Shark Quest: Are the World’s Most Endangered Rays Living in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea?

Solving this biodiversity mystery could reveal one of the most important sites to conserve these “rhinos of the sea.”

“We saw two swimming past our canoe the other day as we came to shore!”

“Yes, we saw one over towards the mangroves not so long ago…”

“There was one in our net near the big river…”

Scientists love having a mystery to solve and gathering clues to find out if something is real or not. Since January 2019 my organization, the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been collecting evidence to confirm whether highly endangered sawfish and their relatives — the wedgefish, guitarfish and giant guitarfish (collectively and affectionately known as “rhino rays”) — live in the coastal waters of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea.

Sawfish and their rhino ray relatives — all cousins of sharks — are some of the most threatened species on Earth due to their slow growth, vulnerability to capture in fisheries, and high value in international trade. Recent studies indicate that Papua New Guinea is (together with northern Australia and the southeastern United States) one of the last few strongholds for sawfish populations, making the country a global priority for shark and ray conservation.

Currently sawfish and rhino rays have been well documented along the southern shores and adjacent river systems of Papua New Guinea, and also in the Sepik River, which drains into the Bismarck Sea on the northern coast of the mainland. Sawfish have also been documented in several other provinces in the country, yet no official records exist in New Ireland Province.

Until now.

A Unique Site

The southwestern Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea is known for its renowned biodiversity, much of which lives nowhere else in the world. But that amazing animal and plant life is often both understudied and under threat.

This holds true in New Ireland.

The many islands of New Ireland Province, located in the Bismarck Archipelago, support coral reefs, mangroves, estuaries and tidal lagoons — typical habitats for rhino rays and sawfish. Some 77% of New Ireland’s human population also lives in the coastal zone, where they’re highly reliant on fish and other marine resources for food, livelihoods and traditional practices. Local communities also own most of this coastal zone through customary tenure systems, which may have been in place for centuries.

Human pressure, including population growth, could threaten potential sawfish and rhino ray populations unless sufficient management is in place — but local cooperation will be key to such action.

Surprising Surveys

Over the past year and a half, WCS has conducted interviews in New Ireland’s coastal areas. Part of the interviews involved showing images of each sawfish, wedgefish and guitarfish species, allowing respondents to identify what they saw. To date residents from 49 communities reported that they had seen sawfish and rhino rays in their local waters. There were 144 separate sightings reported by 111 respondents, which comprised 23 sawfish, 85 wedgefish and 36 guitarfish and giant guitarfish. Roughly half the respondents stated they had seen sawfish or rhino rays either often or sometimes.

Sightings map
Papua New Guinea occupies the western half of New Guinea and is the largest of the South Pacific Island nations. The uplifted reefs, limestone terrain and adjacent islands that form New Ireland Province comprise the north-easterly region of Papua New Guinea. From January 2019 to March 2020, fisher key informant surveys were conducted in coastal communities in western New Ireland Province to determine whether sawfish and rhino rays were observed within the customary waters of each community. A total of 144 sightings were made, including 85 wedgefish (blue), 36 guitarfish and giant guitarfish (green) and 23 sawfish (red) sightings. Source: WCS.

When asked if the animals were targeted by local fishers, more than half the respondents said no: The animals were mostly caught accidentally. Only 9% of the sighted sawfish and rhino rays were reported to have been purposefully caught.

Respondents also provided information on where, and in what condition, they had seen the animals: 77% were seen alive, 10% at the market and 2% entangled in nets.

The results suggest that while sawfish and rhino rays are in the region, they are not a key fishery commodity, which is promising news for developing conservation approaches.

Sawtooth rostrum
Large-tooth sawfish (Pristis pristis) rostrum, beside a ruler, which was harvested by local community fishers from the Tigak Islands that lie to the west of mainland New Ireland. This rostrum measured nearly 30 inches in length. Photo: Elizah Nagombi/WCS.

Further Evidence Needed

While physical and objective data has been lacking — I’m still waiting to see one of these animals in the water, myself — we have confirmed evidence of two large-tooth sawfish (Pristis pristis) in the region (two sawfish beaks, also known as rostra, have been found in community villages since this study began), and we’ve received reports of additional sightings.

WCS also conducted baited remote underwater video surveys (BRUVS) in 14 locations in the region in 2019-20, following a 2017 BURVS deployment by FinPrint in western New Ireland Province.

Collectively the BRUVS documented 13 species of sharks and rays, including wedgefish (which have also been photographed by local dive operators), but no sawfish.

Wedgefish
Wedgefish in New Ireland Province: documented by BRUVS during the FinPrint project (left) and by scuba divers (Dorian Borcherds, Scuba Ventures) (right)

But with that success, we’re expanding our search. Over the next 12 months, a further 100 BRUVS will be deployed in areas with a sandy seafloor, where wedgefish and giant guitarfish often rest. Because sawfish typically live in estuaries — where water is often murky — BRUVS will not work due to the poor visibility of the water. In these areas gillnets that have been carefully positioned in river outlets by trained local community members will be monitored for sawfish that may be present. If any sawfish are present in the nets, they will be documented and carefully released.

Opportunities for Conservation

Despite the vulnerability of sawfish and rhino rays — with five of the ten documented species in Papua New Guinea classified as critically endangered — there are currently no protection laws in place. However, since 2017, WCS has worked with over 100 communities in New Ireland Province to establish the country’s largest network of marine protected areas.

The MPAs have been developed through a community-first approach, with extensive local outreach, engagement and education. In that way WCS has been actively informing local residents about the biology, threats and management opportunities for sawfish and rhino rays. We anticipate that new laws to protect and manage these endangered animals will be incorporated into the management rules for the new MPAs.

outreach poster
Example of education and outreach materials produced by the WCS team. This poster presents management methods that can be used by community residents to help manage sawfish and rhino ray populations in their customary waters.

While the mystery as to whether sawfish and rhino ray populations are alive and well in PNG has largely been solved, they are still rare and in need of additional conservation efforts. We hope that this work will help bring awareness and conservation action to these highly threatened species — and make sure they don’t become mythical creatures of the past.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In Part, That’s a Good Thing.

An increase in calls and wildlife rescues means people are paying more attention to nature. That’s an opportunity to learn about animal behavior — and save lives.

Molly Craig’s day begins with feeding hungry baby birds at 6 a.m. The birds need to be fed every 15 minutes until 7 at night. If she’s not feeding them, other staff at the Fox Valley Wildlife Center in Elburn, Illinois take turns helping the hungry orphans.

