From the University of British Columbia: Endangered Gourmet Sea Snail Could be Doomed by Increasing Ocean Acidity
Increasing levels of ocean acidity could spell doom for British Columbia’s already beleaguered northern abalone, according to the first study to provide direct experimental evidence that changing sea water chemistry is negatively affecting an endangered species.
The northern abalone–prized as a gourmet delicacy–has a range that extents along the North American west coast from Baja California to Alaska. Even though British Columbia’s northern abalone commercial fisheries where closed in 1990 to protect dwindling populations, the species has continued to struggle, largely due to poaching.
To better understand the impact climate change — and specifically, increasing ocean acidity — has on this endangered species, UBC researchers exposed northern abalone larvae to water containing increased levels of CO2. Increases from 400 to 1,800 parts per million killed 40 per cent of larvae, decreased the size of larvae that did survive, and increased the rate of shell abnormalities.
“This is quite bad news, not only in terms of the endangered populations of abalone in the wild, but also the impact it might have on the prospects for aquaculture and coastal economics,” says Christopher Harley, Associate Professor with the Department of Zoology and one of the authors of the study.
“And because the species is already thought to be limited by reproductive output and recruitment, these effects are likely to scale up to the population level, creating greater limits on population growth.”
Average CO2 levels in the open ocean hover at 380 parts per million, a number which is excepted to increase slowly over the next century.
What concerns the researchers are the much higher spikes in dissolved CO2 that are already being observed along the BC coast, particularly in late spring and early summer when northern abalone populations are spawning.
The findings were published in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology.
“While we’re looking at a single species that is culturally important as a source of food and artistic inspiration for many coastal Pacific Northwest First Nations, this information may have implications for other abalone species in other parts of the world,” says Ryan Crim, lead author on the paper who conducted the research while a graduate student with the UBC Department of Zoology.
Other species of abalone are farmed around the world, principally in China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The black, white and pink abalone are also endangered on the west coast–red abalone are still an economically viable food species.
The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and conducted in collaboration with the Bamfield-Huu-ay-aht Community Abalone Project, a small abalone hatchery in Bamfield which has subsequently gone out of business. The dual mission of the hatchery was to produce cultured abalone for high end restaurants, and to restore endangered abalone by culturing and releasing larvae and juveniles to the wild.
Harley and Crim will continue to work with the aquaculture industry to study the effects of acidification on oysters and other shellfish.
Paper:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098111000499 (paywalled)
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I call BS. If they are static (‘hovering’) now with increasing CO2 in the air, why are they “expected to increase”? Given the sea contains about 5,000 molecules for every molecule of air, surely the air need to have 5,000 pmm added before the sea will increase by 1 pmm?
I know it is continuous, but there is no prediction that we could release enough CO2 to go anywhere near 5,000 ppm, so how could the sea increase CO2 by more that 1 pmm? And how much pH difference would that make? Too little for anything to ever measure.
The whole ‘ocean acidification’ alarm is a crock.
Thanks to Hawaiian friend Frank Delima I’ve been aware of the long goodbye of our little crustacean
munchiesfriends for a long time.http://www.mele.com/hawaiianMP3s/2142_18.mp3
Save the Opihi!
Expose any organism to an excess of what it normally tolerates and it dies. Enough water will kill you. Pure oxygen will as well. This reminds me of the cancer scares of the last century. By golly, if you drank 100 bottles of Cyclamate loaded Gatorade every day, you might get cancer. You would explode first, but that didn’t count.
1800 ppm? Proving that folks in the GWN subsidize stupid things with their taxes same as us yanks.
pk says: May 25, 2011 at 2:34 pm : remember Limbaughs’ first rule of economics: if you want a critter to flourish, eat it on a commercial basis.
L. Neil Smith pointed that out long before Limbaugh. I believe it’s in _The Probability Broach_ where a character enjoys an eagleburger, some Confederate entrepeneur having noticed that chickens are in no danger of extinction.
TrueNorthist says:
May 25, 2011 at 3:11 pm
“By the way, there is a thriving first nation industry in Abalone. Every restaurant owner in the Lower Mainland will tell you about trucks showing up at their back door loaded with various species of sea life that are banned to anyone else. I live in the heart of the so called native food fishery and can tell you it is anything but. I can get anything — including Sea Otter — if I want it. CO2 my sweaty backside!
