Great Opportunities In Coral Reef Management

Heads-up on several amazing opportunities in applied, field-based coral reef management.

NOAA's Coral Reef Management Fellowship Program is seeking candidates for the 2010-2012 Fellowships. The Coral Reef Management Fellowship Program was established to respond to the need for additional coral reef management capacity in the U.S. Flag Pacific and Caribbean islands. The Program provides U.S. state and territorial coral reef management agencies with highly qualified candidates whose education and work experience meet each jurisdiction’s specific needs, while providing the individual fellows with professional experience in coastal and coral reef resource management.

On June 1, 2009, the Fellowship program will open a two-month application period for the 2010-2012 Fellowships. Fellowships are available in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. And for the first time ever, the program has expanded to recruit a fellow for Florida in the 2010-2012 cycle.

Fellows spend two years working on specific projects determined by each jurisdiction's coral reef management agencies.

Applicants typically have a master's degree and two years of experience or a bachelor's degree and four years of experience (Although most applicants hold either Bachelor's or Master's degrees, applicants holding a PhD or JD are welcome to submit an application for consideration). Jurisdictions may require additional or alternate skills, such as outreach and education experience. More specific eligibility requirements can be found on each jurisdiction's statement of work.

Only two documents are needed to complete an application for the fellowship: a curriculum vitae and a Letter of Application. The Letter of Application should be a one-page document expressing an applicant's interest in the position and why they believe that they would be a good candidate for the fellowship. Letters of Application should address issues covered in a particular jurisdiction's Statement of Work.

Applications will be accepted from June 1st until July 31, 2009. Questions about the Coral Reef Management Fellowship can be directed to the Coral Fellowship Coordinator.

In Search Of Deep Water Corals

James Gates from Living Oceans Society in Canada contacted me recently to help spread the word on an exciting expedition that's set to launch on World Oceans Day, June 8th. The Finding Coral Expedition is planning to do just that: They are in search of cold water, deep sea corals off the coast of British Columbia.

The expedition hopes to locate B.C.’s deep sea coral communities and characterize some of the associated life that calls these deep water ecosystems home. It is very likely that there will be species of fish, invertebrates and corals that have never been seen before. James mentions that while the expedition team hopes to find pristine habitats, they are prepared to also discover coral zones smashed to rubble by environmentally unsustainable fishing gear that drags across the seafloor, devastating everything in its path.

Let's hope for the former.

You can follow the expedition by visiting their website. Good luck, James, and the entire Living Oceans Society team!

Sexy Back

Those rascals over at Deep Sea News are celebrating Sex Week over on their blog. Which means drop what you're doing and get your sexy back over at DSN.

If I wasn't so busy I'd write a special post to help celebrate with my ocean homies. But the next best thing is to dip into my archives for a well seasoned MBSL&S sex post blast-from-the-past. To wit, enjoy this little piece from October 4, 2008:

Coral Spawning: Cue The Barry White Music

During my recent trip to Bonaire, I was lucky enough to be there during a coral spawning week. I've had the good fortune of seeing coral spawn before in Hawaii and along the Great Barrier Reef. But I've always been in the wrong place at the wrong time to see a Caribbean spawning event.

Fortunately, Bonaire is such a popular and well visited dive destination that residents have their reef spawning down to the hour. I kid you not. Click on the chart to the left to get the full rundown on corals and other reef invertebrates that were scheduled to release their gametes en masse. While hard and soft corals prefer to get their groove on under cover of night, other randy inverts such as certain species of sponges, worms, and echinoderms are content for a little afternoon delight, beginning their spawning around midday.

What triggers the mass spawning? Primitive light-sensing pigment mechanisms known as a cryptochromes, which occur in corals, insects, fish, and mammals - including humans - are the genetic trigger. First isolated by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, the Cry2 gene is stimulated by the faint blue light of the full moon and appears to play a central role in triggering the mass coral spawning event. Mass spawning is an annual to biannual event and typically observed anywhere from three to ten days following a full moon. Coral colonies appear to experience at least two major "waves" of gamete release during a spawning event.

I managed to gather a group of divers one evening during the peak of Bonaire's spawning to head out for the reef love-fest. Props go out to my dive buddies for their enthusiasm, especially considering it was the first ever night dive for two of them! We headed out from the shore, flashlights and cameras ready. On the swim to the reef we were buzzed by enormous tarpon that flashed into view just inches from us to snatch-up any fish attracted to the lights. Once at the reef drop-off we began descending along the reef slope looking for any sign of spawning. Most hard coral species extend their fleshy polyps at night in order to feed. Spawning can look like an underwater snowstorm of eggs or egg/sperm packets percolating from a coral colony. Or it can look like puffs of smoke (sperm) being emitted.

We made several passes over colonies of Greater Star coral (Montastrea cavernosa) at about 50 feet and then noticed one colony appeared smokey. Hovering close I saw clusters of 20-30 polyps at a time contract and squirt a pale-colored puff of sperm into the water. Signaling with my light to others, we all gathered around to watch the event. In reaching for my camera, I brought it to my mask only to notice it had flooded. I decided to panic after the dive. I was witnessing a natural wonder.

