Wild Ocean Blue

When it comes to measuring the benefits of marine reserves (or Marine Protected Areas aka MPAs, or marine parks, or no take zones, or whatever you want to call them) it’s usually fish populations or marine habitats that we focus on. Now it seems that protecting areas of the sea from fishing pressure can very quickly help ocean predators – including penguins.

African penguins. Photo by ClifB

A new study from South Africa reveals that when a 20km stretch of ocean – not a lot really – was declared off-limits to fishing fleets, a local colony of African penguins spent on average 30% less time out fishing for themselves. Within 3 months of the fishing ban, the penguins found more to eat inside the protected area now that the human hunters weren’t competing for fish.

Spending less time hunting for their dinner is good news for penguins because it cuts down their exposure to other ocean predators that are partial to a penguin-dinner including great white sharks, orcas and cape fur seals.

African penguins. Photo by Paul Mannix

At the same time, another penguin colony 50km away weren’t so lucky. With no protection of their local fish stocks, they had to spend longer in the sea finding enough food for themselves and their youngsters.

African penguins are considered to be vulnerable to extinction, so it’s certainly very encouraging that they can benefit so rapidly from the careful siting of relatively small marine reserves.

Hopefully more reserves like this will be created to help secure the penguins’ future.

In detail:

• African penguins, also known as the black-footed penguin live on the SW coast of Africa.
• They are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.
• Population declines are mainly blamed on overfishing of their target prey including sardines and anchovies by purse-seine fleets.
• In 2000, a catastrophic oil spill affected nearly half the entire population of African penguins and spawned the world’s largest sea bird rescue operation.
• The paper by Pichegru et al is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Did you know that the world’s largest coral atoll is British, and that it could become the world’s largest marine reserve?

View from Diego Garcia. Photo by sushicam

Those are two impressive facts and they apply to the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, some 300 miles south of the Maldives.

The coral reefs of the chagos are among the most untouched and healthy reefs left on the planet, mainly because they happen to be a long way from any major human settlements.

I’m writing this post partly just to tell you about the Chagos – if you haven’t already heard of them – and also to ask for your help.

We have until Feb 12th – this Friday – to show support for the protection of the Chagos Archipelago and all the thousands of marine species that live there. The UK government – in a rare demonstration of expansive environmental thinking – is considering plans for a marine reserve that could cover 500,000 square kms. That is truly huge and far, far bigger than any other marine reserve anywhere today.

Containing hundreds of coral species and thousands of fish species (including, it’s thought, important tuna breeding grounds), this area is of extraordinary biodiversity value. And yes, as I’ve mentioned a few times already, this is the International Year of Biodiversity, so what better time to make this monumental pledge to the natural world.

Specifically, there are three proposals under consideration:

• Strict protection for the entire archipelago i.e. no fishing at all, anywhere
• Moderate protection for the entire area, with some deep sea fishing allowed
• Protection of only the “most important” areas of reef

Conservationists are united in their support for option one. Over 10,000 members of the public have already showed their support, signing a petition urging the UK government to Protect Chagos.

The Chagos archipelago is part of the British Indian Ocean Territories and consists of 55 islands, including Diego Garcia, home to a joint UK/US military base since the early 1970s when the native Chagosians were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles. This, quite rightly, stirred up a huge human rights debate that continues to rage on today.

I don’t mean to brush the human issues aside, but I’m not going to talk more about it in this post. Only, I do want to point out that plans for a marine reserve should not go against plans to allow Chagosians to return. If or when that happens, there is flexibility in the marine reserve plans to make allowances for the native islanders to come back and make a sustainable living from the seas around the archipelago. So this isn’t a case of people versus wildlife – there should be room (to some extent) for both.

Please join over 10,000 other people in signing a petition calling for the highest level of protection in the proposed marine reserve: no fishing at all.

I’ve signed it. And I urge you, dear, thoughtful, planet-loving readers, to do the same.

And don’t just take my word for it. Here is veteran environmental campaigner Tony Juniper saying much the same things as me.

This week an extract of my book Poseidon’s Steed was published in the Guardian, and the book is now available to buy in Europe from various online booksellers. So I thought it was time I blogged about my favourite fish.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is ‘Are seahorses endangered?’. And my answer is, sadly, yes they are.

Seahorses around the world are not only taken from the oceans (both deliberately and accidentally) in scarily high numbers, but they also suffer from the breakdown of their fragile habitats – especially coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves.

So, what can we do about it? Well, here are my top ten tips for doing your bit to save the seahorses:

1. Don’t buy dead seahorses

This may sound a little odd. Why would you want a dead seahorse?

Because they live inside a coat of bony plates – which take the place of a more conventional suit of fishy scales – seahorses maintain much of their delicate and intricate shape after they die.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same, but much of the seahorses’ beauty lives on after death and there is something to be said for having your very own magical seahorse sitting on your desk (I must admit I have one on my desk, in a little cardboard jewelry box, given to me by a friend who’d had it for years – it must be a long time dead).