Shame on UBC!”
Got to find something else to blame any reductions on. Bit like the Fraser River salmon being sold on the black market by Indian organized crime.
And the re-introduction of the sea otter has also had local effects. Which begs the question of what the ‘natural’ abalone pops were back when the coast was swimming with sea otters. Selective ignorance of history is one of the standard tricks of ‘Conservation Biologists.’ Lets them set fake baselines for fake comparisons.
Yes. UBC. Some excellent faculties and then all the rest. They did, after all, give Dear Suzuki his start. And he was actually a great lecturer back then. Seems the rising CO2 levels, or something, have had serious impacts on him since.
Of course we don’t want all or even most species to go extinct. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why we would want no species to ever go extinct. It seems to me that one of the ingredient needed for natural selection is for some species to go extinct. Are we that arrogant to think that only the exact combination of species that exist now are the best combination that could ever exist? Maybe some species need to be extinct for a more viable planet to evolve.
If the higher concentration of CO2 is making the oceans more acidic then it must also be making our fresh water lakes and river more acidic. A search finds no papers making that claim.
Perhaps the 139,000 submarine volcanoes and vents etc could be responsible??
http://www.suite101.com/content/acid-oceans-due-undersea-volcanoes-not-humans-a220085
Crispin in Waterloo
May 25, 2011 at 2:31 pm
The CO2 content of seawater is 90 ppm.
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm
###
Thanks for this. I was pretty sure that the real CO2 content of seawater was under 100 PPM, but I was unsure, and being at work did not have the bandwidth to do the research. My field use to be fresh water ecology, though I spent a lot of time mucking around estuaries and other brackish waters also.
It is nice to know that I am not the only with “please don’t eat me” running through my head reading this thread. 🙂
To better understand the impact climate change — and specifically, increasing ocean acidity — has on this endangered species, UBC researchers exposed northern abalone larvae to water containing increased levels of CO2. Increases from 400 to 1,800 parts per million killed 40 per cent of larvae, decreased the size of larvae that did survive, and increased the rate of shell abnormalities.
===
In order to appreciate the sensitivity of wiener dogs to high temperatures, we exposed one specimen for few days to + 200c and we can report with certainty that increasing temperature can kill this species. This is bad news for the pet world in a warming climate…
Retired Engineer says: (May 25, 2011 at 4:44 pm)
“This reminds me of the cancer scares of the last century. By golly, if you drank 100 bottles of Cyclamate loaded Gatorade every day, you might get cancer. You would explode first, but that didn’t count.”
Thank you for remembering this. In 1970 at Florida Inst of Tech I always enjoyed a cold Gatorade after an evening of basketball at the gym. After they outlawed the cylamates it has never tasted the same, something seems to be missing.
DesertYote: I was reporting on the high side. The link shows that some say it is only 80 ppm. Either way, it is a bit tongue-in-cheek (i.e.: a lie) for the folks at California North to start at 400 and go to 1800.
More joke science. They use S.E.M.(std. error of mean) instead of using standard deviation. The conclusions are not supported by the data presented in my opinion. All they demonstrated is that their handling of the organism killed it. The fact that a substantial number of the organisms died at their control level of 400ppm was disturbing. Also, they note that there are greater excursions of pH change already observed in the ocean, but their results don’t follow the real world.
I might add I am a maniac on oceanic biologic preservation. This is absolute bull crap. They have a problem with poachers and not having oceanic clear zones. While most Americans assume Canada is a biologic “green” state, it is anything but. They have destroyed cod, halibut, abalone, lobster, salmon, and any other fishery you could think of with abandon. They are among the worst in the world when it comes to preserving oceanic resources. Right up there with the Brits and Spaniards. They also coddle poachers who encroach on American waters.
The devil is in the details. Tans (Oceanography Vol.22, No.4 2009) concluded that based on realistic predicted consumption of fossil fuel reserves, that atmospheric CO2 concentrations will peak somewhere between 2029 to 2069 at ~500 – 600 ppm and then start declining as remaining fossil fuel reserves are exhausted.