When the center’s resident birds, opossums, squirrels and other wildlife aren’t being fed, cleaned or cared for, Craig, Fox Valley’s director of animal care, finds herself trying to answer the seemingly ceaseless stream of calls from concerned citizens who’ve come across a hapless animal and don’t know what to do about it.

“Phones have been ringing off the hook,” she says.

Fox Valley and other wildlife rehabilitation centers across the country have seen a large increase in calls from the public since coronavirus-lockdown orders took effect in March. Wildlife Rescue League in Virginia, a help line that gives advice or directs callers to local rehabbers, reports their calls have increased by 62% compared to last year, with staff now fielding more than 50 a day.

In any other year, this increase in volume wouldn’t surprise rescue centers. Spring is the normally their busiest season. It’s when birds make their spring migrations, snakes and bears come out of hibernation, and many animals time their mating behaviors to produce young as the days get warmer. This means people can encounter fledgling birds hopping on the ground, fawns lying still alongside a trail, or baby cottontail rabbits curled up in the grass. To humans they appear to be orphaned, when in fact the parents are usually keeping a watchful eye nearby or gathering food. Injuries also increase this time of year as lawnmowers nick rabbit nests, young squirrels fall out of trees, and birds encounter domestic cats or fly into windows.

“People have a tendency to panic,” says Beth Axelrod, president of the board of directors at the Wildlife Rescue League. “They feel empathy for an animal that they think is in need, which is good, but that puts them into panic mode, and they feel like they want to get this animal help right away.”

But this year things have shifted into overdrive. The pandemic has changed our normal routines — more people are spending time outside and becoming aware of the wildlife in their backyards or local parks.

It’s not that there are more orphaned or injured animals, it’s that people are paying more attention.

“People are home, they’re bored, they’re looking out the window, they’re going on walks, they’re actually paying more attention, or they have the time to look an animal up and find out where it’s supposed to go, “ says Melissa Anahory, programs and operation assistant at Woodlands Wildlife Refuge in Pittstown, New Jersey.

Woodlands Wildlife Refuge has taken in 250 more animals than this time last year. At Fox Valley, they’re up 1,000 animals. Several rehabbers I reached out to for this article were unavailable for interviews because they were so overwhelmed with constant animal intake and care.

 

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One of our latest releases. #opossum #wildliferehabilitation

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Wildlife rehabilitators in big cities aren’t experiencing the same surge in calls as their more suburban or rural counterparts. Downtown Washington, D.C. is seeing fewer calls than its surrounding counties. In Manhattan, Jerry Basford, a volunteer and board member at the Wild Bird Fund, says he isn’t surprised. “Fewer cars on the road means fewer pigeons getting hit.”

What did surprise Basford, though, was the increase in donations. Both online and onsite donations have doubled.

“We thought our donations were really going to dry up,” he says. “You know, people out of work, et cetera. And it’s been just the opposite. It almost seems like people really want to do something.”

People who bring animals to wildlife rehabilitators tend to become donors, explains Anahory. This year that means the more animals that come in, the more donations they receive to help rehabilitation centers stay open during the pandemic.

Beyond donating money, volunteerism is on the rise — or at least, the desire to volunteer. The Woodlands Wildlife Refuge, Wildlife Rescue League and the Owl Moon Raptor Center in Boyds, Maryland, have all seen an uptick in requests to volunteer. Jaci Rutiser, a longtime volunteer at Owl Moon, says there have been so many requests to help since the start of the pandemic that they’ve had to start a waitlist.

Unfortunately, for wildlife rehabilitation centers, the threat of COVID-19 has meant cutting volunteers and limiting the amount of staff that can be present at the same time. Many wildlife rehabilitators who are licensed to practice in their homes have shut down their operations because the risk of exposure to illness is too great. The animals that would normally go to them are now going to the centers that have remained open.

This places additional stress on workers and volunteers. Axelrod says a typical summer was already demanding, with up to 30 calls a day. “So having over 50 calls a day is even more challenging.”

Craig points out that a lot of the calls Fox Valley receives are from people who don’t understand normal wildlife behavior — and that means more opportunity for education.

“Most of our calls are from people finding animals in their yard or out on nature walks,” she says. “And since so many more people are doing those things right now, we’re getting a lot more of those kinds of calls. A lot of them we’re able to give advice over the phone, and the advice is typically, that’s a natural behavior. Leave it be.”

The pandemic may be unprecedented in our experience, but experts says this desire to do more follows patterns we’ve seen during other tumultuous times. Alison Cawood, marine ecologist and citizen science coordinator at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, notes that big changes such as elections or natural disasters often inspire spikes in people wanting to do something bigger than themselves, whether it’s reporting a species on a citizen science app or calling a wildlife rehabilitator about an injured animal.

“When things are more stressful, I think a lot of people want to do something to help,” she says. “You can’t fix whatever the big thing is, but here are these things that you can do. You can help the environment.”

What happens next? As many states ease lockdown restrictions, and as summer turns to fall, wildlife rehabilitators expect they’ll soon experience a well-earned reprieve from tending to baby animals and answering continuous phone calls. But this period — and rehabbers’ efforts — could leave a lasting impact. Thanks to them, many people will be returning to work or classrooms better informed about the wildlife that exists around them.

And those concerned citizens and rehabilitators may emerge from this first perilous chapter of the pandemic knowing that, because of their attention, thousands of animals have been given a second chance at life.

Previously in The Revelator:

Rehabilitating Injured Wildlife Taught Me to Look at Both Life and Death

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The Informal Blue Economy: East Africa’s Silent Shark Killer

Subsistence, artisanal and small-scale fisheries represent a previously unrecognized threat to many protected shark and ray species.

Gunter Pauli famously developed his Blue Economy concept, a global business model for marine resource use, based on the principles of using local resources in a responsible manner and injecting money back into the local economy. This has been widely applied to fisheries around the world. Yet because much of the world’s fish is caught by foreign vessels and consumed thousands of miles from capture sites, Pauli’s locally focused concept is not that simple in our globalized economy and world fisheries (and COVID-19 reminds us that globalization is not always positive).

Such fishery products are neither local nor low-cost. They carry the burden of big input costs (often requiring financial subsidies) and take away potential food and income from local communities. Furthermore, (over)fishing linked to these international operations has already caused major declines in fish populations globally. Nevertheless, fishing remains central to the Blue Economy plans of many nations.

