The Oyster’s Garter

Before Miriam posted her most excellent explanation of what the North Pacific Trash Gyre really looks like, I had a vision for how to clean it up: A multinational fleet of mighty ships, their prows split wide open to admit the polluted sea water, slurping it up into giant filters to pick up the plastic, and spitting out clean ocean out the back. I can see them trawling back and forth over the ocean until, eventually, some bearded guy in a yellow rain slicker and a sou’wester wipes his brow, turns to his first mate and says, “Ayuh, we finished cleanin’ the watah.” And then Miriam posted, and I learned just how difficult cleaning up a Texas-sized ocean of trash with plastic at multiple depths really would be. Alas.

So how do we fix it? Over at Blogfish, Mark Powell lined up three proposed solutions: more recycling of plastic, ban the worst products, or a massive reorganization of our economy. In the comments, someone proposes plankton trawls, which is pretty close to my vision big ocean filtering boats. Unfortunately, there are serious problems with all of these ideas: banning the worst plastics might reduce the growth of the trash heap, but it won’t exactly clean up the mess itself. Same problem with recycling. I’m still keen on the trawl/ocean sucking barge idea, but there is that pesky problem of bycatch, in that you’d filter out any fish or plankton living in a marine area larger than Texas.

But then I recalled something about microbes that eat oil, when we have massive oil spills. Well, heck, plastic is made of hydrocarbons, right? Maybe there’s something that can eat plastic.

And thus I enter the fabulous world of bioremediation, the notion that we can fix biological problems with other bits of biology, most commonly by using bacteria to turn something toxic or polluting into something non-toxic or non-polluting. Back in 2005, Spanish scientists studied microbes that ate oil after a major spill off the Spanish coast. And recently some University College Dublin scientists evolved a bacteria to eat polystyrene, the main ingredient in styrofoam.

Now there’s companies that specialize in this stuff. A clean-up company called Ecochem claims you can use micorbes to clean up everything from the MTBE added to gasoline to fuel and oil spills that have seeped into the earth. I also found a fungus that eats certain hard-to-recylce plastic resins that get used in particle board and cars. So that seems promising, but I’m not sure fungus will do all that well in the water.

So, I’m afraid my search came up short, which isn’t too surprising, because if there was a plastic-eating microbe out there, we probably would have already set it to work on our landfills, let alone the gyre. Still, I have to think that if bacteria eat oil and styrofoam, then we can’t be too far off from finding one that will help us along with our plastics clean up. In the meantime, maybe those giant trawlers aren’t such a terrible idea?

Everyone knows about the whole Nalgene Bottles of Death, right? The Federal government came out with a report saying that a chemical from the bottles, called bisphenal A (BPA) could be harmful to babies and maybe, possibly, adults. People flipped out, bottles were pulled off the shelves, and I had to spend 18 seconds of my day to decide that I am not an infant (physically), and I shall continue to drink out of my favorite Nalgene bottle. But the furor isn’t what’s interesting about all this to me. It’s that Nalgene has been making these bottles for decades! And *now* we figure out they might be bad for us? What’s going on? Well I’ll tell you what’s going on. We don’t know squat about how plastic affects our health in this country, or really about much of anything else that we make out of chemicals. The University of California Centers for Occupational and Environmental Health recently published a report that outlines the dire state of our knowledge of chemical effects on people and the environment, and it advocates for policy solutions to fix the problem.

Some choice quotes:

Tracking data on chemical use in California is also lacking: there is no state-wide information on the volume or location of chemicals or products produced or imported, no catalogue of their commercial and consumer uses, and virtually no record of their ultimate disposal or environmental fate.

Look, I’m a reporter by trade. I’m pretty aware of how much the government doesn’t know. But seriously, we still in the midst of a nation-wide mass freakout about securing our towns and cities from the ravages of terrorists, but we don’t track the vats of chemicals that slosh around American factories and trucks? Really?

Public agencies have insufficient information to identify chemical hazards of highest priority for human health and the environment.

I thought that was what public agencies got paid to do.

Producers are not currently required to assume full responsibility for the health effects and environmental consequences that can occur over the lifecycle of their products. As a result, there is little impetus to minimize the potential hazards associated with the manufacture, use or disposal of chemicals and products.

There’s nothing new about producers not having to pay for the external costs of their products (like disposal), but I like seeing it laid out like that.

