SOURCE:  NPR/Christopher Joyce    January 25, 2018

Millions of tons of plastic waste end up in the ocean every year. And the trash stays there: Whether it’s grocery bags or water bottles or kids’ toys, plastic is practically indestructible.

Now marine scientists have discovered that it’s killing coral reefs.

A new study based on four years of diving on 159 reefs in the Pacific shows that reefs in four countries — Australia, Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar — are heavily contaminated with plastic. It clings to the coral, especially branching coral. And where it clings, it sickens or kills.

“The likelihood of disease increases from 4 percent to 89 percent when corals are in contact with plastic,” researchers report in the journal Science.

Senior author Drew Harvell at Cornell University says the plastic could be harming coral in at least two ways. First, bacteria and other harmful microorganisms are abundant in the water and on corals; when the coral is abraded, that might invite pathogens into the coral.

“It’s certainly well known that plastics abrade corals, create new openings,” she says. “They basically tear open the skin of the coral and that can allow an infection from anywhere to start.”

In addition, Harvell says, plastic can block sunlight from reaching coral.

A survey of 150 reefs found plastic was a common pollutant.

Kathryn Berry/Science

Her group found increased risk of four diseases in coral in contact with plastic.

“This is a huge survey,” says Harvell. It was the idea of Joleah Lamb, who was at the time, a graduate student.

“There are really great studies showing how much plastic is going into the oceans and how much is floating on the surface,” says Lamb, who’s now a fellow at Cornell University. “But we really didn’t have an idea about what’s underneath the surface of the ocean.”

The more they looked, especially in Asian waters, the more they found: bottles, diapers, cotton swabs, food wrappers. They noticed that coral that had plastic didn’t look healthy.

Based on how much plastic the researchers found while diving, they estimate that over 11 billion plastic items could be entangled in coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific region, home to over half the world’s coral reefs. And their survey did not include China, one of the biggest sources of plastic pollution.

Australian reefs had the least amount of plastic observed on reefs, which the researchers attribute to a more comprehensive system for waste control. Other countries in the Pacific don’t have much control over what ends up in the waste stream. “Massive amounts of plastic are being thrown into the oceans from land,” Harvell says, in countries that don’t have much recycling and with dumps that are often adjacent to the ocean or waterways that run into the ocean.

Coral reefs already are susceptible to bleaching due to unusually warm water, either from seasonal shifts in water temperature or from human-caused global warming. “Bleached coral is more susceptible to disease,” Harvell says. “The bleached coral is stressed. Plastic would make things that much worse.”

Matthew Savoca, a marine scientist at the the University of California, Davis, who studies the effects of plastic in the ocean, suggests that ocean waters with lots of plastic waste might also carry other pollutants that could also be contributing to higher rates of coral disease.

But Lamb says they found that corals within yards of each other showed a noticeable difference: Those with plastic were much more likely to be diseased. “It seems to be something associated with the plastic itself,” says Lamb.

Exactly how the plastic is causing disease is still unclear. What is clear from numerous studies is that the amount of plastic getting into the oceans is on the rise.

SOURCE:  The Guardian/Helena Pozniak   Jan 12, 2018

Thanks in part to the BBC wildlife series, there has been a sea change in the popularity of marine biology courses and the study of the world’s oceans.

When she was just 12 years old, an impressionable Cathy Lucas, now associate professor in marine biology at the University of Southampton, met Sir David Attenborough. He’d come to talk to students about his 1979 landmark wildlife series Life on Earth. “I thrust him my copy of his book to sign. He inspired me to go on and study zoology.”

Just back from a research trip to Saudi Arabia, she’s since spent years investigating what makes jellyfish tick – programme makers at the BBC’s latest natural history series Blue Planet IIsought her expertise for a segment. Although jellyfish have been around for at least 500m years, they’ve remained the poor relation of marine life, often misrepresented as freakish, alien blobs, says Lucas.