As this concept continues to grow, and as the world celebrates television’s Shark Week, we have an important question: How will global Blue Economy plans treat sharks and rays?

Healthy ecosystems (upon which fishers rely) depend on sharks and rays fulfilling their ecological roles as apex and meso-predators. Furthermore, because they grow slowly and produce few offspring, few shark and ray species are resilient to fishing pressure. Despite this many species are caught as bycatch or targeted for meat, fins or other lucrative products. As a result a quarter of all shark and ray species globally face the threat of extinction. This makes sharks and rays very poorly suited to Blue Economies built around fishing.

We see this clearly in East Africa, where the Western Indian Ocean contributes significantly to world fisheries, including 13% of reported global shark catches from 2003-2018, according to data compiled by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Many of these species are threatened and listed on one or more global conservation conventions, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). Few are legally protected in this region.

Hammerhead
Scalloped hammerhead shark (IUCN critically endangered) constitute significant proportions of artisanal catches in East Africa. Photo: Christelle Razafindrakoto © WCS

But there are other fishing sectors, which often slide under the radar. Subsistence, artisanal and small-scale fisheries operate across much of the globe and, despite their relatively informal operations, provide critical sources of income and protein for millions of people in coastal areas, particularly in developing nations. But what impact are they having on fish stocks, and how does this compare to industrial fisheries?

In most cases we simply don’t know, because many such fisheries are poorly regulated and their catches are poorly monitored.

Fishermen
Fishermen in Tanzania. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)

However, where such fisheries are being monitored, emerging data reveal that some contribute significantly to national catches. In Mozambique, for example, catch reconstructions indicate that artisanal and subsistence fishers may be catching as much as three times the industrial sector, suggesting that total catches are being grossly underestimated.

These fisheries therefore play a major role in the overall fisheries of many countries and contribute enormously to peoples’ income and food security.

In the process these fisheries also contribute to an economy we might describe as “informal” because they’re barely monitored or regulated. At the same time, these operations form part of a highly organized and efficient network that has informally “unlocked” local marine resources.

We might call this the Informal Blue Economy, the Blue Economy’s not-so-little cousin — and it has a staggeringly large impact on sharks and rays.

wedgefish
Near full-term bottlenose wedgefish (IUCN critically endangered) removed from a large pregnant female, landed in a coastal fishery in East Africa. Photo: Faki Haji © WCS

Thanks to an increase in monitoring of these Informal Blue Economy fisheries in recent years, we now know that in East Africa subsistence, artisanal and small-scale fisheries catch many threatened shark species. Longlines and gillnets set in shallow areas catch a diversity of ray species, including endangered mobula rays and guitarfishes, and critically endangered wedgefishes.

There appears to be a targeted fishery for critically endangered hammerhead sharks in northeast Madagascar. Targeted fisheries likewise appear to exist in Tanzania and Kenya for pelagic sharks, including vulnerable silky sharks, endangered mako and thresher sharks, and critically endangered oceanic whitetip sharks — all of which are CITES-listed and heavily affected by industrial fisheries.

Of the 27 CITES-listed shark and ray species that occur in the region, at least 20 are caught and killed in these fisheries. In some places juveniles and pregnant females form significant components of the catches, compounding the challenge of these species’ slow reproductive rates.

The emerging data reveal that an Informal Blue Economy operates along the East African coastline, where it very efficiently catches and kills sharks, rays and other species. Until recently, this has gone largely unrecorded. To go back to Pauli, while these informal fisheries are using local resources and injecting money back into the local economy, this is not being done in a responsible manner.

Thanks to this new understanding, this problem has started to attract attention on national and international levels. Our colleagues at WCS have been working with government and local partners to achieve a better Blue Economy and ensure that sharks and rays are appropriately and sustainably managed. We look with optimism to seeing progress on shark and ray conservation as a result in the coming years.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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For Species That Rely on Wind, Climate Change Won’t Be a Breeze

Plants that depend on wind for pollination or seed dispersal may face challenges as warming temperatures force species to shift their ranges, according to a new study.

Warming temperatures on land and in the water are already forcing many species to seek out more hospitable environments. Atlantic mackerel are swimming farther north; mountain-dwelling pikas are moving upslope; some migratory birds are altering the timing of their flights.

Numerous studies have tracked these shifting ranges, looked at the importance of wildlife corridors to protect these migrations, and identified climate refugia where some species may find a safer climatic haven.

“There’s a huge amount of scientific literature about where species will have to move as the climate warms,” says U.C. Berkeley biogeographer Matthew Kling. “But there hasn’t been much work in terms of actually thinking about how they’re going to get there — at least not when it comes to wind-dispersed plants.”

Kling and David Ackerly, professor and dean of the College of Natural Resources at U.C. Berkeley, have taken a stab at filling this knowledge gap. Their recent study, published in Nature Climate Change, looks at the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change.

It’s an important field of research, because while a fish can more easily swim toward colder waters, a tree may find its wind-blown seeds landing in places and conditions where they’re not adapted to grow.

Kling is careful to point out that the researchers weren’t asking how climate change was going to change wind; other research suggests there likely won’t be big shifts in global wind patterns.

Wisps of cottongrass blows in the wind
Cottongrass blows in the wind at the edge of Etivlik Lake, Alaska. The plant is a sedge with wind-dispersed seeds. Photo: Western Arctic National Parklands, (CC BY 2.0)

Instead the study involved exploring those wind patterns — including direction, speed and variability — across the globe. The wind data was then integrated with data on climate variation to build models trying to predict vulnerability patterns showing where wind may either help or hinder biodiversity from responding to climate change.

One of the study’s findings was that wind-dispersed or wind-pollinated trees in the tropics and on the windward sides of mountain ranges are more likely to be vulnerable, since the wind isn’t likely to move those dispersers in the right direction for a climate-friendly environment.

The researchers also looked specifically at lodgepole pines, a species that’s both wind-dispersed and wind-pollinated.

They found that populations of lodgepole pines that already grow along the warmer and drier edges of the species’ current range could very well be under threat due to rising temperatures and related climate alterations.

“As temperature increases, we need to think about how the genes that are evolved to tolerate drought and heat are going to get to the portions of the species’ range that are going to be getting drier and hotter,” says Kling. “So that’s what we were able to take a stab at predicting and estimating with these wind models — which populations are mostly likely to receive those beneficial genes in the future.”

That’s important, he says, because wind-dispersed species like pines, willows and poplars are often keystone species whole ecosystems depend upon — especially in temperate and boreal forests.

