From the Archives: Yellow-Bellied Serpents of the Warm-Watered Reckoning

The 2018 yellow-bellied sea snake at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Note: this piece was originally written in February 2018 for the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Science Desk. It was revised in February 2021.

Washing up sick, tired, and a long way from home last month on Newport Beach, a yellow-bellied sea snake may be a harbinger for dramatic changes in Southern California’s waters. The venomous serpent could still be swimming if not for a storm that swept the snake ashore and provided scientists evidence of its incursion. “One might not wash up again this year,” says Greg Pauly, a herpetologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “But one will probably wash up next year.” Are foreign animals in Southern California waters the new normal?

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Native to the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the yellow-bellied sea snake differs from other aquatic serpents because of its namesake yellow underside and its paddle-shaped tail that propels it through the water. They are the only sea snake species that inhabits the open ocean habitat, where they feed exclusively on fish using potent venom. Perfectly built for water, these snakes are virtually doomed on land as they are unable to travel across sand.

The recently discovered sea snake joins four others in California history: three that washed ashore during the winters of 2015 and 2016, and one from 1972. Stranded on the beach and sick from cold water temperatures, the snake was euthanized and brought to Pauley to join the other wayward sea snakes at the Natural History Museum. It is now curled up in a jar of alcohol in the museum’s basement.

The 2018 yellow-bellied sea snake specimen.

What makes this particular snake noteworthy is that it washed up in a non-El Nino year. El Nino is a climate phenomenon when warmer water and different currents occasionally carry creatures adrift. Pauly believes that these snakes are beginning to arrive during non-El Nino years, when water temperatures are too cold for them to digest food, because they are extending their range north along the Baja California peninsula. As more snakes inhabit this area, they are susceptible to being picked up by surface currents and carried north. This is likely what happened to the Newport Beach snake.

Are sea snakes arriving in our waters the new normal? Greg Pauly believes it could be likely. “My expectation is that this is going to be an increasing occurrence now that snakes are washing up in non-El Nino years.” However, the existence of these seagoing reptiles are not the only signs of change in Southern California’s warming waters.

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The reason why sea snakes washing up on Southern California’s beaches is newsworthy is because it hardly ever happens. The water here should be too cold for them. But the world’s oceans are in the midst of unnatural temperature fluctuation.

Although the earth has been experiencing accelerated climate change for centuries, the temperatures in the Pacific Ocean experienced a dramatic spike in 2014. This area of increased temperatures stretches down the Pacific coast and out some 125 miles into the ocean and has been dubbed the “Blob.” Certain areas of the Blob are up to 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than average, according to a study that mapped the Blob from 2014 to 2016. A warming event of this magnitude in such a short period of time is unprecedented.

Kirk Lynn, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, believes that water temperatures are beginning to level off, citing the latest California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (CCIEA) Report. But there is no denying the damage that warming waters have done to the ecosystems of the Pacific coast. The Blob is tied to mass California sea lion die-offs as well as a deadly algal bloom that stretched the entire West coast. That 2015 bloom caused several commercial fisheries to temporarily shutter and killed approximately thirty whales that migrated through it.

The view from above the surface of a kelp forest along California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The main culprit for the Blob’s warmer waters is a lack of upwelling in coastal areas. Through the use of satellite monitoring, scientists found that the winds along California have weakened. As a result, not enough of the deep, nutrient-rich water is being thrust up by these winds to cool the unusually warm water. Lynn stresses that the lack of upwelling is merely a case of seasonal climate patterns gone to the extreme. “Neither the ‘Blob’ nor El Nino events are part of global warming, and oceanic conditions are returning to neutral states,” he says. But regardless of what’s driving this trend, the lack of upwelling can have disastrous effects on the whole marine ecosystems.

A horn shark swims through the kelp forest exhibit at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego.

The plight of kelp forests is a prime example. Without upwelling bringing cool water and nutrients, giant kelp languishes in warm surface water while ravenous urchins, whose populations have exploded as predatory sea stars struggle in warming waters, eat away at its stalk. In Northern California, bull kelp forests that once extended along the coasts for miles have been mowed down by the urchins. The wasteland left in their wake provides a grim look at what Southern California’s already-declining kelp forests may soon look like.

Into this warming environment arrives the yellow-bellied sea snake and a whole slew of other exotic creatures. According to Lynn, species typically seen off of Mexico, like whale sharks and manta rays, have been reported off the Channel Islands. Lynn also notes that “Juvenile white sharks have lingered in Orange County surf zones past their normal stay during summer months,” a frightening thought for some residents. Additionally, subtropical brown boobies, a seafaring bird that dive-bombs for fish, were recently spotted nesting for the first time in the Channel Islands.

While foreign sharks and sea snakes generate headlines, perhaps the bigger, and more perplexing, change in Southern California’s water is the shifting population of anchovies and sardines, which serve both as the backbone of California’s prosperous fishing industry and a key cog in the marine food web.

Diane Pleschner-Steele is the executive director of California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes the sustainable use of California’s pelagic fisheries and cooperative research. In 2014, her organization helped assist with the Southern California Coastal Pelagic Species Survey (CPS) conducted by Lynn and other California Fish and Wildlife Service scientists. The study, which aimed to gain information about the abundance of certain fish stocks in Southern California waters, is a great resource to view larger population trends.

Pleschner-Steele believes that we have entered “uncharted waters” when it comes to anchovies and sardines. “The old hypothesis was that sardines prefer warmer waters and anchovies prefer colder waters” she said. But the years after the 2014 study have presented “highly anomalous” results that turned prior knowledge on its head. The population of anchovies thought to prefer colder water has “mushroomed, notwithstanding the Blob,” according to Pleschner-Steele. Equally confounding is that fishermen reported “an abundance of both sardine and anchovy in the same time and space,” despite their preferences for different habitats.

The big question now is to figure out what these trends mean. The fishery data for anchovy and sardines possibly point to an ecosystem in flux as the fish respond to warming water differently than scientists predicted. But Pleschner-Steele is not quick to jump to conclusions: “The jury is still out: I think it’s too soon to make meaningful, or accurate, sense of this. We need to keep monitoring closely and document environmental forces that’s influencing behavior.”

While short term variations, like El Nino conditions, may affect our marine ecosystems in the present, sea temperature rise is a long-term trend that we cannot fully grasp quite yet. As Pleschner-Steele remarks, the ocean is too complicated “to know if this is the new normal.”

We cannot precisely predict what Southern California’s marine ecosystems will look like over the next few decades, but perplexing fishery trends and the influx of nonnative species gives us a glimpse of what the future could hold. While it is unlikely that a large population of sea snakes will call California home anytime soon, their existence off our coast tells us something about a changing environment. We would be wise to listen.

The swell of the Pacific off La Jolla, California.

All Pictures by Jack Tamisiea. Special thanks to Greg Pauly, Kirk Lynn and Diane Pleschner-Steele for taking the time to answer my questions.

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Inferno: Australia On Fire

The images from Australia being broadcast on the screens of our televisions and phones are reminiscent of an apocalyptic disaster film or the most horrifying fire and brimstone sermon ever delivered. Whole neighborhoods engulfed in flames. Kangaroos burned to a crisp. Fruit bats dropping out of a sky overwhelmed by billowing black, toxic smoke. Sometimes the sky glows a ghostly blood red. Australia’s climate change reckoning has arrived.

An area larger than West Virginia has smoldered as over 100 wildfires continue to ravage the continent. 24 people and counting have lost their lives, thousands more forced to evacuate as almost 1,500 homes have been destroyed. The smoke from these fires made the air in Australia’s capital, Canberra, the most polluted air in the world on New Year’s Day. 480 million of Australia’s iconic animals, from kangaroos to koalas, have been decimated by the flames according to Chris Dickman, a biodiversity expert at the University of Sydney. He calculated the grim number by using previous estimates of the mammal density in the Australian state of New South Wales, one of the states being hit the hardest by the fires, and comparing it to the area that has been seared. This incredible number is probably an underestimate as fires spread deeper into the states of Victoria and Queensland as Australia’s summer just begins.