Dead seahorse by luv life

But don’t forget it is just the dead body of a fish that once led a quiet, gentle life on the sea floor.

Picking up a dead seahorse from the beach isn’t so bad. But the ones on sale in seaside souvenir shops will almost certainly have been taken live from the sea. So please, don’t buy them. The seahorses will thank you.

2. Make sure your pets were born on a farm

Following the publication of an extract of my book in the Guardian, a few readers have commented that keeping endangered seahorses might not be such a good idea. Have a read of chapter 5 of the book and you’ll find details of modern seahorse farms where seahorses are being bred for the aquarium trade.

Baby seahorses. Photo by pixiesticks23♥ (real busy)

So these days there is no excuse. Anyone who wants to keep these cute animals at home can do so without taking them from a wild.

In the book I also go through some of the pros and cons of keeping seahorses: for you, for seahorses, and for the environment. It’s not up to me to say if people should or shouldn’t keep seahorses – although I can see how lovely it would be to have live, beautiful seahorses in my life every day.

But if you want to keep them, make sure you go to reputable suppliers. Or check out online forums: home aquarists are often giving away spare baby seahorses that were born in their tanks. And this doesn’t just apply to seahorses; always choose captive bred not wild critters for your tank.

3. Don’t buy seahorse medicines

Again, this might sound odd.

Especially to anyone who isn’t familiar with the popular practice in various countries of using seahorses as an ingredient in traditional medicines.

Traditional Chinese medicine texts dating back 500 years prescribed seahorses for all sorts of medical conditions from broken bones and bed wetting, to skin rashes and even a flagging libido. Global demand for seahorse medicines is a driving force behind a growing market in seahorses taken from the sea – at least 25 million of them every year.

Dead seahorses on sale in a medicine shop in Vietnam. Photo by Helen Scales.

Especially worrying is the growing popularity of pre-packaged, off-the-shelf seahorse medicines that use weeny, dark-coloured seahorses that traditional Chinese medicine doctors normally don’t bother with. This means that now any seahorse, no matter what size or colour, can now be used in traditional medicines.

So, if you do use traditional medicines and can afford to buy seahorses (they aren’t cheap), then think about engaging your compassion for the natural world and choose an alternative that doesn’t include endangered species. Because there are lots of alternatives.

4. Protect the seahorses’ world

All sorts of human activities threaten the shallow coastal habitats that seahorses call home including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangroves, and estuaries. The list of problems is long and growing and includes pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and ocean acidification.

And these are all things to worry about and take action over. Especially important is the creation of many more marine reserves or marine protected areas or marine parks or whatever you want to call them. Essentially these are places where the destructive influence of humankind is minimised, by banning fishing, extraction, direct input of pollutants and so on. Some strict marine reserves ban people altogether.

Healthy coral reef. Photo by Jiangang Luo Marine Photobank

There are obvioulsy problems that do not respect the boundaries of marine parks. But we know that protected habitats on the whole are healthier and can cope better when more insidious problems like climate change come along.

Currently less than 1% of the oceans are offered protection from human activities. That number needs to go up – a lot.

You may not have the power to set up your own marine reserve (who does?) but public support of local, regional, national and international campaigns to protect the oceans is vital for action.

5. Stamp out destructive fishing

A major threat to seahorses comes from trawl boats that plough through their habitat. Shrimp trawl boats don’t only catch shrimp but they also scrape up millions of seahorses every year (most seahorses made into traditional medicines are picked out of trawl nets), devastating their fragile habitats in the process. This insensitive, unselective form of fishing has to stop.

Trawl bycatch. Photo from Marine Conservation Cambodia/Marine Photobank

Do your bit by not buying fish that were caught in trawlers. How do you know, you cry? Well, you can ask. More and more these days, supermarkets and restaurants are giving customers information about how their fish is caught. If they don’t say and won’t tell you, then don’t buy.

Check out Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new Super Green List of fish that are good for you and not so bad for the oceans.

6. Take a stand against climate change

We may be releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above our heads, but an awful lot of it ends up dissolved in the oceans where it’s already starting to wreak a particular brand of marine catastrophe. The oceans are becoming more acidic. And the seahorses – along with so many other marine creatures – are going to get hit hard, mainly because lots of them live in habitats that may soon be gone: coral reefs.

So don’t ignore the goings on in Copenhagan next month, because this really matters. Especially if you like the idea of a world with seahorses and coral reefs and other beautiful extraordinary wildlife.

And we can all do our bit to help. Switch off lights, turn down thermostats, insulate your house, recycle, drive less, fly less, ride your bike more. Get involved in campaigns like 350.org. And think of the seahorses while you do it.