But recent population blooms have piqued scientists’ interest. “Attention is focused on what’s driving this growth in numbers – and the effect this has on the oceans.” Invited to a screening of the Blue Planet II series, she once again heard Attenborough speak and thought: “Here I am, doing this, as my actual job.”

Lucas teaches students on Southampton’s marine biology degrees based at the National Oceanography Centre. Like many universities around the country, Southampton is noticing the “Blue Planet effect” on the numbers of students interested in the field. “Big series such as these are critical in raising awareness of the issues facing marine wildlife,” says Lucas.

Even between the first and second series, there have been dramatic changes in the oceans, says David Duffy, a research fellow at Bangor University. “Most of these changes can be traced back to human activity, which is having a devastating impact.”

Duffy is working with scientists at the Sea Turtle hospital in the Whitney laboratory for marine bioscience at the University of Florida, investigating the huge rise in cases of young turtles suffering cancerous tumours. “Numbers worldwide are skyrocketing and this is almost certainly due to human activity, but we don’t know exactly what activity,” he says.

Drawing on techniques he developed during five years spent researching human cancers, Duffy has been analysing samples from the turtles operated on: “I became convinced that the cutting-edge techniques I was using could be applied more broadly, so I embarked upon a project that brought me back to wildlife and the sea – having studied marine snails as a postgrad.”

From acidification of the oceans to the aggression of hermit crabs, there’s no shortage of research avenues, says Prof Mark Briffa who’s taught students on Plymouth University’s one-year master of research (MRes) in marine biology. As professor of animal behaviour in the School of Biological and Marine Sciences, he’s currently researching how and why sea anemones fight.

“We’re still seeing students coming through who were inspired by the first Blue Planet series,” he says.

Plymouth accepts about 20 students on the year-long course, which kicks off with some taught modules to build research skills. Students then pursue individual research projects, working with university researchers or those based at the nearby Marine Biological Association. They may investigate local shores, go offshore or travel to a research facility in Ischia, Italy.

“The degree gives you a chance to dip your toe into research and see if it’s for you,” says Briffa. Students go on to find work with marine agencies and environmental consultancies, he says.

Briffa hopes the students also leave inspired with a sense of wonder and curiosity: “I can go to a local rocky shore and pick up a single rock and find some major divisions of life – that can’t fail to fascinate anyone.

“It sparks questions of why animals live where they do and how they survived. There’s a whole world down there that people simply aren’t aware of.”

SOURCE:  Reuters/Varsha Saraogi            Jan 8, 2018

LONDON, Jan 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A ban on plastic microbeads, used as exfoliants in toothpastes, face washes and shower gels that end up in the oceans, will come into force in Britain on Tuesday, but lawmakers said more needed to be done to tackle plastic pollution.

The tiny plastic beads pollute waterways and oceans, where they can be eaten by marine life and end up in the human food chain. A report by lawmakers in 2016 said the industry’s commitment to phasing them out was inconsistent and recommended a ban.

“Microbeads in cosmetics are an avoidable part of the problem, which is why we called for a ban,” member of parliament Mary Creagh, chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, a cross-party green watchdog, said in a statement. “This is a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done. Since we called for a ban, my committee has also recommended a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles, a latte levy for plastic-lined coffee cups and reforms to make producers responsible for their packaging.”

A deposit return scheme involves consumers paying a small deposit that is refunded when they return empty plastic bottles and is common in many parts of the world including Denmark, Germany and Australia.

In Britain, the idea of a deposit return scheme for bottles has won the backing of two supermarkets, Iceland and the Co-op, the first major retailers to support the policy to promote recycling and tackle ocean plastic pollution.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said last month the government “will be working with industry to explore how we can reduce the amount of single-use plastic waste.”

Eight million tonnes of plastic – bottles, packaging and other waste – are dumped into the ocean every year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain, says the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

If current pollution rates continue, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050.

