# Ocean Acidification Impact on Marine Life: A Climate Justice Club Report

## Introduction
As president of our school's climate justice club, I'm excited to share important information about ocean acidification and its impacts on marine life beyond the well-known coral bleaching phenomenon.

Since our school mascot is the cuttlefish, understanding how cephalopods and other marine creatures are affected is particularly relevant for our Spirit Week awareness campaign.

## What is Ocean Acidification?

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, causing chemical changes that lower the water's pH level, making it more acidic.

This process is happening at an unprecedented rate due to increased CO2 emissions from human activities.

## Impacts Beyond Coral Bleaching

### Cephalopods (Including Cuttlefish and Octopuses)
Cephalopods are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification because they rely on calcium carbonate to form their internal shells and beaks.

As ocean acidity

# Ocean Acidification Impact on Marine Life: A Climate Justice Club Report

## Introduction
As president of our school's climate justice club, I'm excited to share important information about ocean acidification and its impacts on marine life beyond the well-known coral bleaching phenomenon.

Title:

Content: Supplement
Sunday WorkShop
Green Living: Exploring Coastal Habitats and Playing with Sand as an Ecologist
[Ming Pao News] Lung Mei Beach has recently become a "lack of oxygen aquarium", making everyone more concerned about the beach ecology.
The sandy shore is one of the major habitats in Hong Kong. At present, the STEM electives in junior high school science and senior high school, including biology and integrated science, have a field visit, which allows students to become “ecologists ” to study and sample the coastal habitats.
"Students usually go to the beach to pile up sand and swim, and less observe organisms from a scientific point of view. Through these inspection techniques, they can understand that the beach is an important place for life in the ecosystem."
Janice Cheung, Education Project Supervisor and Evaluation Manager of WWF Hong Kong, led the related research activities for more than 10 years. She said that this research method for students is not complicated and encourages the public to refer to it. In addition to swimming, you can also bring simple tools and do scientific experiments.
Choose the beach according to the purpose of the visit
Janice refers to the natural beaches in Hong Kong, including beaches frequented by the public, which can generally be divided into two categories: exposed and sheltered, depending on the geographical location and the intensity of the waves.
The former usually faces the open ocean, has strong scouring power, the sand is larger, it is drier when stepping on it, and the water is faster when the tide is receding, such as Big Wave Bay on Hong Kong Island, for example, the latter is protected by features such as cape and other features, and the sand grains are small.
The two habitats are different, and different species can be observed. "A lot of time to visit the mudflats, because they are outside the mangrove forest, so you can see multiple organisms at the same time."
She refers to the ecological links, according to different inspection purposes, you can choose to nearby mangroves, coastal plants or rocky beaches.
The artificial beach is still worth exploring.
She also reminded that although artificial beaches do not fall into these two categories, it is still worth carrying out exploration activities: "It is not certain whether species will return after artificial beaches are stabilized, but the public can use these tools and observation techniques to compare the difference between artificial and natural beaches and see if the creatures of artificial beaches will return."
Most of the time, she will choose to visit the location near the education center, in Hoi Ha Wan or Yuen Chau Tsai, but pay attention to the fact that Hoi Ha Wan is a marine park, the public is not allowed to dig sand, only to observe the sand surface.
You can consider some convenient locations, such as Ting Kok, Tai Po, "we can see whether there is a balance in the environmental aspects of the development of Tai Po town", or Hoi Sing Bay, near Wu Kai Sha, "hidden small, but not too much sediment, it will be safe."
The most important thing is to choose the ebb time to ensure that you can see more creatures while ensuring safety. Although the usual public ecological tours will also take participants to the beach, the activities mainly observe the biodiversity of the beach with the naked eye, such as various crab cave shapes, the footprints of birds passing by, and take photos.
The learning activities focus on scientific inquiry, using the biological and environmental knowledge and applied ecological knowledge that students have learned in the classroom, dividing the beach into different parts, trying to hypothesize, random sampling, classification, measurement, using tools to record the distribution and number of organisms, on-site experiments, and inspecting nearby habitats.
Intertidal zone horizontal and straight sampling observation
After arriving at the beach, Janice will roughly determine the area of the intertidal zone. "Generally, there are two tides per day, the highest level of water coverage at high tide, and the lowest level of water coverage at low tide is the intertidal zone at low tide.
Then randomly place a sample size of 1 meter by 1 meter in each area. Students will first estimate the number of species, such as clams, snails, crabs, hermit crabs, fish, shrimp, insects, etc., based on their normal knowledge of the beach.
She pointed out that the sample square and sample strips are scientific instruments. The public can simply draw out 50 cm by 50 cm with a rope, and narrow the sampling range. "The beach is so large, so that you can focus on some of the organisms."
After that, you can leave the sample for 15 to 30 minutes, and then go back to observe, "We may disturb some organisms when we put the sample, and wait for a short period of time, the crab will have a chance to see the environment is stable, and then walk back and observe more."
Students will first examine the sand creatures, and then dig the sand to a depth of 10 to 15 cm to compare the creatures in the sand.
She advised the public to bring tools such as shovels and tweezers to facilitate dredging of sand. If any creatures or burrowing animals are found in the gaps, they can be easily picked up for observation and put back.
In addition, you can also refer to “Hong Kong Field Map: The Beach ”, a guide that she herself has consulted from time to time. If you travel with your children, you can pre-print WWF ’ s study worksheets (bit.ly / 3iESVVc, page 1).
If you want to study more carefully, you can prepare magnifiers, paper and pens, small nets, and a sorting tray containing organisms.
After years of investigation, she said that Hong Kong beaches generally have the following distribution laws:
High tide zone: closer to the land (back beach), the time of immersion is the least, the creatures do not like to stay in this area, due to long sun time, less water, difficult to find food, no matter the sand or sand in the creatures are not many.
It is possible to see dead or dying marine life, fallen leaves from the land and debris from the tide.
Middle tide area: When the tide is rising and low, there are not many organisms on the sand surface, but there are usually many clams in the sand. Like Hoi Ha Wan, she often sees 20 or 30 different kinds of clams. She estimates that the tide brings the clams here at high tide, but she does not want to stay on the sand. Sari.
Low tide area: Long soaked in shallow water, more food, more prey and competition interaction, for example, some snails will be exposed to decomposition on the surface of the beach when the feeding tide is down.
Usually there are crabs or host crabs, mainly eating dead organisms or eating debris from sand grains. There are fewer organisms in the sand, she concluded, because there is less oxygen in the water for a long time.
Lack of oxygen caused black sand is not unique to artificial beach
The same sand beach, the landform may also change with time, like Hoi Ha Wan in the past, in recent years, the accumulation of sand in the middle of the sand, the formation of sand spit (sand spit), Janice describes as a very high sand dunes, from the original mid-tide area into a high tide area, the sea water is difficult to cover, the biological distribution also changed.
She will briefly explain to students how the sand is formed by the accumulation of rocks and ocean sediment. Then she will pick up the sand and observe it, so that the students can understand that the sand has different colors and is mixed with other minerals.
There are boulders and gravel scattered along the coast, so there are scattered gravel beaches on the beach.
When digging sand to study the vertical distribution of organisms, students occasionally see black sand like dragon tail recently exposed, it turns out that this is not only a problem of artificial beaches: "The lower the beach, the less oxygen, the composition of anaerobic bacteria, some chemicals make the beach black, forming a hypoxic environment."
In general, the oxygen content decreases with increasing beach depth.
Because anaerobic bacteria breed and move in the deeper layers of the beach, the sand will be black and emit a smell like a stinky egg.
This situation is more likely to occur in small sand beaches, because the accumulation of seawater tends to cause insufficient oxygen, and organisms generally do not live in such anaerobic layer, so digging sand is not better, "usually by the water flow to bring in some oxygen, some organisms, such as the shell at the bottom of the sand, will stretch out a siphon to extract the water with oxygen on the surface of the beach, will not go to the bottom of the oxygen."
She mentioned that the shellfish studied in recent years showed signs of diminishing in size and number, and when they used to bring their students to life, they put the animals and sand back to their original places and filled the holes they had dug.
If the public wants to pick up clams during the inspection, it is recommended to first refer to the "Clam Conservation Ruler", measure the size of the clams, and follow the principle of "fine clams remaining".
The students were surprised by the results.
After sampling, the students had to pick up five shells in each area and observe them on the sand for 5 to 10 minutes. The results showed that the shells would slowly drill into the sand, as Janice said, to their great surprise: “The shells they see are not very active, but when they are put on the sand, they will feel safer. ”
In response to different subject areas and student interests, she will observe with students the food chain from primary producers to predators, as well as the beach microhabitat, including stone bottoms, crevices and water bodies, such as stone oysters stacked together, snails or shells attached to loose stone heads, and sheds hiding in rock pits when the tide is receding. of the predators.
If you are a junior high school student, you can teach some taxonomic knowledge, from the shape of the identification of spiral shell, double shell and other organisms.
Students go to the beach, at a glance, usually feel flat, there are no creatures, "some starfish color and beach like, to pay attention to find, like every summer will find the entire beach covered with white maple starfish, they come up to breed."
The students were happy to see.
Janice said that the intertidal zone is the breeding ground for many marine life: "Many fish, shrimp and crabs, marine life are small plankton when they are young, need to hide in the sheltered beach, slowly grow up, go to the open sea life, we have marine resources." An ideal “outdoor laboratory ” for studying biodiversity.
Hong Kong is a coastal city with a long coastline, which she believes provides a unique ecological environment, convenient transportation, and the public deserves to visit the beach and discover the other side of nature.
■ Common Hong Kong Beach Creatures
Hermit crab
It is commonly found on the sandy surface of the low-tide area that covers the beach, and is also known as the surface-dwelling animal.
Most of them are fast-moving crustaceans, most of them scavengers, feeding on dead creatures or eating debris from sand.
Some bottomed animals also use protective colors to hide themselves from hunters and prey discoveries.
Pseudochromis cleavage
The shellfish are light brown, usually with black stripes or black patches. They are burrowing animals, also known as endosaurs. Most of them are bivalves and insects.
Feibai Maple Starfish
A carnivorous creature found on the sand at low tide in a sheltered beach, this is a small five-armed starfish, brown and sometimes with dark patches on its arms, often hiding in the sand.
Amphipus polymorpus
A high-pitched scallop that covers the sand in the high reaches of the beach and lives on the biofilm and humus that covers the sand. Depending on the tidal cycle, it can be a surface dwelling or a burrowing animal. Although burrowing animals are not easily swept away by the waves, they can avoid predators and reduce the risk of dehydration, they face difficulties in finding food and partners and risk of oxygen deprivation.
Oleichthys aureus
Usually found in the middle of the beach, it is an intermittent burrowing animal. It is only about 1 cm long. It is a small, round shell. It is pure brown, light beige, orange, sometimes with spots, stripes or wavy lines.
Reference: Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department website, "Hong Kong Field Map: Beach"
by Vincent Leung
{Photo} Photo provided by interviewees
{Art} Chang Yu-chi
{edit} Lin Hsiao-hui
fb: http: / / www.facebook.com / SundayMingpao
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Title:

Content: Announcement
Fish deaths threaten livestock.
Environmental Disasters and ‘ Painful ’ Economic Impacts
2022-08-16 | 07: 04
2,499 Views
Report: Alsumaria News
No year or period passes without the announcement of the crisis of fish deaths in the southern provinces, which has an economic, environmental and social impact on all regions of Iraq, in addition to threatening the livelihoods of many Iraqis in light of the difficulty of obtaining a profession at the present time, as fishermen in the areas of the Iraqi marshes never imagined that they will abandon a profession inherited from their parents and grandparents.
Occasionally, Iraqi media and social media platforms have circulated hundreds of videos from many riverine areas of Iraq, showing the death of millions of fish floating on water bodies and inside productive pools in central and southern Iraq.
According to environmental activist Abulhasan al-Masafri, "Lake Razzaza in the province of Karbala has witnessed during the past period large deaths of fish without any government signal and interest in the incident."
He added that "the deaths in the lake occurred because of the low levels of water in it, and the high temperatures that lead to the evaporation of water and high salt concentrations," pointing out that "all these factors made the lake unsuitable environment."
The phenomenon of the death of fish in Iraqi waters, especially the marshes in the south, returns to the forefront from time to time, for reasons attributed by specialists to reckless fishing through the dumping of toxic substances by some fishermen as well as the most prominent reason, which is drought.
A member of the Association of Management of National Fish Lakes in Diyala, Mustafa Khalidi, revealed a comprehensive stop for all fish lakes.
Al-Khalidi said in an interview that "Diyala used to include 30-40 native fish lakes near the main and even sub-river streams, and it depends to a large extent on the permanence of the water, in order to feed them continuously throughout the year."
He added that "all fish lakes have now stopped working because of the severe drought crisis and the decline of water, in addition to the existence of strict instructions to prevent the existence of lakes at the current time because of the limited availability of water."
He pointed out that "the lakes were feeding the markets with more than 100 tons of fish per week," stressing that "only fish breeding cages remain in large rivers, including the Tigris is still engaged in fish production at the moment."
Approximate statistics indicate that the number of people working in these lakes, directly and indirectly, reaches more than 1,500 people, which threatens to stop their livelihoods.
For his part, environmental activist in the province of Dhi Qar, Raad al-Asadi, said that "large quantities of fish have been killed in the Ishaqi River, which is the southernmost of the province of Dhi Qar, which is one of the most prominent rivers that feed the central marshes in Chabaish."
He stressed that "the river is close to the stations that feed the areas of the east and Kassra in the Chabaish and Cheetahs, and therefore the death of fish is the beginning of the spread of diseases dangerous to the environment in the areas it feeds, because of the high salinity."
Two months ago, an official in the Basra Agriculture Directorate, Shaker Abdul Razak, said that 90 percent of the tilapia fish had died.
He explained that the cause of pollution is the dumping of waste in the river, pointing out that the solution for the Directorate is to pump water in the riverbed to remove pollution.
The Basra Agriculture Directorate vowed legal procedures for those who pollute the river.
The director of agriculture of the province Hadi Hussein Qassem, said that "the Directorate formed a working team of the fish department at the moment of receipt of information on mortality."
He added that "the dead fish are considered alien to the visual environment and undesirable to the consumer," explaining that the analysis of the samples showed "the poor quality of water in this river due to the dumping of heavy and sunken water and the waste of shops and some residential neighborhoods, which led to a decrease in the proportion of oxygen in the water."
More than three million people live in the province of Basra, and the population of the province depends on some government stations and more than 200 private civil stations to secure drinking water, and according to them, the water of the province is salty and not suitable for drinking or agriculture.
According to international standards, the salinity of drinking water should not exceed 500 degrees of the standard "TDS", while the salinity in Basra water exceeds the specified number.
The vice president of the Fish Breeders Association in Iraq, Akram al-Mashhadani, says that "more than 75% of fish breeders have abandoned this profession, due to the spread of the virus (Koi herpes) in lakes and rivers, which caused the death of large numbers of these riches with the expansion of the circle of infection and danger as time progresses."
Koi runaway (KHV), a viral disease also known as interstitial nephritis in carp fish or gill necrosis virus, is a killer with an estimated 100% eradication rate among this species of fish.
Since 2008, the fishing profession has flourished after the introduction of carp, through the American Development Organization.
Mashhadani adds that "the virus began to spread in 2018 in the Tigris River and then moved to lakes and river basins, at a time when the production capacity of fish farming was about 900 thousand tons, but it is decreasing by 20% each year since the virus."
He pointed out that with a number of lake owners, they met with officials in the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation and the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, in order to receive government support to eliminate the virus.
“But none of those rounds came up with solutions and we were given the vaccine to the private sector, which is very difficult because it ’ s more than a million dollars in price with few suppliers of such vaccines, ” Mashhadani continued.
On October 26, 2018, a massive fish mortality in Iraq killed millions of cultured carp in the Middle Euphrates region, creating concern in the country.
There was widespread fear that fish deaths were due to mysterious pollution that could also poison people, while fish farmers suffered financial losses due to fish deaths, which affected their livelihoods.
Mashhadani pointed out that "there are other aspects added to the viral disease that affects fish, which is the scarcity of water and the high prices of feed for fish farming."
He calls on the competent authorities to legislate laws concerning fish farming, especially since most of the regulations adopted in Iraq date back to 1972, when fishing was confined to the high seas.
Most of the lakes for fish farming are distributed at the outskirts of the northern capital Baghdad, extending towards the city of Samarra, numbering more than three thousand sites, most of which are not officially licensed.
In turn, says the adviser of the former parliamentary agriculture committee, Adel al-Mukhtar, "fish farming can be classified into four types, the first is fish farming in lakes and river cages and is the most famous and approved by the Ministry of Agriculture."
“This section suffers from the deadly virus, water scarcity, high feed prices and lack of marketing, so it must be eliminated because it puts a great strain on our water reserves and is dangerous for these diseases to spread to the rest of the rivers, ” he added.
He stressed that "the volume of water used by those lakes allocated for fish farming reaches about one billion and a quarter of a billion cubic meters, in light of the futility of the continuation of this profession and the investment of fodder in filling the lack of nutrition for poultry and livestock."
He continued: "This wealth can be compensated through many alternatives at lower cost and more affordable prices for the quantities of water, including the adoption of water bodies such as Tharthar, Habbaniya, Razzazah, marshes and others, which is the second section of fish farming."
The third type is fishing at the Faw marine area in the far south of Iraq, according to the mukhtar, adding that "there are about 1500 boats out of service, each of these boats can return within 10 days by about half a ton of fish."
He pointed out that "most of the fishermen in that region are subjected to humiliation, beatings and arrest by the Iranian authorities, which prevent them from practicing this profession, despite the fact that there is an agreement to regulate fishing in territorial waters."
The fourth type is "located on the high oceans" according to the chosen one.
According to the strategic plan of the Ministry of Agriculture in 2014, the area allocated to fish lakes should not exceed 31 thousand dunums for two decades, but the current area is more than 60 thousand dunums.
At the end of his speech, Mukhtar stressed that "the solution to eliminate the deadly virus, is to stop the breeding of fish of the first type for at least five years."
A few days ago, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Agriculture Mahdi al-Jubouri said in a statement to the official agency that "the rise in fish prices came because of seasonal injuries and also increased demand with the scarcity of the product in some periods, which led to raising prices, in addition to rising prices of vaccines, medicines and feed."
He added that "the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture within the emergency support law for food security will support fish feed, which will reduce the cost of production and reduce prices in the coming days."
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  1. 1. Tropical Desert Biome - the UAE
  2. 2. Meshkani et al., 2013 Barremian-Aptian (Early Cretaceous) 130-113 MYA Campanian (Late Cretaceous) 72-86 MYA Eocene (Paleogene) 34-56 MYA Recent meaning Holocene (Quaternary) 11,700Years ago till now
  3. 3. Teller et al., 2000
  4. 4. Bray and Stokes, 2004
  5. 5. http://www.richardsdubaiguide.com/dub aiguide_usefulinfo.asp?DG_PAGEID=41 http://travel.nationalgeograp hic.com/travel/abu- dhabi/empty-quarter-desert/
  6. 6. http://www.oneeyeland.com/image .php?imgid=71411 http://pollock- virag.com/UAE/2008_Sandy_Beach/S andy_Beach_2008.htm http://www.memphistours.com /Dubai/Dubai-Shore- Excursions/Dubai-Port-
  7. 7. http://www.desertriders.ae/morning-desert-safari/ http://scienceandfunmh.blogspot.ae/2013/03/tropical- rainforests.html Solar-Driven Air Circulation
  8. 8. • Major Coastal HabitatTypes: •Mudflats, beaches and rocky coastal habitats •Coastal plains, sand sheets and low dunes •Coastal sabkha and sabkha matti • Major Inland HabitatTypes: •Sand sheets, dunes and mega-dunes •Plains (alluvial and interdunal •Mountains, rocky terrain and wadis •Inland standing water habitats and habitats of moist ground
  9. 9. Habitat type code and explicit name of the habitat type 1) Definition – general description of the abiotic features and vegetation 2) Characteristic plant and animal species 3) Geographical distribution 4) Habitat types generally associated in the field 5) Perceived threats 6) Bibliographical references
  10. 10. 1010 Mudflats and sand flats exposed at low tide 1) Mudflats and sand flats exposed at high tide, devoid of vegetation. 2) Plants: Devoid of vegetation. Animals: Important feeding grounds for numerous species of birds, in particular migratory waders. 3)Widespread along the Arabian Gulf coast. Geomorphological unit:VI. 4) Can be associated with all other habitat types listed under 1000. 5) Locally threatened due to coastal development, dredging, etc.
  11. 11. 1) Sand sheets and dunes in which shrubs (i.e. woody plants taller than ca. 1 m) are physiognomically conspicuous elements of the vegetation: 4211*: with Haloxylon persicum (Cyperus conglomeratus, Haloxylon salicornicum or Zygophyllum qatarense often co-dominant); 4212: with Calotropis procera (mainly in the east of the Emirate). Presumably a degradation stage of other communities; 4213: with Leptadenia pyrotechnica (widespread mainly in the east of the Emirate). Presumably a degradation stage of other communities. 2) Plants: Calotropis procera,Cyperus conglomeratus, Dipterygium glaucum, Haloxylon persicum, Haloxylon salicornicum, Leptadenia pyrotechnica, Limeum arabicum, Zygophyllum qatarense. Animals:Stone curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus), Acanthodactylus gongrorhynchatus, A. schmidti, Diplometopon zarudnyi, Eryx jayakari, Phrynocephalus arabicus,Scincus mitranus,Stenodactylus arabicus,S. doriae, S. slevini.
  12. 12. 3) Widespread in the eastern part of the Emirate. Haloxylon persicum characteristic of a narrow, near coastal belt to the south-west and west ofAbu Dhabi island.This habitat type with Haloxylon persicum (4211) is of considerable biogeographical importance and of outstanding conservation value. Geomorphological units: 4211 (with Haloxylon persicum): (II), (III),VI; 4212 (with Calotropis procera): I,V; 4213 (with Leptadenia pyrotechnica): I, II,V. 4) 4310, 4510 and 5200. 4211 also with 3100. 5) Sand sheets with Haloxylon persicum still well-developed, but becoming increasingly fragmented due to the construction of new roads and tracks. 6) Aspinall & Hellyer (2003), Brown & Böer (2005), Brown & Sakkir, (2004a), Mandaville
  13. 13. Sand sheets and low dunes with Haloxylon persicum (Habitat 4211) are characteristic of a narrow coastal belt to the south-west of Abu Dhabi island.The stands are of considerable biogeographical interest and exceptional conservation value. Small mammal and reptile burrows are often found in the mounds of sand which accumulate around the base of the shrubs.
  14. 14. Is there much biodiversity in a tropical, semi-arid desert environment?
  15. 15.  All reptiles apart from sea turtles found in the UAE and northern Oman belong to the Order Squamata  Three suborders  Sauria (lizard) (5 families)  Amphisdaena (worm lizard) (1 family)  Serpens (snakes) (4 families)
  16. 16. ▪ Asaccus ▪ caudivolvulus ▪ gallagheri ▪ Bunopus ▪ tuberculatus ▪ spatalurus(splatulate tail NOTTRUE) ▪ Hemidactylus ▪ flavivirudus(common large one by doors) ▪ robustus (slightly smaller, not turkikus anymore) ▪ persicus (rocky areas) Asaccus caudivolvulus A. gallagheri Bunopus tuberculatus B. spatalurus Hemidactylus robustus H. persicus
  17. 17. ▪ Pristurus ▪ carteri (only added to the UAE list this year) ▪ celerrimus(means fastest) (mountains) ▪ minimus (on plants in the sand, very small) ▪ rupestris (common one in oases) ▪ Ptyodactylus hasselquistii(fan-footed gecko – falaj, fort, mountain caves) Pristurus celerrimus P. minimus P. rupestris Ptyodactylus hasselquistii Pristurus carteri
  18. 18. ▪ Stenodactylus ▪ arabicus(sand) (Stenodactylus = slender finger) ▪ doriae (sand) ▪ khobarensis (sabka margins) ▪ leptocosymbotes (Eastern Sand gecko) (gravel plains) ▪ slevini (Sleven’s sand gecko,W. Abu Dhabi and Sweihan, DhubValley) (hard sandy and gravel plains but doesn’t overlap with leptocosymbotes though same habitat, found at FossilValley) ▪ Teratoskinkus keyserlingii (no longer skinkus because skinkus as a species has a wide distribution throughoutAsia. It was divided up into three subspecies, one being keyserlingii, the Iranian one. Recent genetic work shows distinct difference with Iranian population – allopatric speciation) Stenodactylus arabicus S. doriae S. khobarensis S. leptocosymbotes S. sleveni Teratoscincus keyserlingii
  19. 19.  Distribution appears not to overlap S. leptocosymbotes S. sleveni
  20. 20. 1. Urban Sprawl 2. Habitat Destruction 3. Habitat Fragmentation 4. Introduction of exotic species 5. 6. 7.
  21. 21.  Bray H.E., Stokes S. (2004) Temporal patterns of arid-humid transitions in the south-eastern Arabian Peninsula based on optical dating. Geomorphology, Vol 59, 271-280.  Brown G., Boer B. (2004) Interpretation Manual of the major terrestrial natural and semi-natural habitat types of Abu Dhabi Emirate. ERWDA and UNESCO Publication.  Gardner A.S., Howarth B. (2009) Urbanisation in the United Arab Emirates: The challenges for ecological mitigation in a rapidly developing country. BioRisk, Vol 3, 27-38.  Garzantia E., Vermeeschb, P., Andòa, S., Vezzolia, G., Valagussaa, M., Allenb K., Kadic, K.A., Al- Jubouryd, A. I. A. (2013) Provenance and recycling of Arabian desert sand. Earth-Science Reviews, Vol 120, 1-19.  Meshkani S.A., Mehrabi B., Yaghubpur A., Sadeghi M. (2013) Recognition of the regional lineaments of Iran: Using geospatial data and their implications for exploration of metallic ore deposit. Ore Geology Reviews, Vol 55, 48–63.  Teller J.T., Glennie K.W., Lancaster N., Singhvi A.K. (2000) Calcareous dunes of the United Arab Emirates and Noah's Flood: the postglacial reflooding of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf. Quaternary International, Vol 68–71, 297–308.