7. Go see the seahorses

Aquariums around the world are home to thousands of seahorses and more of them than ever are bred in captivity and not taken from the wild (many aquariums swap baby seahorses when they have too many, which is often the case for the seahorses species that breed happily in tanks).

Seahorse and shrimp fish in an aquarium. Photo by Cal_gecko

Stop for a few minutes and watch the seahorses doing their seahorse thing, and let your thoughts wander off. When they come back, you’ll have your own personal seahorse moment to carry with you and remind you about these amazing creatures and the wild world they live in.

And have a read of the information boards at the aquarium. You never know what you might learn about the world of seahorses.

There’s a great new Secret Lives of Seahorses exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But fear not, if you aren’t in California there are seahorse exhibitions all over the place.

8. Go dive for seahorses

If you are an addict of the underwater world like me, then there are heaps of places to go see a seahorse. Well, you can try anyway: they are extremely tricky to spot, with their cunning camouflage and shy nature.

Plus they are naturally rare creatures. You’ll not spot a big herd of them galloping by, but maybe – if you’re lucky – you might catch sight of a solitary seahorse grasping onto a blade of seagrass or coral branch. (Although, a friend of mine has just been diving in Indonesia and swears she saw a sea fan covered in dozens of pygmy seahorses. I’m not sure if she wasn’t just suffering from a case of nitrogen narcosis).

And you don’t have to venture to the tropics to see seahorses. Contrary to popular belief, seahorses inhabit shallow seas along virtually every coastline, tropical and temperate (but they don’t like really cold, icy waters, so don’t bother looking there).

Me and a seahorse. Photo by Steve Trewhella 2009.

A few weeks ago, I saw my first British seahorse off the beach at Studland in Dorset. Yes, that’s right. A British seahorse. There are two species on our fare but chilly shores.

Divers can play an important role in proving that a seahorse is worth more in the water than out. So, go out and support dive operations that care about their local seahorses.

And if you do spy a seahorse, try not to hassle it, poke it, prod it, or blind it with camera flash.

In this picture I am holding onto Troy (or rather, he is holding on to me), but I must point out, I was diving with a licensed seahorse handler (the UK species are now protected). We were conducting a survey, taking down this guy’s vital statistics, and stopped just quickly for an unmissable photo opportunity!

Check out chapter 6 of Poseidons’ Steed for more seahorse spotting tips.

9. Send in your seahorse sightings

Do your bit for seahorse research by getting involved with local seahorse spotting projects. The British Seahorse Survey collects reports of seahorse sightings from across the British Isles – and that goes for live seahorses in the water and dead seahorses too.

Get your seahorse spotting reports in!

10. Spread the seahorse love

And finally… (as they say on the news)

Recycled cashmere seahorse by snaulkter

Raspberry seahorse by snaulkter

I recently discovered these gorgeous cuddly seahorses made from recycled materials by a brilliant artist/designer snaulkter.

They are simply the most adorable – and accurate – depictions of seahorse in fabric that I’ve seen (and trust me, over my years of being a seahorse fanatic friends have given me virtually every beanie baby and cuddly seahorse ever made!). And I love that they are made from reused fabrics. Perfect!

So go get the kids hooked on seahorses, or indulge a grown up’s passion. Each seahorse is a unique critter, and each one is beautiful. Go see for yourself…

So… there you have my top 10 suggestions of how to help save seahorses. I’d love to hear you thoughts of any other things we can do.

That’s it. We can’t ignore this any longer. Coral reefs are in big, serious trouble. Not the sort of trouble that might spoil a few nice dive sites. This is the sort of trouble that could spell the end of all the world’s reefs within the next century. Yes, it could mean no more reefs.

So be warned. This is an unapologetically dismal post.

But please don’t take my word for it. I urge you to find half an hour to watch Professor Charlie Veron, veteran coral reef scientist, give a lecture on the past and future of the world’s coral reefs. Is the Barrier Reef on Death Row?

Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row? ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies/Marine Photobank

J.E.N. Veron, known as Charlie, is undoubtedly the world’s most well-respected coral taxonomist and biogeographer. His three-volume Corals of the World sits behind me, reminding me of the days I’ve spent conducting underwater coral surveys.

But lately he has become increasingly worried that those books could become history books. Now he spends his time researching and lecturing about the future of coral reefs. In particular ocean acidification, the ‘great big gorilla in the cupboard that is waiting for us’ as he put it.

Dead coral and live starfish. Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

In his lecture Veron tells us about how reef extinction has happened before. Five times in fact. Each time, corals under various guises were hit hard, but each time reefs reinvented themselves and came back.

So why is this 6th extinction any different? I actually think he nails that question most eloquently in his recent paper The coral reef crisis.