And there are even more plants that rely on pollen dispersal by wind.

“That’s going to be important for moving genes from the warmer parts of a species’ range to the cooler parts of the species’ range,” he says. “This is not just about species’ ranges shifting, but also genetic changes within species.”

Kling says this line of research is just beginning, and much more needs to be done to test these models in the field. But there could be important conservation-related benefits to that work.

“All these species and genes need to migrate long distances and we can be thinking more about habitat connectivity and the vulnerability of these systems,” he says.

The more we learn, the more we may be able to do to help species adapt.

“The idea is that there will be some landscapes where the wind is likely to help these systems naturally adapt to climate change without much intervention, and other places where land managers might really need to intervene,” he says. “That could involve using assisted migration or assisted gene flow to actually get in there, moving seeds or planting trees to help them keep up with rapid climate change.”

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Sharks: Imperiled, Maligned, Fascinating

A collection of our best articles and essays about some the world’s most at-risk groups of species — and what we can learn from them.

Here at The Revelator, we love a good shark story.

The problem is, there aren’t all that many good shark stories. According to recent research, sharks and their relatives represent one of the world’s most imperiled groups of species. Of the more than 1,250 known species of sharks, skates, rays and chimeras — collectively known as chondrichthyan fishes — at least a quarter are threatened with extinction.

That’s just what we know so far. About half of all shark species have a conservation status of “data deficient,” meaning we have no idea how well they’re doing or whether they’re at risk.

But that’s why it’s so important to tell stories about sharks. They’re our lens into issues like conservation, ocean protection, overfishing, coastal development, wildlife trafficking and so much more. And as frequently maligned species — Jaws, anyone? — sharks also help us to understand our relationship with predators that may seem scary but don’t really pose much of a threat.

Sharks also give us an opportunity to talk about people — the people living near them, the people harming them, the people who rely on them, and most importantly the experts working to understand and conserve them.

And honestly, sharks are just fascinating. They come in all manner of shapes and sizes; often boast amazing behaviors; serve important roles in their ecosystems; and have wide and varied reproductive strategies — some of which make them more vulnerable to exploitation. Oh, and most of them look pretty cool (although there are a few oddities in the bunch — we’re talking about you, goblin sharks).

So let’s keep talking about sharks — whether it’s during Shark Week or the other 51 weeks of the year.

With that in mind, we’ve collected our best essays and articles about sharks and related conservation issues (and we’ll add to this list as we go along). Check them out below:

Speaking of Shark Week:

Film Fakery: Does Shark Week Harm Conservation Efforts?

Big Questions:

Are We Ready for Shark Conservation to Succeed?

Sharks and Fisheries:

How to Protect Sharks From Overfishing

Florida Anglers Are Targeting Endangered Sharks

Fishing for Fun? It Has a Bigger Environmental Impact Than We Thought

Fins from Protected Shark Species Still Heavily Traded

‘Essential’ But Unprotected: How the United States Fails Its Most Important Fish Habitats

The Informal Blue Economy: East Africa’s Silent Shark Killer

How the United States Must Help Sharks Around the World

Sharks and the Extinction Crisis:

Found But Lost: Newly Discovered Shark May Be Extinct

A Chance to Save the ‘Rhinos of the Sea’

Shark Quest: Are the World’s Most Endangered Rays Living in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea?

What Losing 1 Million Species Means for the Planet — and Humanity

The Extinction Crisis is Here. How do We Keep from Feeling Overwhelmed?

Broader Ocean and Conservation Issues:

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

How Do You Protect a Species You Can’t See?

Here’s Our Best Opportunity to Save the Oceans — and Ourselves

Coral in Crisis: Can Replanting Efforts Halt Reefs’ Death Spiral?

What Are the Biggest Challenges for Saving the Oceans?

Empowering Communities to Save the Ocean

Something Fishy: Toxic Plastic Pollution Is Traveling Up the Food Chain

Trump’s Offshore Oil Plan: Like Nothing the Country Has Ever Seen

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Can Cities Go Zero-waste? One Japanese Town Tried

Kamikatsu famously declared its goal was to go waste-free by 2020, but it didn’t quite get there. Their experience shows we can’t move further without systemic changes.

One of the many unfortunate outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic has been the quick and obvious increase in single-use plastic products. After COVID-19 arrived in the United States, many grocery stores prohibited customers from using reusable bags, coffee shops banned reusable mugs, and takeout food with plastic forks and knives became the new normal.

Despite recent scientific evidence that reusables don’t transmit the virus, the plastic industry has lobbied hard for a return to all things disposable plastic. Inevitably, a lot of that plastic will continue to flow into our environment.

While COVID-19 has certainly thrown a wrench into the hard-earned progress we’d been making in reducing waste, eliminating plastic pollution entirely was always going to be challenging — with or without a pandemic. The jarring rise of single-use plastics is an expedited version of a familiar trend. Plastic production has been steadily increasing for quite some time.

As a zero-waste advocate, I’ve seen how the tsunami of plastic continuously being produced and flooding our planet has made achieving zero-waste goals incredibly difficult. The sheer amount makes it hard to safely and efficiently dispose of plastic, no matter how hard we try.

But as I examine the problem, and search for solutions, I keep coming back to one noteworthy example.

In 2003 the small Japanese town of Kamikatsu set an ambitious zero-waste declaration, aiming to be 100% waste-free by 2020. The goal was to produce no trash, meaning everything from food packaging to unwanted clothing to yesterday’s newspaper should be reused, repurposed into new goods, or recycled.

Now that 2020 has arrived, we can see the result: In the 17 years since establishing its goal, Kamikatsu transitioned from openly incinerating all its trash to reusing and recycling 80% of its waste.

While the town made incredible progress, it ultimately fell short of its 100% goal. Its main issue? Unrecyclable plastic packaging and mixed materials still end up in the trash.

As one resident explained to the AFP news agency last year, “Our lifestyle depends mainly on plastic. Consumers can reduce plastic waste to a certain extent, but we’ll still have waste if producers keep making plastic products.”

Kamikatsu Yuki Shimazu
Kamikatsu, Japan. Photo: Yuki Shimazu (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This reveals a worldwide truth: Even products made mostly from easily recyclable materials like paper, aluminum or cardboard can’t be sorted and recycled if they contain plastic components that can’t be separated.