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Title:

Content: Study: 259 species of marine plastic waste travel around the world, even becoming invasive species
The yellow duckling sailed across the ocean with a gooseneck vase, embarking on an adventure | Photo Credit: Hu Kai-shen
What we want you to know is
Biological "hitchhiking" has a long history, now they have marine debris, under the wind like a skull-sail pirate ship, drift more than 20 times faster than algae, more and more young animals without the ability to float the ocean, are on this can take the wind and waves of the plastic speedboat.
Text: Hu Kai-shen (Chengyang Environmental Consultant)
The news of marine life eating sea waste is often on the news page, and the image of plastic waste harming the marine ecology is deeply rooted in people's hearts.
However, the academic community discovered that there are creatures that take advantage of the opportunity to open up the land through the sea!
In 2015, the academic community counted 395 species of marine life that had been mistakenly eaten or entangled by sea waste.
Surprisingly, 85 species can use the surface of sea waste as a new form of "habitat", and as many as 259 species may use the floating nature of sea waste to travel around and even become invasive species. [1]
From life rafts to pirate speedboats, the plastic age makes biological travel easier
Bio ’ s “hitchhiking ” tour has a long history.
Long before the invention of plastic, organisms such as diatoms, foraminifera, tubeworms, vines, and two shells hitchhiked. They have been attached to floating volcanic pumice, driftwood, seeds, macroalgae, or animal carcasses since floating, forming unique rafting organisms.
However, the buoyancy of these organic drifts will not last for a few days, and they will sink into the deep sea with the screams of passengers.
Now, they have marine litter.
Marine plastic materials are relatively stable and durable and resistant to corrosion.
After entering the water, there is still a large section in the air, like a pirate ship lifting a skeleton sail under the wind of the sea, and the drift speed is more than 20 times faster than that of algae!
As early as 2005, scientists observed that an increasing number of animals that did not have the ability to float in the ocean during their infancy appeared to be riding on the wind-breaking plastic speedboats. They waving flags and waving across the previously inaccessible geographical barriers of wooden or horsetail algae rafts and creeping ashore on unknown coasts. [2]
Ocean plastic debris hitchhikers have formed a unique plastic biosphere. In September 2022, the 7th International Ocean Waste Congress in Busan, South Korea, held a special talk for them to take a look at their transcontinental journey!
If you want to know who loves hitchhiking, throw away all kinds of plastic to attract them.
Ana Luzia Lacerda, a researcher from the Sorbonne University in France, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Brazil, dipped into nine types of plastic sheets in five geographically diverse seas, using the natural environment to cultivate microorganisms and invertebrates on the plastic surface, and then analyzed the DNA of these microorganisms by molecular biology.
Preliminary analysis has found that the dominant species in some locations are two types of tiny diatoms.
Tube worms were found in samples from four sites. Ninety days later, the plastic removed in France showed filamentous green algae not found anywhere else.
The authors believe that to solve the mystery of the marine plastic biosphere, important clues lie in their diversity, variations in different environmental conditions and plastic properties.
Keep swimming! Those who swim to Hawaii with the sea bus
The North Pacific Gyre is the world ’ s largest ecosystem, and its central Pacific Garbage Patch is the world ’ s largest bowl of “ocean plastic soup. ”
The US research team analyzed 1,500 underwater images of marine debris taken by volunteers in two waters in the North Pacific between 2018 and 2020 to identify small fish hiding in hitchhikers.
Clara Benadon, a researcher at Bowdoin College in the United States, said they divided the sea waste into 43 categories, and the fish floating in the sea waste is not diverse, but there are differences in composition.
In addition, the area covered by marine waste can also affect clustered species.
The study found four species of fish that have no record of settlement in the area east of the Hawaiian Islands, including the striped beanfish, naked frogfish, grouper, and an unknown species of rockfish. They may have traveled thousands of miles to reach the eastern Pacific Ocean with their fishing nets.
The study speculates that a growing number of persistent floating sea wastes, like regular buses, help fish cross geographical barriers into previously inaccessible waters.
Smuggling to Missy? Finding the answer in the garbage stranded on the coast
Driven by ocean currents and monsoons, the west coast of North America is a major disaster area along the coast from Alaska, British Columbia to Washington.
Washington State University, in collaboration with beach cleaning groups, also records the types of organisms attached to the surface of the garbage, the coverage rate, etc.
Kathryn Willis, a Fulbright Scholar at the university, used five years of long-term data to study the impact of marine waste materials and geographic regions on biological attachments.
The study found that the hydrological differences between the open coast and the inner coast of the fjord may have contributed to the difference in the composition of the attached species in the two places, but the rattan is the most dominant in both places.
In addition, when a coastal area has more plastic waste, the total weight of the attached biological waste is also higher.
Researchers believe this could be an indicator of ocean plastic.
Join the Ocean Traveler program and find out about the sea plastic stowaways.
Taiwan is like a rest stop on the Kuroshio Highway, the most powerful ocean current in the Pacific.
The bottles washed ashore are covered with algae and vines, and the foreign characters in the gaps indicate the country of origin like a passport.
Similarly, Taiwan also has garbage accidentally falling into the sea, becoming a vehicle for small creatures to travel to other places.
At the conference, Martin Thiel, a nearly two-meter-tall marine waste researcher and professor of marine biology at the Catholic University of the North in Chile, warmly hugged me and invited Taiwan to join Ocean Travelers, a citizen science project launched in September.
He wants us to pick up 100 pieces of sea waste at the beach, record information about types, floating / sinking, attached creatures, and put them on the ground, take photos, and upload data. [3]
This multinational detective project sounds great! In fact, we have been photographing and documenting strange creatures on the surface of sea waste for over a year.
Maybe beach cleaners, like you, also have private and private floating hot spots, suitable for this special investigation, join our multinational detective program!
Annotation
1.
Gall, S.C., & Thompson, R.C. (2015).
The impact of debris on marine life.
Marine pollution bulletin, 92 (1-2), 170-179.
2.
Thiel, M., & Gutow, L. (2004).
The ecology of drafting in the marine environment.
I. The floating submarine.
Oceanography and Marine Biology: an annual review, 42, 181-264.
3.
"Ocean Traveler" English version of the website.
Please contact us at info @ indigowaters.org
This article was published with permission from the Environmental Information Center, and the original was published here.
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Title:

Content: Supplement
Sunday WorkShop
Dining Table Learning: Leave the Ocean a Bowl to Breathe
[Ming Pao News] In coffee shops or Western-style restaurants that provide light meals, in addition to avocado, salmon is often found on the menu – a popular ingredient that can increase the price in an environment with high operating costs, and is simple and convenient to handle (especially smoked salmon), high plasticity, and any sauce or side dishes are safe dishes.
In Hong Kong, we can always choose to eat a certain kind of fish, so most restaurants only use a few popular and convenient seafood.
I also love seafood, but I can ’ t help but worry about what ’ s left of our ocean when I see cheap sushi restaurants, snow-covered fish fillets, and comments on social media groups showing off that I ’ ve eaten a variety of rare species of fish.
Gifts of the Ocean
The ocean covers about two-thirds of the earth. More than 80% of human discoveries about the ocean are still unknown, but 80% of the earth's living creatures are home to the sea.
Oceans are just as important as rainforests. The entire ecosystem regulates the Earth ’ s temperature and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing abundant food for humans.
Humans feed from rivers, lakes, and coasts when they are present, especially when gathering and hunting are unable to provide enough food, and fish is abundant and endlessly abundant as a transitional food.
As humans evolved from harvesting and hunting to domesticating wild animals and plants to farming and animal husbandry, until the Industrial Revolution, the methods of obtaining fish were largely the same: fishing with forks and nets, fishing with fishes or dams, and collecting mollusca (shellfish, octopus, squid, etc.) on the coast.
Archaeologists and historians view fish as the food that has underpinned the development of human civilization.
China had a regular fishery industry as early as 3500 BC. Since 475 BC (the Warring States Period), it has developed a complete set of aquaculture management methods. After more than 1,000 years, the business derived from fish farming, such as planting mulberry trees next to fish ponds to raise silkworms, making fish sauce, etc., has led to economic development.
In addition to beer and bread, dried fish was an important food for the craftsmen, priests and civilians involved in the huge pyramid project in ancient Egypt (circa 2560 BC).
Pickled fish and dried fish were the daily food of the Roman Empire (27 BC to 476 AD), feeding sailors, armies and slaves.
Fish played a very important role in Japan from the Ribbon Period (about 14000 BC to 300 AD), especially after Buddhism came to Japan in the 7th century AD and the Emperor issued a meat ban. In 1883, British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was convinced that cod, herring, sardines and mackerel fisheries, and possibly all large marine fisheries, were inexhaustible. It does not affect the number of fish.
It has now been proven that this great biologist far underestimated the destructive power of this human creature.
The Sea of Sorrow
Since trawling began in the 1300s, mankind has been “evolving ” its destructive power since the industrial revolution. In the 1890s, steam trawlers caught up to eight times more than windswept fishing boats, and diesel-powered trawlers sometimes caught up to 40% more than steam trawlers.
After World War II, sonar (also sonar), originally used to detect enemy positions in the ocean, was used to detect fish stocks, nylon nets replaced cotton nets, and larger steel boats replaced wooden fishing boats, which were able to go farther to catch deeper fish.
The documentary “Seaspiracy ” points out that the current trawl is as big as a football field, towing along the seabed, leveling the entire seabed into wasteland faster and larger than leveling the rainforest. Today, the average forest area that is leveled every minute is equal to 27 football fields, and the average seabed area that is leveled every minute is 4,316 football fields, equivalent to one year. It flattened Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Thailand and Australia.
Leading international fisheries experts estimate that if current fishing trends continue, the oceans will be wiped out by 2048.
While the bottom trawl destroys all benthic habitats, a quarter of the fish catch is immediately discarded, because these by-catch have no market value, and the by-catch also includes high-ranking and important organisms in the marine life chain such as dolphins and sea turtles, seriously disrupting the ecological balance.
According to the Plastic Pollution Coalition, more than half of all marine litter is plastic fishing gear, especially fish nets.
Some fish products, such as canned tuna, are labeled with the Marine Stewardship Council Certified Sustainable Seafood label or the Dolphin-Safe label issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are thousands of connections, and no one has ever been sent to a fishing boat to monitor the actual operation, so long as the money can buy these labels.
These labels can increase the price of products and become a more profitable tool for fishery enterprises.
Since the 1970s, trophic levels such as halibut, cod and bluefin tuna have been at the highest, with numbers falling by 86 to 99%.
Once a 12-year veteran of the MICHELIN Samsung in Japan, Jiro Ono, the god of sushi, lamented that he could not find good seafood when he was young, and the seafood that used to be easy to get is now rare.
Utilizing quotas to support sustainable fisheries
As fewer and fewer fish are available, fish are raised to meet the market ’ s demand for seafood, and nearly half of all fish now come from farms.
It looks like aquaculture is a way out, but that doesn ’ t reduce the impact on the ocean.
Although there are sustainable natural farms, the quality of fisheries is even better than that of wild capture, but most of the world's farms for economic efficiency, fish are crowded in a high-density living environment, swimming in their own excrement, antibiotics and uneaten feed pollution the surrounding water quality, once the genetically unified fish escape will endanger the diversity of endangered wild species.
In addition, meat or scavenging species (salmon and shrimp) feed mainly for fishmeal, in fact, it is also consuming non-protected wild fish, and it is very inefficient (1.2 kg of feed per 1 kg of salmon; 1.5 kg of Bluefin Tuna per 1 kg).
At present, the only way to protect the ocean is to not eat seafood.
I always want to eat seafood.
David Toutain, the French chef who received two Michelin stars and a green star in Paris, suggested that we should leave the table to nature, avoid eating from time to time, eat less fish and meat, and leave the quota for eating quality, quality and quantity.
I envy my friends living in Paris who participate in the community to support sustainable fishing, get to know fishermen and learn about ocean-friendly fishing methods. Members can only order the seafood that the fisherman is expected to catch during the week, not what kind of seafood the fisherman is asked to provide.
Use what you can and don't waste it.
Slow Food has set up an international network, Slow Fish, to focus on marine biodiversity, promote sustainable fisheries and promote responsible seafood consumption. Unfortunately, the Slow Fish network in Asia is only in Taiwan. Although there is no organization support in Hong Kong, as a consumer, you can think about and consciously choose before eating fish.
WWF-Hong Kong has produced the Seafood Selection Guide, which covers the seafood varieties commonly found in local markets, supermarkets, refrigerated food stores and restaurants. It is divided into three categories: Preferred, Second Choice and Avoid.
The revised Taiwan Seafood Selection Guide by the Taiwan Ocean Conservation and Fisheries Sustainability Foundation is also worth a look.
Australian chef Josh Niland, who specializes in fish cooking, said that fish should not be regarded as an immutable and readily available commodity. Quality fish is not easy to come by, and should be treated as a precious and important place to encourage consumers to know and choose different fish, learn to handle whole fish and make the best use of them, and reduce waste.
I am still planning to cook a weekly seafood soup for dinner. After reading a lot of information, I still have to wait for a special day to eat seafood. Instead, I will cook vegan weekly mixed vegetable soup, replace fresh cream with chickpeas and potatoes, and add fresh flavor with kombu and salted yeast.
Chow Ta Miso Soup. Recipe
【 Ingredients 】 (4 to 5 servings)
• kumbu … … 8g
• Water … … 800g
• Dried chickpeas … 120g
• Onion … 1 piece (180g)
• Garlic … 1 piece
• Extra virgin olive oil … about 60 to 90 grams (about 4 to 6 tablespoons)
• Carrot … … 200g
• Potato … … 320g
• Mushrooms … 250g
• Laurel leaves … … 1 slice
• Thyme … 0.5g (about half a teaspoon)
• Coriander … … a little (chopped)
• Salt Koji … 40g (about 4 teaspoons)
• Lemon juice … 2g (about half a teaspoon)
• Black pepper … 0.6g (about half a teaspoon)
• Overnight sourdough bread … … 1 slice
• Sea salt … about 3g (half a teaspoon)
【 Practice 】
1. Put kunbu in the water, put it in the refrigerator overnight (8 hours), put it in the pot the next day, cook for half an hour on a low heat, do not cook until the water boils, the water is slightly out of steam, ready (after cooking the kunbu can be left to make other cold dishes).
Wash and peel the onion, rinse the chickpeas, put in a pot, add 360 grams of kunbu soup, half an onion, bay leaf, 2 grams of salt, heat over medium heat, roll the soup over a low heat, and cook until the chickpeas are softened.
2. Preheat the oven to 180 ℃. Cut the garlic in half. Drain 1 teaspoon of olive oil on each side and sprinkle 1 / 5 teaspoon of sea salt. Bake in tin paper for 40 minutes or until the garlic is softened.
3. Dice sour bread, drizzle with olive oil, bake in oven for 15 minutes until golden brown, set aside.
4. Peel and diced potato and carrot, and diced mushrooms and another half onion, set aside.
5. After the chickpeas are boiled, add half of the potatoes to the chickpeas and cook until softened.
6. Baked garlic meat, cooked potatoes and half chickpeas, add 200g of kombu soup and beat into a paste.
7. In another pot, add 4 to 5 tablespoons of olive oil, heat over medium heat, add onions and fry until transparent.
Add the mushrooms, fry until dry, add the carrot and potato, fry until slightly golden on the surface.
8. Add the mashed potato chickpeas, the remaining chickpeas, and the water of the chickpeas to the pot. Cook on a low heat for 10 to 15 minutes. If too thick, add the remaining kombu soup and dilute.
Serve with thyme, salt yeast, lemon juice and black pepper.
Serve with bread, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with chopped coriander. Finish.
Text, photos and photos by Lin Nu
{Art} Chang Yu-chi
{edit} Wang Cuili
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Content: Scientists warn of what could lead to a “mass extinction ” of marine life that“ rivals ” the severity of the Great Death!
The Libyan Observatory Newspaper
A new study has revealed that greenhouse gas emissions could lead to mass extinctions of marine life to levels not seen since before the dinosaurs.
Researchers in New Jersey modeled the future extinction risk of marine life in all of the world's oceans under different projected climate scenarios.
If emissions are not curbed, the loss of marine species due to global warming and oxygen depletion could reverse the “Great Death, ” the most serious extinction event on Earth, by about 2100, they say.
The Great Death, known as the deadliest extinction on Earth, saw the loss of 95% of all marine species when it occurred about 250 million years ago.
It can also match other major extinction events in Earth's history, including the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
According to the researchers, tropical waters will face the greatest loss of biodiversity, while polar species are more at risk of extinction.
On a more positive note, experts say reversing greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the risk of extinction by more than 70 percent.
Lead author Justin Penn, at Princeton University ’ s Department of Earth Sciences, said: “The bright side is that the future is not written in stone.
The scale of the extinction we have discovered depends heavily on the amount of carbon dioxide [CO2] we release going forward.
“There is still enough time to reverse the trajectory of CO2 emissions and prevent the magnitude of warming that could cause this mass extinction. ”
The Great Death marks a period when life on Earth has never been so close to extinction without recovery, either before or after.
When carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans, it becomes extremely acidic and the level of oxygen in the water drops, killing marine life.
Scientists have long debated theories of the cause of extinction ranging from meteorite impact to volcanoes, which could have caused climatic and environmental changes that make the Earth uninhabitable.
But in the event of the next mass extinction, history will directly blame anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
For the study, Ben and co-author Curtis Deutsch, also based at Princeton, combined existing data on marine species with climate change models to predict how changes in habitat conditions will affect their survival.
The experts compared their model to the size of the “Big Five, ” five historical mass extinctions recorded in the fossil record, among them the“ Great Death. ”
The researchers say that with global temperatures rising “as usual, ” marine life is likely to be subjected to a mass extinction that could potentially rival the size and severity of the Great Death.
Since the Great Death is the deadliest extinction event on Earth, the next marine extinction is likely to surpass the other four species.
Among the events, they found a common pattern – as the ocean warms and oxygen availability decreases, there is a clear decline in the abundance of marine life.
Water temperature and oxygen availability are key factors that will change as the climate warms due to human activity.
Warm water is not only a risk factor for species adapted to cold climates; it also contains less oxygen than cold water, slowing ocean circulation further and reducing the supply of oxygen at depth.
Paradoxically, the metabolic rates of the species increase as the water warms, and therefore the demand for oxygen rises as the supply decreases.
“Once the oxygen supply is less than what a species needs, we expect to see significant species losses, ” he said.
Experts say marine animals have physiological mechanisms that allow them to adapt to environmental changes, but only to a certain extent.
The researchers found that polar species are more likely to become extinct globally if climate warming occurs because they will not have suitable habitats to move to.
Tropical marine species are likely to be better off because they have traits that allow them to cope with warm, low-oxygen waters in the tropics.
To determine the relative importance of climate in the occurrence of extinctions, the team also compared future extinction risks from climate warming with data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on current threats to various marine animals.
They found that climate change currently affects 45% of marine species at risk of extinction, but is only the fifth most important stressor after overfishing, transport, urban development and pollution.
However, Ben said climate change could soon overcome all these stressors in importance.
"Extreme warming will lead to climate-induced extinctions, which, towards the end of the century, will compete with all current human pressures combined," he said.
The study, “Avoiding mass extinction of oceans due to climate warming, ” was published in the journal Science.
Source: Daily Mail

