Using hydrophones to eavesdrop on a reef off the coast of Goa, India, researchers have helped advance a new low-cost way to monitor changes in the world’s murky marine environments.

Reporting their results in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), the scientists recorded the duration and timing of mating and feeding sounds – songs, croaks, trumpets and drums – of 21 of the world’s noise-making ocean species.

With artificial intelligence and other pioneering techniques to discern the calls of marine life, they recorded and identified

• a medium sized “grunter,” loudest at dusk, Terapon theraps (photo, right, at eol.org/media/15232663l audio https://bit.ly/41LQmn);
• fish of the Sciaenidae family (audio: https://bit.ly/3KWtawy);
  choruses of plankton-eating fish species (audio: https://bit.ly/3oAsGo5); and
• snapping shrimp (audio: https://bit.ly/3mTQ0gd), including commercially-valuable tiger prawns.

Some species within the underwater community work the early shift and ruckus from 3 am to 1.45 pm, others work the late shift and ruckus from 2 pm to 2.45 am, while the plankton predators were “strongly influenced by the moon.”

Also registered: the degree of difference in the abundance of marine life before and after a monsoon.

The paper concludes that hydrophones are a powerful tool and “overall classification performance (89%) is helpful in the real-time monitoring of the fish stocks in the ecosystem.”

The team, including Bishwajit Chakraborty, a leader of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), benefitted from archived recordings of marine species against which they could match what they heard, including:

• A cacophony of spawning tiger perch: (audio: https://bit.ly/3LkZYkj), and
• Snapping shrimp (audio: https://bit.ly/41NZWH2), whose sounds baby oysters reportedly like to follow
• Also captured was a “buzz” call of unknown origin (https://bit.ly/3GZdRSI), one of the oceans’ countless marine life mysteries.

A contribution to the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, the research will be discussed at an IQOE meeting in Woods Hole, MA, USA, 26-27 April.

Advancing the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS)

That event will be followed April 28-29 by a meeting of partners in the new Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS), a major legacy of the decade-long IQOE, ending in 2025.

GLUBS, conceived in late 2021 and currently under development, is designed as an open-access online platform to help collate global information and to broaden and standardize scientific and community knowledge of underwater soundscapes and their contributing sources.

It will help build short snippets and snapshots (minutes, hours, days long recordings) of biological, anthropogenic, and geophysical marine sounds into full-scale, tell-tale underwater baseline soundscapes.

Especially notable among many applications of insights from GLUBS information: the ability to detect in hard-to-see underwater environments and habitats how the distribution and behavior of marine life responds to increasing pressure from climate change, fishing, resource development, plastic, anthropogenic noise and other pollutants.

“Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an effective technique for sampling aquatic systems that is particularly useful in deep, dark, turbid, and rapidly changing or remote locations,” says Miles Parsons of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and a leader of GLUBS.

He and colleagues outline two primary targets:

• Produce and maintain a list of all aquatic species confirmed or anticipated to produce sound underwater;
• Promote the reporting of sounds from unknown sources
  Odd songs of Hawaii’s mystery fish

In this latter pursuit, GLUBS will also help reveal species unknown to science as yet and contribute to their eventual identification.

For example, newly added to the growing global collection of marine sounds are recent recordings from Hawaii, featuring the baffling

• Mystery fish
• 1 (audio: https://bit.ly/3LjHDUJ),
• 2 (audio: https://bit.ly/3UW24u0), and
• 3 (audio: https://bit.ly/3KWtVpo), now part of an entire YouTube channel (https://bit.ly/3H5Ly54) dedicated to marine life sounds in Hawaii and elsewhere (e.g. this “complete and total mystery from the Florida Keys”: https://bit.ly/41w1Xbc (Annie Innes-Gold, Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology; processed by Jill Munger, Conservation Metrics, Inc.)

Says Dr. Parsons: “Unidentified sounds can provide valuable information on the richness of the soundscape, the acoustic communities that contribute to it and behavioral interactions among acoustic groups. However, unknown, cryptic and rare sounds are rarely target signals for research and monitoring projects and are, therefore, largely unreported.”

The many uses of underwater sound

Of the roughly 250,000 known marine species, scientists think all fully-aquatic marine mammals (~146, including sub-species) emit sounds, along with at least 100 invertebrates, 1,000 of the world’s ~35,000 known fish species, and likely many thousands more.

GLUBS aims to help delineate essential fish habitat and estimate biomass of a spawning aggregation of a commercially or recreationally important soniferous species.

In one scenario of its many uses, a one-year, calibrated recording can provide a proxy for the timing, location and, under certain circumstances, numbers of ‘calling’ fishes, and how these change throughout a spawning season.

It will also help evaluate the degradation and recovery of a coral reef.

GLUBS researchers envision, for example, collecting recordings from a coral reef that experienced a cyclone or other extreme weather event, followed by widespread bleaching. Throughout its restoration, GLUBS audio data would be matched with and augment a visual census of the fish assemblage at multiple timepoints.

Oil and gas, wind power and other offshore industries will also benefit from GLUBS’ timely information on the possible harms or benefits of their activities.

Other IQOE legacies include:

• Manta (bitbucket.org/CLO-BRP/manta-wiki/wiki/Home), a mechanism created by world experts from academia, industry, and government to help standardize ocean sound recording data, facilitating its comparability, pooling and visualization.
• OPUS, an Open Portal to Underwater Sound being tested at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany to promote the use of acoustic data collected worldwide, providing easy access to MANTA-processed data, and
• The first comprehensive database and map of the world’s 200+ known hydrophones recording for ecological purposes

Marine sounds and COVID-19

The IQOE’s early ambition of humanity’s maritime noise being minimized for a day or week was unexpectedly met in spades when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

New IQOE research to be considered at the April meeting includes a paper, Impact of the COVID‑19 pandemic on levels of deep‑ocean acoustic noise (https://bit.ly/3KZTaIt) documenting a pandemic-related drop of 1 to 3 dB even in the depths of the abyss. With a 3 dB decrease, sound energy is halved.

Virus control measures led to “sudden and sometimes dramatic reductions in human activity in sectors such as transport, industry, energy, tourism, and construction,” with some of the greatest reductions from March to June 2020 – a drop of up to 13% in container ship traffic and up to 42% in passenger ships.

Other IQOE accomplishments include achieving recognition of ocean sound as an Essential Ocean Variable (EOV) within the Global Ocean Observing System, underlining its helpfulness in monitoring

• climate change (the extent and breakup of sea ice; the frequency and intensity of wind, waves and rain)
• ocean health (biodiversity assessments: monitoring the distribution and abundance of sound-producing species)
• impacts of human activities on wildlife, and
• nuclear explosions, foreign/illegal/threatening vessels, human activities in protected areas, and underwater earthquakes that can generate tsunamis

The Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) funded an IQOE Working Group in 2016, which quickly identified the lack of ocean sound as a variable measured by ocean observing systems. This group developed specifications for an Ocean Sound Essential Ocean Variable (EOV) by 2018, which was approved by the Global Ocean Observing System in 2021. IQOE has since developed the Ocean Sound EOV Implementation Plan, reviewed in 2022 and ready for public debut at IQOE’s meeting April 26.

One of IQOE’s originators, Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University’s Programme for the Human Environment, says the programme has drawn attention to the absence of publicly available time series of sound on ecologically important frequencies throughout the global ocean.

“We need to listen more in the blue symphony halls. Animal sounds are behavior, and we need to record and understand the sounds, if we want to know the status of ocean life,” he says.

The program “has provided a platform for the international passive acoustics community to grow stronger and advocate for inclusion of acoustic measurements in national, regional, and global ocean observing systems,” says Prof. Peter Tyack of the University of St. Andrew’s, who, with Steven Simpson, guide the IQOE International Scientific Steering Committee.

“The ocean acoustics and bioacoustics communities had no experience in working together globally, and coverage is certainly not global; there are many gaps. IQOE has begun to help these communities work together globally, and there is still progress to be made in networking and in expanding the deployment of hydrophones, adds Prof. Ausubel.

A description of the project’s history and evaluation to date is available at https://bit.ly/3H7FCbN.

Encouraging greater worldwide use of hydrophones

According to Dr. Parsons, “hydrophones are now being deployed in more locations, more often, by more people, than ever before,”

To celebrate that, and to mark World Oceans Day, June 8, GLUBS recently put out a call to hydrophone operators to share marine life recordings made from 7 to 9 June, so far receiving interest from 124 hydrophone operators in 62 organizations from 29 countries and counting. The hydrophones will be retrieved over the following months with the full dataset expected sometime in 2024.

They also plan to make World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring (WOPAM) Day an annual event – a global collaborative study of aquatic soundscapes, salt, brackish or freshwater – the marine world’s answer to the U.S. Audubon Society’s 123-year-old Christmas Bird Count.

Interested researchers with hydrophones already planned to be in the water on June 8 are invited to contact Miles Parsons (m.parsons@aims.gov.au) or Steve Simpson (s.simpson@bristol.ac.uk).