The truth is, some materials simply aren’t recyclable, and only 9% of all the plastic ever created has been recycled. As Kamikatsu’s residents have painstakingly proven, no matter how many categories consumers sort their waste into or how diligently they scrub down their plastic food containers, most plastics cannot be recycled.

Meanwhile we keep hearing the industry-driven narrative that recycling can stop plastic from choking our marine life or littering our natural places. That’s intentionally misleading.

Around the world, as in Kamikatsu, plastic is everywhere. With excessive amounts of plastic products and packaging stocked on store shelves, it’s clear that zero-waste goals cannot be achieved by consumers alone. Plastic is not a “zero waste” material, so in order to achieve zero waste, companies must stop making so much plastic.

marine debris
Marine debris collected at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Photo: NOAA

We can achieve that. The first steps include banning some of the worst and most polluting single-use plastics, placing a pause on the development of new plastics facilities, and protecting state and local governments’ ability to enact more stringent regulations.

We must also shift the paradigm by holding producers responsible for the waste they create. By requiring new plastic products to contain recycled plastic and making producers fund the collection and recycling of plastic products, producers would be incentivized to design longer lasting products that can actually be reused and recycled.

These goals — outlined in numerous scientific studies and advocacy reports — have some forward motion. In the United States, a federal bill was recently introduced in both the House and the Senate, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. If passed this bill — or others like it on the local, state or national levels — could help move the world beyond single-use plastics and make that needed systemic change a reality.

The bill hasn’t moved forward since it was introduced this past February, but the world is still on a deadline. A recent study published in the journal Science looked at rising levels of plastic production and said “coordinated global action is urgently needed to reduce plastic consumption, increase rates of reuse, waste collection and recycling, expand safe disposal systems and accelerate innovation in the plastic value chain.”

Requiring producers to stop making nonrecyclable products designed to be thrown out is the first step toward achieving that goal. Only then will Kamikatsu and other towns, cities and countries around the world finally be able to eliminate plastic pollution and reach 100% zero waste.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Conservationists Have a New Tool to Save Parasites From Extinction

Parasites play a vital role in a healthy ecosystem, yet modern conservation techniques often do more harm than good. We propose a solution.

The modern wave of species losses that scientists have dubbed the sixth mass extinction threatens to unravel complex ecosystems, irrevocably alter our biodiversity, and endanger the survival of humanity.

From the largest elephants to the smallest fleas, tens of thousands of species are now hurtling toward extinction.

Among the most vital of these, believe it or not, are parasites.

Although parasites are small and sometimes maligned, they’re incredibly important. A healthy parasite community is an indication of a healthy, balanced ecosystem, and many species play key roles in keeping their native habitats functioning properly. Some roundworms mediate competition between host species to help maintain higher levels of biodiversity. Certain tapeworms bioaccumulate toxic pollutants, such as heavy metals, and in doing so protect their hosts and wider ecosystems from harmful effects. New pharmaceuticals are even being developed from the saliva of ticks.

Clearly parasites have benefits to both humanity and nature, and their loss could have serious consequences.

But the first step in halting the global extinction crisis is determining which species are declining, and this can be tricky. The IUCN, which manages the Red List of Threatened Species, has established methodologies to determine a species’ conservation status, but this system works badly for parasites, largely because it wasn’t developed with invertebrates in mind.

One example is population size. Take a rare bird species that only has 500 individuals left, and a pinworm species that lives on those birds that consists of 10,000 individuals. Based on those numbers alone, the bird species would probably be viewed as more threatened. However, if those 10,000 pinworms only occurred in five of the 500 birds, then the pinworms would likely be much more vulnerable to extinction because the loss of that handful of birds could wipe them out.

Stelis subemarginata
Stelis subemarginata, a rare bee species and a nest parasite of the bee genus Osmia. Photo by Brooke Alexander/USGS

Another challenge of conserving parasites is that, due to their small size and high species diversity, they often need to be killed to be identified and monitored. Obviously, killing a declining species to monitor it isn’t an ideal conservation strategy.

As a parasitologist focusing on rare, threatened and potentially extinct parasite species, I’ve often been struck by these problems, especially the need to kill a parasite population. And, like others, I wondered if there was a solution.

My colleagues Allen C.G. Heath and Pedro Cardoso and I have now provided a solution to the problem of viably assessing and conserving parasites, which we’ve presented in our new study in the journal Biological Conservation.

Our framework — which we call the Conservation Assessment Methodology for Animal Parasites (CAMAP) — starts by acknowledging the potential for host-specific parasites to become co-endangered, or even go extinct, when their hosts decline.

After that it outlines seven key criteria scientists can use to determine whether a parasite species should be considered threatened, endangered or critically endangered. These include geographic range, the number of infected hosts, the decline of host species, the rate of decline, and the conservation status of host species.

Our model also establishes goals conservationists can use to collect the most important information to determine a species’ conservation status and outlines what they can do if that data is not yet available.

Most importantly, this framework allows conservationists to less obtrusively survey parasite populations without wiping them out completely. Now, instead of having to try and collect, kill and identify as many parasites as possible to work out what’s going on with the population, we can instead sample a designated subset of the host population to address a parasite’s conservation needs.

And those needs are stronger than ever. In recent times we’ve lost a range of parasites, from fleas to flukes, to factors as varied as invasive species and our growing appetite for seafood. Some, such as the New England medicinal leech, have been lost for now and may yet be found and saved. And some, such as the Manx shearwater flea and Heath’s tick, are certainly still with us and urgently need conservation action.

heath's tick
Heath’s tick. Photo credit: Mackenzie L. Kwak

Every extinction, including the loss of a parasite, is a species lost that we will never get back. With each extinction the carefully balanced tower of species that makes up our biome becomes more unstable and at risk of collapse. Yet until now conservationists have lacked the tools to assess Earth’s diverse parasite fauna and save it. Our model may finally provide the necessary mechanism to do so — and perhaps avert further extinctions before more of these vital, often ignored species vanish from the ecosystems that depend on them.

The authors have also made the paper detailing their framework available for download through ResearchGate.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Why We Should Care About Parasites — and Their Extinction

The Long-lost Frogs Found in a Remote Ecuadorian Reserve — and the Threat That Could Wipe Them All Out

Scientists have rediscovered the endangered Mindo glassfrog, which hasn’t been seen in decades. And it’s just one of many remarkable species they’ve found in an at-risk habitat.

One of the world’s rarest, most beautiful and least-seen frogs has been rediscovered — thanks, in part, to a scientist’s parasitic infection.