With the exception of pesticides and pharmaceuticals, laws governing chemicals in the U.S. and California generally require public agencies, not producers, to carry the burden of proof that a chemical or product causes unreasonable harm to human health or the environment before the agency can implement protective measures.

And the kicker to that last item: “the standard of evidence exceeds agency resources.” So, to sum up, we have no idea where the chemicals are, we have no idea whether chemicals are or are not safe, when we think something might not be safe, it’s up to us to prove their not safe, and finally, we can’t afford to gather the evidence to prove it.

I could go on a whole policy rant about taxes and “Starve the beast” mentalities, but that’s not really science, technology, or oysters gone wild.

The report advocates a host of policy goals, including mandatory hazard and tracking data provided by the producers, a government run green labeling program, and tax incentives for using chemicals known to be safe for people, animals, water, and the environment. Let’s hope this report gets into the right hands.

[Thanks Blogfish for pointing us to the report.]

The platypus genome has been sequenced, and it really IS an unholy mixture of mammal, bird, and reptile. Check out Jim Lemire’s handy breakdown. And did you know that platypus secrete milk through their skin because they don’t have nipples?

Further adventures with fish traps! As I’ve mentioned before, my sugar momma for this trip to Curacao is fellow Scripps graduate student Ayana Johnson, who is trying to build a better fish trap, one that excludes juveniles and tiny non-target reef fish. Our adventures with tying the traps to the truck were only the beginning - we still had to get her modified fish traps in the water.

Trouble is, Ayana is deploying eight per site and the traps are really quite big - about 4 feet wide and 1.5 feet deep - so we needed a boat to get them out. So here’s what stacking fish traps looks like if you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. That’s Ayana on the left and me on the right.

After only one day of checking the traps, we’ve already noticed a sharp difference between the regular traps and the ones with escape slots. (All the fish we catch will be released at the end of the five-day experiment.) The regular traps catch all kinds of tiny useless-but-beautiful fish, like juvenile French angelfish and four-eye butterflyfish. And eels. Holy crapoly, huge moray eels that come into the traps and eat everything else. In contrast, the modified traps did not have nontarget fish. But they also didn’t have any fish, though it’s hard to judge after only one day in the water. After seeing my very favorite fish on the reef, the fluttery silly-looking smooth trunkfish, caught in an unmodified trap, I sure do hope that Ayana can find a way to stop wasting all these fishy lives.

Carnival of the Blue #12 is up at the Island of Doubt. More ocean awesomeness than you can measure with an 100 meter transect tape!

Though my giant swollen hand remains a medical mystery, I now have a suspect. The dread Bearded Fireworm lives on the reef, peaceably crawling about munching on coral polyps. Until…a giant five-fingered hand reaches down from the sky and tried to sample the tunicate that it happens to be crawling on. Then the worm extends its GIANT POISONOUS SPIKES and bam! The offending hand is useless for a week.

They’re not exactly spikes, of course. Most marine worms are polychaetes, also known as bristleworms. Each of their segments has a fleshy protrusion called parapodia, from which protrudes hair-like bristles called setae. (Here’s a nice diagram.) Setae come in all kinds of forms - they can be jointed for traction, hooked for gripping, and so on - but the bearded fireworm’s case, they are hollow and filled with poison. Because of this kickass defense, fireworms fear no predators and are out and about during the day. The one that nailed me must have been small or I would have seen it, but individuals can get up to 12″ long.

Bearded fireworms apparently also have an unfortunate tendency to sneak into people’s aquariums. Googling around brought out some rather desperate threads on how to remove them. I can personally assure these people that gloves are no defense. I wasn’t wearing any pansy neoprene diving gloves, either - when I work with spiky things like nasty spicule-filled tunicates, I wear hardened rubber work gloves. But they were no match for the probable fireworm, no no.

The moral of this story? Looky, no touchy is BY FAR the best way to hang out on a reef. Collecting tunicate samples is way more harrowing than I thought it would be. On top of the fireworm, I almost got nailed by an extraordinarily attractive and extraordinarily toothy Golden Moray yesterday. (Rick would be…so proud. Scroll down for his That’s a Moray Monday series with all the moray goodness you can handle. Except for the golden moray. Rick, do you take requests?)

And sorry, ghouls. I forgot to take a photo of the swollen hand at its peak, what with the science and the doctor and all. Though my thumb still hurts, it is no longer even the slightest bit impressive. You will simply have to use your fervid imagination.