In December, all l93 countries that are members of the United Nations signed a U.N. resolution to eliminate plastic pollution in the sea, a move some delegates hoped would pave the way to a legally binding treaty. (Editing by Ros Russell )

SOURCE:  RSMAS/University of Miami    Dec 5, 2017

MIAMI—While a little added stress may be helpful to flee a dangerous situation, or to meet an approaching deadline, it’s no secret that prolonged exposure to the stress hormone cortisol is linked to health problems. So, what effects does stress have on animals in the wild that need to navigate the same waters as the ocean’s top predator— great white sharks?

Predators are known to impact the population abundances of their prey by killing and consuming them. But can predators in the wild also exert control over their prey from the stress associated with living in high-risk waters?

University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led research team found just the right situation—fur seals living among one of the densest populations of great white shark off South Africa’s Western Cape—to test this predation-stress hypothesis in the wild.

In the three-year study, the scientists focused their investigation on six islands in the region where Cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus) colonies have varied seasonal exposure to hunting great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). To evaluate the seals’ stress levels in relationship to hunting sharks, the team collected hundreds of seal fecal samples and measured them for glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations (fGCM), a cortisol stress hormone.

The team compared stress hormone levels in seal fecal samples with residency patterns of great white sharks at the different seal colonies based on satellite tagging data. The team also compared seal fecal cortisol concentrations with measured shark attack rates on seals at one the sites. The researchers found that seals exhibited high stress levels when the risk of great white shark attack was high, at locations where and when the seals were under risk of unpredictable and lethal attack from great whites as the seals they left the safety of an island’s inner perimeter and passed through a gauntlet of white sharks hunting to reach offshore feeding grounds.

“Our findings showed that seals exhibited high stress in the places and at the times when great whites were hunting and the seals had no way of anticipating or effectively preventing a predation attempt from any shark that decided to attack,” said the study’s lead author Neil Hammerschlag, a research assistant professor at the UM Rosenstiel School and UM Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.

“Comparable stress responses were not detected in places and times where sharks were not hunting. Interestingly, stress responses were also not detected at one island where seals could reduce their risk of attack by using kelp beds and reef as underwater refuges, despite the presence of hunting great whites,” said study co-author Scott Creel, a Professor at Montana State University.

In one location, called Seal Island in False Bay, the seals’ fecal stress levels were highly correlated with weekly shark attack rates. However, seals did not show comparable signs of stress at another location known as Geyser Rock in Gansbaii, which contains kelp beds and reefs that the seals use as natural safe passageways from sharks as the move about the island.

Based on the findings, the authors suggest that predation risk will produce physiological costs in the form of a stress response when risk cannot be adequately predicted or controlled by behavioral responses.

“These results underline the ecological importance of apex predators,” said Hammerschlag. “Any resulting loss in health or survival of prey due to predator-induced stress could have cascading effects on the entire ecosystem and food web.”

The study, titled “Physiological stress responses to natural variation in predation risk: evidence from white sharks and seals,” was published on December 1 in the journal Ecology, DOI: 10.1002/ecy.2049

The study’s authors include: Michael Meÿer, Simon Mduduzi Seakamela and Steve Kirkman from the Republic of South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs, Chris Fallows of Apex Shark Expeditions, and Scott Creel from Montana State University. Funding for the study for provided in part by Canon USA and the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation.

Photo Caption:  A great white shark launches an attack in pursuit of a Cape fur seal.
Photo: Chris Fallows/ Apex Shark Expeditions

SOURCE: Bloomberg/Natasha Rausch    Nov 28, 2017

A huge study of the epidemic’s acceleration shows most deaths began with a prescription.

It’s been conventional wisdom for some time now that America’s opioid epidemic began at the pharmacy. Now there are numbers to put any doubt to rest.

SOURCE:  Pew Charitable Trusts/Holly Binns  October 25, 2017

Some of the deep-sea corals in the Gulf of Mexico started growing when Rome still ruled an empire and Native Americans were constructing civilizations in the vast forests that would—centuries later—become the U.S. Southeast.

