“As we have argued here on World Ocean Radio too often before, we can no longer protect ourselves from the cause and effect of climate change through indifference, contrived ignorance, and lack of action. That response is irresponsible to the victims, the coastal communities, and to the rest of the nation who are being asked to finance the reparation this time and next.”
~ Peter Neill from WOR 198: Some Answers for Sandy
This summer he was struck at how fast he was seeing something kill off what he estimates are millions of coral colonies.
“Something is damaging the reefs in the whole part of the island so it has to be something relatively big,” said Lilley.
Lilley contacted scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey who’ve determined the diseased coral is different from what killed coral heads in Kaneohe Bay last year.
The Kauai outbreak is believed to be due to a type of cyano bacteria and fungus which has compromised the health of the reef, according to researcher Thierry Work.
Work said he took samples from the reef earlier this month and will be back to collect more coral and fish to conduct toxicology tests.
Lilley has sounded the alarm which he hopes will trigger action to get the disease in check, and prevent its spread.
“We have a billion dollar industry tourist industry in Hawaii with snorkels who want to see the reefs. If we let them die on the north shore of Kauai, that’s going to be a huge impact financially on the resources, and the money coming in,” said Lilley.
The Kauai resident is also concerned about what he saw on a recent dive where he documented evidence of diseased turtles and fish.
“The other day at Annini, we counted eight turtles,seven of the eight had eye infections, two had noticable tumors and oneof the eight, had its eyes missing completely,” Lilley said.
The video he shot of a blind turtle knocking into the reef was what saddened and worried him.
But he has also been finding a growing number of sick puffer fish too.
“The tobys are turning black. Their fins are turning black, and rotting and falling off, and then they die,” said Lilley.
So, is there a connection between the diseased marine life and the distressed coral?
A rapid response team of scientists is headed to Kauai next week to find out.
In the meantime, Lilley hopes the video on his website will help educate and encourage ocean users statewide to be on the alert.
“Then, they can report in other parts of the Hawaiian Islands. That will help us scientists in a huge way; where else it, if anywhere, so we can put a picture together as to what’s causing this problem,” said Lilley.
Special thanks to Coral-list: Guin contact@guinapora.com via coral.aoml.noaa.gov
The live-streamed online event in November is slated to provide content from nations all over the world, and will encourage participation through social media sites including Twitter. It will include expert commentary, as well as “crowd-sourced videos about how weather is altering our lives and homes, and profiles of communities developing solutions to the climate crisis,” the group said.
The strong push to use social media to boost interest in addressing climate change comes as advocates are playing defense politically in Washington, D.C.
Climate change legislation is dead – at least for now – on Capitol Hill, and Republicans are pushing to block Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas regulations.
Organizers hope to build political momentum with the event, which will occur just a week after November’s U.S. elections. Fox said “24 Hours of Reality” is “explicitly intended to connect people everywhere and activate them to take action and to advocate for system-wide solutions with their elected officials.”
Gore announced the event to the Social Good Summit that’s taking place in New York City.
The summit is aimed at exploring ways to harness new media and technology to address environmental problems, poverty and development, disease and other issues.
Environmentalists are citing extreme weather – including recent heat waves and drought in the U.S. – to seek to show that climate change is not an abstract, future problem, but rather something that’s already underway with damaging effects.
Great post on The Ocean Foundation blog about sea turtles at a very special place: Bahia de Jiquilisco. DV
by Brad Nahill, Director & Co-Founder of SEEtheWILD
To arrive to a new place in the dark is like tasting a new food with a blindfold on. You can feel the edges, but a full color appreciation isn’t possible until daylight arrives. Night time in the small town of La Pirraya on an island in Jiquilisco Bay is quiet; the fishermen and their families gather in small compounds preparing the days catch and saving energy for an early rise the next day. But hiding outside the lights of the town is the beginning of a conservation movement that could save one of the world’s most endangered populations of ocean wildlife.
