Wild Ocean Blue

I welcomed in the new decade under a stunning blue moon here in Cambridge, and it’s got me to wondering whether the brand new year, and decade, that lie ahead of us might also be full of other rare and beautiful things.

2009 was undoubtedly the year when more people than ever before began paying attention to the problems of climate change. It was incredible to see these issues climb so high in the international agenda, even if the outcome might not yet be what most of us were hoping for.

But has all the talk about climate change distracted us from many of the other threats to the natural world?

Biodiversity – the wonderful diversity of wild species and the threats they face from human actions – is an issue that has been patiently waiting in the wings, waiting for the UN to push in out onto centre stage in 2010. Because this year is the UN International year of biodiversity.

The question is, will the dwindling populations of so many important, breathtaking, extraordinary species command as much global attention in 2010 as the climate change debate did in 2009.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky.

Coming up in the following months are a few major international meetings that could decide the fate of some of the world’s wildlife.

The international trade in bluefin tuna – highly prized for Japanese sushi – could be banned in March at the latest conference of CITES – the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Following the failure last November of management bodies to take bold steps to help stop these magnificent fish being hunted to extinction, CITES could be the bluefin tuna’s last hope. But will countries with a vested interest in the trade be prepared to vote for a ban? The pessimist in me says, not likely.

Bluefin tuna on sale in Tsukiji Market, Tokyo. Photo by Sanctu

Also on the agenda at the CITES meeting will be a group of sharks that conservationists fear are being driven towards extinction by demand for their meat and most notably their fins, to be made into the Asian delicacy sharks fin soup. I’ve been working for the last 6 weeks assessing the proposals to have hammerheads, oceanic whitetips, spiny dogfish and porbeagle sharks join a trio of awesome sharks that already have trade restrictions – the basking sharks, whale sharks and great white sharks.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by gnuru

I’ll be blogging more about sharks and tuna this year, so watch this space.

Then, November will see another landmark UN meeting and with it another opportunity to make global deals that could help secure the future of the planet, this time at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

Back at the Rio Earth summit in 1992 nations pledged to put a halt to the loss of biodiversity. And they were going to do it by 2010.

Everyone knows that this has not happened – no where near it. We are barely even starting to understand how human actions are affecting biodiversity, let alone figure out ways of stopping extinction.

So this meeting will be a tricky one, but could be vital if a way forward for global action against extinction is to be found.

But ultimately what I hope this coming year will do is help people appreciate why biodiversity matters, just like many people in 2009 began to realise why climate change matters.

The link between biodiversity loss and our own lives may not be as obvious as the threats from climate change, but there are so many ways in which we depend on healthy, diverse, functioning ecosystems. And that’s something else I’ll be writing about more this year.

For now, Happy New Year to you all. May 2010 be full of rare and beautiful things for us all.

Saturday was International Day of Climate Action run by 350.org

I meant to publish this post on Saturday – but somehow I must have hit ‘Save Draft’ instead of ‘Publish’! whoops!  Sorry about that. But it’s still not too late to get involved in the campaign.

This is an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis, the solutions, as 350.org says “that science and justice demand”.

The focus of the campaign is on the number 350, because that is becoming widely considered as the “safe upper limit” for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (in parts per million or ppm). Keep CO2 levels beyond that and we are really in trouble.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, if we don’t get levels down to 350 ppm we may as well wave goodbye to coral reefs and all the benefits – economic and otherwise – they provide. And given that currently the atmosphere holds around 387 ppm, there is a massive task ahead.

But we have to do something because this matters way too much.

And with the climate talks coming up in Copenhagen in December, now is the time for the international community to stand up and make themselves heard. Well, that’s what SAturday was all about anyway.

But don’t just let me go on about it. Check out the 350.org website and see what’s going on, pledge your support and spread the word.

In a USA Today blog, Desmond Tutu said this week that the 350 campaign is “the same kind of coalition that helped make the word “apartheid” known around the world. In South Africa, we showed that if we act on the side of justice, we have the power to turn tides. Worldwide, we have a chance to start turning the tide of climate change with just such a concerted effort today.”

My tiny contribution to today are these seahorses… 350 of them.

Because if CO2 levels keep on rising, then we may well see the last of the coral reefs (at least on a time scale with any meaning to humanity) and with them we would see the disappearance of many of the world’s seahorse species (and the million upon million of other species they share the reefs with).

Now we wouldn’t want that, would we?

350 seahorses. my tiny contribution to International day of Climate Action, October 24th 2009

Happy International day of Climate Action everyone. Let’s all take some action, shall we?

If you’ve been watching my tweets lately, you’ll probably already have noticed I like to link to ocean stories from around the web.

So I thought I’d give you some thoughts on my favourite ocean tweets from the past week.

For starters, it seemed to be a week of great seahorse fecundity with the announcement of baby seahorses being born in two English aquariums. We had spotted or yellow seahorses in Chester – a species native to the Indo-Pacific.

And then the patter of tiny fins could be heard in Hastings with the arrival of 200 baby short snouts. These are European seahorses that live around the UK coastline and down into the Mediterranean.

Seahorses have been having babies in British aquariums since Victorian times, so this is nothing especially new. But it obviously still exciting.

Photo by Kelly Graham/Marine Photobank

As I discuss in Poseidon’s Steed, keeping seahorses in aquariums helps spread the word about these extraordinary creatures and of course raises awareness about the problems they face in the wild. And with breeding programmes like these two, and many others around the world, aquariums don’t have to rely on wild caught seahorses for their displays.

On a more worrying note, if you haven’t already, then take 30 seconds out of your day to watch a video on the Guardian website showing the sea ice at the north pole shrinking from 1978 to 2008.

Back in the late seventies, satellites first started taking pictures from space of the extent of sea ice over the arctic. Since then, the sea ice has fluctuated annually but overall has been contracting, with 2009 being the 3rd lowest extent on record.

And despite the slight recovery from 2008, scientists are still convinced that in the next few years the arctic will become completely ice-free during the summer.

Arctic Sea ice age in February 2008 compared to the average for 1985-2000. NASA.

Believe what you will about climate change, but this to me is stark evidence of the changes that have been taking place in the environment in the past few decades, and a worying sign of the changes still to come.

And finally…

This week we saw a cheery bit of ocean trivia. A video of bottlenose dolphins getting up to some strange jellyfish tricks has been doing the rounds.

Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). NASA.

The footage came from Tremadog Bay in Wales, and you can see the researchers onboard laughing themselves silly at the spectacle.

It’s not too obvious on the video clip but when the dolphins got a good aim, they flipped  the jellyfish clear out of the water.

It’s behaviour that’s never been see before, but perhaps goes some way to explaining why captive dolphins know what to do when a beach ball is thrown at them.

And why are they doing it? Well, who knows. I’d like to think they were just having a bit of fun.

Thanks for reading. More from me and the ocean world soon.