* * * * *

Media coverage highlights

BBC, UK (522 million) Future Planet: The people eavesdropping on the ocean https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230815-how-undersea-sounds-help-us-understand-ocean-life

UK Press Association via The Daily Mail (83,490,174), Scientists eavesdrop on underwater creatures to gain insights on ocean life https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-12016539/Scientists-eavesdrop-underwater-creatures-gain-insights-ocean-life.html

Agencia EFE, Spain, via Forbes Mexico (2.84 million) La inteligencia artificial se pone a escuchar los hábitos de la vida marina
(Artificial intelligence listens to the habits of marine life)
https://www.forbes.com.mx/la-inteligencia-artificial-se-pone-a-escuchar-los-habitos-de-la-vida-marina/

Meteoweb, Italy (966,000)
Anche i pesci rispondono alla Luna: lo studio
(Even fish respond to the moon: the study)
https://www.meteoweb.eu/2023/04/pesci-rispondono-luna/1001234154/

Vice / Motherboard, USA (23,547,525) Scientists Recording Ocean Sounds Picked Up a Mysterious ‘Buzz’ They Can’t Identify
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjdqb/mysterious-ocean-buzz-soud

Visão – Sapo newswire, Portugal Investigadores ‘ouvem’ zumbido estranho no fundo do mar (Investigators hear strange sounds at the bottom of the sea) https://visao.sapo.pt/exameinformatica/noticias-ei/ciencia-ei/2023-04-27-investigadores-ouvem-zumbido-estranho-no-fundo-do-mar/

Yahoo! News Taiwan, Taiwan (10,753,841)海底魚蝦也會發聲？ 科學家號召全球加入水下生物聲音圖書館計畫 (Will fish and shrimp also speak? Scientists call on the world to join underwater biological sound library programs) here

ORF Online, Austria (7,397,979) Unterwassermikrofone belauschen FischeUnderwater microphones eavesdrop on fish https://science.orf.at/stories/3218981/

MSN France, France (244,797) Dans l’océan Indien, des sons non identifiés intriguent les scientifiques (In the Indian Ocean, unidentified sounds intrigue scientists) https://www.msn.com/fr-fr/actualite/technologie-et-sciences/dans-loc%c3%a9an-indien-des-sons-non-identifi%c3%a9s-intriguent-les-scientifiques/ar-AA1argbx

Down To Earth, India (713,481)Sonorous submarine: Technology used to study fish in Goa can help find how sea life responds to climate change  https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/sonorous-submarine-technology-used-to-study-fish-in-goa-can-help-find-how-sea-life-responds-to-climate-change-88987

Gazete Duvar, Turkey (7,313,044)
Okyanusta tanımlanamayan bir ‘vızıltı’ keşfedildiAn unidentified ‘buzz’ was discovered in the ocean https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/okyanusta-tanimlanamayan-bir-vizilti-kesfedildi-haber-1615486

Futurezone, Germany (1,076,142)Ozean: Forscher zeichnen rätselhaftes Geräusch auf – niemand hat es je zuvor gehört (Ocean: Researchers record puzzling sound – nobody has ever heard of it before) https://www.futurezone.de/science/article448822/ozean-forscher-zeichnen-raetselhaftes-geraeusch-auf-niemand-hat-es-je-zuvor-gehoert.html

Coverage summary in full: click here

News release in full, click here

The Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has recommended developing a factual record to explore factors contributing to the near-extinction the vaquita porpoise – the world’s smallest cetacean and rarest marine mammal – in the Gulf of California in Mexico. 

The recommendation responds to a submission on Enforcement Matters under Chapter 24 of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA/CUSMA) filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Animal Welfare Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Investigation Agency. 

The submitters assert that “the Mexican government is failing to effectively enforce several environmental laws and as a result has caused the near extinction of the vaquita porpoise. Approximately only 10 vaquita remain.” The submitters assert that vaquita populations have been declining over the years due to the use of gillnets to fish for totoaba, an endangered fish threatened by illegal fishing for its swim bladder, which is sold in international markets.

The vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) is the world’s smallest cetacean and the most endangered marine mammal. The vaquita has the smallest range of any whale, dolphin, or porpoise, and only lives in a small 1,500 square-mile area in Mexico’s upper Gulf of California, near the town of San Felipe.

The totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi) is a large, schooling marine fish whose habitat partially overlaps with the vaquita.

According to the submission, Mexico is not effectively enforcing the General Wildlife Law (Ley General de Vida Silvestre) and federal regulations issued between 1975 and 2020 banning totoaba fishing and protecting the vaquita.

In response to the submission, Mexico reported having seized 2,363 totoaba swim bladders, issued fines amounting to roughly US$17.5 million, and recovered 384 nets – 73 km long in all – between September 2019 and September 2021. The Secretariat, however, concluded that there are central questions that remain unanswered regarding Mexico’s enforcement of the relevant laws and orders. 

The CEC Secretariat finds that a factual record could provide information on Mexico’s efforts to enforce the 1975 totoaba ban by imposing sanctions and taking measures to effectively implement the ban; including collecting information on organized groups involved in the illegal fishing, storage, distribution, transportation, and commercialization of the totoaba.

The CEC Secretariat also finds that a factual record could present information on

• Mexico’s efforts to implement the 2015, 2017, and 2020 Gillnets Orders aimed to protect the vaquita, including:
• the permanent ban on gillnet use; the characteristics of agalleras and their effects on marine biodiversity;
• effectiveness of devices or monitoring systems for vessels, and
• the launch and landing sites prescribed by the orders.

A factual record could provide information on sanctions; daily number of vessels and detention by port authorities; actions to address recidivism; net recovery; ongoing surveillance and effectiveness, and policies and programs encouraging the sustainable use of natural resources in the upper Gulf of California.

The CEC Council should vote on whether to authorize the Secretariat to prepare the factual record, normally within 60 working days of receiving the recommendation, by 31 May 2022. 

For more detail, please visit Vaquita porpoise (SEM-21-002 in the CEC’s Registry of Submissions.

CEC Secretariat recommendation in full:

English: https://bit.ly/3v1mJQQ

Spanish: https://bit.ly/3KqZru6

French: https://bit.ly/3v1mJQQ

Annex to the recommendation:

English: https://bit.ly/377xk4M

Spanish: https://bit.ly/3KxQ2B9

French: https://bit.ly/3Jp6WjP

* * * * *

About the Commission for Environmental Cooperation: www.cec.org

Media coverage highlights:

Agencia EFE, Spain, Comisión ambiental aconseja abrir un expediente sobre la vaquita marina

Milenio, Mexico, Bajo T-MEC, piden abrir expediente por omisión ante casi extinción de vaquita marina

Excélsior, Mexico, Órgano del T-MEC ordena abrir investigación a fondo contra México por vaquita marina

La Jornada, Mexico, Recomiendan a México elaborar expediente sobre vaquita marina

Yahoo News Australia, The world’s most endangered animal: Who’s to blame for the vaquita’s demise?

Xinhua, China (Spanish), Autoridad ambiental urgen a México elaborar expediente sobre vaquita marina

Coverage summary in full, click here

News release in full, click here

By assembling and expanding first-ever global audio collection of aquatic life, scientists aim to unveil unidentified swimming objects, monitor diversity, distribution, abundance, and more

Of the roughly 250,000 known marine species, scientists think all ~126 marine mammals emit sounds – the ‘thwop’, ‘muah’, and ‘boop’s of a humpback whale, for example, or the boing of a minke whale. Audible too are at least 100 invertebrates, 1,000 of the world’s 34,000 known fish species, and likely many thousands more.

Now a team of 17 experts from nine countries has set a goal of gathering on a single platform huge collections of aquatic life’s tell-tale sounds, and expanding it using new enabling technologies – from highly sophisticated ocean hydrophones and artificial intelligence learning systems to phone apps and underwater GoPros used by citizen scientists.

The Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds, “GLUBS,” will underpin a novel non-invasive, affordable way for scientists to listen in on life in marine, brackish and freshwaters, monitor its changing diversity, distribution and abundance, and identify new species. Using the acoustic properties of underwater soundscapes can also characterize an ecosystem’s type and condition.

The team’s paper, “Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Biological Underwater Sounds,” is published in the journal “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.”

Says lead author Miles Parsons of the Australian Institute of Marine Science: “The world’s most extensive habitats are aquatic and they’re rich with sounds produced by a diversity of animals.”

“With biodiversity in decline worldwide and humans relentlessly altering underwater soundscapes, there is a need to document, quantify, and understand the sources of underwater animal sounds before they potentially disappear.”

The team’s proposed web-based, open-access platform will provide:

• A reference library of known and unknown biological sound sources (by integrating and expanding existing libraries around the world);
• A data repository portal for annotated and unannotated audio recordings of single sources and of soundscapes;
• A training platform for artificial intelligence algorithms for signal detection and classification;
• An interface for developing species distribution maps, based on sound; and
• A citizen science-based application so people who love the ocean can participate in this project

The wide range of uses for PAM is expanding in step with advances in technology, providing a large volume of easily-accessible data on aquatic life.

Current uses include:

• Monitoring, characterizing and delineating underwater soundscapes
• Investigating aquatic communities
• Documenting distribution and migration patterns of fish, whales, and other marine mammals
• Characterizing marine life responses to changes in, e.g. temperature, salinity or tides, or changes in behavior and distribution in response to climate change, algal blooms, hurricanes and other extreme weather events
• Understanding how prey change their sound production rates or behaviors in the presence of predators
• Observing how human-caused ocean noise pollution – shipping, resource exploration, construction, aircraft or wind turbines, for example – affect aquatic life communication and other behaviors

Many fish and aquatic invertebrate species are predominantly nocturnal or hard to find, the paper notes, making visual observations difficult or impossible. As a result, “PAM is proving to be one of the most effective ways to monitor visually elusive but vocal species in aquatic environments, which can potentially aid in more effective conservation management,” including zoning in marine park areas or fishery closures, the paper says.

Besides making sounds for communication, many aquatic species produce ‘passive sounds’ while eating, swimming, and crawling – often less acoustically complex or distinct than active sounds but important contributions to an ecosystem’s tell-tale soundscape.

“Collectively there are now many millions of recording hours around the world that could potentially be assessed for a plethora of both known and, to date, unidentified biological sounds.”

Says co-author Aran Mooney of the Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Like a biodiverse rainforest, coral reefs are rich with sounds produced by animals as they seek to communicate, defend territories, and attract mates.”

“Biodiversity and our ocean ecosystems are in trouble, with healthy coral reefs declining at alarming rates. This is a problem because reefs provide billions of US dollars in support, in terms of food, protection from storms, and pharmaceutical products. This developing library is a key way to catalog, monitor and track changes in biodiversity on reefs and other ocean habitats before they are gone but also help us define ‘what a healthy reef is’ as we seek to rebuild reefs.”

Adds Jesse Ausubel, a founder of the IQOE and a scientist at The Rockefeller University: “Human song varieties include love and work songs, lullabies, chants, and anthems. Marine animals must sing love songs. Maybe AI applied to the Global Library can help us understand the lyrics of these and many others.”

Example audio, identified species:

1) Growl of the streaked gurnard (Chelidonichthys lastoviza, recorded by Amorim and Hawkings, 2000 (from FishSounds.net; photos: https://bit.ly/3soVka8 and at the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL): eol.org/pages/51109318)

2) Complex ‘boop, grunt, swoop’ call of the Bocon toadfish (Amphichthys cryptocentrus) recorded by Staaterman et al., 2017 and 2018 (from FishSounds.net; photos https://bit.ly/3gxylnR; EOL: eol.org/pages/46565889)

3) Drum sound of the red piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri), recorded by Raick et al., 2020 (from FishSounds.net; photos https://bit.ly/3BaQykv, and at EOL: eol.org/media/2822570)

4) Kina, a sea urchin endemic to New Zealand (description, photo https://bit.ly/3HI6hu2)

5) Paddle crab, endemic to New Zealand (description, photos: https://eol.org/media/3027555

6) “Boing” produced by dwarf minke whales in Western Australia (Balaenoptera acutorostrata); Erbe et al., 2017 (taken from Marine Mammals of Australia and Antarctica).