Luckily, one of my dive buddies (Denise Mattia, a journalist on assignment from New York City) had a professional camera rig and managed to snap at least two shots of the event. While she didn't capture the actual "squirt," you can clearly see the cloud of sperm gathering above the colony. We were down for a little over an hour total and all returned to shore only to compare excited impressions of the spectacle.

If it meant having to kill my camera in order to see it, I think I'd gladly do it all again!

Smithsonian Sant Ocean Hall

I just spent the entire day at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for the opening day of the International Marine Conservation Congress. My brain hurts from all the great presentations today, and my liver hurts from the open bar reception following Daniel Pauley's opening address. It was a grand time, and best of all it was hosted in the brand new Sant Ocean Hall.

This was my first chance to see the new permanent wing at our nation's august and preeminent natural history museum that is dedicated to ocean life through time. I re-filled my glass with complimentary dark beer, scarfed down several more cheesy toasted nibbly-things, and strolled into the hall, chatting-up friends and colleagues while taking-in the exhibits.

This is where I'm supposed to gush in florid hyperbole of the astounding sights and sounds found within the Sant Ocean Hall. How no other museum on the face of the planet has so spectacularly showcased our ocean planet. Or how the exhibit designers managed to convey a compelling narrative of why the oceans are so critical to life on Earth.

But I didn't get any of that. Make no mistake, the Sant Ocean Hall is a visually stunning collection of exhibits. And the specimens are world class or utterly unique. But the hall did not leave me with the impression of a state-of-the-art natural history museum so much as it did a Victorian-age curiosity cabinet. Seriously, it took me back to my first visit to the Museum of Natural History in London and their great hall of mammals that was stuffed to the rafters with stuffed elephants, bones, hippos, diaramas, and whales galore.

Similarly, the Sant Ocean Hall has exhibits everywhere you looked. In cases, in jars, mounted from the ceiling, hanging from walls, or projected onto screens. The rooms were jam-packed with displays. I'm tempted to say the layout was confusing. There didn't seem to be a noticeable "path" to take through the exhibits--not that I'm a proponent of the notion that there's only one way to make your way through a museum. But the educator in me wants to at least find an overarching message. But a coherent take-home "message" was not apparent to me. I suppose you do leave with the notion of the diversity of life in the oceans. But I certainly didn't get a sense of how the ocean or its diversity are so important to making this planet habitable.

The Sant Ocean Hall was beautiful, and certainly inspiring to this marine biologist. But it just left me feeling like the designers missed an opportunity to tell a more coherent story to the public.

Any thoughts from readers who have visited?

Day (And Night) At The Museum

Apologies that my posts have been few and far between lately, but the pace of work hasn't let-up for over a month. I'm writing from Fairfax, Virginia, just outside of Washington DC where I'm attending the International Marine Conservation Congress and the 2nd International Marine Protected Area Conference hosted at George Mason University. I'm excited to be presenting a paper next Sunday on developing business plans for marine protected areas, but till then I'm filling my brain with great information while reconnecting with other ocean conservation friends.

Tomorrow is an all-day special event hosted by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Beyond the Obituaries: Success Stories in Ocean Conservation. This will be my first visit to the brand new Sant Ocean Hall, so that alone is making it a special day. But the IMCC has pulled together an amazing day of presentations. And what a lineup of ocean conservation rock stars. Dr. Nancy Knowlton and Dr. Jeremy Jackson (Doctor's Gloom and Doom, respectively) will be kicking off the day, and Dr. Daniel Pauly will be delivering the evening plenary talk. Somebody pinch me!

If you're in the DC area, you can drop for the daytime events at the Smithsonian as it's free and open to the public. And even if you're not local, you can still join in on the day's events virtually. The Smithsonian is providing a live webcast of the day. You can join the webcast here.

But Does It Come In Black?

I'm scooping the Deep Sea News boys on this one! On Wednesday at the California Academy of Sciences, a newly designed, battery-powered submarine was unveiled. Looking more like a plane than a sub, the Deep Flight Super Falcon is only 20 feet long and is built to carry two people to depths of 1,500 feet at a leisurely cruising speed of 7 mph.

Already tested successfully inside San Francisco Bay, the Deep Flight Super Falcon is next slated to explore the kelp forests and other nearshore habitats of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The craft is the brainchild of California-based marine engineer Graham Hawkes. With a price tag of $1.5 million, the craft is designed to "fly" just like a jet plane, with electric motors controlling for roll, pitch and yaw.

John McCosker, the Cal Academy's chair of aquatic biology, said the sub will enable him and his colleagues for the first time to follow along with the travels of "whales and dolphins and even super sharks - maybe even the mysterious giant squid."

Personally, I'm thinking I'd not wanna be in this thing should a curious (or hungry) Architeuthis or Mesonychoteuthis decide to wrap its tentacles around the hull and drag it down a mile or two deep. And just in case a Megalodon is still swimming around, this sub would be a perfect toothpick.

