State fish and wildlife officials and Florida’s Bonefish and Tarpon Trust have logged nearly 200 incidents with over 30 species acting this way, mostly in the lower Keys, but as far north as Miami.
“Yeah, this is crazy. I was out on a six-hour charter. I had two people on the boat and we were down off a little bit by the bank, and we happened to see a fish floundering on the flats,” Michael Rolph, captain of MyKeys Tours, described. “So, we got close to them. We wanted to see if there was a problem, and we could obviously tell that he was in distress.”
It turned out to be a sawfish, a critically endangered species that might lose four or five mature adults a year. But in just a few months, at least 27 have beached themselves or died after intense episodes of what anglers are calling “the spins.”
“Typically, when we think of fish acting strangely or dying, we either think of low oxygen conditions in the water or red tide, and so we saw neither,” Mike Parsons, professor of marine science at Florida Gulf Coast University’s water school, said.
Parsons’ team is part of a statewide effort to solve the mystery of the spinning fish, and while tests for most toxins have turned up empty, the most promising suspect is found living off seaweed at the bottom. It’s a tiny critter named gambierdiscus.
“This is the highest we’ve seen of the gambierdiscus cells in the Keys,” Florida Gulf Coast University researcher Adam Catasus said. “We don’t know if it’s the main cause.”
The single-celled algae, which can produce various neurotoxins, is showing up in record-high levels, but it’s just one more stressor on marine life that is already reeling from pollution, overfishing and off-the-charts ocean heat waves brought by climate change.
From Inside Climate News:
The dawn of the tropical Atlantic invasion into the Mediterranean Sea
Albano said that when the researchers matched their fossil record with climate data in a model, it showed that level of warming will probably break down a barrier of cold water along the northwest coast of Africa that has blocked nearly all tropical species from reaching and entering the Mediterranean through the eight-mile wide Strait of Gibraltar.
“There is a very large upwelling system where deep, cold water emerges,” Albano said. “This hinders the arrival of purely tropical species from Western Africa. And the question was, how long can this barrier hold and what happens with increasing warming? When would this area become warm enough to allow tropical species to come into the Mediterranean?”
The fossil record shows that iconic tropical species like spiky comb shells and large conchs lived in the Mediterranean during that geologically recent warm era, similar to the current climate.
“This family of gastropods is very famous among paleontologists,” he said. “It really marks tropical conditions that were there at the time, and may come back.”
A related species from the Pacific, the Persian conch, has already spread to the eastern Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, he added.
From Oregon State University Presser on intensifying and widespread Hypoxia.
Depleted oxygen levels are widespread and increasing in the ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast.
The vast amount of data gave researchers a more complete understanding of hypoxia’s severity and distribution in the coastal waters of the northern California Current, said Barth, who also serves as special advisor to OSU’s Marine and Coastal Opportunities program
“This picture has been needed for a long time by policymakers and fisheries managers who make decisions about ocean uses,” he said.
On average, nearly half of the continental shelf, an area the same size as Oregon’s Willamette Valley and slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut, experienced hypoxia during the summer upwelling period in 2021.
Wind-driven upwelling brings deeper, colder, nutrient rich water to the surface of the ocean, fueling a productive upper-ocean food web. However, that same upwelling pushes deep, low-oxygen water near the ocean’s bottom toward the coast. Dissolved oxygen levels are driven even lower near the seafloor by decay of naturally occurring phytoplankton raining down from above. When oxygen levels drop significantly, many marine organisms, including economically and culturally important Dungeness crabs, cannot relocate quickly enough and die of oxygen starvation.
Some areas of the coastal ocean saw higher rates of hypoxia than others, the data showed. Areas of the southern Oregon coast experiencing less hypoxia, for example Heceta Bank, a region about 35 miles off Florence that is known for its abundant and diverse marine life, also is more resilient to hypoxic conditions. However, the region inshore of Heceta Bank toward Cape Perpetua, where coastal waters are not as well flushed, is subject to hypoxia.
Explosive Atlantic hurricane season predicted for 2024, AccuWeather experts warn
The scene is being set for a turbulent year in the tropics, one that could approach a record-setting pace that may exhaust the entire list of names for tropical storms and hurricanes -- and then some.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially gets underway on June 1 and runs through the end of November, and AccuWeather's team of long-range forecasters say now is the time to prepare for a frenzy of tropical systems. There are signs that the first named system could spin up before the season kicks off as the calendar flips to June, a precursor of what's to come.
"The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is forecast to feature well above the historical average number of tropical storms, hurricanes, major hurricanes and direct U.S. impacts," AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Forecaster Alex DaSilva said. This echoes the early warning AccuWeather issued in late February, ringing the alarm bells about the potential for a surge in tropical activity.
I have been struggling with the climate news and seem to have run out of gas in writing about it. So, apologies that this diary is a summary of ocean news stories with little input from me.
I’m not sure about you, but Gaza, Trump, MAGA, and the biodiversity crisis have me curled up in a ball, licking my wounds. I hope to shake it off, but so far, no luck.