Two years ago a team of scientists arrived in Ecuador’s Río Manduriacu Reserve, an astonishingly lush and biodiverse canyon that’s the only known habitat for the critically endangered Tandayapa Andes toad (Rhaebo olallai). The researchers had planned a series of night surveys in the hopes of documenting the breeding behavior for the rare toad, which had been rediscovered there in 2012.

But after the first few night surveys, one of the researchers — conservation biologist Scott Trageser, president of the Tucson-based Biodiversity Group — decided he needed to stay behind. He hadn’t been feeling well, he recounts, and was too fatigued to participate. Instead, he thought he’d look around a stream close to the team’s base camp, where the toads had previously been easy to observe.

He couldn’t find any toads, though. And despite his fatigue — which he later learned was caused by undiagnosed internal parasites that were “slowly ravaging my soul and body” — he continued his quest late into the evening, trekking over “some rather precarious waterfalls” in the process.

Soon an unexpected animal call reached his ears. He looked around and saw a tiny male frog of a species he didn’t recognize. It had yellow-green skin, bulging red eyes and a translucent abdomen. The calls continued: The frog was actively calling for mates.

Mindo glassfrog
The Mindo glassfrog. Photo: Scott Trageser. Used with permission.

Trageser carefully picked up the colorful, one-inch-long frog and placed him in a bag with some water and foliage, then continued looking for toads for almost the whole night.

He arrived back at base camp at 7 a.m., collapsed for four hours, then woke up and eagerly opened the bag and showed its contents to his colleagues.

And blew their minds.

They knew exactly what it was: a Mindo glassfrog (Nymphargus balionotus). The last time anyone had observed the species was 2005, when just a single male was found. Before that it had gone unseen since 1984.

They couldn’t believe their eyes.

“Upon opening the bag and realizing what species he had just found — it’s unmistakable, if you’re familiar with the few photos that existed at the time — our team exploded with excitement,” says biologist Ross Maynard, Ecuador program director for The Biodiversity Group. The team had already discovered another new-to-science species of glassfrog on the same expedition, so this made two amazing findings. (The team published its research on the other species, Nymphargus manduriacu, named after the reserve, last year.)

Three further surveys conducted in 2019 revealed more Mindo glassfrogs in three different streams within the reserve. The researchers observed several females — another scientific first, as all previous observations had been males. They also found metamorphs and two egg masses — proof that the frogs not only existed there but were actively breeding.

Mindo glassfrog
Photos from the paper showcase the Mindo glassfrog’s translucent skin, especially its abdomen, through which you can see its internal organs. Used with permission.

The researchers (including Trageser, who got over his infection) published the news of their rediscovery last month in the journal Amphibian & Reptile Conservation and say the species should be considered endangered.

And the entire reserve could use more protection.

A Hidden Eden

With less than four square miles of protected land under its wings, about 40% of which is owned by locals, the remote Río Manduriacu Reserve isn’t particularly large. But a heck of a lot of wildlife lives among its abundant vegetation, free-flowing creeks and cascading waterfalls.

“To highlight our findings on just the herpetofauna, the reserve can claim to harbor the only known extant populations of four frog species,” Maynard says. They’ve also now documented “two novel frog species that have been formally described, 24 total species listed by the IUCN as being threatened with extinction, and numerous records substantially expanding the known range of various species.”

The reserve also serves as important habitat for several previously unknown orchid, a variety of birds and numerous mammals, including six feline species and the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps).

And that’s not all: Maynard reports that a team led by zoologist Jorge Brito has discovered a new mammal species on the reserve, which represents an entirely new genus. (That research is still working its way through the scientific publishing process.)

That’s not bad for a reserve that didn’t even exist until a few years ago.

“My family and I came across the property by chance,” says Sebastián Kohn, executive director of Fundación Cóndor Andino (the Andean Condor Foundation), which manages the reserve with the EcoMinga Foundation. “The previous owner of one of the plots is an old family friend. By chance we talked about the place and decided to take a look. At the time access to the properties was a lot harder — at least six to eight hours walking — so we didn’t even see them up close before purchasing. We knew they had good forest and immediately fell in love with the Manduriacu River. The price was so cheap that we decided we couldn’t pass on the opportunity to purchase and conserve the forest, even though we still had no idea of its conservation significance.”

That significance quickly became evident when Kohn and other researchers rediscovered the Tandayapa Andes toad there in 2012. The finding helped to inspire the formal push to turn the land into a reserve in 2017.

Mindo glassfrog
The many faces of the Mindo glassfrog. Used with permission.

But the land and its rare residents still aren’t completely secure. Cattle pastures east and south of the reserve have encroached on the forest, and miners have tried to illegally access the property. Mining and deforestation have boomed in Ecuador in recent years, spurred by 2016 deregulation that opened 13% of the country to mining exploration and made it easier for foreign companies to acquire concessions. An open-pit copper or gold mine situated in the canyon could easily send detritus and mercury flowing downhill, where it would pollute the watershed and harm wildlife, as has happened in other parts of the country.

“Sadly, this would all but guarantee the extirpation of the local populations of threatened species documented at the reserve,” says Maynard.

Luckily the local community of 200-300 people, living a couple of miles south of the reserve, opposes mining, in no small part because the researchers and EcoMinga Foundation have spent so much time developing personal relationships and financial-empowerment initiatives. As the researchers report in their paper: “During an attempt by the mining company to access [the reserve] in August 2019, community members came together to assert their position that mining personnel will no longer be able to bypass the necessary lines of communication and documentation to access either the reserve or their private property.”

International forces could also come into play. The mining company that illegally entered the reserve is a subsidiary of BHP Billiton, which has a local alliance with Conservation International and is part of the United Nations Environment Programme’s PROTEUS program, which supports the international development of biodiversity information. “Both partnerships demand that BHP has to protect endangered species and their habitats,” Maynard points out. “Therefore, in our view, if either of these relationships are to maintain credibility in light of the data we are reporting, BHP must abandon their interests within the canyon.”

The Protection of People

In addition to standing up against corporate interests, the researchers and community members have also developed a mutual appreciation for local wildlife.

“Much of the community is nearly as excited about the biodiversity of the reserve as we are, especially the kids,” Maynard says. The conservationists have even provided interested residents with cameras to document the wildlife they encounter. “There are already around a dozen amphibian and reptile species that we’re aware of in the canyon strictly from either community members or EcoMinga staff sending us photos — a perfect example of how science benefits from engaging and including the help of locals.”