What on Earth? Recordings of Unidentified Swimming Objects:

1) Chorus of unidentified fish species in the Indo-Pacific, recorded by Pine et al., 2018 (from FishSounds.net).

2) Unidentified fish species, Azores seamounts, recorded by Carriço et al., 2019 (from FishSounds.net)

3) Growl of an unidentified tropical coral reef fish species, recorded by Staaterman et al., 2013 (from FishSounds.net).

4) A fish call recorded off Austrlia’s western coast, the second half of which reminds scientists of “a section of the Hut of Baba Yaga from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.”

* * * * *

“A database of unidentified sounds is, in some ways, as important as one for known sources,” the scientists say. “As the field progresses, new unidentified sounds will be collected, and more unidentified sounds can be matched to species.”

This can be “particularly important for high-biodiversity systems such as coral reefs, where even a short recording can pick up multiple animal sounds.”

Existing libraries of undersea sounds (several of which are listed with hyperlinks below) “often focus on species of interest that are targeted by the host institute’s researchers,” the paper says, and several are nationally-focussed. Few libraries identify what is missing from their catalogs, which the proposed global library would.

“A global reference library of underwater biological sounds would increase the ability for more researchers in more locations to broaden the number of species assessed within their datasets and to identify sounds they personally do not recognize,” the paper says.

“A global database could serve broader questions, like determining universal trends in underwater sound production, while individual, specialized repositories could continue to inform and detail other topics, such as documenting the presence of soniferous species in a particular region.”

The changing ranges of marine life

The scientists note that listening to the sea has revealed great whales swimming in unexpected places, new species and new sounds.

With sound, “biologically important areas can be mapped; spawning grounds, essential fish habitat, and migration pathways can be delineated…These and other questions can be queried on broader scales if we have a global catalog of sounds.”

Meanwhile, comparing sounds from a single species across broad areas and times helps understand their diversity and evolution.

Numerous marine animals are cosmopolitan, the paper says, “either as wide-roaming individuals, such as the great whales, or as broadly distributed species, such as many fishes.”

Fin whale calls, for example, can differ among populations in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and over seasons, whereas the call of pilot whales are similar worldwide, even though their home ranges do not (or no longer) cross the equator.

Some fishes even seem to develop geographic ‘dialects’ or completely different signal structures among regions, several of which evolve over time.

Madagascar’s skunk anemonefish (https://bit.ly/3uA6Bad), for example, produces different agonistic (fight-related) sounds than those in Indonesia, while differences in the song of humpback whales have been observed across ocean basins.

“If the observer knows a target species’ signal characteristics, these sounds may be more easily detected, but without prior knowledge of either presence or structure of sounds, listening through the noise can be difficult,” the paper says.

“This has been highlighted by the recent COVID ‘anthropause’ experienced at various aquatic locations around the world.” Early in the pandemic, “removal of the anthropogenic component of some soundscapes has provided an opportunity to observe sounds (and therefore presence) of marine fauna that might otherwise be lost in the noise.”

Just as artificial intelligence has enabled facial or voice recognition, as well as phone apps that identify music or plants or birds, AI can one day help scientists distinguish marine life sounds from noise. However, a large number – ideally several thousands – of examples are needed, the paper adds.

As the library expands, it can form the foundation for AI training, which in turn will also facilitate the mining and extraction of marine life sounds from thousands of previously collected recordings.

Phone apps, underwater GoPros and citizen science

Much like BirdNet and FrogID, a library of underwater biological sounds and automated detection algorithms would be useful not only for the scientific, industry and marine management communities but also for users with a general interest.

“Acoustic technology has reached the stage where a hydrophone can be connected to a mobile phone so people can listen to fishes and whales in the rivers and seas around them. Therefore, sound libraries are becoming invaluable to citizen scientists and the general public,” the paper adds.

And citizen scientists could be of great help to the library by uploading the results of, for example, the River Listening app (www.riverlistening.com), which encourages the public to listen to and record fish sounds in rivers and coastal waters.

Low-cost hydrophones and recording systems (such as the Hydromoth) are increasingly available and waterproof recreational recording systems (such as GoPros) can also collect underwater biological sounds.

The library would help standardize the format in which sounds are reported.

“A library to archive unknown sounds and their recording times and locations will be crucial for guiding future studies of marine bioacoustics and biodiversity,” the scientists say. “This is especially important in areas that are rarely investigated or where source identification is particularly problematic, such as the twilight and midnight zones, where a description of unknown sounds can give us insights on biodiversity in the deep ocean.”

“The changing environment and decreasing biodiversity are compelling the documentation of baseline acoustic observations. Technical advances associated with data collection and an increasing number of researchers and institutes collecting PAM data are providing the ability to create bioacoustic databases.”

“Concurrently, awareness of the importance of acoustic cues to aquatic fauna, the impacts of noise on them and the potential for acoustic communities to provide an indication of ecosystem health has reached a stage where PAM is becoming appreciated as a mainstream data source across more species and ecosystems than ever.”

“Finally, public interest and access to user applications means citizen scientists can drive widespread knowledge sharing.”

“Now is the time to facilitate that progress by gathering the acoustic, ecological, and bioinformatic community together to realize an aquatic-sounds sharing platform.”

* * * * *

The paper, “Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Biological Underwater Sounds,” evolved from the ‘Working Group on Acoustic Measurement of Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots’ of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, an international program of research, observation and modeling formed to better characterize and understand ocean sound fields and the effects of sound on marine life.

Support for IQOE is provided by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean, Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute, and Rockefeller Program for the Human Environment.

A more detailed discussion, involving a wider network of contributors, is planned through upcoming stakeholder engagement and scoping workshops.

* * * * *

Media coverage highlights:

Wall Street Journal, United States (35,138,925)

1. Listen: Scientists Are Recording Ocean Sounds to Spot New Species, click here
2. Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Master Animal Language, click here

Popular Science, United States (3,505,129) Why ocean researchers want to create a global library of undersea sounds, click here

Agence France Presse, Mysteries and music: listening in to underwater life, click here

The Guardian, United Kingdom, Fish love songs and fighting talk: underwater sound library to reveal language of the deep, click here

BBC World Service, UK, Newshour, click here 

Voice of America, United States, Marine Researchers Collecting Global Symphony of the Sea, click here 

IFL Science, Canada, From Squeaks To Boings: Scientists Plan Global Archive Of The Ocean’s “Underwater Orchestra”, click here

Actu-Environnement, France, Des chercheurs appellent à créer une bibliothèque mondiale de la biophonie sous-marine, click here

Deutschlandfunk, Germany, Bioakustik – Wie Fische und andere Gewässer-Bewohner kommunizieren, click here

ABC News, Australia, Underwater sound library being collated, click here

Schweizer Radio DRS, Switzerland, Muaaah, boong oder gragrag – Was Wassertiere sich erzählen, click here

Mother Jones, United States, Check out these strange aquatic boings, growls, and chatter, click here

InsideClimate News, United States, Warming Trends: The Cacophony of the Deep Blue Sea, Microbes in the Atmosphere and a Podcast about ‘Just How High the Stakes Are’, click here

ABC, Spain, Como zambombas o móviles vibrando: así suenan algunos de los animales marinos más curiosos, click here

Noti-Ultimas, Romania, Canciones de amor de los peces y charlas de lucha: biblioteca de sonidos submarinos para revelar el lenguaje de las profundidades, click here

Tag43, Italy, Dai Pesci al vento, una ricerca racchiuderà tutti i suoni del mare, click here

Nachrichten Welt, Germany, Fischliebeslieder und Kampfgespräche: Unterwasser-Soundbibliothek, um die Sprache der Tiefe zu enthüllen, click here

Klikbulukumba, Indonesia, Lagu Cinta Ikan dan Pembicaraan Pertempuran: Perpustakaan Suara Bawah Air untuk Mengungkapkan Bahasa Terdalam, click here

Natursidan, Sweden, Ny databas ska samla havens ljud, click here

Nederlands Dagblad, Netherlands, Wereldwijde online-bibliotheek van onderwatergeluiden in de maak, click here

Khabar 25, Saudi Arabia, اغاني حب الاسماك والقتال الحديث: مكتبة الصوت تحت الماء لتكشف عن لغة الاعماق | الحيوانات البرية  , click here

In print:

Wall Street Journal

The Guardian  |  18 Feb 2022  |  United Kingdom  |  English  | Page: 31
The Guardian (USA)  |  18 Feb 2022  |  United States  |  English  | Page: 23

Social media posts, click here (highlights: Andrew Revkin, Colombia University, 4 tweets, ~90,000 followers, retweeted by Philippe Cousteau and others.

Full coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here (with links to existing marine sound libraries)

Reducing marine debris by 50-90% and a globe circling, high-tech system of monitors are two essential aims among several championed today by nine distinguished international experts appointed to help the UN reach the goal of a clean ocean by 2030.

The Clean Ocean International Expert Group of the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development will formally present its short list of activities and goals, and a strategy to reach them, in a “manifesto” at the outset of a three-day online conference on achieving a clean ocean, Weds. 17 to Fri. 19 Nov. (https://bit.ly/3EQHRfQ).

Co-Chaired by Angelika Brandt of Germany, a Southern Ocean / Antarctica biodiversity expert, and Elva Escobar Briones of Mexico, a deep sea biodiversity expert, the group concisely outlines “the challenges and some of the opportunities that the Ocean Decade can provide for a Clean Ocean.”