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

Since our school mascot is the cuttlefish, understanding how cephalopods and other marine creatures are affected is particularly relevant for our Spirit Week awareness campaign.

Title:

Content: How can hungry little larvae affect carbon emissions in the atmosphere?
In years when leaf-eating insects do not infect, carbon and nitrogen typically enter lakes from decaying leaves, and in years of infestation, researchers have found that the carbon content of nearby freshwater lakes is one-third lower because hungry larvae have effectively blocked the flow of carbon into the lake.
The caterpillar or "caterpillar" is the second stage of the life of the butterfly. When the butterfly hatches its eggs, a small worm appears and begins to bear and eat. The caterpillar grows, but its skin - unlike most insects - does not grow with it, and begins to prepare to get rid of it to appear a new soft skin under the old skin. To the butterfly phase.
Lymantria dispar dispar and Malacasoma disstria maggot infestations occur at least every 5 years in temperate forests, feeding on many leaves, so much so that researchers have found that reduced leaf loss due to feeding on them and increased larval droppings dramatically change the way the larvae feed on them. Nutrients, especially carbon and nitrogen, circulate between land and lakes.
In new research, published in the journal Nature Communications on Nov. 3, researchers found that nitrogen-rich waste, called ferase, can drift into the lake and act as a fertilizer for microbes, which then enables them to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as they metabolize the waste.
Changing the chemistry of water
The report, by a research team led by John Gunn, Canada ’ s research chair on stressed water systems at Laurentian University in Ontario, and published on The Conversation on November 16, states that in years of insect infestation, large amounts of waste may help grow bacteria that emit greenhouse gases in lakes, which overpower salt. The lake is responsible for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
These insects are basically small machines that convert carbon-rich leaves into nitrogen-rich feces, and then the feces fall into the lakes instead of the leaves, which dramatically changes the chemistry of the water, and the researchers believe will increase the extent to which the lakes are a source of greenhouse gases.
With climate change in the temperate zone of the world, insect numbers are expected to increase and move north, this puts northern forests at increased risk of future outbreaks of these insects, which may cause the release of greater amounts of carbon dioxide from nearby lakes.
Where's the good news?
While the effects of insect foliar erosion appear to be increasing in frequency and severity, the lake's water across the Canadian Shield (Laurentian Plateau) is also undergoing a process called water flushing due to the buildup of dissolved organic carbon (which is similar to tea) in the lake's water.
This deterioration in lake water transparency is due to many factors — including climate change, recovery from acid rain and logging — and the 32-year observational study showed that the spread of the leaf-eating larva can effectively offset year-long carbon accumulation in nearby lakes, significantly improving water transparency.
In years when leaf-eating insects do not infect, carbon and nitrogen usually enter the lakes from the decomposing leaves, usually peaking in terms of quantity in the fall.
In the years of the outbreak, researchers found that nearby freshwater lakes, especially those surrounded by leaf-falling forests, had dissolved carbon — or “forest tea ” — one-third less in the water because hungry larvae effectively blocked the flow of carbon into the lake.
The lasting benefits of these voracious insects become apparent when invasive insects encounter already strained trees, such as the stunted birch forest surrounding the huge metal smelters in Sadbury, Ontario, Canada, where this 80,000-hectare industrial zone is experiencing a remarkable natural self-recovery, due to a 98% reduction in acid and metal particulate emissions from the source that was the world ’ s largest source of sulfur pollution in the 1970s.
The legacy of soil loss, pollution and degradation in Sadbury clearly puts trees at a disadvantage in their battle with leaf-eating insects.
The caterpillar is like a small plow?
Trees cannot escape insects but usually survive several violent attacks, yet trees in the industrial areas of Sadbury do not recover well, for other reasons, including loss of soil moisture and organic matter, and decades of accumulation of toxic metal particles from smelters.
The result is that these trees present themselves as a source of food for larvae and other insects, and dead and dying trees are often scattered in natural spaces on their way to becoming soil: in previous laboratory experiments, the team showed that when the gypsy moth larva fed white birch trees in industrial fields, it ate more leaves and produced more waste, which increased plant growth in the soil.
Yes, insects cause great difficulty for trees in industrial sites, but improving soil quality is the real gain, healthy soils are one of the largest and safest places to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, they are the key to our fight against climate change, and as every farmer knows, protecting and restoring soil quality is also essential for sustainable agriculture.
That ’ s why knowledgeable farmers regularly try to stop extracting nutrients from the soil, plowing a nutrient-rich fodder crop like alfalfa, to rebuild the soil.
Research shows that this hungry larva now seems to play surprisingly large roles in altering key features of the global carbon cycle, but now we also think of them as small ploughs that can help improve degraded soils.
Source: The Island
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Content: Unfair search for ‘ red gold ’ in the deep Mediterranean destroys the environment | Climate change | DW | 19.03.2023
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Excessive search for "red gold" in the depths of the Mediterranean is destroying the environment
Coral smuggling in Mediterranean countries is damaging the environment and aquatic life.
This comes despite strict laws against coral reef smuggling.
DW examines the causes of the problem from the coast of Tunisia and southern Italy.
Owners of shops that make jewelry from coral face a dark future as ecosystems collapse
For 20 years, Tunisian Mourad Arfaoui and his family have been turning precious coral reefs into jewelry from inside his shop in the small coastal city of Tabarka.
Al-Arfaoui said: “Everyone is involved in this matter, my children were raised in this store. ”
However, Arfaoui doubts that his sons will be able to move forward with the same work, given the severe shortage of coral reefs that underpin his work.
Tabarka residents say nine out of 10 coral jewellery shops in the city, about 200 km from the Italian island of Sardinia, have closed, especially as coral reef prices continue to rise due to their scarcity.
"There may not be any coral reefs in the future at all and they will simply disappear," he said.
Ecosystems are dying
Red corals, called "red gold", are living organisms found mainly in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, while living in the depths of the sea in an attempt to avoid light.
Locals call them Mediterranean red trees because they help the ecosystem flourish.
The red coral is characterized by picturesque beauty in a blessing turned into a curse; this festival has become a raw material required by jewelers to make beautiful jewelry, but it came at the expense of the environment and the destruction of marine systems.
For decades, fishermen on trawlers have been fishing for coral reefs, leading to their scarcity, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) including precious coral reefs on its Red List of Threatened Species.
Marjan is an important part of the economy of the Tunisian city of Tabarka
However, overfishing is not the only threat to the extinction of red coral reefs, but also climate change, which is causing the oceans and seas to heat at a rapid pace, threatening to wipe out the world ’ s coral reefs in the coming decades.
Since the 1980s, most countries have banned destructive fishing practices such as trawling for coral reefs.
In 2019, the General Fisheries Authority for the Mediterranean adopted more rules to protect coral reefs, while divers can now capture them at depths of more than 50 meters, while governments have to follow through.
In Tunisia, only a few divers are allowed to collect precious coral reefs.
Hunting continues despite the rules.
Despite these laws, businessmen in the city of Tabarka talk about the flourishing black market for smuggling red coral, which means that the laws are difficult to implement due to the large financial return.
A study funded by the European Union has revealed that precious corals can be worth several million euros and are smuggled out of the Mediterranean every year, with North Africa and southern Italy being the main centers of the trade.
In Algeria, despite strict laws, about three tons of red corals, called "bull blood", are smuggled every year.
Divers risk their lives by diving to a depth of more than 100 meters in order to collect coral reefs.
Salah al-Bedjaoui, a former coral reef diver in Tabarka, said the activity was illegal and “there ’ s a lot of fishing on the black market and that puts us in big trouble. ”
Tunisian police have in the past confiscated cars after finding precious coral reefs and pills of the drug "ecstasy" on board, as these shipments are shipped through Tunisia to other countries because it is difficult to verify the country of origin.
Bajawi said: “It ’ s like smuggling cocaine.
An Italian man was arrested on a boat smuggling a reef to Italy.
“Everyone knows there are smuggling operations going on here. ”
"It's like a war."
The small town of Torre del Greco near Naples, Italy, is the global capital of the illegal coral trade, with many family-owned companies making jewelry from precious coral reefs to sell to companies like Gucci, Bvlgari and other of the world ’ s most famous luxury brands.
In this small Italian town, few people want to talk about the thriving black market for coral reefs.
Jewelry made from coral is expensive, and yet it finds a lot of popularity.
Miko Cataldo is one of the few coral traders willing to talk about it, saying: “We fight this problem every day with illegal traders. ”
Cataldo said that many of those involved in the trade have made significant profits from the coral trade, adding that the high demand for coral reefs is not due to the jewelry industry as in some Asian countries precious coral reefs are used to make beauty products and as a source of many medicines.
He said he had received threats from criminals inside his shop because he had spoken against them, adding: "It's like a war we're fighting here."
Italy has drawn up a national plan to protect marine life, but Cataldo said smugglers were moving their goods through Spain and France instead of Italy.
As for Tunisian Murad Arfaoui, he sees greed as the cause of this illegal trade, adding: “Precious coral reefs have become threatened like many other marine organisms because we have not given them time to grow and evolve.
We have forgotten to have some patience and we have also forgotten to appreciate the riches of the deep sea. ”
Jean-Philippe Schulz / M.
p / p

