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Three men and an archipelago

Last night I attended this year’s Galapagos Day talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

And what with this being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and 150 years since he completed On the Origin of Species, it is obviously quite an exciting year for the group of islands he made so very famous.

Guest speakers were Sir David Attenborough (who sat all evening next to a beautiful giant photograph of a seahorse!) and Felipe Cruz (from the Charles Darwin Foundation). In the chair was Andrew Marr.

In an animated half-hour discussion, these three reflected on what makes Galapagos so special and the problems the archipelago faces today.

Sir David spoke of how Galapagos – thanks to its geographic isolation – is ‘a geological world without humanity’. Human visitors to the islands are alien observers, perhaps like no-where else on earth. And the archipelago is all the more magical for it.

In front of a packed audience, virtually all who have visited Galapagos, the speakers tackled the thorny issue of who should be allowed to go to the hallowed archipelago.

Cruz believes that restricted numbers of high-paying tourists is the only way to make Galapagos tourism work. Forget huge cruise ships. Sailing boats are the way to go.

Marr was concerned this would cut out the young, idealistic people – like Darwin himself, perhaps – for who Galapagos could be a great source of inspiration.

Cruz’s solution was to offer scholarships to the brainiest kids.

Unfortunately, Sir David admitted, ‘we can’t all go to Galapagos’. What’s most important is protecting the islands.

All three agreed on the importance of Lonesome George – the last known Pinta Island tortoise, a subspecies of the giant Galapagos tortoise – as a Galapagos icon for us all to reflect on. With George we are staring extinction in the eye.

I was thrilled when Andrew Marr steered the conversation towards the bits of the Galapagos that lie underwater.

Being a barren volcanic outcrop, everything on Galapagos comes from the sea, Sir David told us. The sea birds eat fish, their guano fertilises the plants, and so on.

‘So, if something goes wrong in the ocean, Galapagos is heading for catastrophe,’ Sir David said, reminding us that it’s not just the local issues that must be addressed but the global problems of climate change and ocean acidification.

Marr revealed his love of the oceans, when he admitted that the recent studies predicting that the world’s coral reefs may be wiped out within a few decades, was ‘the most depressing piece of journalism I’ve ever read’.

Sir David echoed some ideas I wrote about in my book Poseidon’s Steed, mentioning a paradox of our modern world, namely, that we know more about the natural world than ever before, and yet we are also more cut off from nature than we ever have been.

If we make the mistake of thinking that we are independent of the natural world, then we are heading, very swiftly, for disaster.

I couldn’t agree more.

Then, on a lighter note, the speakers were asked by a member of the audience to name their favourite Galapagos species. Marr chose the boobies. Cruz picked Galapagos petrels. Sir David picked the marine iguanas, because there is ‘nothing like them in the world’

‘Except for the spitting,’ added Marr to a tittering audience.

‘It’s a nasal discharge!’ Sir David corrected him.

In detail:

• The talk was the 14^th annual lecture hosted by the Galapagos Conservation Trust.
• It is 50 years since the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation were established.
• The Galapagos Islands are currently listed as a World Heritage Site in Danger because of the many threats to the unique biodiversity that lives there.
• When Darwin visited the archipelago, fewer than 1000 people lived there. Now there are 30-35,000 residents, and around 165,000 visitors to the islands each year.
• The Galapagos sea cucumber fishery is closed again this year, following surveys showing the population is still not large enough to sustain exploitation.

New discoveries in underwater Galapagos

Tomorrow I’ll be attending the annual Galapagos Day talk at the Royal Geographical Society, hosted by the Galapagos Conservation Trust. I look forward to hearing what the guest speakers Sir David Attenborough, Andrew Marr and Felipe Cruz have to say about the status and future of the islands, including the underwater world.

And hopefully it won’t be all doom and gloom. Just last week, some good news shone through from Galapagos with the discovery of several new coral species including one that was thought to have been wiped out by the 1997-98 coral bleaching event.