Land of Fire

Wildfires in Australia may not seem as drastic as fires in other parts of the world, like the recent outbreaks in California and the Amazon over the last two years because Australia’s vegetation and animals have adapted to fire over millions of years. In Australia, the world’s second driest continent behind Antarctica, plants and animals have had to grapple with low precipitation, scolding temperatures and high evaporation rates since the continent became dominated by desert at the end of the last ice age. In this environment, fire has almost always been a regenerative tool to destroy weeds, provide nutrient-rich ash in arid soil and even help certain plants release their seeds. Some plants, like eucalyptus trees, even bring about bush fires by dropping their flammable bark in large piles at their trunks that act as kindling when the summer heats up, bringing about Australia’s natural fire season.

But this Australian summer has been disastrous for even the most fire-adapted ecosystems as Australia’s climate has become even more extreme. A crippling drought, even by Australian standards, left the landscape incredibly flammable in September. A record December heatwave, when temperatures reached as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, caused New South Wales to declare a week-long state of emergency. It effectively dosed the parched eastern coast of the continent in lighter fluid and sparked a record blaze. Even the fire-adapted forest ecosystems have no time to recover as they repeatedly go up in smoke.

This koala, named Sam, became known worldwide after an image of her drinking from a firefighter’s water bottle during a dangerous bout of fires in 2009 that culminated in Black Saturday, when 400 individual fires ravaged the Australian state of Victoria and killed over 170 people. Sam recovered from her burns and her remains are on display at the Melbourne Museum.

Koalas, Australia’s iconic narcoleptic marsupials, are being vaporized along with their forest homes. Unlike kangaroos and emus, who can frantically flee areas on fires, koalas are usually confined to the top branches of eucalyptus trees. When the fire comes, koalas are scalded as they are unable to escape the blaze. Over 8,000 of the small marsupials have perished, about a third of the population of New South Wales. Because of koala’s charisma, their demise has struck an emotional chord with global animal lovers across social media. Images and videos of dehydrated koalas taking swigs of water from water bottles after escaping burning forests have become a heartbreaking symbol of this calamity. The WWF is currently accepting donations to help protect koala habitat.

This alarming loss of biodiversity could spell doom for Australia’s animals, almost 80 percent of which are only found there. Although not on a similar magnitude to this, Australia has had the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world over the last 200 years. Most of these were small marsupials that were decimated by the invasion of introduced cats and foxes. Now koalas, kangaroos and flying foxes, which have literally dropped out of the sky due to lesser heat waves in the past, are fighting for their very survival in this Australian inferno.

The Climate Change Culprit

Flying foxes, like this black flying fox in Toowong, Queensland, have been decimated by intensifying heatwaves over recent years.

In terms of assigning blame, Australians should look no further than their own government, which continues to avoid the link between the amount of coal and gas it exports (Australia is the largest exporter for both in the world), climate change and these cataclysmic fires. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was vacationing in Hawaii when the fires raged out of control, has gone to great lengths to downplay this catastrophe, even as a third of all Australians are affected. Furthermore, there are still plans for Australia to build its largest coal mine in the near future.

But how does coal and other fossil fuels spark Australia’s deadly fires? Australia exports coal and gas to power developing countries around the world. When fossil fuels are burned, the resulting emissions create a blanket of greenhouse gases that smothers the earth and traps heat inside of the atmosphere. This heats the planet, causing the ice caps to melt at the poles, islands to sink in the tropics and record heat waves to decimate Australia. With humans continuing to burn fossil fuels, Australia’s fire season will lengthen, temperatures will continue to soar to unfathomable highs and natural disasters like this will only become more destructive.

Australia has an incredible wealth of natural resources and incredible habitat and wildlife. Unfortunately, the world’s smallest continent has become just as synonymous with destroying this amazing natural splendor. Its koala habitat was critically splintered by deforestation long before it caught ablaze. One of its most unique animals, the Tasmanian devil, is being wiped out by an infectious facial tumor disease. Most troubling of all is that as the Great Barrier Reef continues to bleach, the country is doubling down on its efforts in fossil fuel exportation. These devastating wildfires are the most recent example of Australia’s incredible and unique wilderness being squandered by self-induced climate destruction.

What is most frightening about these fires is that the Australia’s fire season is just beginning as temperatures usually peak in January and February. Could the worst still be ahead? Climate change is no longer a phenomenon happening at the poles, and it has not been for awhile. People around the world need to view this disaster as a sobering sign of what our collective future may be on a warming earth. Australia will not be an isolated incident. It is a preview of what is coming next.

Donate here to the Australian Red Cross to help the victims of Australia’s bushfire.

A koala at the Featherdale Wildlife Park in New South Wales.

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All photographs by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/1/6/21051897/australia-fires-animals-dead-500-million-estimate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwf9yQhYVrA&feature=emb_logo

https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2020-01-06/what-to-know-about-australias-deadly-wildfires

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/australia-heat-wave-bushfire-emergency-declaration-new-south-wales-sydney-smoke-today-2019-12-19/

https://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the-environment/53-fire-plants-and-vegetation

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-blazes-will-reframe-our-understanding-bushfire

La Brea: Unlocking the Secrets of Extinction in Los Angeles's ‘Tar’

Los Angeles was once home to a strange and terrifying agglomeration of giant ice age animals, from iconic saber-tooth cats to massive mammoths. At the end of the last ice age, they all mysteriously disappeared. L.A.’s premier fossil site may hold clues to what happened to these animals in its gooey asphalt.

Los Angeles is built on more than just broken dreams of stardom and glittery entertainment. Below the City of Angels are massive, gooey deposits of asphalt (not tar!). This viscous, low-grade form of crude oil is the remnant of ancient microscopic sea creatures, crushed by time and pressure deep within the earth. In 1923, Los Angeles produced nearly a quarter of the world’s oil by tapping into these immense reservoirs. Today, this dark, syrupy substance paves parking lots and roads, but 50,000 years ago, it created a vice-like death trap in the heart of what is now Los Angeles.  As a result, we have an oily time capsule that gives us an intimate look at the animals that once ruled ancient Los Angeles, as well as clues into the forces that may have sparked their extinction.

Evidence of asphalt’s penchant to trap animals has been apparent since the first fossil animal bones were discovered at Rancho La Brea in 1875. Located on a posh stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in a public park next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the former oil refinery is now home to the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the premier fossil sites for ice age fossils on the planet. Gooey asphalt still seeps out of the ground here, sometimes in brand new areas. The world’s first complete saber-tooth cat skull was discovered here. Dozens of mammoths have been exhumed from the asphalt, their bones creating a jumbled puzzle dozens of feet into the ground. The treasure trove of fossils in this sticky ice age graveyard vividly brings to life ancient Los Angeles, which would be unrecognizable to Angelenos today.

Instead of thousands of miles of paved streets and palm trees, primeval L.A. would have resembled the untamed plains of the Serengeti, only with a larger and stranger cast of characters. Huge herds of Columbian mammoths, each one weighing as much as five of the cars stalled in L.A.’s rush hour traffic, thundered across the savannah with a horde of animals you would never find here today, like camels, wild horses, hulking bison and elephant-like mastodons. 12-foot tall bears, mega-lions and packs of dire wolves terrorized these giant herbivores as condors and giant teraton birds (whose name literally means “giant bird” in Greek) with 11-foot wingspans soared overhead. The most famous creature here was the stocky Smilodon fatalis, or saber-tooth cat, who’s terrifying fangs help earn its distinction of California state fossil. Perhaps the strangest creatures here were the giant ground sloths who lethargically moved from tree to tree, using their immense claws to grab the top branches. The Harlan’s ground sloth, the largest species found in the Tar Pits, weighed a ton and a half!

Ancient Angelenos at the Page Museum (from left to right): Smilodon fatalis, dire wolf skulls, Columbian mammoth, American lion, and Harlan ground sloth.