The statement charts the most direct route to a clean ocean citing these objectives for 2030:

* Enlarge understanding of pathways for spread and fates of pollutants

* Reduce and remove top-priority forms of pollution (e.g., marine debris) by large amounts, as much as 50% to 90%

* To prevent recurrence, reduce sources or emission of pollutants (e.g., anthropogenic noise, discarded plastic and harmful chemicals, farming practices adding harmful sediment outflow)

* Improve dramatically the outcomes of control measures (e.g., to decrease amounts of mercury in tuna, die-offs of marine life, eutrophication)

* Improve monitoring (often as part of the Global Ocean Observing System [GOOS]) for more accurate, precise, timely, comprehensive real-time tracing of spills and monitoring of ocean soundscapes; improve systems to provide timely warning of pollutants emerging and increasing

* Identify and accelerate development and adoption of technologies to promote a Clean Ocean. These could range from cleaner, more efficient motors and fuels to new forms of remediation and waste management; better ways to monitor, track, and map marine pollutants and progress toward a clean ocean (such as aerial remote sensing, genomics, and hydrophone arrays); and better technologies for emergency cleanup

* Improve national mechanisms (legal, regulatory) for control and prevention, better align financial incentives, and lift compliance with international treaties

* Lift public engagement and understanding with access to information associated with behavioral shifts favoring the motto of “reduce, reuse and recycle” and encourage participation in citizen science as part of events involving sailing, surfing, and other activities dependent on a Clean Ocean

With such a framework agreed and in place, specific objectives can be identified and efforts activated, with targets and timetables similar in scope and character to next spring’s anticipated world agreement to protect 30% of the marine environment by 2030, and the completion of high-resolution mapping of the seabed, also by 2030.

Interim objectives for 2025

The expert group underlined that, “This process should aim to define and attract financial and other support to meet an initial set of goals for 2025, followed by goals for the end of the Ocean Decade in 2030.”

And they set out examples of nearer term objectives for 2025:

*Quantify the global harm of marine pollution from all major sources on ecosystems and organisms and on human health; assessment methods need to take into account multiple stressors.

* Survey the totality of anthropogenic chemicals flowing into the oceans.

* Define a Clean Ocean, including acceptable levels of pollution to set threshold values, and define ecological boundaries or maximal levels of pollutants as well as their rates of degradation to maintain well-functioning ecosystems; this includes understanding tolerances of species and ecosystems to pollutants.

* Develop a widely shared vision of a Clean Ocean.

* Identify high-priority geographic challenges such as polar regions and urban coasts.

* Identify barriers to action impeding scaling up solutions for regional and global impact; quantify possibilities for amelioration.

* Identify key partners, including those who might be left behind, and provide engagement strategies for early career ocean professionals, indigenous peoples, and island communities.

* Develop reference scenarios for industrialization of the oceans during the next decade, including tourism, seabed mining, windfarm development, for example, as they relate to a Clean Ocean.

* Develop initial estimates of costs associated with transitions to a Clean Ocean.

* Secure major financial commitments.

“By 2030 we want to achieve measurable improvement in monitoring and clear reduction of emissions and harm through a spectrum of technical and behavioral strategies,” the group says.

The three-day on-line conference Nov. 17-19 will highlight more than 30 activities in place or in development around the world that can make important contributions by 2030 to a Clean Ocean.

These include initiatives to:

*Successfully and consistently monitor marine debris from space as part of an Integrated Global Marine Debris Observing System

* Operate deep sea observatories in the Atlantic that document and publicize multiple stressors

* Observe the vast Southern Ocean to give early warnings of possible pollution hot spots in this relatively pristine ocean

* Instrument 30% of coastal city ocean spaces to report on pollution changes including restoration

* Identify and greatly reduce persistent organic pollutants globally.

The manifesto, which presents the signatories’ views and not official positions of their respective institutions, is also directed at other groups such as the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, the Economist magazine World Ocean Initiative, and the World Ocean Council.

The group plans to share its manifesto with other expert groups, national committees, and with endorsed projects and programs of the UN Ocean Decade to speed development of a strong set of Clean Ocean activities.

Says lead author Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University, New York City: “We want this decade to transition from increasing to decreasing the environmental problems of the oceans.”

Clean Ocean International Expert Group

Co-Chairs

• Angelika Brandt, biodiversity of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica; Germany
• Elva Escobar Briones, biodiversity of the deep sea; Mexico

Members

• Frida Armas-Pfirter, marine and coastal law; Argentina
• Jesse Huntley Ausubel, technologies for ocean observing; USA, lead author
• Gina Bonne, environment and climate, Seychelles
• Saskia Brix-Elsig, polar seafloor biology; Germany
• Angelique Songco, marine protected areas; Philippines
• Kaveh Samimi-Namin, coral reef ecosystems; Iran
• Sofia Fürstenberg Stott, maritime industry innovation; Sweden

Links

UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development
www.oceandecade-conference.com/en/program.html

Creating the Ocean We Want
www.oceandecade-conference.com/en/creating-the-ocean-we-want.html

Clean Ocean Laboratory
www.oceandecade-conference.com/en/a-clean-ocean.html

Ocean Decade Factsheet
www.oceandecade-conference.com/files/Factsheet%20Ocean%20Decade.pdf

* * * * *

In full

Manifesto for Clean Ocean 2030
Clean Ocean International Expert Group,
in anticipation of the Ocean Decade Laboratory
A Clean Ocean, 17-19 November 2021
A clean ocean where sources of pollution are identified and removed

Comprising 71% of Earth’s surface, the ocean encompasses remote trackless seas and heavily trafficked harbors. It spans the seafloor through the water column to the sea surface and extends from coastal zones to mid-ocean. The ocean spans habitats from beaches and rocky shores to reefs and canyons and polar and deep seas. AClean Oceanbenefits both humanity and the spectrum of other forms of life ranging from whales and fish to mollusks, corals, and seagrasses with which we share it.Our Manifesto for Clean Ocean 2030 aims to increase circularity of the economy in the face of increasing industrialization of the oceans and promote mobilization to manage ocean pollution at its sources in ways that enable both a profitable Blue Economy and a Clean Ocean.

Ocean Pollutants

Many forms of pollution threaten or already dirty the ocean:

• Debris, including plastics
• Oil and chemical spills and releases from seafloor extraction, pipelines, and shipping
• Runoff of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals from agriculture and both rural and suburban areas
• Sewage and other coastal runoff, including pharmaceuticals, from urban areas and harbors, and associated harmful algal blooms
• Contaminants that, although settled in sediments, can be remobilized by disturbances
• Sewage and other improperly discarded wastes from vessels
• Acute and chronic elevation of noise and light
• Radiation from radioactive materials deposited or discharged into the oceans
• Invasive species and other harmful aspects of bilge and ballast water carelessly released
• Construction debris from platform and island building, spoils from channel dredging and pipe-laying, and derelict facilities
• Abandoned and discarded equipment from ocean navigation and research and military activities

Threats to a Clean Ocean

Pollution in the ocean comes from land-based and atmospheric sources and from the sea itself.

• Land sources include agricultural fertilizers (causing deoxygenation or dead zones), herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and other materials employed in the bioeconomy; micro- and macro-plastics from carelessly used and discarded products; non-metabolized medicines and other drugs from human consumption; detergents and many other chemicals that form parts of urban and industrial metabolism; heavy metals from mining; and brine from marine water desalination.
• Atmospheric sources include greenhouse gases (primarily generated on land) associated with climate change and acidification; forms of sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and other harmful pollutants generated both at sea and on land; noise from aviation and wind farms, and dust from anthropogenic fires.
• Sea sources include spills from extraction, transport, and use of petroleum products; ship sources of waste, including discarded fishing gear and other forms of waste; untreated wastewater from recreational and commercial vessels; deep-sea tailing placements; lubricants and other chemicals from offshore facilities; underwater noise from shipping, mining, fishing, and pile driving; and night-time illumination of vessels and fleets.

Since 1969 the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP) has examined these and other threats to the Clean Ocean and provided authoritative, independent, interdisciplinary scientific advice to organizations and governments to support the protection and sustainable use of the marine environment.

The Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development

Launched in January 2021, theUnited Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development(2021-2030), the “Ocean Decade,” is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for ocean actors across the world to come together to generate knowledge and foster the partnerships needed to support a well-functioning, productive, resilient, sustainable, and inspiring ocean. We propose that the leadership of the Ocean Decade organize Clean Ocean activities in the following way:

• Collect the major Clean Ocean recommendations from the reports of GESAMP and other expert bodies, such as national academies of sciences.
• Consolidate and reduce these and other inputs to a set of not more than ten global goals for a Clean Ocean. New targets and timetables should be similar in scope and character to the Endorsed Recommendations to protect 30% of the marine environment by 2030 and complete the high-resolution mapping of the seabed by 2030.
• Work with the many concerned entities worldwide to coordinate and optimize roles and contributions so the Decade will achieve historic collaborative global objectives for a Clean Ocean.

This process should aim to define and attract financial and other support to meet an initial set of goals for 2025, followed by goals for the end of the Ocean Decade in 2030.

Examples of Clean Ocean objectives for 2025

• Quantify the global harm of marine pollution from all major sources on ecosystems and organisms and on human health; assessment methods need to take into account multiple stressors.
• Survey the totality of anthropogenic chemicals flowing into the oceans.
• Define a Clean Ocean, including acceptable levels of pollution to set threshold values, and define ecological boundaries or maximal levels of pollutants as well as their rates of degradation to maintain well-functioning ecosystems; this includes understanding tolerances of species and ecosystems to pollutants.
• Develop a widely shared vision of a Clean Ocean.
• Identify high-priority geographic challenges such as polar regions and urban coasts.
• Identify barriers to action impeding scaling up solutions for regional and global impact; quantify possibilities for amelioration.
• Identify key partners, including those who might be left behind, and provide engagement strategies for early career ocean professionals, indigenous peoples, and island communities.
• Develop reference scenarios for industrialization of the oceans during the next decade, including tourism, seabed mining, windfarm development, for example, as they relate to a Clean Ocean.
• Develop initial estimates of costs associated with transitions to a Clean Ocean.
• Secure major financial commitments.

By 2025 we aim to identify potential pathways toward solutions for knowing what is manageable. By 2030 we want to achieve measurable improvement in monitoring and clear reduction of emissions and harm through a spectrum of technical and behavioral strategies.