Resisting the lure of mining jobs will probably remain an issue in a place that doesn’t have many other options for income. That’s why the foundations continue working to develop alternatives to the people around the reserve. “In the end, they want what most people want: to earn a living for their families and to appreciate the land around them,” he says. “The solution to protecting the reserve is by finding sustainable jobs for community members that serve as alternatives to destructive practices such as mining or cattle ranching.”

As part of that effort, Maynard says, EcoMinga has hired an aspiring naturalist from the community, Jimmy Alvarez, as part of its staff. “These are the types of actions that I believe will lead to long-term conservation success: training and hiring locals to be part of the solution while earning a salary.”

Work Still to Be Done (After the Pandemic)

The research team still has a few more publications and species assessments pending from their previous expeditions, and they’re getting ready for more — eventually.

“Once the pandemic has been tempered, we absolutely look forward to continuing our efforts at the reserve,” Maynard says. “Our data suggests there are plenty more species to be documented in the canyon, and we also hope to develop research projects in collaboration with our partners to better understand the mysterious life histories of these poorly understood species.” They still need to find out more about how the Tandayapa Andes toads reproduce and deposit their eggs, and they don’t know why the Mindo glassfrog is thriving in the reserve but not elsewhere nearby, or much about its behavior. For example: Why do they deposit their eggs on the underside of leaves, unlike all other glassfrogs in the genus that lay them on top, and do they engage in combat like other species in the genus?

“The questions one can ask are endless,” Maynard says. “As my wife often points out, I’d rather be in that canyon than anywhere else, any day, anytime.”

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Porcupines Face a Poaching Crisis — and It’s All Because of What’s in Their Stomachs

New research indicates a growing online trade in porcupine bezoars — a ball of inedible material that sometimes gathers in their digestive tracks.

A porcupine’s diet is wide, varied, and a little hard to digest. A lifetime of grasses, herbs, bark and other vegetation can leave little bits of indigestible matter behind in a porcupine’s digestive tract, where they occasionally congeal into a hard ball called a bezoar.

That sounds uncomfortable, but a porcupine’s health probably doesn’t suffer due to the presence of this undigested mass in its stomach or intestines — that is, not until humans come along.

For centuries people have valued these rare “stones” or “dates,” as they’re sometimes called, for their purported healing abilities. Bezoars have been used to “treat” everything from fevers to diabetes and even cancer.

Bezoar use even creeps into popular fiction: the stones are an ingredient for protective spells in the Harry Potter universe.

The medicinal claims are equally fiction: there doesn’t appear to be any veracity to bezoar use to treat illnesses. Yet despite the lack of evidence, the trade in bezoars has persisted. Not only that, it appears to be increasing.

A study published recently in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation tracked, for the first time, the online trade in old-world porcupines (those from the family Hystricidae in Asia and Africa). The researchers examined e-commerce sites in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for four months in 2019, where they found active for-sale listings for 443 individual bezoars and a large variety of powdered products. Based on the weight of the powders, and the assumption that they might have contained other ingredients, the researchers estimate this translated to at least 680 and as many as 1,300 bezoars. (The researcher ignored “out of stock” listings and more dubious sites, such as one that claimed to have 2,000 tons of product on hand.)

bezoar
A bezoar and typical medical claims, posted to Instagram. Screen grab July 24, 2020.

Previous research has suggested that bezoars only grow in an incidentally small portion of the porcupine population, so the total number of animals killed to accumulate that quantity for sale could conceivably have been in the tens of thousands.

And since the study didn’t look at the e-commerce sites every day, it probably uncovered only a portion of the total trade.

This paper calls for more study about this issue and additional conservation actions to protect porcupines. Currently the various species enjoy some national-level protection but precious little on the international level, because they’re still perceived as relatively common. In fact, most old-world porcupine species currently appear on the IUCN Red List as either “least concern” or “data deficient.” Only the Philippine porcupine (Hystrix pumila) is listed as “vulnerable to extinction.” None are currently protected by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species.

Should that change? While the authors acknowledge the limitations caused by their study’s short time frame and their inability to examine and verify the nature of the bezoars (some of which could have come from other animals or been counterfeits), they still uncovered an alarming level of trade. The authors warn that “current trade levels are likely unsustainable, and we predict that porcupine species may become threatened in the future should current trade levels continue.”

And while some porcupines are farmed, this study indicates pressure on wild porcupines, which also face threats from habitat destruction and the bushmeat trade, as well as persecution as agricultural pests. It suggests a need to protect certain populations which fetch higher prices due to their purported purity. The study quotes one popular website: “The most valuable for the porcupine bezoars are procured from … the rainforest of Indonesia or Borneo. The porcupines here eat unpolluted herbs that have high medicinal value causing the bezoars … to be of the rarest and highest value. The price is very high and has collection, medicinal and stockpiling value.”

In many ways this isn’t surprising. The bezoar trade has been around for centuries, and it isn’t restricted to southern Asia. The paper notes that Europeans in the 16th to 19th centuries, who sometimes wore the stones as jewelry, valued porcupine bezoars so much they priced each one “as high as forty times its own weight in gold.”

Bezoars today don’t fetch quite that amount, but the study still found them selling for around $151 a gram — two and a half times the current price of gold — all for a useless clump of congealed, inedible food.

Too bad we don’t value a living porcupine half that much.

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Harmful Algal Blooms Are on the Rise — Here’s Why Stopping Them Is So Hard

More frequent, longer-lasting blooms can harm both wildlife and human health — and even kill. Can we learn to predict and prevent them?

From the fall of 2017 to the beginning of 2019, Florida endured a persistent and damaging algal bloom caused by the algae Karenia brevis, also known as red tide. The blooms formed in both Gulf and Atlantic waters, sickening people, killing birds, fish, dolphins, manatees and other marine animals, and driving visitors away from beach towns.the ask

Scientists say it’s a problem that’s going to get worse — and not just in Florida. Harmful algal blooms, which can occur in both fresh and marine waters, are becoming more frequent, lasting longer, and occurring in more places. In recent weeks news reports have warned residents in western New York, Utah and California to stay out of rivers and lakes clouded with these microscopic organisms that can sometimes be fatal to people, pets and wildlife.

To be clear, not all algae are dangerous. In fact the vast majority are beneficial to ecosystems. They’re the base of the marine and aquatic food webs, providing nutrients for fish and shellfish, which in turn feed other animals — including people. They also produce half of our oxygen.