Piecing Together Ancient L.A. with Clues from the ‘Tar’

Although these animals were gigantic, commonly referred to as megafauna (‘large animals’), they were far from safe around Rancho La Brea. The underground asphalt has been seeping towards the surface for millions of years, occasionally breaking through and creating a glistening puddle of molasses-like asphalt. This oil was often hidden by rainwater or fallen leaves, creating the perfect megafauna trap. Many of the immense animals roaming ancient Los Angeles would take a wrong step and become fatally ensnared in the bubbling asphalt. The more their giant bodies struggled, the more trapped they became, eventually starving as they sank into the oily depths of the earth. The fossil remains of predators are much more prevalent here as a dire wolf or saber-tooth cat seemed to crave a bite of a trapped bison leg or a hairy ground sloth rump stuck in tar. Over 4,000 dire wolves and counting have been pulled from this ‘predator death trap.’

Today, this ice age cemetery has produced 3.5 million plant and animal fossils from a hundred different individual tar pits that help paleontologists like Dr. Emily Lindsey and Dr. Regan Dunn, both associate curators at the La Brea Tar Pits, reconstruct L.A.’s ancient past. They work at the Page Museum, an onsite museum where the fossils removed from the tar pits are studied, stored and eventually exhibited to the public in all of their stained-black glory.

Although discoveries of large animals like mammoths and ground sloths captivate the public and stir up images of Los Angeles’ wild past, much smaller and seemingly mundane fossils act as an incredibly detailed diary of ice age Los Angeles, providing intimate clues about past climates. Dr. Dunn researches Rancho La Brea’s incredibly well-preserved fossil plants to reconstruct how ancient Los Angeles looked. “The [fossil] plants tie everything together and provide the context within each of these animals are making their living here.” The types of plant fossils, whether a preserved leaf, piece of wood or even a pinecone, tells scientists like Dunn what plants existed in certain areas, recreating what the overall habitat looked like when mammoths roamed L.A. The fossil remnants of a 27,000 year old California sycamore trees, for example, confirms there were streams and rivers at Rancho La Brea since the trees today only grow along the banks of permanent water sources.

Large fossilized tree trunks, mostly from long-living juniper trees, also help Dunn piece together the annual weather patterns tens of thousands of years ago. “Each year [junipers] make a ring and the size of that ring is dependent on how the growing conditions were that year.” A wetter year will produce bigger rings because the tree was able to stockpile more biomass thanks to the increased precipitation. By dating these tree fossils and then comparing the growth rates of each fossil, Dunn can learn a lot about “what the precipitation and temperature were like during the ice age [in Los Angeles].” The asphalt at La Brea even preserves pollen from the ice age, offering paleobotanists like Dunn one more tool to recreate ice age Los Angeles. From all these fossil clues, scientists at the Page Museum can determine how Los Angeles’ climate has changed over the past 50,000 years. 

The Pleistocene garden outside the Page Museum displays several species of plants that once covered ice age Los Angeles. The garden occasionally gets a visit from a fellow remnant from that bygone era - a rabbit.

And how it has changed! When herds of Columbian mammoths roamed near the deadly tar pits some 40,000 years ago, Los Angeles was cooler and wet, creating a much lusher environment. Although this was during the last ice age, when ice sheets covered large swaths of the world including much of North America, Los Angeles was ice free. Instead of a frozen tundra, a variety of grasses and shrubs, with pockets of redwood and evergreen forests, flourished where languid ground sloths fed.

The Great Megafauna Extinction Debate

Similar to how the climate has changed in the last 40,000 years, so to have the inhabitants of Los Angeles. Many species, like coyotes, mountain lions and the recently extinct California grizzly bear, all survived along with smaller animals like rabbits and frogs into modern times. But gone are the mammoths, saber-tooth cats and ground sloths and most of the other large animals in La Brea’s asphalt pits. And scientists have not been able to pinpoint why these large animals all disappeared around the end of the Pleistocene epoch.

“[The disappearance of the megafauna] has been one of the biggest debates in paleontology for the last sixty years.”

— Dr. Emily Lindsey

According to Dr. Lindsey, who has also examined fossils from contemporary asphalt pits in South America, this extinction was the most important extinction event since the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid some 65 million years ago. “Very recently, everywhere except Africa [had] about 2/3 of its big animals go away, which had a huge impact [on global ecosystems].” In some places, almost all large animals went extinct. Australia and Southeast Asia, for example, lost 97 percent of their animals 110 pounds or bigger in a 10,000 year span from 50,000 to 40,000 years ago. The reason for this global loss of large animals “has been one of the biggest debates in both paleontology and archaeology for the last sixty years” according to Lindsey.

Australia’s megafauna extinction

Australia is known today for its collection of bizarre and dangerous animals, like koalas, kangaroos and a deadly collection of snakes. But if you were to travel back some 50,000 years, you would meet a host of monstrous beasts. There were wombats the size of rhinos, giant killer lizards some 25-feet long and tortoises the size of small cars. But the strangest, and possibly deadliest, was the marsupial lion Thylacoleo (left, at the Australian Museum in Sydney) that used its dagger-like claws and bolt cutter-like bite to dispose of the giant kangaroos of the day, often by dropping out of a tree. Like the disappearance of L.A.’s megafauna, the reason for the loss of these giants is not quite known but is probably some combination of Australia becoming more arid and the arrival of humans more than 50,000 years ago.

Lindsey explains there are two historical schools of thought on what caused the disappearance of the world’s megafauna. One school looks at how climate change at the end of the last ice age was causing the upheaval of many of the world’s ecosystems as the earth warmed. According to Lindsey, paleontologists can point to several examples, like the giant Irish elk in Europe, of species struggling when “their habitats are becoming climatically or ecologically intolerable.” The other school takes a more sweeping approach, looking at the spread of humans around the globe. In many cases, like in Australia, most of the large animals disappear within a few thousand years of the arrival of humans. The giant moa of New Zealand is another example of a megafauna that succumbed to human hunting. In the Americas, Lindsey says, the extinction was particularly swift. “When humans arrive in the Americas, within 5,000 years in North America, most of the large animals go away.”

Lindsey says she does not fall into either of these camps when it comes to the disappearance of the species found in the La Brea Tar Pits. She takes the point of view of a growing third group that looks at endangered megafauna today, like Africa’s rhinos and India’s tigers, and sees that the threats facing these species are extremely complex. “Large animals today are threatened by a variety of factors, like humans and climate change and habitat fragmentation and any number of intersecting processes,” Lindsey says. Today, she points out, most of Africa’s large mammals are protected on game reserves and in national parks. But when climate change makes these areas inhospitable, these animals are essentially trapped in these protected swaths of land because they cannot migrate out due to the human-modified landscape.  In other words, climate change and human factors are essentially teaming up to cause megafaunal extinction today, which Lindsey believes supports the extinction theory of many species at La Brea 11,000 years ago. “Climate change is already impacting and fragmenting populations and then onto this landscape of weakened populations arrives this novel predator [humans] to naive fauna, creating a one-two punch.” The drawn out process of climate change causing extinction was often exacerbated by the arrival of spear-hurling humans that wiped out populations that were already struggling. 

Art inspired by the Pits (clockwise): a comparison of the skulls of three cats found at La Brea; a re-imagination of the California state flag with the largest bear in the state’s history, the short-faced bear, which could run up to 30 miles an hour in short spurts!; Smilodon, the state fossil of California; and a few of the thousands of dire wolf remains buried in tar.

At the Tar Pits, Lindsey wants to use the sprawling collection of fossils to dig deeper into when specific species went extinct and compare that to the arrival of humans in Southern California. From work she has done in South America with fossils from this time period, Lindsey discovered that some megafaunal species, like ground sloths, not only survived the initial climate change, but also ended up living alongside humans for thousands of years.

Plant fossils and fossilized pollen are intricate clues to solving the climate change portion of the extinction puzzle as they preserve how the local environment has shifted since the end of the ice age. The animal skeletons removed from the tar pits can also offer clues to this shift of climates in California. Lindsey and other paleontologists at the Page Museum are examining fossil remains from four different pits originating in four different time periods from the end of the ice age. They will look to see whether the 5 most common species at the tar pits - dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, coyotes, Western horses and bison - physically transformed over tens of thousands of year in response to a warming climate.  And the scientists here will seemingly never run out of fossil material to analyze.