For countless generations, these structure-forming animals have thrived in the cold, dark depths, serving as homes to starfish, squat lobsters, crabs, sharks, and many species of fish, including grouper and snapper. But modern-day threats loom for these fragile and slow-growing jewels, which may take centuries to recover from damage, if they recover at all. Of primary concern is fishing gear, such as trawls, traps, longlines, and anchors, which can break coral. Fortunately, fisheries managers can do something about this.

While energy development and changing ocean conditions also pose threats to corals, fisheries managers have jurisdiction over preventing damage from fishing gear. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, which sets fishing policy in the Gulf’s federal waters, prohibits anchoring or the use of certain types of deep-fishing gear near some coral communities. The council is considering extending similar protections to additional areas where scientists have identified dense communities of corals.

The council is taking public comment here and will host public hearings early next year. Protecting corals is an important part of conserving the Gulf’s marine ecosystem.

You can see Gulf of Mexico deep-sea corals in this video and learn more about them here.

Our ocean is under assault from a battery of threats that are damaging ecosystems, depleting fish stocks, and changing the marine environment. One of those threats gets relatively little attention but is both serious and solvable: large-scale illegal fishing.

Here are seven facts about this crime, including what is being done to address it.

1. Illegal fishing accounts for up to $23.5 billion worth of seafood every year.

That’s up to 1 in 5 fish taken from the ocean. At the top end of that estimate, that’s 26 million tons of fish annually—or 1,800 pounds of fish stolen every second.

2. Up to 32 percent of seafood imported into the U.S. is caught illegally.

While illegal fishers tend to target the waters of countries with few enforcement resources, which means the bad actors face less risk of being caught, they are less discriminating about where they sell their ill-gotten catch.

A 2014 study published in the journal Marine Policy found that up to 32 percent of seafood imported into the U.S. is caught illegally. This is because once fish get past a port, it is very difficult to determine where, how, and by whom they were caught.

3. Illegal fishing is linked to a host of other crimes.

The activities connected to illegal fishing include arms and wildlife smuggling, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses. In some cases, crew members on illegal vessels have been sold into slavery and work for years at sea in horrific conditions for little or no pay.

4. Some governments make it easy to fish illegally.

Some states provide flags of registration to nefarious vessel owners and conceal the whereabouts of these vessels and their activities. Tightening policies—though regional fisheries management organizations, international treaties, and stronger control of seafood imports at the national level—can help increase accountability for such countries. For example, the European Union, with its red-yellow-green card system, has forced numerous countries to ensure that the seafood they import to the EU as caught legally.

5. Marine reserve status doesn’t make an area safe from poaching.

Although defined boundaries on a map might convey a sense that all marine life within those lines is safe from human threats, protected-area designations are almost meaningless unless they are backed up by effective surveillance and enforcement. In fact, illegal fishers intentionally target reserves because they know that fish are more abundant within those areas.

6. Illegal fishers historically have had a remarkably easy time evading detection, capture, and punishment.

This is due to a combination of factors, including patchwork fisheries policies around the world, lax enforcement at many ports, and the difficulty of policing the open ocean.

7. Ending illegal fishing requires action on numerous fronts—and that’s happening.

The Port State Measures Agreement has led to stronger controls in dozens of countries to stop illegally caught fish from coming ashore. More fisheries management bodies are requiring that boats have International Maritime Organization numbers to boost accountability.

Interpol, under Project Scale, coordinates efforts to fight illegal fishing among its 192 member countries and has caught many illicit actors. And Oversea Ocean Monitor, a satellite-based platform developed by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the U.K.-based firm Satellite Applications Catapult, is proving to be a highly effective tool for spotting suspect activity across large spans of the ocean, even the most remote places.

SOURCE:  California Healthline/Pauline Bartolone     Nov 8, 2017

Dr. Mary Meengs remembers the days, a couple of decades ago, when pharmaceutical salespeople would drop into her family practice in Chicago, eager to catch a moment between patients so they could pitch her a new drug.

Now living in Humboldt County, Calif., Meengs is taking a page from the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook with an opposite goal in mind: to reduce the use of prescription painkillers.