Examples of Clean Ocean objectives for 2030

• Enlarge understanding of pathways for spread and fates of pollutants.
• Reduce and remove top-priority forms of pollution (e.g., marine debris) by large amounts, as much as 50% to 90%.
• To prevent recurrence, reduce sources or emission of pollutants (e.g., anthropogenic noise, discarded plastic and harmful chemicals, farming practices adding harmful sediment outflow).
• Improve dramatically the outcomes of control measures (e.g., to decrease amounts of mercury in tuna, die-offs of marine life, eutrophication).
• Improve monitoring (often as part of the Global Ocean Observing System [GOOS]) for more accurate, precise, timely, comprehensive real-time tracing of spills and monitoring of ocean soundscapes; improve systems to provide timely warning of pollutants emerging and increasing.
• Identify and accelerate development and adoption of technologies to promote a Clean Ocean. These could range from cleaner, more efficient motors and fuels to new forms of remediation and waste management; better ways to monitor, track, and map marine pollutants and progress toward a clean ocean (such as aerial remote sensing, genomics, and hydrophone arrays); and better technologies for emergency cleanup.
• Improve national mechanisms (legal, regulatory) for control and prevention, better align financial incentives, and lift compliance with international treaties.
• Lift public engagement and understanding with access to information associated with behavioral shifts favoring the motto of “reduce, re-use and recycle” and encourage participation in citizen science as part of events involving sailing, surfing, and other activities dependent on a Clean Ocean.

Now is the time for ambitious targets and timetables to elicit the science for the Clean Ocean we want.

* * * * *

Coverage highlights:

Agencia EFE, Spain, via Infobae, Argentina, Expertos piden reducir hasta un 90 % los desechos marinos antes de 2030, click here

Indo Asian News Service, India (via ProKerala.com) Reducing marine debris by 2030: UN panel, click here

SciTech Daily, United States, A Clean Ocean by 2030: UN Experts’ “Clean Ocean Manifesto,” click here

Earth.com, United States, Steps needed to achieve a clean ocean by 2030, click here

中文业界资讯站 (CN Beta), Mainland China, 到2030年实现清洁海洋：联合国专家的“清洁海洋宣言” (Achieving Clean Oceans by 2030: The “Clean Ocean Declaration” of UN Experts), click here

News Track, India, International experts to assist UN in cutting marine debris by 50-90-pc, click here

News release in full, click here

An unprecedented analysis of almost 10,000 Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) events worldwide over the past 33 years was launched today by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

The first-ever global statistical analysis examined ~9,500 HABs events over 33 years and found that the harm caused by HABs rises in step with growth of the aquaculture industry and marine exploitation and calls for more research on linkages.

Conducted over seven years by 109 scientists in 35 countries, the study found that reported HAB events have increased in some regions and decreased or held steady in others. A widely-stated view that HABs are on the rise throughout the world, perhaps due to climate change, isn’t confirmed.

However, the study, “Perceived global increase in algal blooms is attributable to intensified monitoring and emerging bloom impacts,” published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment, creates the world’s first baseline against which to track future shifts in the location, frequency and impacts of HABs, which differ depending on which of the 250 harmful marine algae species is involved and where, requiring assessment on a species-by-species and site-by-site basis.

A public webinar on Global HAB Status Report will take place Tuesday Jun 15, 2021 at 1 PM, Paris time. To register: https://bit.ly/3z3kjCB

Databases mined

The scientists mined both the global Harmful Algae Event Database (HAEDAT), consisting of 9,503 events with one or more impacts on human society, and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) database, containing 7 million microalgal observation records, including 289,668 toxic algal species occurrences.

The study found that regionally-recorded HAB events, after being corrected for higher levels of monitoring effort, have

Increased:

• Central America/Caribbean
• South America
• Mediterranean
• North Asia

Decreased:

• West Coast America
• Australia/New Zealand

No significant change:

• East Coast America
• South East Asia
• Europe

The 9,503 events’ impacts on humans break down as follows:

• 48% involved seafood toxins
• 43% high phytoplankton counts and/or water discolorations with a socio-economic impact
• 7% mass animal or plant mortalities
• 2% caused other impacts (including foam and mucilage production)

(As well, in 11% of events, a single incident had multiple impacts, e.g. both water discoloration and mass mortality)

Of the event records linked to seafood toxins:

• 35% were Paralytic Shellfish Toxins (PST)
• 30% Diarrhetic Shellfish Toxins (DST)
• 9% Ciguatera Poisoning (CP)
• 9% marine and brackish water cyanobacterial toxins
• 7% Amnesic Shellfish Toxins (AST)
• 10% others, including Neurotoxic Shellfish Toxins (NST), Azaspiracid Shellfish Toxins (AZA), and toxic aerosols

By region, the largest number of records came from, in order:

• Europe
• North Asia
• Mediterranean
• The east and west coasts of North America
• Caribbean
• Pacific/Oceania
• Southeast Asia

With more limited data sets for South America, and Australia/New Zealand

All geographic regions were impacted by multiple HAB types, but in varying proportions.

• 50% of regional HAEDAT records in the Caribbean, Benguela, Mediterranean Sea, North and South East Asia related to high phytoplankton density problems.
• Seafood toxins and fish kill impacts dominated in all other regions

Among toxin-related impacts:

• Paralytic Shellfish Toxins (PST) prevailed in North America, the Caribbean, South America, South East Asia, and North Asia
• Diarrhetic Shellfish Toxins (DST) were the most frequently recorded in Europe and the Mediterranean (and are an emerging threat in the USA) Neurotoxic Shellfish Toxins (NST) were confined to the US State of Florida, with a single outbreak also reported from New Zealand
• Human poisonings from Ciguatera were prominent in the tropical Pacific, the Indian Ocean, Australia and the Caribbean.

For the most part, however, the impacts were confined to shellfish harvesting area closures; rarely to human poisonings. The exception: Ciguatera event records are almost exclusively based on medical reports of human poisonings.

HAB events over time

Eight of nine regions used in the study showed increases in reports logged via HAEDAT of harmful events per year, of which six were statistically significant.

The OBIS dataset, meanwhile, generally showed an increase in sampling effort in five of the nine regions.

When all the information was combined, the researchers could find no statistically significant global trend overall.

They also found, however, that aquaculture production increased 16-fold from a global total 11.35 million tonnes of seafood in 1985 to 178.5 million tonnes in 2018, with the largest increases occurring in Southeast Asia and South America/Caribbean and Central America, with North America and Europe stabilising.

The number of recorded harmful algal bloom events over time was strongly correlated with intensified aquaculture production in all regions with data suitable for the study.

However, says lead author Gustaaf M. Hallegraeff of the University of Tasmania: Intensified aquaculture clearly drives an increase in HAB monitoring efforts essential to sustaining the industry and protecting human health.

“And, just as clearly, a secondary effect of aquaculture is nutrient pollution. But a major data gap exists here. Conducting a meta-analysis of HABs vs aquaculture we had data on HAB monitoring efforts using OBIS records as a proxy but data on nutrient pollution is inadequate. The relationship between aquaculture-related nutrients and HABs therefore represents an important direction for further research.”

Greater monitoring efforts

The study revealed

• A 4-fold increase from 1985 to 2018 in observations of organisms mainly responsible for Diarrhetic Shellfish Poisoning (84,392 OBIS records)
• A 7-fold increase in observations of organisms mainly responsible for Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (128,282 OBIS records)
• A 6-fold increase in observations of organisms mainly responsible for Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (9,887 OBIS records)

(Note: Some observations may include non-toxic species or strains.)

In each case, the clear increase in the number of observations of problematic organisms paralleled an increase in records of associated toxic syndrome impacts.

They also found that the presence of toxic HAB species doesn’t always accurately predict cases of human shellfish poisonings, which the study credits to the food safety risk management strategies in many affected countries. Some 11,000 non-fatal events related to Diarrhetic Shellfish Poisoning were reported worldwide, mostly from Europe, South America and Japan, with impacts consisting mostly of shellfish harvesting area closures.

Also, the study says, despite widespread distribution of the responsible algal species, there have been no human fatalities from Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning since the original 1987 incident in Prince Edward Island, Canada (150 illnesses, three fatalities). But ASP-associated mortalities of important marine mammals are of growing concern in Alaska and other parts of western North America, and ASP toxins have been linked to marine mammal calf mortalities in Argentina.

Of the world’s 3,800 human Paralytic Shellfish Poisonings from 1985 to 2018, the largest number (2,555 from 1983 to 2013, including 165 fatalities) occurred in the Philippines, which depends strongly on aquaculture for human food protein.

DNA and other advanced detection methods have improved knowledge of the global distribution of ciguatera- causing organisms. Ciguatera poisonings, rarely fatal but annually affecting 10,000 to 50,000 people, have been decreasing in Hawaii and remained stable in French Polynesia and the Caribbean but constitute a new phenomenon in the Canary Islands.

Farmed fish killed by algal blooms: Largely a human-generated problem.

Aquacultured finfish mortalities account for much greater economic damage than HAB-contaminated seafood. Notes the study: wild marine finfish can simply swim away from blooms but those held captive in intensive aquaculture operations are vulnerable. Recorded losses include US $71 million in Japan in 1972, $70 million in Korea in 1995, $290 million in China in 2012, and $100 million in Norway in 2019.

A 2016 Chilean salmon mortality event caused a record $800 million loss, causing major social unrest.

Again, the presence of fish-killing HAB species doesn’t accurately predict economic losses, the study shows. For example, Heterosigma blooms occur on the west and east coasts of Canada and the US, but fish mortalities are mostly confined to the west coast. In large part, the difference reflects the differences between sites where blooms occur and the relative location and size of aquaculture operations.

A harmful algae species that caused no problems in Australian lagoons killed 50,000 caged fish in Malaysia in 2014. It is now also known in Japan and the Philippines.

The authors note that some troublesome algal species may thrive, others decline, as ocean waters warm and acidify.

Commentary

“There has been a widely-stated contention that HABs worldwide are increasing in distribution, frequency or intensity, so a quantitative global assessment is long overdue,” says lead author Prof. Hallegraeff of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania.

“While some of the HAB literature over the past 30 years has handpicked selected examples to claim a global increase and expansion in HABs, this new big data approach shows a much more nuanced trend,” he adds.

“Our study concludes that the health and economic damages caused by harmful microalgae — seafood poisoning, water discolouration that blights tourism, and the death of finfish in aquaculture operations, for example — differ between regions.”

Adds co-author Adriana Zingone: “We also found that overexploitation acts as a natural multiplier of the effects of HABs, leading to an increase in impacts independent of an actual trend in HABs.”