In addition to the 3.5 million specimens already found, a collection of storage containers dot the landscape of Hancock Park, patiently waiting for paleontologists to dig into them. Many of these are from a huge cache of fossils that was unearthed when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was excavating nearby land for their new parking garage in 2006. This discovery was among the largest this century, containing over 90 species in all, from tiny insects to a nearly complete skeleton of an 18,000 pound Columbian mammoth named Zed. This treasure trove of ice age fossils, dubbed Project 23 for the 23 gigantic crates housing all the bones and asphalt, could help define the roles that both climate change and humans played in the demise of Southern California’s megafauna over the last 50,000 years. 

Above: Some of the 23 boxes that contain literal tons of fossil debris dug out from the nearby Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art parking lot.

Special thanks to Dr. Regan Dunn and Dr. Emily Lindsey for taking the time to discuss their research with me at the Page Museum.

All artwork and photography done by Jack Tamisiea.

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Sources:

https://www.wired.com/2012/02/la-brea-tar-pits/

https://tarpits.org/research-collections/tar-pits-collections/botany-collections

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate-australian-megafauna.html

Joshua Trees: Trapped in a Crucible of Climate Change

Southern California’s iconic Joshua trees may be an early casualty of climate change as their desert home continues to heat up.

“It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”

— Jeannette Walls

In a habitat as inhospitable as the Mojave Desert, the driest desert in North America where temperatures can soar above 120 degrees, plants and animals often need each other to survive. Nowhere is this natural teamwork more apparent than in Joshua Tree National Park, where the namesake Joshua trees rely on a relationship with a symbiotic moth. However, the park’s changing climate is straining this vital relationship.

A study from 2018 found that Joshua trees are being forced to move to either higher altitudes or farther north as temperatures continue to increase. This raises the logical question of how will these trees move? Trees and other plants move in groups, often with the aid of wind or animals to help disperse their seeds to new areas.

One of the early “vehicles” of seed dispersal was an animal you would never expect to find in such an inhospitable environment. Until 11,000 years ago, Shasta ground sloths lived in these deserts, feasting on the fruit of the tough Joshua tree, all the while ingesting the plant’s seeds as well. While the shaggy ground sloths moved across the southwestern deserts (probably at a similarly slow pace to their living relatives), they would drop the Joshua tree seeds in heaps of dung, some of which have been found fossilized with almost intact seeds. The bear-sized sloth probably succumbed to human hunting-induced extinction, which removed an important seed disperser for the Joshua trees.

A Shasta ground sloth skeleton on display at the La Brea Tar Pits Page Museum

Relatively intact remnants of Joshua trees found in Shasta sloth dung preserved in Gypsum Cave, Nevada.

Shasta sloth dung preserved in Gypsum Cave, Nevada!

But the Joshua trees have been able to survive the disappearance of the ground sloths thanks to another mutualistic relationship (a relationship between two species where both benefit) with the yucca moth. These moths help the trees by pollinating their flowers and the tree returns the favor by offering the moth’s offspring food and shelter in their developing seeds. Adult yucca moths are selfless, lugging (relatively) large balls of pollen from tree to tree before promptly dropping dead. Only their offspring will reap the rewards of eating through the Joshua tree seeds before returning the favor themselves as adults in a cycle that has worked for eons.

The 2018 study examined this relationship throughout the park, finding that Joshua trees were healthiest in the areas where the moths were abundant. More moths makes it easier for the trees to reproduce, but will the two species be able to maintain this relationship as the Joshua trees continue to creep closer to cooler temperatures?

Joshua trees are incredible plants, capable of reaching 40 feet in the most hostile of environments.

This is where the outlook for Joshua trees turns bleak. The study found that the yucca moth populations, in the few areas with suitable temperatures for Joshua trees, are not healthy. The relationship of these species is so tight, they may not make it through the century as climate change continues to force them apart. And the clock is already ticking down for both the yucca moth and the Joshua trees. In Joshua Tree National Park, the trees at lower altitudes are already becoming scorched and dying from the heat as trees in higher altitudes cannot successfully reproduce without the moths. Without the moths, Joshua trees are forced to asexually reproduce, creating inadequate clones that are vulnerable to pests and not able to disperse the species.

If Joshua trees were to disappear from their namesake park, something that could happen by as soon as 2100, many other animals, besides the yucca moth, would feel the loss. They provide shade from the brutal desert heat and provide habitats for insects, small mammals and birds. But some of the life that sprouts up around Joshua trees are harmful. Invasive grasses have entered the park, bringing with them a higher chance of wildfire that can decimate Joshua trees, which have never adapted to fire. As climate change continues to warm the park, the threat of wildfires will only increase.

While many visitors will mostly only see Joshua trees when they visit Joshua Tree National Park, there is an abundance of life that perseveres in this difficult environment. 57 species of mammal call this park home, including this coyote.

So is there any way to save the Joshua trees? In terms of helping the trees navigate to cooler environments within the park, people with knowledge of all the different pockets of climate around the park can try to plant the fruit of the trees in cooler areas, but this would be useless in the long run if yucca moths are not able to live there too. The complexity of interspecies relationships makes navigating climate change that much more difficult. Another, more out-of-the-box idea, would be trying to bring back the Shasta sloth to fill their ecological roles as large seed dispersal—a role that has remained empty after they left. Copious amounts of hair and other genetic material has been preserved in the hot, dry caves throughout the area to make them a somewhat logical de-extinction candidate. But at this point, that idea is more science fiction than reliable solution.

The reality is there is no easy solution to the Joshua tree’s predicament. The only thing we can do is treat the world better and try to individually reduce our emissions of green house gases that drive climate change. This phenomenon is not only sinking faraway islands and melting the ice at the poles. It is happening across the United States, even threatening an iconic Southern California symbol. It takes over a century for a Joshua tree to grow to a mangled, wind-beaten adult. In 80 years, the spiny symbol of perseverance in the inhospitable desert could be gone from its last stronghold. It simply cannot take the heat.

Above: Almost nothing is more hauntingly beautiful than gazing upon Joshua trees at sunset. Their mangled limbs make them seem like alien monsters as light fades beyond the horizon. They are the perfect subject to highlight the incredible explosion of colors in the back drop.

All photography by Jack Tamisiea.

Similar Articles:

Sources:

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2439

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/joshua-trees-moths-threatened-climate-change-scientists-seek-solutions/

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/04/13/missing-sloths-modern-pollution-and-the-fate-of-the-joshua-tree/

https://www.nps.gov/articles/shasta-ground-sloth.htm

Climate Change Hits the Tetons

One of America’s iconic National Parks is feeling the heat from climate change. The results could trigger a dangerous cascade through the last (relatively) untouched pocket of wilderness in the United States.

The last rays of sunshine falling over historic Moulton Barn.

Thirteen million years ago, the land of what is now Wyoming violently shook. All the shaking resulted in a tear in the earth along the earthquake’s fault line miles below. The land west of the fault line was lifted upward as the land east of the line sunk some 20,000 feet. The result of these vicious earthquakes is the Teton Mountain Range, the picturesque backbone of Grand Teton National Park, and the sunken valley containing Jackson Hole to the east.

But the craggy pinnacles of the soaring mountain range were not only created by tremors deep in the earth. Glaciers carved the mountains into the iconic, jagged shapes we see today over tens of thousands of years as they advanced and retreated. While the massive, canyon-carving glaciers have been gone for the past 10,000 years, many smaller glaciers formed in an extended cold period that lasted from 1400-1850. Today these small glaciers demonstrate how the park’s climate is changing.

The majestic peaks of the Tetons soar high above the sunken valley at dusk one summer night.