Hawaii MPAs Work

In the wake of recent news from Southern California's Channel Islands that marine protected areas there have resulted in bigger and more abundant fish, I've just received similar (and not altogether surprising) news from Hawaii of MPA successes there.

You may recall that I've written extensively here and there on the complex free-for-all situation that exists in Hawaii with regard to commercial harvesting of reef fish for the aquarium trade. As I've previously described, the State of Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources have attempted to better manage heavily targeted ornamental reef species through the use of no-take protected areas called Fish Replenishment Areas (or FRAs). The idea being that fish stocks protected within FRA's are able to recover and both adults and juveniles spillover and replenish stocks in non-protected areas.

When I wrote about this issue last year, there was what appeared (to me at least) to be a rush to judgement by some locals in concluding that FRAs were not working. Fewer fish (notably Yellow tangs, Zebrasoma flavescens) were observed on reefs and aquarium fish collectors were said to be holding the smoking gun. The State of Hawaii was called upon to ban fish collection or heavily regulate it.

I won't deny there is a need for the State of Hawaii to add restrictions to the lack of regulations around aquarium fish collecting. But according to Impacts of West Hawaii Marine Protected Areas on Yellow Tang Stocks and Fishery Sustainability, a report issued last week by the Kona DAR offices, FRAs are working remarkably well along the Big Island's Kailua-Kona coast. (The report I describe here is a redacted version of the more expansive study, Impacts of a Hawaiian marine protected area network on the abundance and fishery sustainability of the yellow tang, Zebrasoma flavescens, published in the journal Biological Conservation [Vol. 142:1066 -1073, 2009]. I haven't found an online link to the redacted report, but send me an email and I'd be happy to forward a pdf version to you.)

In 1999, before the FRAs were implemented, there was no difference in yellow tang density between ‘open’ sites (green squares in the graph on the left) and sites which were slated to become FRAs (red circles). Both had about half the abundance of the established ‘older reserves’ (blue triangles). By 2003, and in all subsequent years, densities in FRAs had increased to levels similar to those in the older reserves. Monitoring data therefore provides unequivocal evidence of population recovery within FRAs.

But wait, there's more.

FRAs don't just increase fish stocks within their protected waters, but outside their boundaries as well (see graph at top of post). High densities of fish in boundary areas are evidence of ‘spillover’ (outward movement of fish from reserves into surrounding open areas) and indicate that reserves supplement adult stocks not only within their own boundaries, but also in open areas up to a kilometer or more away. This is not to say that tighter regulations on aquarium collecting are not needed. FRAs alone are likely insufficient to meet a growing aquarium collection industry. But the data paints a promising picture of how to successfully manage reef fish recovery.

I can't put it any better than the conclusion presented in the report, so I'll close with this assessment by the State of Hawaii on the value of FRAs as a resource management tool,

The West Hawaii reserve system has been shown to have a number of benefits above and beyond impacts on yellow tang. Those include greater numbers of other targeted species, reduced conflict between collectors, commercial ocean recreation operations, and community members, and greater numbers of attractive and conspicuous fishes in reef areas which are readily accessible to commercial and recreational divers and snorkelers.

In addition, survey data provides clear evidence that the West Hawaii protected areas network, by sustaining adult stocks over large areas of the coastline, helps to ensure the long-term sustainability of yellow tang stocks in West Hawaii and of the fishery which depends heavily on this species. Increased fishing effort and catches in recent years demonstrate scope for severe over-exploitation in the absence of reserves, and suggest that additional management, including perhaps limits on participation as well as specific additional protection of breeding stocks may be necessary to optimize future fishery benefits.

Jane Lubchenco On Mitigating Climate Change

NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco wants to start a National Climate Service to help farmers, fishermen and city planners better deal with the coming challenges from a changing global climate.

Listen in on a Living on Earth interview as Dr Lubchenco shares her thoughts and vision on how science should guide our decisions on climate change.

Quit Picking On Sea Turtles

Last week, a 54-year-old Sonoma County, California, woman pleaded guilty to charges of illegally importing guitar picks made from endangered sea turtle shells. The U.S. Attorney's Office says Qing Song pleaded guilty to one felony count on Wednesday. She was sentenced to 10 months of home confinement and a $2,000 fine.

What remains unclear is the extent of the US-based distribution. Song was more than likely just a single player in a much larger network. And of course, this verdict does absolutely nothing to decrease the ongoing illegal harvesting of endangered sea turtles for commercial trade that occurs throughout the tropics.

Song admitted to importing picks (or raw shells) of the Hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) from China and selling them in the United States. According to the AP report, "some musicians apparently covet the shells instead of plastic picks because they believe they produce a superior tone."

Really? It takes an endangered species to bring out the Guitar Hero in some musicians? And all along I was thinking it had something to do with skill and inherent talent. I mean, Eddie Van Halen, Bonnie Raitt, and Johnny Cash seemed to do just fine with plastic.

Hawksbill turtles are rated as critically endangered - one step above being considered extinct in the wild, according to the World Conservation Union’s rankings of endangered species.