Here, Veron and his co-authors succinctly explain that the rate of current (and near future) climate change is way faster than it ever has been in the past. This leaves little hope that corals will be able to adapt their way out of trouble. Even if they could, like they have in past, it would take thousands to millions of years for them to recover: that’s hardly relevant on a human time scale.

‘The difference is that this time humanity will have been the cause and also one of the species to suffer,’ they write.

Synergism

In both his lecture and paper, Veron explains the critical importance of multiple threats. Reefs today face a scrimmage of problems, not just rising sea levels, but rising acidification, rising temperatures triggering mass coral bleaching events, overfishing, poor water quality and bigger, more frequent storms (watch his lecture for more details on all of these).

Scientists have – until now – mostly studied how reefs deal with each of these issues in turn. But what happens when they all come along together?

Synergism. The combined effect will almost certainly be greater than the sum of the separate effects.

Bleached and healthy coral. (c) Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

It’s an idea I wrote about in my masters thesis nearly a decade ago. Back then, there were hardly any studies focussing on how different stresses launch a combined assault on reefs. Now it’s something that people are having to think about more and more.

time to give up on reefs?

Veron doesn’t shirk his responsibility of delivering some really bad news. He outlines a series of increasingly spine-chilling scenarios. As CO2 levels ramp up from the current 387 ppm (parts per million in the atmsophere), first to 400, then 500 and 600, reefs will crumble and disappear.

By the time we reach 600 there won’t be any reefs left. And that could happen within 100 years.

Telling the story through the eyes of a moray eel he met on a recent dive on the Great Barrier Reef did little to take the edge off his apocalyptic message.

Unless we deal with carbon emissions, reefs are on their way out.

‘We must approach this as reality, not as a fairy tale’ Veron entreats.

That’s a message that has to get through at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December. If we could somehow manage to keep CO2 levels below 350 ppm, there is a chance reefs will survive.

So, please. Go make yourself a cup of tea and watch Charlie’s talk. And join the campain to save the world’s coral reefs. And when December comes round, you might like to listen in to what’s going on in Copenhagen.

Because this really matters.

p.s. why coral reefs matter

You may already know this, but just in case here are a few of the many reasons why reefs matter:

• They cover just 0.2% of the world’s marine environment and yet are home to around one third of all marine species.
• Approximately 500 million people live within 100km of a coral reef, many of them relying on reefs for food and income.
• Intact reefs protect coastlines.
• Reefs globally generate something like 170-375 billion dollars of income every year, in terms of food, tourism etc. That’s really just a good guess, and doesn’t count all the services that reefs provide that we can’t imagine replacing.

In detail

• The lecture: Charlie Veron gave this talk in July this year at the Royal Society, introduced by Sir David Attenborough.
• The paper: The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350 ppm CO2

The Pacific island nation, Palau, has announced a ban on shark fishing throughout it’s territorial waters. This bold show of commitment to curbing the global shark cull will put over half a million square km of ocean off limits to shark fishing. That’s an area slightly smaller than the whole of France.

In recent years we hear little but bad news about sharks. As experts work their way through the species, virtually every one is assigned a label of endangerment on the IUCN Red List, ranging from near threatened to critically endangered.

So is this at last some good news for sharks?

Young tiger shark (c) Terry Goss 2007/Marine Photobank

Surely yes, it is. It doesn’t matter one bit that Palau’s decision was sweetened by the prospect of tourist dollars pouring in from scuba divers desperate for shark encounters. Perhaps all the better that recognition is growing of the alternative price tag sharks carry, rather than as simply a pile of meat, cartilage and fins.

But I can’t help worrying about that enormous area of ocean we are talking about here in a region famous for it’s abundant shark populations. Does Palau have the resources to police such a vast area? How can they possibly keep out illegal fishing boats?

There’s no doubt that Palau are going to need some help if this is to be anything but a marine reserve on paper.

Other countries need to take steps to help stamp out illegal shark fishing and work out ways of cutting down the number of sharks killed unintentionally every year by long-lining and trawl fisheries.

One relatively straight-forward solution – or part of the solution – would be a world-wide ban on landing fins that are not accompanied by the sharks they grew on.

A shark thrown back without its fins. Nancy Boucha, www.scubasystems.org 2005/Marine Photobank

The greatest incentive for shark fishing these days is to sell their valuable fins into the shark fin soup trade. Forcing fishermen to give up at-sea finning could help cut down the number that of sharks are killed every year. A single boat can carry thousands of fins, but far fewer whole shark carcasses.

Pile of shark fins. Jessica King/Marine Photobank

President of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, told BBC News “…the need to protect the sharks outweighs the need to enjoy a bowl of soup.”

Absolutely it does.

Whatever happens next, Palau has made a radical and admirable step in declaring shark fishing out of bounds. It raises the bar in terms of the level of commitment we need to see all around the world if the oceans are to be anywhere near as shark-infested as they should be.