Glaciers are a body of thick ice that slowly move as snow accumulates and compacts on mountains or near the poles. Logically, a warming climate would cause glaciers to melt. But another important factor is the rate and extent to which the Teton glaciers are shrinking. This is what researchers in the park’s Glacier Monitoring Project are trying to determine by mapping the retreat of the glaciers.

With the additional benefit of glacier data that dates back to the 1950s, the project has uncovered some startling trends as the ice continues to thaw. Overall, 25 percent of the total glacier cover has disappeared between 1967 and 2006. All seven of the park’s remaining glaciers have shrunk between the 1960s and 2010 and one glacier in particular, Teepe Glacier, lost 60 percent of its area over this period as summer temperatures continue to skyrocket. Teepe Glacier can be gone in as little as a decade as it has stopped moving, becoming a stranded snowball in a climate change-induced hell.

One of the most recognizable glaciers remaining in the National Park is the Skillet glacier on Mount Moran. Easily seen from Jackson Hole, the glacier resembles a skillet or broken guitar.

The Grand Teton glaciers may seem like a logical casualty of global warming, but that does not make their loss any less devastating. Besides their role in creating the iconic soaring peaks of the Tetons, the natural melting of the glaciers provides crucial cool water to downstream ecosystems. The park’s dozen or so native species of fish, from the mountain whitefish to the cutthroat trout, rely on the cool water from glacier melts. These fish control the insect population and provide food for a multitude of creatures, including bald eagles. Trout, in particular, bolster the park’s reputation as one of the premier trout fishing spots in the country. Once the glaciers are gone, will the park’s ecologically and economically vital native fish population disappear as well?

Climate change will not only expedite the melting of glaciers, but it will also continue to change the distribution of animal and plant species, altering the park’s ecosystems. For example, in Alaska’s Denali National Park, high-altitude Dall sheep have been forced to continuously climb higher into the mountains as their plants of choice are found only in increasingly higher altitudes due to the warming climate below. Eventually they may have nowhere else to go.

During my visit to the park, we were constantly playing “spot the moose” as the large herbivores were surprisingly cryptic. Whenever we were close to a moose it would disappear into the forest and vanish. This is one of the best shots I was able to capture of an adult female moose as it retreated into the thicket with its calf.

The Grand Teton National Park is such a crucial area to examine the effects of climate change because it constitutes a large swath of one of the last, relatively undisturbed areas of temperate wilderness in the world. Together with the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone, and a handful of protected forests and state areas, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem harkens back to a Western landscape nearly untouched by man. The ecosystems containing the world-famous natural phenomenons, like Yellowstone’s geysers and hot springs that helped it achieve the distinction as the world’s first national park, flow seamlessly into the ecosystems surrounding the iconic Tetons to the south. Together this connected web of wilderness encompasses some 20 million acres of habitat for iconic species, from bison to grizzly bears.

America’s national mammal, the hulking bison, in Grand Teton National Park.

Grand Teton National Park, in particular, is located in the rugged heart of this undisturbed wilderness and acts as an ark for animal species that once inhabited most of the western United States. The park contains 18 species of carnivore, 7 hoofed mammals, 5 amphibian species, 300 birds and 900 species of flowers that splatter the alpine meadows with color each spring. The full reach of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem even stretches farther than the three states (Idaho, Montana and Wyoming) that it officially spans. The Swainson’s hawk that resides here in the summer travels all the way down to South America each winter.

An American crow, one of the 300 or so bird species that fly through the park at some point each year, lets out a vocal “CaaW!-CaaW!-CaaW!”.

Grand Teton National Park is also the summer destination of one of the continent’s last great mammal migrations. As the snow begins to retreat north at the beginning of spring, hundreds, even thousands, of pronghorn antelopes begin the 100 mile-plus journey north from their wintering grounds in the Upper Green River Valley in central Wyoming to Jackson Hole.

What was that? One of my favorite pictures that I’ve taken is of this pair of alert pronghorn antelopes trying to figure out where a sound came from.

With large organs to aid air intake and padded feet, pronghorn antelopes are the second fastest land animal on the planet, capable of reaching speeds of 60 miles per hour. These incredible speeds easily outpace any living predator in North America. The only creature that could ever keep up with the pronghorn was a prehistoric North American cheetah that pursued ancient pronghorns here millions of years ago. The pronghorns outlasted the cheetah and have been traversing this migration path for some 6,000 years. However, their migration is becoming more strenuous as several areas along their route are claimed for large-scale energy development. Large swaths of protected wilderness are vital to help pronghorns continue their incredible migration for thousands of years to come.

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In such a complex collection of ecosystems that comprise the Grand Teton National Park, one species disappearing could have unforeseen consequences throughout the environment. For example, in nearby Yellowstone, the removal of wolves through decades of hunting interestingly led to the near disappearance of the park’s beavers.

So what was the connection between wolves and beavers? With the wolves eradicated, the population of elk skyrocketed. The unnaturally large population of elk heavily browsed young willow plants, which served as the beaver’s lifeline during the winter months. The return of wolves to the park in 1995 helped dent the large elk population and disperse them throughout the park, saving the willows from over-browsing and resulting in larger beaver populations. Moreover, the more robust beaver population caused improved hydrology of the streams where they lived. Their dams store water and help remove some of the seasonal runoff into the streams.

A herd of elk saunters across the plains in Grand Teton National Park.

The Grand Teton National Park is an incredible habitat for dozens of species which represent the last vestiges of a bygone era before the west was settled. Huge herds of bison roam the plains, nonchalantly crossing a highway, indifferent to the automobiles and pavement beneath them. Their incredibly brawny frames illustrate the defiance of the natural world as they lumber across the road. It is one of the last places where you need to worry about both the mother grizzly and the territorial bull moose.

Kings of the Road: Weighing up to 2,000 pounds and standing over 6-feet tall at the shoulder, the American bison is the largest mammal in North America and more than capable of doing its fair share of damage to any vehicle. Yellowstone National Park is the only place where bison have continuously lived since prehistoric times as the great creature was almost hunted to extinction in the 19th century.

But physical signs of man’s quest to conquer nature still are evident here, none more iconic than the Moulton Barn. The wooden barn is perhaps the most picturesque barn in the world with the jagged peaks of the Tetons as its backdrop. It has come to symbolize the inclusion of humans in the western landscape, a trend that began when settlers rushed to grab any parcel of land they could over a century ago.

Today, the signs of man’s relationship with nature are becoming more and more evident as the glaciers in the Tetons continue to melt. This will cause ripples in the park’s ecosystems, already complex and fragile. Each species plays a major role for the rest of the ecosystem, as the wolves in Yellowstone illustrate. As the climate continues to warm, whole ecosystems can vanish in one of the world’s last great wildernesses.

A Uinta ground squirrel hanging out by the Moulton Barn in Grand Teton National Park.

All photographs by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem

https://www.conservationinstitute.org/10-fastest-animals-on-earth/

https://snowbrains.com/nasa-how-the-teton-mountain-range-wy-was-created/

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/greater-yellowstone-ecosystem.htm

https://northamerica.wcs.org/wild-places/yellowstone-and-northern-rockies/pronghorn-field-program/pronghorn-migration-path.aspx

https://www.nps.gov/im/gryn/climate.htm

https://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/nature/animals.htm

https://www.gtnpf.org/wolves/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/earth/surface-of-the-earth/yellowstone-tetons/

https://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/nature/glaciermonitoring.htm

https://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/nature/upload/pope-parks-climate-change.pdf

https://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/nature/fish.htm

Climate Change in the Chesapeake

America’s largest estuary and seafood buffet is starting to lose its crabs as its islands sink below the waves. Climate change is beginning to ravage the iconic Chesapeake Bay, right down stream from our nation’s capital.

Part 1: Decline of the “Beautiful Swimmers”

Measuring only four inches long and nine inches wide and encased in thick armor, the bottom-dwelling blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) seems like an unlikely candidate to anchor one of the ten most valuable fisheries in the U.S. The ten-legged crustacean, named for its two meaty, bright-blue front claws, is particularly integral to the region surrounding America’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, where a third of blue crabs are harvested. The blue crab harvest (about 55 million pounds per year between 2000 and 2009) underpins an estimated $3.39 billion seafood industry in Maryland and Virginia alone!

