I was forwarded this special section to the L.A. Times last week by my friend Liz. It’s a wonderful five-part series on how our oceans are being altered each and every day. It took me an afternoon to read through it all, but it’s well worth it. In this time where environmentalism is becoming almost fad like and very vogue with the widespread success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth [and if you haven’t seen that yet, what is your major malfunction!] how can the issue be pushed more the the forefront while being taken as deadly serious as it needs to be taken?
The oceans were once thought by scientists to be so vast and so quickly healing that any damage we humans could possibly do would be repaired with no consequence. But looking closer, we’ve all learned otherwise. Our oceans are reverting back to the primordial ooze from whence life as we know it first blossomed. The notion of seeing what our oceans looked like when life as we know it first started to sprout may sound romantic, but it’s a nasty place. A nasty place where many, if not most, marine organisms of today cannot survive.
Part one is an article titled A Primeval Tide of Toxins and discusses a 2.7 million-year-old cyanobacteria causing problems all the way up the food chain from plankton to humans. This ancient cyanobacteria is thriving in the oceans now as they did 2.7 billion years ago in an acidic primordial ooze.
The ancient seas contained large areas with little or no oxygen — anoxic and hypoxic zones that could never have supported sea life as we know it. It was a time when bacteria and jellyfish ruled.
Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has spent most of her career peering into waters that resemble those of the distant past.
On research dives off the Louisiana coast, she has seen cottony white bacteria coating the seafloor. The sulfurous smell of rotten eggs, from a gas produced by the microbes, has seeped into her mask. The bottom is littered with the ghostly silhouettes of dead crabs, sea stars and other animals.
The cause of death is decaying algae. Fed by millions of tons of fertilizer, human and animal waste, and other farm runoff racing down the Mississippi River, tiny marine plants run riot, die and drift to the bottom. Bacteria then take over. In the process of breaking down the plant matter, they suck the oxygen out of seawater, leaving little or none for fish or other marine life.
Part two is an article titled Sentinels Under Attack about how large marine animals [sea lions, seals, whales of all sizes, dolphins, sea turtles] all succumb to similar fates as they eat the ancient toxic algae. The toxicity builds up through the food chain, just as mercury does. We should all be accustomed to the warning labels on all forms of fish products now with mercury levels becoming a thing we now live with. Little amounts of mercury are present in the tiniest things in the oceans. Those plankton are eaten by larger predators and those predators are eaten by bigger fish up the food chain. And then those larger fish end up on our dinner plate or aluminum can in the pantry; same thing happens with the toxic algae.
As [scientists] watch the oceans disgorge more dead and dying creatures, scientists have come to a disquieting realization: The proliferation of algae, bacteria and other microbes is making the oceans less hospitable to advanced forms of life — those animals most like humans.
“Marine mammals share our waters, eat some of the food we eat and get some of the same diseases we get,” said Paul Sandifer, chief scientist for the Oceans and Human Health Initiative of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If environmental conditions are not good for these sentinels of the sea, you can believe it won’t be good for us either,” Sandifer said. “What we allow to flow into the sea will come back to bite us. You can bet on it.”
Parts three through five are just as informative and just as jarring as the first two. The basic notion of these articles is to show how drastically and quickly our oceans are changing and for the worse [for us more contemporary flora and fauna]. The vast bodies of water we never thought could really be harmed by human action because of their resiliecy are dying and we’re quickening the pace with our waste washing straight into them from our inland rivers. We’re causing these cyanobacteria to flourish and cause problems for marine predators up the food chain as the toxic levels compound just as mercury does, toxic fumes stretching several miles inland from beaches causing repertory problems in humans, plastics constantly washing around the oceans and not biodegrading… But it’s all stuff we need to know and it’s all part of a good informative read. The series doesn’t really tell us how we can help reduce waste and fight the toxic blooms. Any experts or well-read citizens of the BMT community have suggestions?