Since the observed effects on larval abalone were fairly small at 800 ppm CO2, one must conclude that the effects at 60 – 80 percent of the testing level will be even smaller to non-existent.
In short, what a load of baloney !
reference:
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/22_4/22-4_tans.pdf
Mike, May 25, 2011 at 4:35 pm made claims that phytoplankton was decreasing due to Global Warming based on the following: Global phytoplankton decline over the past century http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/abs/nature09268.html
and that NPP has decreased due to drought induced by global warming:
Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5994/940.short
It appears that the first claim is incorrect and is slowly being walked back. See http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/on-plankton-warming-and-whiplash/?ref=science. I would also point out that SST is not increasing, but decreasing http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/03/global-sst-update-through-mid-march-2011/
The second claim, that drought has increased between 2000 and 2009, reducing NPP, may be correct (I couldn’t find verification), but it is well known that droughts are cyclical. See http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5275
Land use changes are also a factor in NPP according to several sources.
It appears, from reading a bit about NPP measurements, that they are based on models and that the methods used are evolving. Not a very exact calculation, apparently. Satellite data is now being generated, so check back in about 20 years.
When I was a kid, we went on a field trip to a local limestone quarry (Milan, Illinois), which was under the sea during the Cretaceous. I think the limestone was several hundred feet thick. On a quarried shelf about 70 feet down in the rock, I cracked open a big chunk and found an abalone shell, about 8 inches across and with the string of breathing holes near the outer edge. That far down in the limestone was a long time ago, so abalone are a hardy species to have lasted this long.
http://www.californiadivers.com/busabalone.htm This link has a succinct overview of the current status of the Abalone, and Abalone industry. The ban is on wild caught Abalone, not aquaculture. You can buy abalone steaks, here: http://www.m5corporation.com/40-Fresh-Not-Frozen-Red-Abalone-Steaks-p/ab1002.htm
I never really understood this gastronomic gastropod thing. Gimme a juicy steak every time.
The University of Southampton, UK, did similar experiments and found shell problems, until it was discovered that they had introduced hydrochloric acid into the test tanks because the extra CO2 had no effect.
Since oceans have survived higher atmospheric concentrations ofCO2 and experienced greater coral and shell growth at that time than today I find these results suspect or at least the conclusions wrong.
“Calamari steak” makes a fair substitute for abalone. Actually, these are from cuttlefish, not squid. Having eaten both, I know that they are different critters. Lightly flour then flash fry in brown butter and make a pan sauce with garlic, shallot, lemon, white wine, and capers. Finish with Italian parsley, and serve over linguini with a green salad on the side. A Portuguese Vinho Verde goes well in the summer time. It ain’t abalone, but it ain’t bad!
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Mike who says: May 25, 2011 at 11:52 am “You demand empirical evidence we are damaging the planet, but when you get some you simply dismiss it. Amazing.”
I am reminiscent of a time as a child when the coral reef die off was the fault of mans activity in the area only to find out that it was the cycle of el nino . . . warming of the water . . . . not man at all!
Over and over it has been demonstrated that what many blame man for . . . . is simply a natural cycle . .
“empirical evidence” of change is not evidence that “we are damaging the planet” . . . .
Non sequitur (logic) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)
The ratio of atmosphere to oceans is about 0.4% by weight.
An increase of 1400 ppm in atmospheric CO2 (from 400 ppm to 1800 ppm) would amount to a 6 ppm increase in CO2 in the oceans, allowing for equal mixing, on the one hand, and no adaptive capability, on the other.
@charlie Foxtrot says:
Thanks for the dot Earth link. It does point to increased uncertainly in the 40% decline estimate. It does not support Watts’ claim that this estimate is “alarmist BS.”
Now, this is funny. You try to prove that a specie cannot adapt to a doubling of CO2 in 100 years, so you make them go through a 4.5x increase in 1 hour. I’m pretty sure abalones did exist when CO2 was higher.
They have not proven that any of these two hypothesis are false:
1- An abalone can adapt to a doubling of CO2 every day.
2- An abalone can live in up to 2x more CO2 than what existed when it was born.
If any of these two hypothesis were true, abalones would be far from danger.