Worth billions and full of succulent flesh, it is no wonder that the blue crab has become a local icon around the Bay. It is Maryland’s state crustacean, adorning both t-shirts and the dinner table throughout the state. The seafood staple has became so beloved in the Chesapeake Bay region that most people refer to them as “Chesapeake blue crabs” even though they are found up and down the Atlantic Coast from Nova Scotia to Argentina. The crab’s scientific name even reflects the admiration that Marylanders have for them and their meat. It means “savory beautiful swimmer.”

A model female blue crab shows off her large claws at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

But over the last few years, the populations of these beautiful swimmers has alarmingly declined. According to the annual Blue Crab Advisory Report by the Chesapeake Bay Program, the overall population of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay fell by 18 percent between 2017 and 2018, from 455 to 372 million crabs. The diminished 2018 population had only 147 million adult female crabs, well below the Bay Program’s target of 215 million females.

The obvious culprit for the decline of the bay’s iconic shellfish would be overfishing. With blue crabs and other seafood worth billions to the states surrounding the bay, short-sighted over-harvesting seems likely. Yet, as with most environmental issues, the actual reasons for the decline are more nuanced.

Blue crab in watercolor.

Overfishing, or harvesting an animal faster than its population can reproduce, is a factor for the decline, but it is far from the only culprit. The eelgrass beds throughout the Chesapeake, that young crabs rely on for shelter, are being smothered by sediment and nutrient runoff from nearby agriculture. The excess nutrients in the water also cause bacteria populations to skyrocket, depleting large swaths of the bay of oxygen and killing off the crab’s prey in the resulting dead zones.

Although the crab’s population has dropped, the Chesapeake Bay Program still sees them as relatively healthy and has not adjusted blue crab management since the drop-off of 2018. NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) deems the crabs to not technically be overfished yet because the adult female crab population still exceeds the overfishing threshold of 70 million.

But the Chesapeake Bay is becoming increasingly impacted by human settlement. As these effects continue to increase and the Bay’s climate changes, will the incredibly valuable blue crab population continue to dwindle?

Maryland is famous for its steamed blue crabs lathered in Old Bay seasoning.

Part 2: A fragile bay and a changing climate

Blue crabs are a perfect window into the health of the Chesapeake’s overall ecosystem because their intricate life history transports them all over the bay. Blue crab eggs are released near the salty mouth of the Bay in egg masses that can contain up to 2 million crab eggs. The larvae is transported by currents into the ocean where they grow, molting their shells several times in the process. Eventually, the larvae move back into the brackish (a salt and freshwater mix) water of the Bay where they continue to molt, eventually become adult crabs a year to 18 months after they’re born. Adults move toward the upper bay and connecting rivers. Over their three-year lifespans, the blue crab will inhabit every habitat in the Bay, from the Atlantic Ocean at its mouth to the rivers that feed into the Bay.

A gray tree frog from Easton, Maryland. There are dozens of reptile and amphibian species that live in the Chesapeake region including Maryland’s state reptile the diamondback terrapin.

Over these stops, the crabs are vital to the function of the ecosystem. As versatile omnivores, the crabs voraciously eat anything smaller than them. Clams, oysters, mussels and even smaller blue crabs are all on the menu. The crabs also act as valuable recyclers of dead organic material in the Bay as they scavenge dead fish and other carrion.

In addition to being the Bay’s preeminent eaters of small and dead animals, blue crabs themselves are also important prey for young fish and birds, including the large, prehistoric-looking great blue herons that slot into the upper reaches of the Bay’s complex food chain. Sporting a 7-foot wingspan and a lethal stealth hunting approach, the great blue heron (or the dinosaur of the marsh) keeps the population of fish, crustaceans and amphibians in check.

A great blue heron grabs a fish from the water. Even though the bird has up to a seven foot wingspan, it has hollow bones, only weighing a couple of pounds!

Dozens of species of birds, like the great blue heron, live in the Bay year-round. Dozens more visit the Bay at different times of the year, such as the dive-bombing, fish-eating osprey and the majestic bald eagle. One million waterfowl visit the Chesapeake Bay region every winter during migration as an important stopover along the great Atlantic Flyway.

Above: Osprey are found everywhere except Australia and Antarctica, a testament to their success as species. Also known as sea hawks, they eat almost exclusively fish, with they hold on to with their sharp talons (picture 2).

In addition to the plethora of birds that pass through the Bay each year, the Chesapeake supports over 3,600 species of animals and plants. From forests to wetlands to the rivers that bring freshwater into the salty estuary, species as diverse as dragonflies and sea turtles thrive here. Over 300 species of fish call the estuary home, eating juvenile blue crabs before becoming heron food. What’s left over of the fish after the heron has had its fill is then recycled by blue crabs, an intricate food web where nothing is wasted. It is a machine that has hummed along since rising sea levels flooded the Susquehanna River valley 12,000 years ago, creating the Chesapeake Bay.

The ruby meadowhawk dragonfly is common in the northern United States

But the Bay’s climate is in a state of flux, drastically threatening its ecosystems.

Part 3: Swallowed by the Bay

The word Chesapeake comes from the Algonquian word Chesepiooc, first heard by European explorers traveling through one of the Bay’s many tributaries from the doomed Roanoke Colony in Virginia in the 1580s. The word may mean “great shellfish bay”.

Since then people have been using the Chesapeake Bay for recreation, sustenance and as a dumping ground for the undesirable leftovers from the many industries that line the Bay’s shores. After centuries of exploitation, the Chesapeake is starting to fight back.

The boatyard at Oxford, Maryland, a small town on the Bay’s Eastern Shore.

The Chesapeake Bay is uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise because of its low-lying topography. This threat is exacerbated as millions of people live along the bay’s coasts, putting themselves in the “flood-zone”. No where is this more painfully apparent than at historic Tangier Island. The tiny island, famous for its unparalleled catch of soft-shell crabs, has lost an average of eight acres per year since 1850. This island, in the middle of one of the Bay’s widest points, will be uninhabitable in 50 years.

Most of the 460 locals of Tangier Island believe the disappearance of their land to be due to erosion caused by the Bay’s powerful waves, but the island is experiencing many of the telltale signs of climate change-driven sea level rise. Water is coming up through the ground and the island’s marshes are drowning. On an interesting note, the island’s residents voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in 2016, causing a media-frenzy in 2017 and even a call from Trump himself, promising that the island would remain there for hundreds of years.

Dusk in the marsh.

Whatever the people on Tangier believe is causing the Chesapeake to swallow their island is up to them, but they are far from alone in facing this slippery predicament. Throughout the Bay, the combination of climate change-driven sea level rise and the natural sinking of soaked coastal lands have caused the water’s level to increase by a foot in many areas since 1900. At least 13 islands have disappeared from the Chesapeake, and estimates put the total water rise between 17 and 28 inches above 1990 levels by 2095.

The Chesapeake’s ecosystem has been broadcasting these troubles for decades. The disappearance of crabs and oysters has greatly altered the water-quality of the country’s largest estuary. Crabs no longer clean up the dead material, and the water that was once filtered out by oysters is full of harmful particulates in areas where the invertebrates have declined.

A retro oyster can-the Chesapeake’s oyster population has plummeted in recent years thanks to a combination of over-harvesting, disease and habitat loss.

The stark economic decline resulting from the coastal floods, the receding islands and the dwindling shellfish should be a call to action. Over the last 30 years, the decline in oysters has cost Maryland and Virginia more than $4 billion. Between 1998 and 2006, a similar decline in blue crab populations has cost Maryland and Virginia $640 million. The loss of Tangier Island to the residents would be incalculable.