Perhaps reefs are more resilient to rising temperatures and coral bleaching than we previously thought?

Symbiotic algae living inside corals in the Galapagos are showing signs of thermal tolerance, thanks to studies since 1998 by Andrew Baker of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami.

The 3-year Darwin Initiative study brought researchers to the northern Wolf and Darwin Islands for the first time since the 1970s.

Team leader Terry Dawson, from Southampton University, has plans to return to Galapagos on the trail of a gaggle of magnificent pelagic species – including whale sharks and hammerhead sharks.

Could it be that these and other marine migrants are cruising an oceanic highway across the eastern reaches of the Pacific, between Cocos Island off Costa Rica through to the Las Perlas and Coiba Islands in Panama and Malpelo Island off Columbia? Dawson and his team hope to find out.

You can follow up on the latest results of the Galapagos coral reef surveys in the journal Galapagos Research.

in detail:

• Species new to science and the Galapagos include zooanthid species from the genera Hydrozoanthus, Parazoanthus, Antipathozoanthus. Also, the reef-building corals Pocillopora effusus, Pocillopora inflata, and Pavona chiriquiensis.
• A possible new gorgonian Pacifigorgia sp. was collected, together with a new reef-building coral, Leptoseris sp.
• Small colonies of Gardineroseris planulata were found at Wolf and Darwin islands, despite reports that it became extinct in the 1997-98 El Niño event.

one in two fish from a farm

They say ‘eat more fish’.  And we are.

But with dwindling populations of large, tasty wild fishes, we are now getting more than half of our global annual omega-3 fix from fish farms.

So says a study in the journal PNAS, by a team of researchers led by Rosamond Naylor from Stanford University in the US.

Wild fish catch in Sabah, Malaysia by Helen Scales

Are farmed fishes a problem? They are when they are fed on the millions of tiny fish that are scraped up from the seabed every year and made into fishmeal and fish oils.

And most farmed fish (and crustaceans) are avid fish-eaters. That goes for shrimp, salmon, tuna and many of our favourite eats.

For every kilo of salmon on the supermarket shelves, around 5 kilos of smaller wild fish are used (or 1 to 5 pounds for US readers!).

Far from taking pressure off wild populations, this merely shifts the focus of exploitation to a different point in the oceanic food web.

Can’t we eat vegetarian fish instead? Well yes, we can. Tilapia and Chinese carp are traditionally raised on plants.

But (why is there always a but?), since the early nineties, fish farmers – including many in China – have begun boosting yields by adding fishmeal to tilapia and carp diets.

Now, at a global scale, farms rearing vegetarian fish use more fishmeal than shrimp and salmon farms combined.

So, is there an answer to this fishy issue? Clearly health-conscious seafood lovers will still want their fish.

Naylor and colleagues recommend that the amount of fishmeal used by fish farms could be cut down without harming the product or productivity too much.

Part of the solution will be tighter regulations on fisheries that contribute to fishmeal production, like anchovies and sardines.

And there could also soon be alternatives to fishmeal and fish oil on the market, including extracts from grains, live-stock by-products, as well as GM plants and microorganisms that could be harvested for that all-important long-chain omega-3 fatty acid.

Hello

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.

I’ve named this site wild ocean blue after the personal website I ran for years (until helenscales.com took it’s place). My plan is to post up-to-the-minute snapshots from the marine world – scientific studies, conservation programmes, photographs etc – that encapsulate the diversity, fragility & beauty of the oceans.

Ultimately, I hope this site will go some way towards answering the question: Why do the oceans matter?

And in addition, now that my first book has been published, I will also put on my writers’ hat and cast a literary eye over the oceans to hunt down other people’s words – both old and new – about the marine realm.

I will begin by offering up what I think are the some of most interesting and important aquatic papers being published (in particular, ones that aren’t making it into the wider press), and then I will take it from there.

Your thoughts and ideas are always most welcome. Thank you for visiting and I do hope you enjoy reading my blog.

All best wishes,

Helen