Nitrogen pollution disrupts Pacific Ocean

Surging nitrates in Asian waters could dramatically affect marine wildlife. So says science journal Nature in a news piece explaining why we should care about human-caused increases in ocean nitrate levels.

Waste from agriculture and burning of fossil fuels are the suspected cause. This is bad news, and could lead to increasing ocean "dead zones" where oxygen is depleted and many of our favorite ocean animals flee or die.

I always wonder about the demand-side effect on nitrogen that might occur in changed ocean ecosystems based on my experience with rivers. In some streams with healthy ecosystems, increased nitrogen causes increased growth of animals like fish. This happens in a "tightly coupled" ecosystem where fertilizer efficiently moves through plants to herbivores to predators. So the demand side of the system sucks up increased nitrogen supplies.

This effect is so pronounced that it's exploited by people in some places by fertilizing streams with nitrogen to increase the growth of desirable fish.

In our oceans, how much of the excess nitrogen would get cycled into fish biomass if the ecosystems were healthy? Is there a demand-side effect that we neglect to include in our analyses? Does anyone out there know the answer? I've seen tidbits of research that suggest it matters, but never a clear and precise study.

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The great salmon carcass caper

Restoration of ecosystems is good except when it's not.

What do you think about putting the dead rotting bodies of salmon into streams with water quality problems caused by excess nutrients? If you're like me, that sounds bad.

So why are smart and earnest conservationists doing it in the Molalla River, which is on Oregon's nutrient-polluted streams list? Because swarms of salmon used to die and rot in streams, so restoration means putting dead salmon bodies in streams where they "should" be. This seems to work in nutrient-limited streams, but a stream with nutrient excess may respond differently.

When salmon streams are healthy, then the rotting bodies feed bugs and fish. When salmon streams are degraded, lacking native species, and already burdened with excess nutrients, then adding more nutrients isn't likely to restore anything.

There's nothing magic about salmon carcasses. They will feed and make more of whatever lives there. It what lives in a stream is algae and non-native fish, then salmon carcasses will only feed the unwelcome guests.

I like the idea of salmon carcasses in streams. But only at the end of a restoration process when habitat is good, native species are present, and the ecosystem is fairly healthy. I'm happy when the rotting bodies are native fish that just spawned after swimming upstream naturally.

But putting salmon in streams to jump-start the process may just worsen existing problems. All things in good time.

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Whale poop fertilizes oceans

Ocean life depends heavily on fertilizer (nutrients) brought up from cold, rich deep water into brightly lit surface zones. Now there's a new mechanism on the books for nutrient "upwelling."

Whales feed under the surface, and poop near the surface, each time bringing a whale-load of nutrients to the surface. Hooray for whale poo. So it turns out that the main function of whales is to move nutrients from one place to another. But hey, that's the whole point of life anyway, from the perspective of biogeochemistry.

Do you know where you've been transporting nutrients from...and to? That would make an interesting story of a life.

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Turning shrimp into gasoline

What makes more sense, eating prime Gulf of Mexico shrimp or turning them into gasoline? If midwestern farmers have their way, we'll be turning shrimp into gasoline.

If you burn a gallon of corn-based ethanol in your car, you're pouring nitrogen onto a field in the midwest, and the runoff from that field runs down to the Gulf of Mexico where it adds to the dead zone. So instead of shrimp from the Gulf, you have ethanol from the Mississippi watershed.

How do you feel about putting lovely shrimp into your car? I'm not too happy about it. Growing shrimp is a higher and better use for the Gulf of Mexico than serving as a waste receptacle for corn-growing ethanol makers.

We need some way to tie the two problems together, so that we can make the proper judgments about what to do.

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Sewage to fertilizer

A large sewage treatment plant in Oregon is testing a process to make fertilizer from sewage. The process, from a Canadian company, is advertised as a win-win process that saves money and turns waste into a useful product.

The process uses Magnesium to capture phosphorus and ammonia and turn it into BB-sized pellets that can be spread as fertilizer. So long as there are no problems with toxics in the sewage, it ought to work.

Now about their proposal to put some of the fertilizer in streams to fertilize salmon production. Nice try, mimicking the natural nutrient delivery of dead salmon carcases, but I've seen this idea misused in the past. Most of our streams need fewer nutrients, not more. And pellets are not the same as salmon carcases, which are eaten directly instead of just fertilizing plant growth.

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Starving grey whales linked to global warming?

Grey whales are dying of starvation off the US west coast, and global warming is a possible cause. Too bad, they were just recovering from the end of commercial whaling--out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Climate change is an ocean issue even though you don't know much about it yet. Oceans are already getting more acid as atmospheric CO2 goes up, and that will create harm before warming causes harm. Acidification has already slowed the growth of corals.

Now starving grey whales are the next ocean victim of climate change. What's happening is that warmer water has reduced upwelling of nutrients by increasing ocean stratification (think trying to mix oil and vinegar). Warmer surface water in the ocean makes the top layer refuse to mix with deeper water.

And...deep water is the major source of nutrients that fertilize plankton growth. Once plankton growth is reduced, everything else goes hungry. Now, big grey whales are suffering, after a near-miraculous rebound once whale hunting was stopped.

The alarm on declining plankton isn't coming from only green groups.Crusty oceanographer John McGowan, who taught my first oceanography class at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is sounding the alarm on declining plankton.