Title:

Content: Poisonous sunscreen.
UV filters can harm aquatic life - Sunrise Gate
Saturday 9 July 2022 4: 21 PM Cairo Cairo 24 °
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Poisonous sunscreen.
UV filters can harm aquatic life
DBA
Published on: Saturday 9 July 2022 - 4: 05 PM | Last updated on Saturday 9 July 2022 - 4: 05 PM
Warmer temperatures attract people to beaches and water, but large amounts of sunscreen get into the water with bathers – UV filters and nanoparticles from creams and sprays can damage coral reefs and other marine organisms, more and more studies are currently showing such effects.
And replacement solutions are in the works – but until then, it ’ s up to the users themselves.
Up to 14,000 tons of sunscreen end up in the seas each year, of which 4,000 to 6,000 tons reach coral reefs, according to researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
How this affects the marine environment has not been conclusively explained, but the UV filters included in these condoms are particularly worrisome.
NOAA observed that these substances inhibit the growth of green algae, lead to abnormalities in young mussels, and harm the immune system and reproduction of sea urchins.
For dolphins, these substances can accumulate in cell tissues and be passed on to small animals, while they can reduce fertility in fish and cause genetic changes.
But UV filters pose a particular threat to coral reefs — along with stressors such as rising sea temperatures.
A 2016 US study suggested that an organic chemical filter, oxybenzone, in particular, could damage the genetic material of sensitive caterpillars and cause their larvae to encapsulate and die in their skeleton.
The results of studies like this prompted the US state of Hawaii to pass a law banning the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate from 2021.
Similar regulations apply in Key West, Florida, the Virgin Islands, the island nation of Palau, the Thai Maritime National Parks, the Caribbean island of Bonaire, and some holiday areas in Mexico.
How the corals were damaged by oxybenzone was determined by a recent US study published in the journal Science, where scientists from Stanford University used a type of coral and a type of marine anemone for this purpose, added "oxybenzone" in high concentrations within fish ponds, and then exposed them to various light radiation.
The effect was surprising: only organisms exposed to the simulated rays of the sun died.
Lead author of the study, William Mitch, said: “It was strange to see that oxybenzone makes sunlight toxic to corals – as opposed to what it ’ s supposed to do. ”
Oxybenzone, like other chemical UV filters, is actually used as a sunscreen because it absorbs ultraviolet rays that fall on human skin and then releases them as harmless heat.
However, the researchers observed that anemones and corals metabolized the filter in such a way that the resulting material formed harmful roots when exposed to sunlight, turning the filter into a phototoxin.
Scientists also note that algae, which live in symbiosis with corals and give them their colorful appearance, apparently protect their host by trapping toxins produced from oxybenzone.
Thus, the currently prevalent coral bleaching phenomenon, along with oxybenzone in the water, could have even more deadly consequences for corals.
Bleaching occurs when stressed corals expel their “algae ” partners, thus exposing their white skeleton.
According to the study, these bleached corals are more susceptible to "oxybenzone".
In addition to oxybenzone, another organic chemical candidate is under discussion, octocrillin.
According to studies, this substance is suspected to harm water fleas, ciliary and zebra fish by affecting the balance of their hormones, among other things.
In addition, this water-insoluble substance is difficult to decompose and therefore can accumulate in living organisms.
According to various studies, UV filters can now be found in both tropical coral reefs and in the Arctic Ocean – as well as in the Baltic Sea: Catherine Fish of the German Leibniz Baltic Research Institute in Farnmunde conducted measurements on the German Baltic Sea coast in 2016, and found there 30 nanograms of UV filters per litre of Baltic Sea water.
In rivers that drain into the Baltic Sea, the amount was sometimes as high as 836 nanograms per liter.
Although these quantities are small, they may have a long-term impact on marine organisms.
Germany has no nationwide monitoring to measure pollution of water bodies with UV filters, and there are no specific upper limits on their allowable amounts.
In response to the potential environmental risks of chemical UV filters, more and more manufacturers are offering “coral-safe ” or“ coral-friendly ” metal sunscreens.
These protectors contain zinc or titanium dioxide – molecules act like tiny mirrors on the skin, reflecting UV light.
Some manufacturers are trying to reduce this effect by reducing metal dyes and relying on nano-sized particles, but Spanish researchers showed in 2014 that these nanoparticles act as catalysts that make sunlight produce highly reactive hydrogen peroxide from water, which can harm microorganisms.
Research is currently underway on alternatives in which compounds from algae, seaweed and other marine organisms act as UV filters.
Until these products are ready for the market, the best green sun protection is likely to be one that relies on reducing the amount of condoms used without cutting them out altogether — given the risk of skin cancer.
The consumer magazine "UMID" of the German Federal Agency for the Environment recommends the use of metal filters in non-nano-form and advises exposure to the sun in the afternoon or just before sunset, stay in the shade and protect the body with appropriate clothing and bathing at home, thus reducing the UV filters that end up directly in the water.
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Which marine organism is vulnerable to increased levels of ocean acidification?

Which marine organism is vulnerable to increased levels of ocean acidification?

Which marine organism is vulnerable to increased levels of ocean acidification?

Which marine organism is vulnerable to increased levels of ocean acidification?

## What is Ocean Acidification?

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Content: There were 1,357 press releases posted in the last 24 hours and 396,480 in the last 365 days.

Integrated actions across multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) can help address coastal ocean acidification

Integrated actions across multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) can help address coastal ocean acidification

Published 17 June 2024 Science Leave a Comment
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 constitute a set of 17 global goals established as a blueprint for achieving a more sustainable and equitable world for humanity. As part of the SDGs, target 14.3 is focuses on minimizing and addressing the impacts of Ocean Acidification (OA). We argue that moving forward in meeting the targets related to pH levels in the coastal ocean can be facilitated through accounting for various drivers of pH change, which are associated with advancing a suite of SDG goals. Addressing ‘coastal acidification’ via a suite of linked SDGs may help avoid inaction through connecting global phenomena with local impacts and drivers. This in turn can provide opportunities for designing novel place-based actions or partnerships that can aid and provide synergies for the joint implementation of programs and policies that tackle a suite of SDGs and the specific targets related to coastal ocean pH.