“But a small handful of these organisms are harmful,” says phytoplankton ecologist Pat Glibert of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

We spoke with Glibert about this tiny — but dangerous group — of algae, why they’re becoming more problematic, and what we can do to protect people and ecosystems.

When algae are deemed to be harmful, what is it that they’re harming and how?

University of Maryland phytoplankton ecologist Pat Glibert. Photo: Courtesy of Pat Glibert

Some algae can grow to levels that just create a nuisance. They can overwhelm the system and when they die, their decomposition uses up oxygen, causing dead zones in the sea or fresh waters.

In the case of red tides — named because they visibly color the water a red or sometimes brownish color — their growth reduces the light penetration in the water. So the organisms that live near the bottom, such as sea grasses, are harmed, and the organisms that depend on that bed of grass in the water are also harmed.

But some of these species actually make toxins that can cause fish kills or harm to other marine organisms. And they can also cause harm for humans when we consume the fish or shellfish that has consumed these organisms.

These harmful algal blooms can occur all over. What are the regional differences in the kind of algae and their potential harm?

In marine waters we are primarily concerned with a group of organisms called dinoflagellates. And in fresh waters, the major organisms of concern fall in a category called cyanobacteria. They make very different toxins and have very different effects both environmentally as well as with regard to human health.

The freshwater toxins are concerning for a number of reasons. On initial exposure one may have a skin rash or something uncomfortable that’s relatively mild. But they can get into drinking water and, over a long period of exposure, they are tumor promoters. We know liver cancer is associated with these toxins, and there’s increasing evidence that the freshwater toxins can also be associated with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or ALS. There’s a lot of work going in right now to understand that relationship.

In marine waters we’re typically exposed to toxins through shellfish. The shellfish themselves are not affected by these toxins because a lot of them affect the nervous system and shellfish don’t have a nervous system. But shellfish can accumulate the toxin. One of the diseases that we are very concerned about comes from saxitoxin, which is most common if one is eating mussels. It’s from the dinoflagellate Alexandrium and it can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning. It results in respiratory paralysis. With a high enough dose people do die.

A different toxin is the Florida red tide. That toxin can become aerosolized. If people breathe that sea spray at the beach it can cause respiratory distress, including coughing. Many people can end up going to the hospital, but people aren’t likely to die from it. The other thing that many of the toxins cause is an upset stomach that may take a couple of days to get over, but people do recover.

What about the effects on wildlife?

That depends on the species of algae. But some things like Karenia brevis in Florida are indiscriminate killers. Fish, turtles, manatees are all affected.

dead fish on beach
Dead fish on the shore of Padre Island as a result of a harmful algal bloom. Photo: Terry Ross, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In California there’s a toxic diatom species, Pseudo-nitzschia, and it seems to affect sea lions and other large marine organisms. They tend to show symptoms very similar to epilepsy and disorientation. Death is one end point, but there are many other impacts on these organisms as well.

What’s driving the growth of these harmful algal blooms?

We certainly know that blooms are increasing in frequency, in geographic extent, and in duration in many parts of the United States and the world. A lot of this is due to the fact that we are polluting these waters with nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from the land.

Nutrient pollution can come from wastewater, whether it’s discharged from municipal sewage treatment plants or from septic systems. We don’t always do an adequate job, in many places, of removing those nutrients.

That’s one source. A second is runoff from fertilizer application, particularly from agricultural use, but we use a lot of these fertilizers on our lawns, golf courses and gardens as well.

And then there’s the waste from concentrated animal feeding operations, whether it’s chickens or pigs or dairy. A lot of that waste is either held in lagoons and ultimately spread on land. Or it goes into the atmosphere and then comes down with rain. So these operations themselves are highly concentrated sources of pollution that end up in waterways.

The other issue is that the climate is changing. Waters are getting warmer. Many organisms grow better when waters are warmer. That’s true for some of these [algae] species.

But because of climate change we’re also seeing changes in precipitation. We’re having more storms in some areas, more hurricanes, and because the atmosphere is now warmer, when those hurricanes do develop, they are often holding more moisture. So hurricanes become wetter. That means that the rain that comes with these storms washes more of these nutrients into the sea.

What can we do to reduce these blooms?

This is a very difficult problem to solve. The ultimate solution is to try to reduce nutrients that are winding their way into our fresh and marine waters.

At a personal level, we can reduce the amount of nutrient fertilizer we put on our own lawns, but the pollution that comes from the concentrated animal operations, from municipal sewage and from crop agriculture are the big issues that we have to solve. And they’re going to be very difficult to solve because we have to continue to grow our food.

There are approaches that people are taking to try to address blooms at the time that they occur, methods to apply various products to reduce the bloom. There is some success in applying clay to the surface of the water that causes the dinoflagellates to fall to the bottom of the bay or estuary. But those are very localized solutions.

aerial image of bloom across river
Aerial photo of an algal bloom in Virginia’s James River near the Monitor-Merrimack Bridge. Photo: Wolfgang K. Vogelbein, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The other approach that we are taking is to build mathematical models of when and why and where a bloom may occur and use that as an early warning system. So we may not be able to solve the problem, but at least we can protect human health or seafood resources before a problem occurs.

There are also a number of exciting areas of research. One is my own, which focuses on understanding these organisms from their physiology — how they obtain their nutrients, how they make toxins, why they make toxins. How is nutrient pollution related to not only growth of the algae but production of their toxin?

Also the other area that I think is so exciting is really pulling all of these factors together in building predictive models and using models to ask questions of “what if we did this, what would it show”? Or “what if we did that, what would be that effect”? We’re making great progress, but the problem is still a very large one.

Has our response to the problem matched the scale of what’s needed and the urgency of the issue?

It always seems to be in the forefront at the time there’s a bloom. And then as soon as that bloom subsides, the public interest and the interest in solving the problem go away.

Clearly we need more money to address issues of nutrient pollution. We need to upgrade sewage treatment plants. We need to address the fact that so much of the country still depends on septic systems or very small “package plant” [treatment systems] that do nothing to reduce nutrients.

The issue of concentrated animal waste is enormous because the animal waste isn’t treated and does make its way into the environment by land or sea or atmosphere, and ultimately gets discharged into waterways.

We need more attention on those issues. We need more attention on developing preventative measures. We need to have more approaches to protect human health from these events because they are going to be increasing.

The outlook is for more blooms and longer blooms in more places if we don’t address all of these problems of nutrient pollution and climate change collectively.

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