Commercial fishing has been a staple industry in Maryland for over 300 years. The fish, crab and oysters of the Chesapeake Bay continue to provide the state with hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The Chesapeake Bay is truly incredible because it not only offers refuge to over three thousand species of plants and animals, but it provides economic sustenance to the 17 million people that live around it. In order to continue to benefit from the Bay, we need to change the way we use it. The first step is to recognize and acknowledge that we are the ones who are sinking the Bay, and then to take the necessary actions to stop it.

Chesapeake dinner plate.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea

Similar Articles

Sources:

https://www.cbf.org/issues/what-we-have-to-lose/economic-importance-of-the-bay/index.html

https://serc.si.edu/research/projects/blue-crab-and-fishery

https://chesapeakebay.noaa.gov/fish-facts/blue-crab

https://www.chesapeakebay.net/S=0/fieldguide/critter/blue_crab

https://www.nwf.org/Home/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Wild-Places/Chesapeake-Bay

https://chesapeakeconservancy.org/what-we-do/explore/wildlife-webcams/great-blue-heron/

https://www.myeasternshoremd.com/kent_county_news/spotlight/blue-crab-population-declines-by-almost/article_e7d3b39d-dadb-5d2b-8dee-c3ece7d813f1.html

https://www.cbf.org/document-library/cbf-reports/CBF_BadWatersReport6d49.pdf

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/b/blue-crab/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/09/climate-change-rising-seas-tangier-island-chesapeake-book-talk/#/06_chesapeake_bay_book_talk_chesapeakerequiem_case.jpg

https://www.cbf.org/about-the-bay/chesapeake-bay-watershed-geography-and-facts.html

Reef In Peril

The world’s largest living reef, visible from space, is in rapid decline thanks to threats ranging from an acidifying ocean to an outbreak of coral-destroying starfish. Will the priceless natural wonder be able to recover?

Great Barrier Reef in Hot Water

Almost all of us have seen the frightening headlines scroll through our social media timelines: “Half of the Great Barrier Reef is Dead” or “The Great Barrier Reef: Bleached Beyond Repair.” These headlines are rightfully terrifying, accurately illustrating the damage the Reef has endured thanks to man’s wanton environmental disregard.

The Great Barrier Reef is in very warm water, both literally and figuratively. The headlines have done a great job of making us aware of the dire situation, but many people do not dive deep enough into the associated articles to understand that, while overwhelming, the threats facing the Reef can be mollified with united conservation efforts from both Australia and the rest of the world. It’s not too late to reverse the troubling trend and help this World Heritage Site rebound.

Blackface rabbitfish and other fish mill above a reef off Heron Island, part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Part One: The Threats

A key means to help preserve the remaining (relatively) intact areas of the Reef is to understand the threats it faces. The fundamental cause is man’s industrialization and the resulting climate change. As energy began to be created in mass quantities by burning fossil fuels in factories, greater amounts of gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), were released into the atmosphere. CO2 and a variety of other gases, including methane from cows and natural gas, act like a blanket over the earth, trapping solar energy as it is reflected by the earth and trapping it in the atmosphere, creating a warming, or “greenhouse effect”. As more light is trapped by the blanket of greenhouse gases, the surface of the earth warms as well as the world’s oceans.

But exactly why the Great Barrier Reef is doing so poorly in this warming world is slightly more nuanced. Logically, a warmer ocean would mean more coral reefs, incredibly diverse environments that require warm water to thrive. But the excess CO2 in the atmosphere causes the oceans to become more acidic as the ocean absorb the excess from the atmosphere. The ocean is slightly basic (pH>7) and as it acidifies and becomes more neutral in pH, coral fares as well as you would in a vat of acidified liquid.

Below a reef head during a dive off of Heron Island.

An acidifying ocean changes everything for coral, which are tiny animals related to jellyfish. They cannot easily form their calcium carbonate skeletons, which act as the bedrock for coral reefs, because less carbonate ions are available in acidic seawater. Corals are pretty much hindered from growing by ocean acidification, and will start to dissolve soon if emissions continue to rise. Outside of the chemistry of the water, temperature and light levels are key. Corals exposed to increased temperatures and increased amounts of light over a duration of time (sometimes only a couple of days) will become stressed and eventually bleach. The corals become ghost white as they are forced to expel symbiotic algae (called zooxanthellae) from their tissue as they cook under intense light and heat. The zooxanthellae are crucial to the coral, turning sunlight into energy through photosynthesis. The coral is not dead when it bleaches, but it is essentially starving. Bleaching events usually create mass coral mortality.

Small fish swim in and out of a patch of bleaching coral on Heron Island’s reef

In the Great Barrier Reef, the 1-2 threat of ocean acidification and coral bleaching have become more destructive over the last few decades as the oceans continue to warm and CO2 continues to be pumped into the atmosphere. Severe bleaching used to ravage a reef every 27 years. Since the 1980s, these events have occurred roughly every six years. The first truly severe bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef was in 1998, but the following bleaching event, in 2002, was disastrous, bleaching over 50% of the Reef.

But the 2002 monster bleaching event was dwarfed by one in 2016, when 80% of a large protected swath of the northern Reef was killed by heat stress. Badly bleached reefs need at least 10 years to rebound, but the Great Barrier Reef barely had time to catch its breath as a similarly unprecedented bleaching event hit the reef in 2017, wiping out 20% of the total coral cover. Since the massive warming event in 2016, over half of the Reef’s coral has died, particularly devastating the northern area of the Reef.

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Attack of the Crown-of-thorns

Natural to the Great Barrier Reef, crown-of-thorn (COT) starfish are efficient coral consumers. The large, venomous spine-studded starfish love to feed on branching corals, which are the type of corals most susceptible to bleaching. In recent years the relatively scarce starfish’s population has exploded in an outbreak.

Like other threats the Reef faces, the crown-of-thorn starfish (COTS) outbreak can be tied to human impact on the oceans. The most prevalent hypothesis of what causes COTS outbreaks, which feature over 30 times the natural COTS density, is the added nutrient levels on reefs caused by nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich runoff from agriculture. The increased amount of nutrients cause blooms of phytoplankton that offer plenty of food for COTS larvae. COTS outbreaks can also be linked to the removal of the venomous starfish’s predators, such as the giant triton snail, titan triggerfish and humphead Maori wrasse from the reefs through overfishing.

COTS outbreaks can prove fatal when combined with climate change. COTS outbreaks have been found to strip 90% of a reef’s living coral tissue. A healthy reef is capable of recovering from COTS outbreak in 10-20 years, but a stressed reef in warming water may never be able to recover. Moreover, these outbreaks appear to be occurring more frequently in recent years. A variety of methods is being tested to control the ruthless corallivores, from harvesting them with divers to injecting them with compressed air, but the starfish has been able to run rampant throughout the Great Barrier Reef.

Crown-of-thorns starfish lurks below coral off of Heron Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef.

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Part Two: What Can Be Done

With half of the Reef’s coral dead, one of the most incredible natural wonders really seems to be heading toward the brink. Experiments are being conducted to find out ways to better equip coral to survive bleaching events. There is a dizzying variety of coral in the world’s oceans, especially in a corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans fittingly called the “Coral Triangle”, and not all coral’s respond to bleaching the same way. Researchers in Hawaii have researched how hardier corals react under the warm and acidic conditions they will face later this century. Depending on how well each species responds, they will be selectively bred with other resistant corals to form a sort of “super coral” through assisted evolution. Other projects have focused on trying to figure out ways to reinsert zooxanthellae into bleached corals. Some hypothesize that certain types of the symbiotic algae may be better suited in warmer water and will not be expelled from their hosts as quickly.

The hope with these projects is to engineer stronger coral and zooxanthellae that will be able to survive in the “new normal” environmental conditions caused by humans. This reactionary approach will always be similar to putting a bandaid on a wound. It will provide some level of healing but will not remedy the underlying causes. Humans everywhere need to cut back on emissions to slow the rapid change of our climate.

The reef’s edge, Heron Island.