My arrival to Jiquilisco Bay in southern El Salvador started at the small port town of Puerto Parada. We waited for the boat to arrive on a small concrete dock at the end of the main road into town. There was little indication that we were on the edge of the largest wetland in the country other than the mangrove trees across the channel. The dark boat ride was punctuated by distant lightning that was more entertainment than threat. Once our group, an international team of sea turtle conservationists, was settled into our rustic cabins, our night began. We received word of hatchlings at a nearby hatchery and set off on a short boat ride up the beach.
The few dozen hatchlings in the blue bucket at the hatchery were the first newborn hawksbill turtles I’d ever seen. With a red flashlight to protect their eyes, we inspected this healthy group who were eager to get to the water. No sooner had we released them on the beach than we received a call of a nesting female hawksbill on a nearby island. We hopped back into the boat for another short ride across the calm water.
Hawksbills are well known for their preference for nesting much further up the beach, normally venturing into the beachside vegetation to lay their eggs. That knowledge didn’t prepare me for the location of this turtle, probably more than 50 feet inland on the other side of a barbed wire fence that was tall enough to keep people out but let turtles through underneath. That turtle was the perfect illustration of why this population remained hidden for so long; many turtle experts had considered the hawksbills of the Eastern Pacific functionally extinct until just a few years ago.
That turtle decided not to nest so a few of us broke off from the group to visit another hatchery where we waited for sunrise to inspect three hawksbills that were being held to put satellite transmitters on the next day. Along the way, we stopped the boat to see another hawksbill that was on another isolated stretch of beach. Finally, we arrived at the hatchery with an hour or so left in the evening. I stole off to find a hammock and was asleep before I could even take off my sandals.
I wish I could accurately describe my first impressions of Jiquilisco Bay in the daylight but after the long night, I was so disoriented my vision was pretty blurred. Stumbling out of the hammock, I walked over to a four-foot deep hole where three large hawksbills were calmly waiting to be released. These turtles were much larger (their shells measured about 3 feet long) than the one small hawksbill I had worked with years before in Costa Rica; if I didn’t know better I would have thought they were a different species. In addition, there were more hatchlings to release.
Our visit to Jiquilisco was organized by ICAPO (The Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative) and these turtles are part of an ongoing study looking to unlock the mysterious life cycles of these turtles. There are estimated to be fewer than 500 nesting females hawksbills left in their range, which goes from southern Baja California, Mexico to Peru. Until recently, researchers assumed that hawksbills only lived in and around coral reefs, of which there are relatively few along the Pacific coast of the Americas. However, research by ICAPO and their partners has shown that these turtles live primarily in mangroves, a fact that surprised many turtle experts.
Jiquilisco Bay is estimated to harbor nearly half of their nests and most of the rest are found in Padre Ramos Estuary, not far south in northern Nicaragua. Through the hard work of several organizations working in these two hotspots, there is a growing group of people working hard to ensure these turtles are around for a long time. ICAPO and its partners coordinate a local team of 75 residents, known as “careyeros” (carey is Spanish for hawksbill) who patrol key beaches around the bay, looking for nesting turtles and relocating their eggs to hatcheries.
Once I finished photographing these turtles and headed out to the beach, the incredible beauty of this area hit me full force. Across the water, a series of perfectly shaped volcanoes rose up over the bay. As the baby turtles slid into the water, the human residents of Jiquilisco were just getting started. Fishing boats crossed the water, heading to preferred spots in the brightening day.
As we arrived back to La Pirraya, the town was in full swing, preparing for their annual hawksbill festival, complete with parade, dignitaries, throngs of media, and more. The parade got off to a loud start with the Navy’s marching band and a parade of more than a hundred local students. The students held home made signs about protecting turtles and keeping trash out of the ocean and a few wore turtle costumes despite the quickly rising temperature.
While I was pleasantly surprised at the large turnout to the festival, the sheer number of media outlets in attendance was shocking. Roughly 30 people from seemingly every media outlet in the country was there including TV news, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and more. Many citizens of El Salvador are proud of its role in protecting hawksbills and the mix of cutting-edge technology, international turtle experts, and beautiful children was a potent combination that media outlets could not ignore.
