud and sand covered the forest for eons, creating an oxygen-free environment that protected the trees from the punishing environment of the ocean. But in 2004, Hurricane Ivan's powerful winds and waves uncovered some of the forest. Since then, scientists have slowly been revealing the site's hidden history.
The team is also working to make the forest a marine protected area, so salvage operations can't log the primeval grove and turn the ancient wood into high-end coffee tables.
Ancient grove
Tree scientists quickly identified the trees as the freshwater swamp-dwelling cypress species, notable for their craggy "knees," which anchor similar trees into the mud along the Gulf of Mexico today.
The team took cores from the trees to analyze the tree rings, then handed those samples on to Grant Harley, a dendrochronologist (a scientist who studies tree rings) at the University of Southern Mississippi. The growth rings, sap and wood fibers were still visible in the tree stumps.
"When we ran those samples through the band saw, you can smell the resin just like you were cutting into a fresh piece of wood today," Harley said.
The scientists said that though they originally thought, based on the depth of the site, that the trees were 10,000 years old, radiocarbon dating from nearby sediments suggests the forest dates to an ice age that prevailed more than 50,000 years ago.
Volatile period
Under a microscope, the growth rings are thinner than in modern-day bald cypress, the researchers said, suggesting that the trees faced higher levels of environmental stress (trees nowadays, with constant growing conditions, usually have fatter, more even tree rings). It may also have been drier and cooler than now.
Sea levels were 400 feet lower at the time than they are today, meaning the coastline extended far out into the sea.
At the time, the Gulf of Mexico was a volatile place, Raines said.
"The world was really rocking then, with sea level changing as much as 75 feet [23 m] in 1,000 years," Raines told Live Science.
Rising at a rate of about 8 feet (2 m) per 100 years, the changing sea levels exceed some of the worst-case scenarios currently predicted for modern-day climate change, Raines added.
Tree ring data revealed that all the trees lived and died in a 500-year period, with periods of stress and growth, and all the trees ultimately dying at the same time, Raines said. The team also managed to analyze pollen from sediments near the trees, and found a transition in the environment that occurred rather dramatically. At its height, the river delta was made up of grassland that then gave way to a vibrant cypress forest, the researchers said. As sea levels rose, the grassland gradually moved inland, with the grassy fringe closest to the water retreating, before rising waters swallowed up the whole forest.
The team said it is still learning more about the ancient climate during this ice age. But like everything in the ocean, the waterlogged cypress grove's time is limited. As storms and shifting tides continue to reveal more of the forest, it will gradually be devoured by shipworms and bacteria, like so much else in the sea, Raines said.
For now, however, thousands of tree stumps still stand, rooted in the mud where they first grew as seedlings.
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My depressing summers in Belize.
I spend the hot months in the water, studying ocean ecosystems. What I see happening to our coral reefs is deeply alarming.
My Depressing Summers in Belize
By JOHN BRUNOJULY 6, 2017
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Entrance to the famous Great Blue Hole, part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System. Credit Michele Westmorland/Corbis, via Getty Images
When summer arrives, my friends and family inevitably roll their eyes when I tell them I’m packing for my fieldwork in the Caribbean. They picture a book and a white-sand beach. I do get a tan. But it’s no vacation.
I study ocean ecosystems. The work is chronically underfunded, so food and housing is basic or worse. When we’re in Belize monitoring the health of coral reefs, about half the nights we sleep under the stars on a dock. When I can afford a roach- and gecko-infested room, it’s often so rustic that it’s preferable to sleep outside.
There are also the tropical diseases we acquire (dengue, for instance), the insects that lay eggs under our skin (bot flies), stinging jellyfish, scorpions hiding in our shoes and, of course, feisty sea turtles (on one trip an enormous loggerhead turtle bit one of my graduate students on the rear). It’s also physical work, made harder by the intense heat and humidity. One former undergrad in my lab was in the National Guard. After she was deployed to Kuwait, she emailed us to say that the assignment was easier than fieldwork with us.
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The Belize Barrier Reef. Credit Pete Oxford/Minden Pictures, via Getty Images
Still, I love all of it. One of the big rewards is the wonders you stumble into by just spending so much time in nature, the kind of things you see in BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough. Last summer I woke up in the middle of the night, looked over the dock and saw a dozen spotted eagle rays slowly circling beneath me. It looked like a mobile you’d hang over a baby’s crib. We’ve also come across mating leatherback turtles (awesome, but not so sexy), orcas and manta rays in the Galápagos Islands, a huge tiger shark in Moorea and fields of tiny eels peeking out of their holes on the sandy seafloor in Palau.
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Like many of my peers, I’ve walked away from the type of purely basic academic science I was trained to do to focus on trying to understand and slow the rapid changes underway in ocean ecosystems. My team has been working on determining whether protection from fishing and pollution in well-policed marine reserves can moderate or reverse the loss of Caribbean corals, the small invertebrate animals that build up reefs over thousands of years.