“It should be noted that over the last 40 years capacity and monitoring efforts to detect harmful species and harmful events have also increased, thus increasing the reporting of harmful events across the world’s seas,” she says.

“The absence of events and decreasing trends, like all negative results, are rarely published. Whether or not HABs are increasing globally, however, their impacts are a growing concern all around the globe.”

Says co-author Henrik Oksfeldt Enevoldsen: “As the human population continues to increase in tandem with resource demands, HABs will predictably constitute a serious threat in terms of seafood safety and security, a hindrance to recreational uses of the sea, and a problem for the tourism industry.”

“Occurrences of harmful species over time and their human impacts can be expected to change locally, regionally and globally alongside the effects that climate, hydrography and human pressure impose on the coastal environment.”

“Understanding the trends and distribution patterns of harmful species and events at multiple spatial and temporal scales will help predict whether, where and when to expect HABs, their frequency and intensity. This knowledge is fundamental for effective management of HABs and to optimise the uses and values of the maritime space in coastal areas.”

Johan Hanssens, Secretary-General Flanders Department of Economy, Science and Innovation, a sponsor of this report, concluded: “This status report is a very timely reminder, at the start of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, that a thorough understanding of natural and ecological processes in the ocean is crucial for the development of the blue economy, now that many coastal countries are turning to the sea for additional resources, including food provisioning. International scientific collaboration is essential and most efficient to address the associated challenges.”

###

New interactive portal

At a new interactive portal (https://data.hais.ioc-unesco.org), also launched today, concerned citizens and scientists can extract data and knowledge about HABs occurrences over time at every scale, from local to global.

Key public databases used

The Harmful Algal Event Database (HAEDAT)

The only existing database of information about harmful algal events from around the world, summarized into ‘events’ associated with a management action or negative economic / ecological impact. Includes cases of non-toxic water discolorations, mucilage, anoxia or other damage to fish. Link: http://haedat.iode.org

HABMAP-OBIS: Database on the geographic range of Harmful Species

The Database provides biogeographic information, as referenced maps, of the microalgal species that are listed in the IOC-UNESCO Taxonomic Reference List of Harmful Microalgae. Because entries concern these taxa regardless of the intraspecific variability in toxicity and impacts, the database provides a worldwide map of potential risks related to the occurrence of toxic species. Link: https://obis.org

The IOC-UNESCO Taxonomic Reference List of Harmful Microalgae

Includes formally accepted names of 150+ planktonic or benthic microalgae that have been proven to produce toxins. The number of species in the list has doubled over the years. Link: http://marinespecies.org/hab

These datasets will help address three main questions in future:

1. The distribution of HAB species, HAB events, and toxins globally
2. How the geographic distribution, characteristic, frequency and intensity of HABs are changing and if these changes attributable to global change
3. How climate change alters impacts from HABs on human health, ecosystems, economics, food and water security

Background

Algae are essential for life on Earth and for fisheries. But when some species “bloom” they can cause harm in various ways.

Some 5,000 species of microalgae form the foundation of aquatic food chains, help control atmospheric CO2 levels, and produce roughly half of the world’s oxygen. The troublemakers are approximately 250 species that can produce potent toxins or cause harm through their sheer biomass.

A harmful algal event is broadly defined as “any event where humans, animals or other organisms are negatively affected by algae.” These include:

• A bioaccumulation of toxins in seafood reaching levels unsafe for human consumption, or a ban on harvesting wild or farmed shellfish or other seafood.
• An abundance of harmful algae causing the closure of e.g. a beach or desalination plant
• A bloom of toxic or non-toxic microalgae causing discoloured water, scum or foam causing damage to tourism

The Global Harmful Algal Bloom Status Report (GHSR) initiative is funded by the Flanders Government through the DIPS-4-Ocean Assessments project (link) as part of the UNESCO/Flanders Fund-in-Trust for the support of UNESCO’s activities in the field of Science (FUST).

Principal authors: 19 principal authors from 15 countries (including two from Australia, two from France, three from the USA)

• Gustaaf M. Hallegraeff, University of Tasmania, Australia
• Donald M. Anderson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA
• Catherine Belin, IFREMER, France
• Marie-Yasmine Bottein, Ecotoxicology and Sustainable Development Expertise, France
• Eileen Bresnan, Marine Scotland, UK
• Mireille Chinain, Institut Louis Malardé-UMR241, Tahiti
• Henrik Enevoldsen, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Mitsunori Iwataki, University of Tokyo, Japan
• Bengt Karlson, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Oceanographic Research, Sweden
• Cynthia H. McKenzie, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canada
• Inés Sunesen, CONICET – UNLP, Argentina
• Grant C. Pitcher, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Pieter Provoost, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, Oostende, Belgium
• Anthony Richardson, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and University of Queensland, Australia
• Laura Schweibold, Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer, France
• Patricia A. Tester, Ocean Tester, USA
• Vera L. Trainer, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA
• Aletta T. Yñiguez, University of the Philippines, Philippines
• Adriana Zingone, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Italy

About the HAB Programme:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Harmful Algal Blooms (IOC-IPHAB), part of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, initiated the development of the Global HAB Status Report in Paris in April 2013, developed with the support of the Government of Flanders within the IOC International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) Programme, which manages both the Harmful Algae Event Data Base (HAEDAT: http://haedat.iode.org) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS: https://obis.org). Partners include the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), The North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

OBIS focuses on the global distribution of all marine species including those HAB species that are toxic to humans and fish as covered by the IOC-UNESCO Taxonomic Reference list of Harmful MicroAlgae (a subset of the World Register of Marine Species), while HAEDAT holds information specifically on the HAB events that have adversely impact on human society, whether by high biomass (clogging of fishing nets, beach closures), aquaculture fish kills, or seafood toxin events leading to shellfish farm closures, human poisonings or even death.

Agence France Presse, here

Agencia EFE, Spain here

IndoAsian News Service, India, here

News sites

Le Figaro, France, L’impact grandissant de la prolifération des algues, here

Deutsche Welle, Germany, Turkey’s ‘sea snot’ is part of a growing environmental threat, here

Deutschlandfunk, Germany, UNESCO-Studie – Toxische Algenblüten führen zu großen wirtschaftlichen Schäden here

BBC World Service Radio, Inside Science: here

Focus Online, Germany, Algenblüten werden folgenreicher, here

Corriere Della Sera, Italy, Studio Unesco: la mucillagine? È causata da allevamenti marini e sviluppo costiero here

Straits Times, Singapore, two stories: Microalgae ‘detective’ developing faster way to identify species that cause harmful algal blooms, here, and More harmful algal blooms expected from intense aquaculture and human activities: UN report, here

Báo Mới, Viet Nam, Thủy triều đỏ gây hại cho hoạt động nuôi trồng thủy sản here

CGTN, Mainland China (12,028,009)Algae blooms harmful to aquaculture: UN global assessment, here

News release in full, click here

Full media coverage summary here

Amid COVID pause in marine activities, growing network aims to monitor soundscapes, assess changes in behavior of marine life; More than 200 widely-distributed non-military hydrophones already listening

Travel and economic slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic combined to put the brakes on shipping, seafloor exploration, and many other human activities in the ocean, creating a unique moment to begin a time-series study of the impacts of sound on marine life.

A community of scientists has identified more than 200 non-military ocean hydrophones worldwide and hopes to make the most of the unprecedented opportunity to pool their recorded data into the 2020 quiet ocean assessment and to help monitor the ocean soundscape long into the future. They aim for a total of 500 hydrophones capturing the signals of whales and other marine life while assessing the racket levels of human activity.

Combined with other sea life monitoring tools and methods such as animal tagging, the work will help reveal the extent to which noise in “the Anthropocene seas” impacts ocean species.

Sound travels far in the ocean, and a hydrophone can pick up low-frequency signals from hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away. The highest concentrations of non-military hydrophones are along the North American coasts — Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic — Hawaii, Europe, and Antarctica, with some scattered through the Asia-Pacific region.

For over a century, navies have used sound to reveal submarines and underwater mines and for other national security purposes. Marine animals likewise use sound and natural sonar to navigate and communicate across the ocean.

But the effects of human-generated ocean sounds on marine life remain poorly understood.

“Measuring variability and change in ambient, or background, ocean sound over time forms the basis for characterizing marine ‘soundscapes,'” says collaborator Peter L. Tyack, Professor of Marine Mammal Biology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

“Assessing the risks of underwater sound for marine life requires understanding what sound levels cause harmful effects and where in the ocean vulnerable animals may be exposed to sound exceeding these levels. Sparse, sporadic deployment of hydrophones and obstacles to integrating the measurements that are made have narrowly limited what we confidently know.”

In 2011, concerned experts began developing the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), launched in 2015 with the International Quiet Ocean Experiment Science Plan. Among their goals: create a time series of measurements of ambient sound in many ocean locations to reveal variability and changes in intensity and other properties of sound at a range of frequencies.

The plan also included designating 2022 “the Year of the Quiet Ocean.”

Due to COVID-19, however, “the oceans are unlikely to be as quiet as during April 2020 for many decades to come,” says project originator Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

“The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unanticipated event that reduced sound levels more than we dreamed possible based on voluntary sound reductions. IQOE will consider 2020 the Year of the Quiet Ocean and is focusing project resources to encourage study of changes in sound levels and effects on organisms that occurred in 2020, based on observations from hundreds of hydrophones deployed by the worldwide ocean acoustics community in 2019-2021.”

With IQOE encouragement, the number of civilian hydrophones operating in North America, Europe, and elsewhere for research and operational purposes has increased dramatically. With these, IQOE and the ocean sound research community can shed needed light on humans’ influences on marine life and ecosystems.

The existing hydrophone network covers shallow coastal and shelf areas most influenced by local changes in human activity. It also includes deep stations that can measure the effects of low-frequency sound sources over large open ocean areas.

Of the 231 non-military hydrophones identified to February 2021, several have agreed to their geographic coordinates and other metadata being shown on the IQOE website, with organizers hoping to attract many more contributors.

Of the hydrophones identified, most are in US and Canadian waters, with increasing numbers elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, more acoustic instrumentation and measurements are clearly needed across the Southern Hemisphere.

The researchers are working to create a global data repository with contributors using standardized methods, tools and depths to measure and document ocean soundscapes and effects on the distribution and behavior of vocalizing animals.