Many of the students stood outside a canopy, looking over the shoulders of the researchers to catch a glimpse of the turtles being prepared for attaching the transmitters. It took more than an hour to clean and sand down the shells, place several layers of epoxy around the transmitter, and allow them to dry. Once completed, the turtles were taken to the water and released. The crowds were kept back to give the turtles room and once they had their bearings, they went directly to the cool water.
I wish this story could have a neat and tidy ending with the turtles heading off into the water, their transmitters providing valuable information for years to come. However, less than a week later I got word that one of the hawksbills was already found dead. The likely culprit was blast fishing, a barbaric practice where fishermen use homemade bombs to kill everything in their range of impact. Read more about this tragedy on our partner EcoViva’s website here.
That news was a reminder that, despite a tremendous amount of progress studying and protecting Jiquilisco’s turtles over the past few years, there is still a lot of work to do. The first order of business is to ensure that the bay receives protection; there are currently no regulations in place for this spectacular wildlife hotspot. ICAPO is hoping to guarantee protection of the critical hawksbill habitat, namely the 50 meter fridges along the primary nesting beaches as well as all the waters within the estuary. These actions by the government of El Salvador are the minimum necessary to give hawksbills the best shot at survival in the eastern Pacific.
SEE Turtles is supporting this work by raising funds to help pay for the egg collection. Last year, we donated more than $5,000 and hope to exceed that this year. To help support this effort, visit our website; for every $1 donated, we can save 2 hawksbill hatchlings at this project.
Come visit Jiquilisco Bay in November with EcoViva.
Brad Nahill is a wildlife conservationist, writer, activist, and fundraiser. He is the Director & Co-Founder of SEEtheWILD, the world’s first non-profit wildife conservation travel website. To date, we have generated more than $300,000 for wildlife conservation and local communities and our volunteers have completed more than 1,000 work shifts at sea turtle conservation project. SEEtheWILD is a project of The Ocean Foundation. Follow SEEtheWILD on Facebook or Twitter.
“The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: Soon enough
You will be quiet too”
– Robert Hass
When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks.
Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species in many of the world’s pristine habitats. (Photograph: Courtesy of Hachette Book Group)
The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish. Some gnash their teeth, others use their bladders or tails to make sound. Sea anemones grunt and belch. Every creature on the reef makes its own sound.
But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction.
Krause, whose electronic music with Paul Beaver was used on classic films like Rosemary’s Baby and Apocalypse Now, and who worked regularly with Bob Dylan, George Harrison and The Byrds, has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species, collecting 4,500 hours of sound from many of the world’s pristine habitats.
But such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise. His tapes are possibly the only record of the original diversity of life in these places.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.
“If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.”
Hawaii, he says, is the extinction capital of the world. “In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, half the 140 bird species have disappeared. In Madagascar, 15 species of lemur, an elephant bird, a pygmy hippo and an estimated half of all the animals have gone extinct.”
Even partially disturbed habitats lose much of their life for many years, says Krause. Recordings of a meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of San Francisco before the surrounding forest was selectively logged in the 1980s sounds very different to when Krause returned a year later.
“The overall richness of sound was gone, as was the thriving density and diversity of birds. The only prominent sounds were the stream and the hammering of a Williamson’s sapsucker. Over the 20 years I have returned a dozen times to the same spot at the same time of year but the bio-acoustic vitality I had captured before logging has not yet returned.”
One in four mammals is threatened with extinction, he says. With the exception of a few sites, frog populations are in decline worldwide and birds are beginning to show radical signs of territorial shifting.
“Things are beginning to quiet down in the pristine habitats. The combination of shrinking habitat and increasing human pandemonium have produced conditions under which the channels … necessary for creature survival are being completely overloaded. The voices of the wild in their purest states where no [human] noise is present are splendid symphonies.”
But the wild natural world, comprised of vast areas not managed by humans, rarely exists now except in a few isolated places such as the Alaskan wilderness, the far Canadian north, Siberia, the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, and the Brazilian Pantanal which are still rich with natural sound, he says.
“The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it.”
By