By Randy Shore | Vancouver Sun | March 24, 2010

Mussels grown in experimental multi-species fish farms not only consume waste, they can provide an additional revenue stream to producers (Photograph by: handout, Vancouver Sun)

New designs for fish farms could keep them in the ocean and help restore damaged marine environments at the same time, says a biologist working on a five-year nationwide aquaculture project.

Marine biologists in New Brunswick and in B.C. are employing mussels, oysters, sea cucumbers, urchins and seaweed to dramatically increase the amount of food created by salmon farms, and they believe they can extract excess carbon and nitrogen pollution from the sea in the process.

Taking the aquaculture industry onto land could be a missed opportunity to do the Earth some good and help mitigate the impacts of global warming, according to Thierry Chopin, a marine biologist at the University of New Brunswick. Nitrogen from agricultural sources contributes to oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, resulting in huge dead zones in which nothing can grow. Fixing and storing carbon is believed to be key to fighting global warming.

“We have to think of extractive species as having a cleansing function in the ecosystem,” Chopin explained.

Read on: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/fish+farming+could+help+environment/2722656/story.html

(Image: Igor Semiletov, University of Alaska Fairbanks)

Prodigious plumes of planet-warming methane are bubbling from sediments across a broad region of Arctic seafloor previously thought to be sealed by permafrost, new analyses indicate. The resulting increase of methane gas in the atmosphere may accelerate climate warming, scientists say.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/fears-of-undersea-methane-leaks-already-coming-true/

By Michael Tennesen | Scientific American | February 23, 2010

CONTINENTAL CREEP: Hypoxic seawater from the deep ocean is moving into shallower near-shore environments off the Oregon coast, threatening or killing marine species that make their home there. (iStockPhoto)

The hypoxic seawater is distinct from the well-known “dead zones” that form at the mouths of the Mississippi and other rivers around the world. Those areas result from agricultural runoff, which lead to algae blooms that consume oxygen. Rather, the Pacific Northwest problem is broader and more mysterious.

Read on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=low-oxygen-ocean-coastal

Not your typical sushi chef. Not your typical sushi. (Photo by Phu Son Nguyen of sushiday.com)

Growing up in small-town Montana, two things just made no sense: vegetarians and sushi. Why eat tofu, or raw fish, when you could just as easily have a big juicy steak? Coming from generations of cattle rancher stock, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s ringing defense of vegetarianism, Eating Animals, with trepidation. But the only beef I ended up having with Foer was that he ruined my ability to enjoy the raw and the rolled—right after I had moved to sushi paradise, Seattle.

“Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across,” Foer writes. At current rates of fishery depletion, scientists predict the demise of most seafood by 2048.

Foer describes modern fishing as warfare. Hajime Sato has a similar take: “[It’s] like someone is beating somebody and I’m just walking by and noticing it but not doing anything about it.”

Read on: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-29-a-seattle-chef-proves-that-traditional-sushi-and-healthy-oceans/

In Playa Junquillal, Costa Rica, so-called leatherback boys carry newly hatched turtles in baskets to the ocean, where the freed turtles make a dash for the water. Photo Credit: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

PLAYA GRANDE, Costa Rica — This resort town was long known forLeatherback Sea Turtle National Park, nightly turtle beach tours and even a sea turtle museum. So Kaja Michelson, a Swedish tourist, arrived with high expectations. “Of course we’re hoping to see turtles — that is part of the appeal,” she said.

But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/science/earth/14turtles.html

In this photo taken Oct. 30, 2009, Research Director for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Andrew DeVogelaere paddles his kayak at the sanctuary in Monterey, Calif. Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases. (AP Photo/John Helprin)

These foragers of the sanctuary’s frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California’s coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification.

“We’re having a change in water chemistry, so 20 years from now the system we’re looking at could be affected dramatically but we’re not really sure how. So we see a train wreck coming,” said Andrew DeVogelaere, the sanctuary’s research director, while out kayaking this fall with a reporter in the cold waters.

Read on: http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1501ap_climate_blue_carbon.html?source=rss