Since 2009 we’ve been annually surveying 16 reefs across the Belizean Barrier Reef, half of which are inside a protected reserve. We typically survey two reefs a day, filming the seafloor with video cameras and counting and identifying every fish in 100-foot-long bands.
Unfortunately, we’ve found local conservation is ineffective in stopping coral loss. Dozens of other studies around the world have reported the same finding. The most striking example is probably mass bleaching and coral mortality on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and again this year. This well-protected reef, relatively isolated from human activities, is nevertheless susceptible to global warming. I was a co-author of a paper last year that found (to my surprise) that the world’s most isolated reefs were no healthier than those adjacent to coastal cities. Even the most remote marine ecosystems in the Central Pacific and the North Atlantic and around Antarctica are being radically altered as oceans warm and become more acidic.
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A diver observing bleached coral at Heron Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last year. Credit Xl Catlin Seaview Survey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Caribbean has warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit during my lifetime. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act as a sort of blanket around the earth, trapping heat that would otherwise be lost to space. Incredibly, 94 percent of this extra heat is going into the oceans, and it’s not just coral reefs that are being affected. Thousands of species are rapidly migrating away from the Equator, trying to stay cool. This is creating new mixtures of plants and animals that are interacting in new and unpredictable ways.
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Our goal as scientists isn’t to save only endangered invertebrates like coral but to preserve the reefs that hundreds of millions of people depend on. Food, jobs, tourism revenue, recreation and buffers from coastal storms are just some of the value coastal communities get from healthy reefs.
I grew up in South Florida in the 1970s, when the reefs of the Florida Keys were still relatively healthy. Snorkeling just a foot or two above acres of golden elkhorn corals was like flying over golden fields of wheat. That is what inspired me to spend my life learning and teaching about the oceans. I was about 10 years old then.
By the time I graduated from high school, most of that coral splendor was gone. A disease linked to ocean warming wiped out about 99 percent of elkhorn coral colonies across the entire Caribbean — literally hundreds of millions of corals disappeared in a matter of months. This species and closely related staghorn corals had dominated Caribbean coral reefs for at least 5,000 years.
Things aren’t getting any better. A few days ago, a colleague, Bill Precht, a coral reef scientist with an environmental consulting firm, sent me a note describing what he saw on a recent dive at Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It’s typical of my summer correspondence from fellow scientists. Depressing.
“This reef is a coral graveyard,” he wrote. “Lots of recently dead colonies now covered with a thin veil or sediment and turf algae.”
So what can be done to protect corals and other marine animals from ocean warming? The obvious solution is to switch to solar and wind energy, now a cheaper source of electricity than coal. Although our economy is already making this shift, it’s happening too slowly to avoid catastrophic warming. A revenue-neutral carbon tax is one effective mechanism to promote renewable energy sources. This solution has been championed by a bipartisan patchwork that includes the former NASA scientist James Hansen; the Republican elders James A. Baker, George P. Shultz and Henry Paulson; and my dad.
Despite all the loss and the looming threats, there is still so much left to conserve. Like the amazingly healthy Orbicella coral reefs I saw in the crystal-clear waters of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, a few years ago, and the staghorn coral reefs within swimming distance of the beachfront hotels of Fort Lauderdale that are now threatened by an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project. There are also a few reefs at higher latitudes or in other lucky locations that are warming much more slowly and could hold out for decades or centuries.
I really don’t know how this will all turn out. Corals and other creatures could adapt to their changing environments. People could radically reduce their carbon emissions. Yet both outcomes are unlikely, and reality is draining my ocean optimism. It isn’t too late, but we need to act very soon.
John Bruno is a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Climate change has changed the geography of Honduras’ Caribbean coast.
The sea is encroaching fast in the coastal area of Balfate, along Honduras’ Caribbean Coast, where natural barriers are disappearing and the sea is advancing many meters inland.
Biodiversity, Caribbean Climate Wire, Climate Change, Development & Aid, Editors' Choice, Environment, Featured, Global Governance, Headlines, IPS UN: Inside the Glasshouse, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs, Projects, Regional Categories, Special Report
Climate Change Has Changed the Geography of Honduras’ Caribbean Coast
By Thelma Mejía
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The sea is encroaching fast in the coastal area of Balfate, along Honduras’ Caribbean Coast, where natural barriers are disappearing and the sea is advancing many metres inland. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS
BALFATE, Honduras, May 15 2017 (IPS) - In Balfate, a rural municipality that includes fishing villages and small farms along Honduras’ Caribbean coast, the effects of climate change are already felt on its famous scenery and beaches. The sea is relentlessly approaching the houses, while the ecosystem is deteriorating.
“What was it like before? There used to be a coconut palm plantation before the beach, and a forest with howler monkeys. Today there are no palm trees and the howler monkeys have left,” environmental activist Hugo Galeano, who has been working in the area for over three decades, told IPS.