Like I said, climate change is primarily an ocean issue, even though you don't know it yet. It's easy to look at oceans as a threat with sea level rise threatening to flood coastal zones and hurricanes getting worse. But the ocean is more victim than villain and ocean life may well suffer more than life on land. Stay tuned and get active if you want your future to include an ocean that you like.

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Iron in rivers fertilizes ocean

Oregon rivers deliver iron to the Pacific Ocean in winter rains, and the iron fertilizes plankton blooms during summer. This new finding helps explain the rich productivity of coastal waters in the region.

There are several surprises here, including the role of iron in controlling productivity of coastal oceans, the delivery of iron from rivers, and the iron cycling in sediments that fuels summertime plankton blooms.

There's a lot we don't know about oceans and ocean life.

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Is the ocean starving?

We know about missing cod, and some know about missing zooplankton. One person's view is that these are all symptoms of an ocean in starvation.

The news at fisherycrisis.com is all bad. Some scientists have criticized the conclusions, but there are some worrisome facts at the base of the arguments.

Is the ocean starving? It's a radical hypothesis, and I invite you to draw your own conclusions.

photo: www.fisherycrisis.com

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Global warming reducing ocean productivity

The heat is on, and our oceans are suffering. Declining ocean productivity is the new concern.

Lost ocean productivity means less food for fish and other ocean animals. This scary problem comes from reduced upwelling and lower nutrient levels. Nutrients are the fertilizer that determines how much phytoplankton (tiny, free-floating ocean plants) can grow in the ocean. Upwelling is when water comes to the ocean surface from the dark, cold, nutrient-rich depths.

All of this from global warming that is making ocean surface waters warmer, and that strengthens ocean stratification--the development of pancake layers of ocean water that resist mixing because they have different temperatures and different densities. Sort of like a layer of oil floating on top of vinegar in salad dressing that needs a shake.

To make things worse, reduced ocean productivity means oceans can't absorb as much CO2, so this is a feed-forward cycle that might worsen global warming-which worsens ocean productivity loss--etc.

Yet another reason to try to control CO2 emissions from our machines.

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Florida algae bloom kills seagrass

Slime is winning in some of southern Florida's bays; seagrass beds are being killed by a smothering algae bloom, with no cure in sight.

The damage is where populated southeastern Florida drips into the Keys, Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay. Nutrient runoff is a suspected cause, from a canal and a road project that used mulched mangroves.

The biggest worry is that an accelerating cycle of algae bloom and decay could create a low oxygen dead zone and wipe out marine life, similar to an event a decade ago.

Efforts are underway to educate people on nutrients and algae, but there's a long ways to go.

Florida is a great ocean state, and we know what's needed to make things better. Come on, Florida, we know you can do it!! The mermaids of Weeki Wachee are watching.

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California ocean ecosystem collapse

For the second year in a row, ocean upwelling has failed and ocean animals are starving off California.

The Farrallon Islands northwest of San Francisco are ground zero in the crisis, where Cassin's auklets (puffin-like birds) are in the second consecutive year of "unprecedented" breeding failure.

“How many years in a row do you see this before you start raising your eyebrows?” said oceanographer Frank Schwing.

Blogfish told you earlier about the plankton crisis, and now we have confirmation that the effects are spreading up the food chain. This is not good.

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Does nutrient pollution cause red tides?

Larry Brand thinks red tides are getting worse thanks to nutrient runoff caused by people. Needless to say, this has not made him popular in his home state of Florida.

Florida's agriculture industry, in particular, would like him to go away.

Links between pollution and red tides have been cited by others, so the suggestion is not exactly implausible. But hey, maybe things are just different in Florida where developers have clout and red tides are natural events.

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Iowa-the place where red snapper die?

Iowa—the place where red snapper die?

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone doesn’t just happen in the ocean, it starts upstream where people are careless with their use of the land. In places like Iowa, 35,000 feet straight below Alaska Airlines flight 2.

This is the place where nitrogen leaked, that fed the plankton, that fueled the bloom, that died and decayed, that sucked up the oxygen, that killed the red snapper, that ruined the Gulf of Mexico.

Far below, a grid of one mile sections as far as the eye can see. Water from farmlands, heading south to the Gulf of Mexico. Is somebody down there getting careless and spilling nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico? Is it Iowa? Or is it everyone? Is it simply the consequences of modern agriculture? Would we have to go back to the stone age to have a healthy ocean?

This brings to mind the lesson of Hank Bosma, a dairy farmer from the Yakima Valley, Washington who used to have a serious pollution habit. I got involved when Charlie Tebbutt with the Western Environmental Law Center asked me to look at some water quality monitoring data from the Yakima Valley, Washington state. Charlie asked whether monitoring data was likely to show what his clients believed, that a few bad dairymen were responsible for much of the waste polluting area streams. I told Charlie that I thought it was unlikely that monitoring data would implicate one or a few farmers. Boy was I wrong.

To make a long story short…most of the dairies were clean, and Bosma's dairy was very-very dirty. Monitoring the watershed every two weeks showed severe nitrogen plumes running downstream from Bosma's dairies.

A recent study says the same thing is true at a much larger scale, that a few locations in the Mississippi River basin are responsible for the great majority of the nitrogen that fuels the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. So there may be a solution, because it isn't everyone.

Flying from Washington to Washington (Seattle to DC), looking down at the Gulf of Mexico dead zone in Iowa, I don't think we have to go back to the stone age to have healthy red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. We just need to learn to farm right, and fish right.

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