As part of the effort to create a global time-series, new software under development by a team of researchers across the country and led by the University of New Hampshire (MANTA) will soon help standardize ocean sound recording data from collaborators, facilitating its comparability, pooling and visualization.

The new MANTA software is available at https://bit.ly/3cVNUox

As well, an Open Portal to Underwater Sound (OPUS) is being tested at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, to promote the use of acoustic data collected worldwide, providing easy access to MANTA-processed data.

Meanwhile, scientists over the past decade have developed powerful methods to estimate the distribution and abundance of vocalizing animals using passive acoustic monitoring.

“Integrating data on animal behavior on soundscapes can reveal long-term effects of changes in ocean sound,” says Jennifer Miksis-Olds, Director of the Center for Acoustics Research and Education, University of New Hampshire.

The fledgling hydrophone network will continue contributing to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a worldwide collaboration of observing assets monitoring currents, temperature, sea level, chemical pollution, litter, and other concerns.

“To observe a return to normal conditions as the pandemic subsides, the intensive acoustic monitoring by many existing hydrophones must continue at least through 2021,” says Edward R. Urban Jr, IQOE Project Manager, of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research.

Comparable unintended opportunities for maritime study are rare and important in modern history. They include the start (1945) and stop (1980) of above-ground nuclear testing, creating traces of carbon and tritium, the movements and decay of which have provided major insights into ocean physics, chemistry, and biology.

As well, the terrorist attacks in New York City and Arlington, Va., on 11 September 2001, caused the cancellation of hundreds of civilian airline flights allowing scientists to study the effects of jet contrails (or their absence) on weather patterns.

Those attacks also led to a shipping slowdown and ocean noise reduction, prompting biologists to study stress hormone levels in endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy.

With their 2001 data, research revealed higher September stress hormone levels over the next four years as the whales prepared to migrate to warmer southern waters where they calve, suggesting that the industrialized ocean causes chronic stress of animals.

Precious chance

Seldom has there been such a chance to collect quiet ocean data in the Anthropocene Seas. COVID-19 drastically decreased shipping, tourism and recreation, fishing and aquaculture, energy exploration and extraction, naval and coast guard exercises, offshore construction, and port and channel dredging.

Data graphed by JP Morgan reveals the impact of COVID in several categories of commercial activity. If true also of maritime activity as suspected, it suggests a relatively short-lived quiet ocean due to COVID — late March to mid-May, 2020.

Says Jesse Ausubel: “Let’s learn from the COVID pause to help achieve safer operations for shipping industries, offshore energy operators, navies, and other users of the ocean.”

“We are on the way to timely, reliable, easily understood maps of ocean soundscapes, including the exceptional period of April 2020 when the COVID virus gave marine animals a brief break from human clatter.”

The end of that break is clear from recent news, he notes, pointing to this from California in mid-March, for example, Port of Long Beach Sets 110-Year Record in February.

Concludes Mr. Ausubel: “We invite parties in a position to help to join this global effort on the variability and trends of ocean sound and the effects of sound on marine life. The shocking global effect of COVID-19 on human additions of noise to the oceans can spur maturation of regular monitoring of the soundscape of our seas.”

###

Coverage highlights:

BBC, UK, Ocean noise: Study to measure the oceans’ ‘year of quiet’
Portuguese: Covid-19: estudo analisa impacto do ‘momento único de silêncio’ nos oceanos provocado pela pandemia

Agence France Presse, Lull in shipping activity gives scientists chance to listen to sounds of the ocean
French: Un réseau mondial d’écoute sur les océans apaisé par Covid
German: Internationales Forscherteam untersucht Tierlaute im Ozean während Corona-Krise

Agencia EFE, Spain, Científicos aprovechan la pandemia para hacer un mapa del sonido de los mares

IndoAsian News Service, India, Amid slowdown, scientists assess changes in marine life behaviour

Gizmodo, United States, International Project Will See How Quiet of Covid-19 Affected Oceans

Down To Earth Magazine, India, What happened when the oceans went quiet during the pandemic? Scientists set to find out

COSMOS Magazine, Australia, Year of the quiet ocean

The National News, United Arab Emirates, Oceans silenced by Covid to reveal impact of human activity on marine life

AllAfrica, South Africa, Covid-19 Gave Us a Chance to Listen to the Silent Seas

Rinnovabili, Italy, Il lockdown ci aiuterà a capire l’impatto dell’inquinamento acustico degli oceani

Time Turk, Turkey, Okyanusların ”sessizlik yılı’

Coverage summary: here

News release in full: here

Additional information:

Eos: Measuring Ambient Ocean Sound During the COVID-19 Pandemic

MANTA: https://bitbucket.org/CLO-BRP/manta-wiki/wiki/Home

JOMOPANS: https://northsearegion.eu/jomopans/news/soundscape-maps-of-north-sea

OPUS: “An Open Portal to Underwater Soundscapes to explore and study sound in the global ocean”
https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/53610 and https://opus.aq (TBC)

IQOE publications, including newsletters, available at Products | International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE)

TEDxExeter: Changing the soundtrack of the ocean, Steve Simpson, 2019:
https://youtu.be/Z8XxAfGBcOo

New tool will help census oceans, monitor fish, track shifting marine life; “eDNA makes the ocean a sea of biological information”

• DNA bits in seawater samples drawn during New Jersey government fish trawls reveals relative abundance of fish with a 70% match between the two sampling methods;
• In addition to great concordance, study finds that each method yields information missed by the other
• Research advances novel, inexpensive way to census oceans from surface to seafloor, help monitor fisheries, assess shifts in marine life due to climate change, around coral reefs, aquaculture or wind farms, oil rigs, and more
• Message in a bottle: DNA in 1 litre of seawater = a trawl sweep of 66 million litres, enough to fill a sports stadium to top of goalposts
• Proposed “Great American Fish Count,” involving citizen scientists collecting waters samples, could set stage for 2nd global Census of Marine Life during upcoming UN Oceans Decade

Humanity is a step closer to answering one of the most ancient of questions — “how many fish in the sea?” — thanks to newly-published proof that the amount of fish DNA collected in a water sample closely corresponds to kilos of fish captured in a trawl with nets.

In a breakthrough study, scientists report that floating bits of DNA found in small water samples reveal the relative biomass of fish in the sea roughly as well as a “gold standard” US state government trawl with nets.

The researchers drew seawater samples during New Jersey government fish trawls and tested the water for fish DNA. Analysis of the water was able to reveal the relative abundance of fish with a 70% match in results between the two sampling methods. In addition to the great concordance between methods, the study found that each sampling method yielded information missed by the other.

While environmental DNA (“eDNA”) has been proven before as a reliable way to determine the variety of fish in an area of water, the new study is the first to show that bits of eDNA floating in seawater also disclose the relative abundance of the species swimming through it.

Published by the prestigious ICES Journal of Marine Science, the paper certifies “fishing for DNA” as an inexpensive, harmless complement to nets, acoustics and other established ways to monitor the health of fish stocks and/or the shifting diversity, distribution and abundance of aquatic life.

The paper, a collaboration between The Rockefeller University, Monmouth University, and the New Jersey Bureau of Marine Fisheries, says the information about the diversity and relative abundance of fish available in a one-litre sample is comparable to a 66 million litre trawl sweep, enough seawater to fill a football stadium to the top of the goalposts.

During four voyages by the New Jersey Ocean Trawl Survey in 2019 aboard the research vessel “Sea Wolf,” scientists led by Dr. Mark Stoeckle, Senior Research Associate at The Rockefeller University Program for the Human Environment, drew one-litre pop-bottle sized water samples from various depths just before the trawler’s nets were lowered.

The finding has profound implications for improving global fisheries management and has led to early proposals for a “Great American Fish Count” in rivers and coastal waters, aided by millions of citizen scientists, comparable to Audubon’s Great Backyard Bird Counts.

Fish and other organisms shed DNA like dandruff, Dr. Stoeckle explains, leaving an invisible trail wherever they swim. This environmental DNA can be skin cells, droppings, urine, eggs, and other biological residues that last in the ocean for a few days.

One year of eDNA sampling, out-of-pocket costs: $12,000

The eDNA process is straightforward and extremely inexpensive compared with traditional marine life monitoring methods, which involve ships with large crews and hand counts.

Co-author Zachary Charlop-Powers at The Rockefeller University, lead developer of the software used in the DNA analyses, explains that eDNA testing involves collecting and filtering a water sample, extracting and sequencing the DNA in a laboratory, then matching the results found in an online DNA reference library.

“The bioinformatic tools used by the team are the same ‘barcode’ analysis pipelines commonly used by microbiologists but were adapted for the study of marine vertebrates.”

He notes too that the year of sampling and DNA extraction required an investment of just $12,000, exclusive of salaries.

“The applications of environmental DNA in the marine realm are vast,” says Dr. Stoeckle, a Harvard-educated MD who helped pioneer DNA “barcoding,” the identification of species from a small region of the animal’s DNA sequence.

“eDNA offers a low-cost way to monitor the effectiveness of a marine protected area, for example, or whether efforts to restore a coral reef are succeeding. It could reveal the ecological effects of marine industrial activities, including offshore wind farms, oil and gas rigs, and commercial and recreational fishing.”

Adds Dr. Stoeckle: To put this in perspective, if we thought of a trawl as a full medical CAT or MRI scan, then eDNA can be thought of as a pocket ultrasound–it can be carried and used anywhere in the hospital, without the time and expense of scheduling a full-scale exam. And eDNA surveys will become better and more informative every year as the technique improves and the DNA reference library grows.

Says co-author Dr. Jason Adolf, Endowed Associate Professor of Marine Science, Monmouth University: “eDNA could also be used to identify life in ocean regions hard to access with trawls, such as very rocky areas, or places too deep or too shallow.”

Monmouth co-author Dr. Keith J. Dunton, an expert on endangered fish species, notes that the results are promising for rare as well as common fish species.

“eDNA along with other technologies like acoustic telemetry offers a sensitive, non-extractive way to monitor declines and revivals of rare, threatened, and endangered species,” he says. “We do not have to put them through stressful capturing to know that they are there.”

Trawl surveys, the main tool used to monitor fish populations, have carefully established protocols and yield rich information but are costly, time-consuming, and require special equipment and fish identification experts. Due to the crew size needed, such trawls have been limited recently by COVID-19.