“Where the beach is now, which used to be 200 metres inland, there used to be a thick palm tree plantation and a beautiful forest. Today the geography has changed, the sea has swallowed up much of the vegetation and is getting closer and closer to the houses. The effects of climate change are palpable,” he said.
Galeano coordinates the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (SGP) in Honduras, and is one of the top experts on climate change in the country. He also promotes climate change mitigation and reforestation projects, as well as community integration with environmentally friendly practices, in low-income areas.
In the near future, this majestic tree will no longer be part of the scenery and a natural barrier protecting one of the beaches in Balfate, on Honduras’ Caribbean coast. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS
The municipality of Balfate, with an area of 332 square kilometres and a population of about 14,000, is one of the localities in the Caribbean department of Colón that makes up the coastal corridor where the impact of climate change has most altered the local residents’ way of life.
Other communities in vulnerable corridor are Río Coco, Lucinda, Río Esteban and Santa Fe. In these places, the sea, according to local residents, “is advancing and the trees are falling, because they can’t resist the force of the water, since the natural protective barriers have disappeared.”
This is how Julián Jiménez, a 58-year-old fisherman, described to IPS the situation in Río Coco. He said his community used to be 350 metres from the sea, but now “the houses are at the edge of the beach.”
Río Coco, a village in the municipality of Balfate is increasingly near the sea. Located in the central part of the Caribbean coast of this Central American country, it is a strategic hub for transportation by sea to islands and other remote areas.
To get to Balfate you have to travel along a partly unpaved road for nearly eight hours from Tegucigalpa, even though the distance is only around 300 km. To reach Río Coco takes another hour, through areas where the drug trafficking mafias have a lot of power.
Jiménez has no doubts that “what we are experiencing is due to climate change, global warming and the melting of glaciers, since it affects the sea, and that is what we tell the community. For the past decade we have been raising awareness, but there is still much to be done.”
The geography of Balfate, a land of famous landscapes in Honduras’ Caribbean region, has changed drastically from three decades ago, due to encroachment by the sea, according to local residents. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS
“We are also guilty, because instead of protecting we destroy. Today we have problems with water and even with the fish catches. With some kinds of fish, like the common snook, there are hardly any left, and we also are having trouble finding shrimp,” he said.
“It is hard for people to understand, but everything is connected. This is irreversible,” said Jiménez, who is the coordinator of the association of water administration boards in the coastal areas of Balfate and the neighbouring municipality of Santa Fe.
Not only Colón is facing problems along the coast, but also the four departments – of the country’s 18 – with coasts on the Caribbean, the country’s eastern border.
In the northern department of Cortés, the areas of Omoa, Barra del Motagua and Cuyamelito, which make up the basin of the Motagua River, near the border with Guatemala, are experiencing similar phenomena.
In these areas on the gulf of Honduras, fishers have also reported a substantial decline inT fish catches and yields, José Eduardo Peralta, from the Coastal Sea Project of the Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources, Environment and Mines, told IPS.
“The sea here has encroached more on the beach, and on productive land, than in other coastal areas. With regard to fishing, there are problems with the capture of lobster and jellyfish; the latter has not been caught for over a year and a half, save for one capture reported a month ago in the area of Mosquitia,“ in the Caribbean, he said in his office in Tegucigalpa.
This tree on one of the beaches in Balfate could fall in a matter of six months, due to the force of the waves which works against its roots, as part of the encroachment of the sea. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS
Peralta said the government is concerned about the effects of climate change, because they could reach dramatic levels in a few years.
The sea, he said, is rising and “swallowing up land, and we are also losing biodiversity due to the change in water temperatures and the acidification of the water.”
In line with Jiménez, Peralta said that “the sea currents are rapidly shifting, and the current should not shift overnight, the changes should take between 24 and 36 hours, but it’s not like that anymore. This is called climate change.”
Honduras is considered by international bodies as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate impacts, as it is on the route of the hurricanes and due to the internal pressures that affect the wetlands, such as deforestation and large-scale African oil palm plantations, which have a direct effect on water scarcity.
Ecologist Galeano said official figures show that in wetland areas, there are approximately two hectares of African oil palms per one of mangroves. He said it was important to pay attention to this phenomenon, because the unchecked spread of the plantations will sooner or later have an impact on the local ecosystems.
On Mar. 9, Environment Minister José Antonio Galdames launched the Climate Agenda, which outlines a National Plan for Climate Change Adaptation for the country, whose implementation recently began to be mapped out.
Among the measures to be carried out under the plan, Galdames underscored a project of integral management of the Motagua River basin, which will include reforestation, management of agroforestry systems and diversification of livelihoods at the productive systems level.
Hurricane Mitch, which caused incalculable economic losses and left over 5,000 people dead and 8,000 missing in 1998, tragically revealed Honduras’ vulnerability. Two decades later, the climate impact is felt particularly in the Caribbean coastal area, which was already hit particularly hard by the catastrophe.
According to the United Nations, 66.5 percent of households in this country of 8.4 million people are poor.
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