Meengs, medical director at the Humboldt Independent Practice Association, is one of 10 California doctors and pharmacists funded by Obama-era federal grants to persuade medical colleagues in Northern California to help curb opioid addiction by altering their prescribing habits.

She committed this past summer to a two-year project consisting of occasional visits to medical providers in California’s most rural areas, where opioid deaths and prescribing rates are high.

“I view it as peer education,” Meengs said. “They don’t have to attend a lecture half an hour away. I’m doing it at [their] convenience.”

This one-on-one, personalized medical education is called “academic detailing” — lifted from the term “pharmaceutical detailing” used by industry salespeople.

Detailing is “like fighting fire with fire,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a Harvard Medical School professor who helped develop the concept 38 years ago. “There is some poetic justice in the fact that these programs are using the same kind of marketing approach to disseminate helpful evidence-based information as some [drug] companies were using … to disseminate less helpful and occasionally distorted information.”

Recent lawsuits have alleged that drug companies pushed painkillers too aggressively, laying the groundwork for widespread opioid addiction.

Avorn noted that detailing has also been used to persuade doctors to cut back on unnecessary antibiotics and to discourage the use of expensive Alzheimer’s disease medications that have side effects.

Kaiser Permanente, a large medical system that operates in California, as well as seven other states and Washington, D.C., has used the approach to change the opioid-prescribing methods of its doctors since at least 2013. (Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

In California, detailing is just one of the ways in which state health officials are attempting to curtail opioid addiction. The state is also expanding access to medication-assisted addiction treatment under a different, $90 million grantthrough the federal 21^st Century Cures Act.

The total budget for the detailing project in California is less than $2 million. The state’s Department of Public Health oversees it, but the money comes from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through a program called “Prevention for States,” which provides funding for 29 states to help combat prescription drug overdoses.

The California doctors and pharmacists who conduct the detailing conversations are focusing on their peers in the three counties hardest hit by opioid addiction: Lake, Shasta and Humboldt.

They arrive armed with binders full of facts and figures from the CDC to help inform their fellow providers about easing patients off prescription painkillers, treating addiction with medication and writing more prescriptions for naloxone, a drug that reverses the toxic effects of an overdose.

“Academic detailing is a sales pitch, an evidence-based … sales pitch,” said Dr. Phillip Coffin, director of substance-use research at San Francisco’s Department of Public Health — the agency hired by the state to train the detailers.

In an earlier effort, Coffin said, his department conducted detailing sessions with 40 San Francisco doctors, who have since increased their prescriptions of naloxone elevenfold.

“One-on-one time with the providers, even if it was just three or four minutes, was hugely beneficial,” Coffin said. He noted that the discussions usually focused on specific patients, which is “way more helpful” than talking generally about prescription practices.

Meengs and her fellow detailers hope to make a dent in the magnitude of addiction in sparsely populated Humboldt County, where the opioid death rate was the second-highest in California last year — almost five times the statewide average. Thirty-three people died of opioid overdoses in Humboldt last year.

One recent afternoon, Meengs paid a visit during the lunch hour to Fortuna Family Medical Group in Fortuna, a town of about 12,000 people in Humboldt County.

“Anybody here ever known somebody, a patient, who passed away from an overdose?” Meengs asked the group — a physician, two nurses and a physician’s assistant — who gathered around her in the waiting room, which they had temporarily closed to patients.

“I think we all do,” replied the physician, Dr. Ruben Brinckhaus.

Brinckhaus said about half the patients at the practice have a prescription for an opioid, anti-anxiety drug or other controlled substance. Some of them had been introduced to the drugs years ago by other prescribers.

Meengs’ main goal was to discuss ways in which the Fortuna group could wean its patients off opioids. But she was not there to scold or lecture them. She asked the providers what their challenges were, so she could help them overcome them.

Meengs will keep making office calls until August 2019 in the hope that changes in the prescribing behavior of doctors will eventually help tame the addiction crisis.

“It’s a big ship to turn around,” said Meengs. “It takes time.”