UPDATE: Replaced stock photo with my own photo for maximum grossness.

Living on a coral reef is like living in New York. Space is at a premium, you get crammed into all kinds of peculiar nooks, and you’ve got to be tough to maintain your personal space. (As a short person on the rush hour subway, I learned that my elbows are very conveniently placed for making tall people move.) So diving on the reef in Curacao feels oddly familiar. I’m here to investigate the mysterious explosion of a colonial tunicate on the reefs of Curacao.

Trididemnum solidum has increased by 900% over the past 30 years (Bak 1996). On Curacao’s central leeward coast, these tunicates are everywhere, taking over the reef and smothering coral heads. Trididemnum is native to the Caribbean, so why is its populations exploding? And is the tunicate domination related to human disturbance?

Trididemnum is like the armored tank of benthic organisms - it photosynthesizes, eats bacteria, is very toxic to anything that eats it, and even has pointy spines in its tissue for extra protection (Bak 1981, 1996, 1998 ). However, Trididemnum’s kryptonite has been its dependence on its symbiotic algae - if the tunicate is shaded, it dies. Trididemnum cannot live on filter-feeding alone. (Citation? Randy Olson, 1986! He was a tunicate god in his past life!)

Since corals (this is the belated Coral Week connection) are supposed to be the dominant competitors in lovely nutrient-poor water, what has changed? Potential changes (with credit to Dr. Bak and various people around Curacao) are:

1) Something used to eat Trididemnum, but doesn’t anymore. This is not very likely since Trididemnum is incredibly inedible, what with the toxins and the pointy spicules. But perhaps the tiny little baby colonies used to get bulldozed by the urchins, and the urchins are now gone.

2) Trididemnum is getting a brand new food source, such as bacterial runoff from the land. Tunicates have a mucous-y feeding basket that can capture very small particles, while corals have to grab them with their tentacles. If there are lots of very small tasty bits floating about, maybe Trididemnum is gorging itself.

3) Corals are weaker than they used to be, and can no longer fend Trididemnum off. Trididemnum will not settle on live coral as a larva (Van Duyl 1981), but it can overgrow it. So, for example, when the corals are stressed by too-warm water, the tunicate has a coral-killing party.

So here I am in Curacao, working on methods to test these hypotheses. Since this is not really my trip (it’s all funded by my partner for her fish trap work) I don’t have enough time to do a full-fledged study. However, I’m hoping that my nuggets of data will be enough to provide direction for a full-fledged study, perhaps this winter.

While I am extremely fond of tunicates, even I must admit that they are not as attractive as corals. In fact, it’s rather depressing to see all these fetching corals smothered by something that seems to be more a part of Jeremy Jackson’s Rise of Slime than of Pretty Tropical Coral Reef Land. I really hope that this work will eventually lead to a bit more insight as to why these tunicates are winning the battle for space, and why the corals are losing.

Sources:

Bak, R. P. M., M. Joenje, I. de Jong, D. Y. M. Lambrechts, and G. Nieuwland. 1998. Bacterial suspension feeding by coral reef benthic organisms. Marine Ecology-Progress Series 175:285-288.
Bak, R. P. M., D. Y. M. Lambrechts, M. Joenje, G. Nieuwland, and M. L. J. Van Veghel. 1996. Long-term changes on coral reefs in booming populations of a competitive colonial ascidian. Marine Ecology Progress Series 133:303-306.
Bak, R. P. M., J. Sybesma, and F. C. Vanduyl. 1981. The ecology of the tropical compound ascidian Trididemnum solidum. Part 2/3. Abundance, growth, and survival. Marine Ecology-Progress Series 6:43-52.
Olson, R. R. 1986. Photoadaptations of the Caribbean colonial ascidian-cyanophyte symbiosis Trididemnum solidum. Biological Bulletin 170:62-74.
Van Duyl, F. C., R. P. M. Bak, and J. Sybesma. 1981. The ecology of the tropical compound ascidian Trididemnum solidum. Part 1/3. Reproductive strategy and larval behavior. . Marine Ecology-Progress Series 6:35-42.

Diving in the morning, and processing samples into the night. I have learned it takes 2 1/2 hours to pump 20 liters of water by hand, and another 2 hours to scrub 10 tunicates. I am a tunicate scrubber, and a bad and naughty blogger. Though now I have two hands to do it with!