Australia, in particular, needs to continue to fight the Carmichael coal mine, a billion dollar fossil fuel-monstrosity that could be the largest in Australia’s mining-heavy history and would be located just inland from the Reef. The mine, which was approved after a lengthy (and probably still ongoing) legal battle, plans to extract at least 25 million tons of coal per year which will result in 77 million tons of CO2 emissions. Most of the coal will be exported from Australia to India, which means transporting it over the Reef in large ships that leave pollution, sediment, and invasive species in their wake. For coral reefs to have any shot in the future, global temperature rise must be capped at around 1.5 degrees Celsius. Achieving that goal would be even more challenging as super-mines, like the Carmichael mine, continue to provide incredible amounts of fossil fuels to developing countries with huge populations like India.

The rusty skeleton of the HMAS Protector just off of Heron Island. Constructed in 1884, the battle ship saw action in the Boxer Rebellion and both World Wars before being intentionally sunk off of Heron in 1943 to act as a breakwater. Today it shelters sea turtles and hundreds of fish.

Some less staggering goals are fishing more responsibly and curbing the amount of agriculture runoff from the coast along the Great Barrier Reef. Both of these will act in tandem to limit COT outbreaks and limit the growth of algae on reefs. Algae, which thrives in nutrient-rich water, is encroaching on coral’s turf as more nutrients are flushed into the ocean and herbivorous fish that eat the algae are overfished. In the Caribbean, a die-off of herbivorous sea urchins in the 1980s led to dense thickets of algae usurping reefs throughout the area. Could the Great Barrier Reef be next?

The Great Barrier Reef is also home to an incredible diversity of marine invertebrates. Sea hares (shown here) are large sea slugs that feed on algae that grows on the shallow coral reef flats. Herbivores like sea hares are vital to maintaining the natural balance of coral vs. algae.

A variety of measures will have to be taken to address the plethora of problems ravaging the world’s largest reef. An important point that is often lost among the devastation is that we can all play a part, no matter where we live, by changing how we live. This involves being smarter about emissions and continuing to fight the creation of large fossil fuel operations, like the Carmichael mine, that not only threaten coral reefs, but everywhere on earth.

Part Three: Why Save the Reef?

 

Heron Island is a half mile-long speck of sand inhabited by thousands of birds, a small resort and a world-class coral research station.

I was lucky enough to visit the Great Barrier Reef twice during my semester abroad, including spending five days on the University Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, which is located at the southern tip of the immense reef. This area was sheltered from the worst of the recent mass bleaching events thanks to a cyclone in Fiji that sent crucial cool water westward.

A parrotfish gorges itself on the algae covering coral.

As someone relatively new to scuba diving who hails from the Great Lakes region (Chicago) far from the tropics, the breathtaking assortment of marine animals and coral was overwhelming. The variety of coral formed a kaleidoscope of soft yellows, pinks and greens as small fish darted between the large branching coral and squat, round brain corals. Large parrotfish, whose gaudy colors reflect the coral, messily chomped on the algae growing on the coral’s surface, sending chunks flying every which way. A snowflake moray eel, splattered with bright yellow and black spots, bared its teeth at me as I drifted a little too close to its rocky crevice. Around 10 percent of the world’s fish species can be found in this one reef system.

The strikingly named many-spotted sweetlips fish, one of over 1,500 species of fish on the Great Barrier Reef.

Sea turtles lazily hunkered down on top of the coral or leisurely swam by, beating their fins every so often. Six of the world’s seven sea turtle species come to the Great Barrier Reef to breed, including the endangered loggerhead sea turtle whose females hoists their bodies up on the beaches of Heron Island to nest. Many were born at this same spot. Giant cow-tailed rays, each one bigger than the last, silently glide along the seafloor as eagle rays flap their wings along the outskirts of the reef, effortlessly flying through the water. Small white-tipped reef sharks joined them there, wary of the divers that had entered their reef. The Great Barrier Reef is home to 134 species of rays and sharks, including species as iconic as the manta ray and tiger shark. Many are at risk, reflecting the global trend of shark decline.

A white-tip reef shark coasts along the outskirts of the coral reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, spanning an area as big as Italy and housing thousands of species. Besides its intrinsic value as an incredible biodiversity spot, it attracts people from around the world and generates billions of dollars for the Australian government each year. Although it has been hit hard in the last few decades, the recovery of portions is still possible. We do not want to be the generation that let the world’s greatest reef erode into oblivion.

A green sea turtle off of Heron Island.

All pictures and art by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-atlas-great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-map-climate-change/

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral_bleach.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/16/why-adanis-planned-carmichael-coalmine-matters-to-australia-and-the-world

http://www.greatbarrierreef.org/about-the-reef/great-barrier-reef-facts/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests

The Plight of the Sage Grouse

Save the Sage Grouse!

The Trump administration’s decision to ease Obama-era sage grouse protections make the peculiar bird an unlikely conservation symbol at a crucial time. Will it be a fatal blow for the sage grouse?

On March 15, 2019, President Trump finalized plans to greatly reduce sage grouse habitat across 10 western states, a plan in the works since December. The decision will slash sage grouse protective habitats by almost nine million acres, making that land more accessible for oil and gas drilling. Environmentalists widely panned the move, labeling it a handout to oil companies. Slightly lost among the outrage over slashing protected areas for drilling was the grim fate of the sage grouse.

The greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) may not look like the most graceful birds, with its spiky tail feathers and scarf of fluffy white feathers adorning its head, but they do know how to “woo” potential mates. Every spring, male sage grouses gather along the plains and strut their stuff in their unique and elaborate courting display. Male sage grouse inflate the two large yellow air sacs hanging over their white stomach and then pop them, making a bizarre noise similar to the sound of a rubber ball bouncing off a wall. Over 70 sage grouses may gather at this festival, proudly inflating and popping their air sacs, filling the sagebrush plains with strange, rubbery sounds.

Unfortunately this spectacular occurrence is becoming less and less frequent as the birds’ habitat continues to dwindle. These birds only live on the sagebrush plains of the western United States, which happen to be some of the richest oil sites in the country. The sage grouse has been involved in land disputes over oil for more than a decade. Sage grouses once numbered in the millions but are now restricted to only 56% of their natural range according to the Audubon society. The bird’s population currently sits at a meager 200,000-500,000 birds as the sagebrush ocean around them disappears.

In 2015, the sage grouse was denied listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) because it was believed that federal and state protections were enough to help protect the bird and alleviate the environmental pressures its dwindling population was facing. In 2015, these protections were surprisingly robust thanks to organizations like the Audubon Society and an ambitious sage grouse protection plan implemented by the Obama administration. That plan banned oil and gas drilling in 10.7 million acres where the remarkable birds resided. The protected area was marked as “sagebrush focal areas” and these spaces would provide a safe haven for the birds and their ecosystems.

The decision reached last week will turn over all but 1.8 million acres of that plan to the oil and gas companies. Environmentalists claim that this will destroy the birds’ nesting areas, further devastating a population in decline. A possible mitigation from this massive loss of habitat would be to list the sage grouse as endangered under the ESA now that federal efforts to help the bird are gone. But that will be fraught with political discord and endangered species status may not be as valuable as it used to be. The actual ESA is threatened by former oil lobbyist David Bernhardt, who now runs the Interior Department. His goal is to weaken the law, which has existed since the Nixon administration in 1973, by making the economic repercussions of listing a species come into play during the listing process. Currently, only scientific proof of a species’ decline is needed for listing.

For the last few years, the sage grouse has repeatedly become a symbol for conservation vs. fossil fuel extraction. It pits one species’ survival against the extraction of energy sources that could potentially put us all in danger due to emissions. But the sage grouse doesn’t care about the potential ramifications down the line. It is in grave danger now as over 80 percent of its protected land from the 2015 plan has been opened up to drilling. We are facing the sobering reality of a loss of not only a strange bird, but an iconic western landscape altogether. In a few years there could be no rubbery popping sounds filling the sagebrush with life. The groups of strange, beautiful birds strutting around, puffing out their chests could be gone. All that will be left are silent oil derricks, extracting the life from the sagebrush.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/climate/trump-sage-grouse.html

https://www.audubon.org/news/whats-greater-sage-grouse