Vargas C. A. & Gelcich S., 2024. Integrated actions across multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) can help address coastal ocean acidification. Communications Earth & Environment 5: 319. doi:10.1038/s43247-024-01485-6. Article.

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Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, causing chemical changes that lower the water's pH level, making it more acidic.

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Content: Overfishing: African Fishermen Paying the Price for Their Malpractice | Politics and Economics | In-depth Analysis with a Broader Perspective | DW | 21.05.2023
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Overfishing – African fishermen are paying the price for their wrong practices
African fishermen in countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean are suffering from a shortage of fish, while overfishing has become a major problem due to harmful fishing practices and large fishing operations in international waters.
Overfishing is threatening the livelihoods of fishermen off the coast of Africa.
The sight of a fishnet coming out of the sea full of fish is often drooled by any fisherman, but it has become rare in African countries bordering the Atlantic, where harmful fishing practices and overfishing have for years destroyed fish stocks and marine life.
Fishermen face many difficulties in fishing, whether to earn a living or feed their families, while large global fishing vessels are forced to resort to innovative and often destructive methods to maintain their marine activity, but these methods are not sustainable, which poses a threat to the marine environment, especially as the phenomenon of climate change worsens.
The crisis was the focus of a panel discussion held on the sidelines of the Ministerial Conference on Fisheries Cooperation among African States bordering the Atlantic Ocean (ATLAFCO) in Rabat, where attendees tried to explore new ways to balance fishing and biodiversity conservation.
The reality for African fishermen seems bleak, with many, including Burton, a fisherman in Benin, stressing the lack of fish.
Burton, who has been fishing in the Bay of Benin for more than 30 years, said: “Once, I could trap fish in the net ten minutes after putting underwater water lamps.
Mr Burton, 50, said fishing had been a lucrative business in the past, but that had changed in recent years.
Miserable measures.
He said the crisis has been exacerbated by large foreign fishing boats fishing for the fish that are supposed to be the day of his comrades who go out at sea on boats and small boats, but competition with large ships seems impossible.
The suffering of Benin fisherman Burton appears to be frequent in other African countries bordering the Atlantic, where years of overfishing have reduced fish catches by almost half over the past 15 years.
Similar to large fishing operations on the high seas, fishermen in countries such as Ghana are looking for innovative ways to catch and keep fish, but many fishermen resort to dangerous practices such as poisoning fish and using dynamite to kill fish at night.
Fishing was a lucrative activity in Ghana, but now fishermen cannot earn a living.
“I ’ ve seen fishermen in Ghana use chemicals like soap powder while others use heavy means like dynamite where they can catch fish using these techniques, ” Burton said.
Hunters have some responsibility.
Experts confirm that these practices inflict heavy losses on the environment as well as being contrary to the law, while these methods have become common amid the efforts of fishermen to secure their livelihood, especially with the failure of governments to work on this problem.
As a result, fishers have become part of the problem as a result of their harmful fishing practices.
Rodrigue Bilibe, a researcher at the Africa Regional Centre for Excellence in Coastal Resilience at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, said the use of dynamite and chemicals "damages the marine and aquatic environment and exacerbates the crisis".
He added in an interview with DW that these practices “contribute to the destruction of coral reefs which hinders the marine ecological balance of coral reefs and eliminates the entire food chain.
Even if the authorities curb these illegal practices, fishermen continue to find new ways to destroy the seabed.
They are still developing other harmful practices to capture what remains of the fish from the seafloor. ”
Although there is a fact that dwindling fish populations are enough evidence of the disastrous impact of harmful fishing practices, Pelepi said fishermen still do not understand the seriousness of the issue and are flouting the rules.
According to the United Nations, fishing is the source of livelihood for about 2.7 million people in Ghana, accounting for 10% of the total population, while fish and seafood are the source of 60% of the protein consumed in the country.
In the face of these figures, the problem of fish shortage is a serious nutritional problem.
A vicious circle.
Participants at the Rabat symposium agreed on the need to find solutions to estimates that the damage caused by this problem in the coastal West African countries alone is estimated to be at least $2.3 billion annually.
Abdelnaji Lamarish, head of cooperation and information systems at TLAFCO, said improving monitoring mechanisms is an important step to start assessing and addressing the problem, adding that African countries should “fight harmful and illegal fishing methods. ”
Amadou Tall, head of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) programme, highlighted another issue: identifying harmful methods among fishermen is less difficult than identifying the latest fishing methods by global vessels in international waters.
Illegal and unauthorized fishing activities are the main problem because they are responsible for 26 million tons of fish caught annually, he said, adding that such practices occur on the high seas, which means that they are impossible to control since they fall outside the jurisdiction of coastal States.
He stressed that although illegal fishing activities take place on the high seas, they do much damage to coasts as coastal populations bear the brunt of illegal overfishing practices.
Fishermen are caught in a vicious cycle as they try to stay active, even through harmful fishing practices, while fish in the Atlantic waters off the coast of West Africa do not feed.
Kosevi Tiasu / M.
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Content: Our Burning Planet

UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB: ANALYSIS

Our antidepressants in the water are making the fish come undone

(Photos: Unsplash / Sebastian Pena Lambarri | Myriam Zilles | Danilo Alvesd)

An item appeared in the international news media last Friday that was next-level apocalyptic. More than a hundred fish species off the Florida coast had been found with heavy traces of human pharmaceuticals in their blood, most of which were antidepressants. The fish, of course, were exhibiting some strange and dangerous behaviours. Question is, will there be a wake-up call in here for us?

  • ‘It is not half so important to know as to feel.’ — Rachel Carson.

It’s a cliché these days to observe that the news can be a hazard to our collective mental health. The prospects for the ignition of World War 3 in Eastern Europe, new variants and outbreaks of a pandemic that we thought was over, increasingly shrill warnings of the collapse of our biomes and the attendant unravelling of modern civilisation — none of these stories, which are now standard fare across most of our major media platforms, encourage what is colloquially referred to as “balance”. Still, through our enforced numbness, some stories shout louder at us than others.

One such story was buried deep below the headlines in The Guardian last Friday, 29 April.

“Fish on drugs,” the item stated, before explaining that “a cocktail of medications” appears to be “contaminating [the] ocean food chain”.

Really?

Yup, really.

A click-through to the story proper (and who, in their daily doom-scrolling, could refuse the dystopian promise of such a lead?) revealed that a three-year study had confirmed “widespread traces of a total of 58 medications including heart drugs, opioids, antidepressants and antifungals in increasingly rare bonefish and their prey”.

As it turns out, with nearly five billion medications prescribed annually in the United States alone — and the average American on a regimen of 12 prescriptions per year — human wastewater has been playing havoc with fish species off the coast of Florida.

The full report, commissioned by the state’s Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, concluded that more than half of the bonefish sampled had drugs in them at levels “above which we expect negative effects”.

Apparently, one of the bonefish tested positive for 17 pharmaceuticals, “eight of them antidepressants that were up to 300 times above the human therapeutic level”.

And while the study had found an average of 11 pharmaceuticals in all of the 125 fish species upon which the bonefish feed, the truly alarming part came when The Guardian zoned out into the broader context.

“In 2013,” noted the reporter, “scientists from Umea University in Sweden… found that wild perch were less fearful and more antisocial when exposed to anti-anxiety medications, which could affect feeding and breeding.

“A 2016 study by the same university found salmon exposed to this medication swam faster and had riskier behaviour.

“Crayfishes’ exposure to antidepressants has been linked to altered behaviour, increasing their boldness and the time they spent foraging, potentially making them more vulnerable to predators.”

So this, it seems likely, is another way in which we are killing our precious marine world. Aside from the anthropogenic climate change that is directly implicated in the mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the vast international fishing fleets that are eradicating the Pacific’s bluefin tuna and the deep-sea mining that threatens to wipe out entire oceanic ecosystems, we appear to be inducing chemical imbalances in the world’s underwater inhabitants.

How, then, should we continue to attend to our own imbalances, whether we choose to engage with the daily news or not?

At the risk of venturing into the esoteric, what the “fish on drugs” story demonstrates, before anything, is that nothing is separate. Our external environments, as human beings in the first apocalyptic stirrings of the Anthropocene, are a sublimely accurate reflection of our collective internal environments.

The truth, if we care to look beyond ourselves, if our personal anxieties and griefs and despairs are to be placed within the framework of the most profound planetary laws — for instance, what is in one is in the whole — is that our medications aren’t working for us.

Because, as scary as this truth may be, it’s not just the fish off the Florida coast (and God-alone-knows where else) that are being short-changed of their evolutionary safeguards — it’s apparently our own species too.

For a number of years, scientists across a range of disciplines have been trying to figure out why the graphs on certain mental disorders have continued to trend flat, when the available pharmaceutical treatments have never been so plentiful.

We all seem to know that the pandemic triggered a sharp spike in the data, with the World Health Organization confirming that the global prevalence of anxiety and depression had risen a staggering 25% in the first year, but what’s less well-known is that even before Covid hit, we were scratching our heads in wonder at the stats.

In November 2019, in a peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology that had been funded by a grant from the US’ National Science Foundation, researchers Kristen Syme and Edward Hagen submitted their findings under the following header: “Mental health is biological health: Why tackling ‘diseases of the mind’ is an imperative for biological anthropology in the 21st century.”

In the first paragraph of the introduction, with all the necessary citations, they stated the case bluntly: “During the 20th century, the biomedical sciences rapidly reduced the global burden of infectious disease, leading to dramatic increases in life expectancy (Murray et al., 2015). In the 21st century, chronic, non-infectious diseases have emerged as major contributors to the global disease burden (Benziger, Roth, & Moran, 2016), with mental disorders playing a substantial role (Whiteford et al., 2013).

“The causes of most mental disorders, however, remain a mystery, and there has been little progress in reducing the prevalence of any of them.”

From within an evolutionary framework — which is to say, the framework of ancestral human biology as opposed to contemporary biomedical psychiatry — what Syme and Hagen were arguing for was an entirely new lens on mental disorders.

It wasn’t their intention, as it certainly isn’t the intention of the author of this piece, to suggest that all psychiatric drugs should be outlawed, or even that many of the drugs haven’t together saved millions of lives (which they clearly and obviously have), but it was their stated mission to shift our gaze to the bigger picture.

For Syme and Hagen, who set out first and foremost to convince their peers in the field of biological anthropology that a) there was “a genuine and widely recognised theoretical crisis in mental health research” and b) that these peers were perfectly placed to fill in the gaps, the vast perspective of evolutionary time offered the most sensible way through.

In the second part of their paper, after laying out the problem in painstaking detail, they suggested a “provisional evolutionary schema for conceptualising mental disorders” that sliced the subject matter into four groups.

This schema, as noted, “identifies one group as relatively rare disorders of development that are probably caused by genetic variants, one widespread group that comprises aversive but probably adaptive responses to adversity and therefore are likely not disorders at all, one group that is probably due to senescence, and one group that might be caused by mismatches between ancestral and modern environments”.

Without getting further into the terminological weeds, it was the second group that, for a brief moment, elevated their research into the media’s mainstream.

Under the title, “Researchers Doubt that Certain Mental Disorders are Disorders At All,” Forbes magazine reported that Syme and Hagen had provided compelling evidence “to think of depression or PTSD as responses to adversity rather than chemical imbalances”.

Given that medical science has never been able to prove that anxiety, post-traumatic stress or depression are inherited conditions, the report noted, there appeared to be a distinct collective upside to this new evolutionary lens — “adversity is something we can overcome, whereas a mental disorder is something to be managed”.

And in terms of the placebo effect, it turned out, this conclusion wasn’t nearly as radical as the casual observer may have thought.

In November 2018, the New York Times Magazine ran a front page feature entitled, “What if The Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?” For around 5,000 carefully crafted and referenced words, the author made the case, based on a quarter-century of hard evidence, that you could give patients a sugar pill, and those patients — “especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence” — would get better.

What were some examples of these so-called conditions? According to the New York Times, the labels included depression and PTSD.

But before we get to suggesting what this all might mean for our over-prescribed fish, it’s important to note that there has lately been a great deal of hand-wringing within the halls of psychiatry itself.

In late March 2022, The Nation magazine weighed in with the investigative feature, “Breaking Off My Chemical Romance”, arguing that “we deserve a fuller picture of both the benefits and dangers of antidepressants.” The feature zoned in on one of the most “hardcore” forms of antidepressants, known in the trade as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

What if we realised that numbing ourselves wasn’t working; not for us and not for the fish?

Expanding from the individual case of an Australian psychiatry student who had been diagnosed with narcolepsy a few months after signing up for an SSRI — and who had later been prescribed both Ritalin and Ambien to help him stay focused during the day and fall asleep at night — the article went on to detail how the attempt to quit such drug cocktails had “basically ruined” countless thousands of lives.

“The theory that antidepressants correct a chemical imbalance of neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine is not a proven fact,” The Nation noted.

“Their basic functioning has not been definitively established. The story we all know is more marketing than science. And the incentive to find out whether they are indeed the best way to treat depression does not exist.

“In a world where so much scientific research is conducted by pharmaceutical companies and the entities they back, if drugs are making a profit, there’s little reason to question them.”

Still, as implied, the article quoted a solid cross-section of working psychiatrists who had recently come up with a lot of reasons to question them, not least of which was the fact that “several of the antidepressants still fell below the threshold of clinically significant improvement over a placebo”.

Importantly, and to reaffirm what was stated above, the point of this op-ed is not to argue that all psychiatric drugs are “bad”.

As The Nation made clear: “The strongest evidence for the beneficial effects of antidepressants applies to people with the most severe depression.”

The point, rather, from a writer who has fought his own battles with these drugs, is that psychiatrists — by their own overworked and overburdened admission — find it too easy to prescribe the drugs in even the mildest of cases, simply because the pressure from the pharmaceutical industry is too strong and entrenched.

So now we have oceans where fish breeding and feeding patterns, established over tens of millions of years, are hopelessly out of whack.

To ingest the “hope” back in, it seems, at least in this one emerging corner of our horrifying planetary predicament, would require recasting the dominant narrative into a form more in tune with the latest scientific research. And that, in turn, would require removing the label of “mental disorder” and replacing it with “adaptive response to trauma”.

In the context of the daily news headlines, how much of a stretch would that be? What if we chose, individually and collectively, to first notice the effect we were having on our fragile natural world — then to own it, then to imbibe it?

What if we realised that numbing ourselves wasn’t working; not for us and not for the fish?

What if we finally got that nothing had ever been separate?

What if we decided tomorrow morning to turn around and face the trauma — because that was the only way that it could, and perhaps would, be overcome? DM/OBP

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What is the main cause of ocean acidification?

water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

What is the main cause of ocean acidification?

water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

What is the main cause of ocean acidification?

water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

This process is happening at an unprecedented rate due to increased CO2 emissions from human activities.

What factors lead to damage of coral reefs?

What is the main cause of ocean acidification?

water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

## Impacts Beyond Coral Bleaching

### Cephalopods (Including Cuttlefish and Octopuses)
Cephalopods are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification because they rely on calcium carbonate to form their internal shells and beaks.

Which marine organism is vulnerable to increased levels of ocean acidification?

As ocean acidity

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Content: Scientists fear a repeat of an ancient fire that wiped out entire species
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Over the past decade, deadly wildfires have become increasingly common due to human-induced climate change and disruptive land management practices.
Southern California experienced a wave of wildfires 13,000 years ago.
These fires have permanently changed vegetation in the region and contributed to the largest extinction on Earth in more than 60 million years.
A team of researchers has a unique perspective on the causes and long-term consequences of environmental changes, both those associated with natural climate variability and those caused by humans.
In a new study published in August 2023, researchers sought to understand the changes that occurred in California during the last major extinction event at the end of the ice age.
The event wiped out most of the large mammals on Earth about 10,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dramatic climatic disturbances spread.
Scientists often call the past 66 million years of Earth's history the Age of Mammals.
During that time, some organisms exploited the extinction of dinosaurs to become the dominant species on the planet.
During the Ice Age, Eurasia and the Americas were teeming with enormous beasts such as woolly mammoth, giant bears, and terrible wolves.
Two camels, three species of ground sloths and five species of big cats roamed what is now Los Angeles.
And then suddenly she went away.
Around the world, the large mammals that characterized global ecosystems have disappeared for tens of millions of years.
North America has lost more than 70% of mammals weighing more than 97 pounds (44 kg).
South America lost more than 80%, and Australia lost almost 90%.
Africa, Antarctica and a few remote islands hold what can be considered “normal ” animal communities today.
The cause of these extinctions remains unclear.
For decades, paleontologists and archaeologists have debated possible causes.
With the end of the last ice age, the warming of the climate changed weather patterns and reorganized plant communities.
At the same time, the population was growing rapidly and spreading all over the world.
Either or both of these processes could be involved in the extinction event.
But the fossil record of any region is usually so rare that it is not known exactly when large mammal species from different regions disappeared.
This makes it difficult to determine whether habitat loss, resource scarcity, natural disasters, human hunting, or a combination of these factors is the cause.
Some records provide evidence.
La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the richest ice age fossil site in the world, preserves the bones of thousands of large mammals that have been trapped in sticky asphalt spills for the past 60,000 years.
The proteins in these bones can be accurately dated using radiocarbon, giving scientists unprecedented insight into the ancient ecosystem and a chance to shed light on when – and why – it collapsed.
A recent study of La Brea Tar Pits and nearby Lake Elsinore uncovered evidence of a tragic event 13,000 years ago that permanently altered southern California ’ s vegetation and caused the disappearance of La Brea ’ s famous mega-mammals.
Sediment archives from the bottom of the lake and archaeological records provide evidence of a deadly combination — a warm climate punctuated by decades of drought and a rapidly growing population.
These factors have pushed the Southern California ecosystem to a turning point.
The catalyst for this dramatic shift seems to have been the unprecedented increase in wildfires, possibly caused by humans.
The processes that led to this collapse are familiar today.
As California warmed up after emerging from the last ice age, the landscape became drier and forests receded.
In La Brea, herbivores have declined, possibly due to a combination of human hunting and habitat loss.
In the millennium before the extinction, average annual temperatures in the region rose by 5.5 degrees Celsius, and the lake began to evaporate.
Then, 13,200 years ago, the ecosystem went into a 200-year drought.
Half of the remaining trees were lost.
With fewer large herbivores eating them, dead plants accumulated on the landscape.
Humans and our ancestors have used fire for hundreds of thousands of years, but fire has different effects on different ecosystems.
Coal records from Lake Elsinore reveal that before humans, fire activity was low on the southern coast of California.
But from 13,200 to 13,000 years ago, as the population grew, fires in the region increased in order of magnitude.
The research suggests that the combination of heat, drought, loss of herbivores and human fires has pushed this system to a tipping point.
At the end of this period, Southern California was covered with plants that thrive after the fires.
A new fire system was created, and the huge animals disappeared.
Lessons for the future
Studying the causes and consequences of Pleistocene extinctions in California can provide a valuable context for understanding today ’ s climate and biodiversity crises.
A similar combination of climate warming and population expansion, biodiversity loss and human-ignited fires that marked the receding ice age in Southern California is once again emerging today.
The worrying difference is that temperatures today are rising 10 times faster than they were at the end of the ice age, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels.
This human-caused climate change has contributed to a fivefold increase in the frequency, intensity and area burned in California in the past 45 years.
While California is now famous for severe fires, the study reveals that fire is a relatively new phenomenon in this region.
In the 20,000 years leading up to the extinction, the Lake Elsinore record showed a drastic reduction in the incidence of any fire even during similar droughts.
It is only after the arrival of man that fire becomes a regular part of the ecosystem.
Even today, collapsed power lines, campfires and other human activities have caused more than 90% of wildfires on the California coast.
The similarities between the massive extinctions of the Pleistocene and the current ecological crises are striking.
The past teaches us that the ecosystems we depend on are prone to collapse when subjected to multiple intersecting pressures.
Redoubling efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, prevent reckless fires and preserve the massive organisms remaining on Earth could help avoid another, more catastrophic transformation.
The report was prepared by Lisa N. Martinez, PhD candidate in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Regan E. Dunne, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences from the School of Arts, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, Duransev.
Source: Science Alert
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