The New Jersey surveys every season involve deploying a bottom trawl, similar to that used in commercial fishing, behind a vessel over a predetermined pattern. The catches in the nets are hauled up and sorted on tables where the weight of each identified species is recorded. Between 30 and 40 trawls are done about every three months.

To compare the trawl survey to the eDNA survey, one-litre water samples were collected at the surface and at depth before the trawls were done. However, samples were only taken before every fourth trawl. When the data from the two surveys were analyzed, the eDNA survey found most of the same fish species, and also found species not captured in the trawl. And it did so with only one-quarter of the samples taken and a fraction of the effort involved.

The paper says most (70% to 87%) species detected by trawl in a given month were also detected by eDNA, and vice versa, including nearly all (92% to 100%) abundant species. Conversely, most dropouts were relatively rare taxa.

Trawl and eDNA peak seasonal abundance agreed for about 70% of fish species.

In other comparisons, monthly eDNA species “reads” correlated with the monthly weight, or biomass, of that species recovered in the trawl.

The eDNA reporting “largely concorded with monthly trawl estimates of marine fish species richness, composition, seasonality, and relative abundance,” the paper says.

“It’s important to understand that the results of both methods are true, and complementary,” noted Stoeckle. “They catch a lot of overlapping, concordant information as well as some information unique to each method.”

Gregory Hinks of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, who co-authored the paper with Bureau of Marine Fisheries colleague Stacy M. VanMorter, adds: “During times like COVID when it is unsafe to conduct surveys with large crews, the eDNA method might allow us still to maintain some continuity in our surveys. In any case, piggybacking eDNA onto an existing survey may eventually provide an affordable way to improve marine fish stock assessment.”

The new paper lays out further research required, such as better calibration of eDNA “reads” to fish body mass — how much DNA is shed by 1,000 anchovies weighing 1 kilo, for example, compared with a one kilo sized sea bass? — and how to account for eDNA reads that may be the result of injury due to a predator attack.

Since collecting water for eDNA is so quick and easy to do, research or oceanographic vessels and commercial and recreational vessels can collect samples as they travel from place to place. Even drones could be deployed to collect water samples.

And with the benefit of additional studies in marine and freshwaters, estimates of animal numbers using eDNA will continue to improve as well as the DNA reference data banks that allow reliable identification of aquatic species.

eDNA opens the way to surveys of unprecedented value, quality, and affordability, says Jesse Ausubel, Director of The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, who developed and helped oversee the first international Census of Marine Life, a decadal (2000-2010) collaboration of about 2,700 scientists in 80 countries.

“eDNA makes the ocean a sea of biological information,” he says. “In the USA we could organize a Great American Fish Count in which millions of citizen scientists might collect water for eDNA testing spanning all our waters. Globally, the incipient UN Decade of the Oceans could include a Great Global Fish Count sampling from sea floor to sea surface and near shore to mid-ocean all during a single day or week.”

Tony MacDonald, Director of the Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute, says “Our institute and scientists were excited to support this innovative work, one of several partnerships in recent years between UCI and The Rockefeller University Program for the Human Environment.”

“We hope to have the opportunity to continue and expand our collaboration with New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection Marine Fisheries and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on future fish trawls to further advance eDNA research.”

Comments Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.) Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Deputy NOAA Administrator: “NOAA is rapidly advancing ‘omics technologies, including eDNA, to improve our ability to monitor and understand biological communities in our oceans and the Great Lakes.”

“Important applications include monitoring endangered and invasive species, assessing biodiversity for ecosystem health, tracking aquaculture pathogens, and augmenting fisheries surveys.”

“Through the NOAA ‘Omics Strategy‘ and our forthcoming Implementation Plan, we have defined goals and actionable steps to integrate modern ‘omics technologies to help meet our mission. Collaboration with Rockefeller University and other partners will allow us to expand and advance ‘omics research and eDNA in direct support of the American Blue Economy.”

(‘Omics refers to a suite of advanced methods used to analyze material such as DNA, RNA, proteins, or metabolites.)

Marine eDNA’s potential applications include

• Exploration: discovering species previously unknown in certain ranges
• Discovering rare species and others unknown to science (or absent from genome databases)
• Sampling remote, difficult-to-reach, and intriguing places
• Assessment of the size of fish stocks
• Identifying the range of marine animals
• Determining the effect of protected area designation on fish and other marine animal populations and other forms of ecological restoration
• Monitoring the effect on native species of fish farming operations, offshore oil and gas operations, or wind farms
• Determining the effects of artificial reefs, of severe storms and other disturbances to marine ecosystems including harmful algal blooms
• Monitoring vulnerable, threatened or endangered species, invasive species, or the presence of species dangerous to swimmers
• Gauging the impacts of climate variability
• Mapping marine animal diversity, distribution, migration and abundance, including invasive species, and species popular with sport fishers

###

Coverage highlights

Science Magazine, United States, Fisheries in a flask? Loose DNA in seawater offers a new measure of marine populations, click here

Agencia EFE, Spain, El análisis del ADN ambiental permite saber el número de peces de los océanos, click here

Inside Science, United States, DNA Floating in Ocean Water Reveals Fish Abundance, click here , via ABC News, USA, click here

New Indian Express, India, Experts find trick to count fish in sea, click here

Coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here

Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 report outlines 8 major transitions needed to slow, then halt nature’s accelerating decline

Final report card on Aichi Biodiversity Targets, set in 2010: 6 of world’s 20 goals “partially achieved” by 2020 deadline.

Towards a landmark new global post-2020 biodiversity framework: GBO-5 synthesizes scientific basis for urgent action.

Bright spots include: extinctions prevented by conservation, more land and oceans protected, fish stocks bounce back in well-managed fisheries.

Montreal — Despite encouraging progress in several areas, the natural world is suffering badly and getting worse. Eight transformative changes are, therefore, urgently needed to ensure human wellbeing and save the planet, the UN warns in a major report.

The report comes as the COVID-19 pandemic challenges people to rethink their relationship with nature, and to consider the profound consequences to their own wellbeing and survival that can result from continued biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO-5), published by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), offers an authoritative overview of the state of nature. It is a final report card on progress against the 20 global biodiversity targets agreed in 2010 with a 2020 deadline, and offers lessons learned and best practices for getting on track.

“This flagship report underlines that ‘humanity stands at a crossroads with regard to the legacy we wish to leave to future generations,'” said CBD Executive Secretary, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema.

“Many good things are happening around the world and these should be celebrated and encouraged. Nevertheless, the rate of biodiversity loss is unprecedented in human history and pressures are intensifying.  Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised.  And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own well-being, security and prosperity.”

News release in full, click here

GBO5 media coverage, summary presentation, click here

Organizers of 1st National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA call for official US Government marine eDNA program; investments to speed sampling results, standard sampling / reporting protocols; priority exploration / baseline monitoring site

Advanced technologies capable of analyzing DNA in seawater will help answer some of humanity’s oldest, most profound questions and concerns, including “who lives in the sea?” – beginning with species of interest in specific areas, including clownfish (Nemo) and blue tang fish (Dory).

To accelerate the pace towards the potentially far-reaching benefits of these technologies-both environmental and economic-organizers of the 1st US National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA (eDNA) (Nov. 29-30, hosted by The Rockefeller University, New York), today prescribed priority steps for government, researchers, industry and investors, including:

• Initiate marine eDNA observations in key US Exclusive Economic Zone basins, including the Gulfs of Mexico and Maine, Monterey Bay, the California Current area, New York Bight, and the Bering Sea / Arctic
• Establish long-term eDNA observational platforms at multiple sites-these will afford crucial insights, e.g., about effects of human activities
• Systematically address unresolved science questions, observation rules and standard operating procedures, reference standards, and archival capabilities
• Anticipate impacts on existing statutes, regulations, permitting/licensing processes as marine eDNA is introduced as a credible ecosystem census indicator
• Explore the decision-making value of marine eDNA and seize commercial opportunities
• Create a US Government National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) for marine eDNA,with multi-year, multi-investor, multi-participant projects

###

Says the conference summary report, available in full at

phe.rockefeller.edu/eDNAmarine2018/report: “Marine eDNA is already a surprisingly reliable, feasible, and affordable ocean observation technology ready for rapid adoption and poised for giant steps forward. In short, it works….Get going.”

Additional source materials:

• Conference website
• Marine eDNA Primer
• sponsored paper: The Ocean as a Living Sensor: Environmental DNA and Acoustics for Detecting Marine Life
• pre-conference news release
• Conference program

Newly sampled areas ranged from Holy Land waters to Coney Island and the White Shark Cafe.

The meeting of approximately 100 US ocean scientists and associated stakeholders with experience, skill and/or interest in marine eDNA was sponsored by the Monmouth University-Rockefeller University (MURU) Marine Science and Policy Initiative.

Related news releases from this source:

Marine species quickly revealed by new ‘Go Fish’ tool, highlights potential of emerging eDNA science: http://bit.ly/2KJgM3p

Naked DNA in water tells if fish have arrived: http://bit.ly/2VUC9E3

Exploring vast ‘submerged America,’ marine scientists discover 500 bubbling methane vents: http://bit.ly/2SWfOEr

* * * * *

Example coverage:

Science Magazine (potential reach online: 4,604,140; print edition (“News in Brief”) readership: 400,000) The ocean is full of drifting DNA. The United States needs to start to collect it, researchers say , click here

“Science Insider” blog by Jeffrey Mervis, click here

Saving Seafood, USA, The Ocean is Full of Drifting DNA. The United States Needs to Collect it, Researchers Say, click here

Experts convene for 1st US National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA, a far-reaching, potent complement to traditional monitoring systems; initiates coordinated US research theme, standardized sampling/reporting protocols; baseline monitoring sites

New York — An innovative tool that can confirm the recent presence of any given fish species in a sample of water is among the marvels to be highlighted at the first National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA, New York City, Nov. 29-30.

About 100 pioneering practitioners and users of eDNA science — a mighty complement to traditional marine life monitoring systems — will convene in Manhattan to detail and share discoveries, state-of-the-art technologies, and new methods.

A new tool created at The Rockefeller University, which will host the conference, offers, for example, a chemical shortcut for researchers to test for the eDNA of a specific, individual species in a water sample.

It makes use of the fact that every species leaves a trail of genetic residue — skin cells, excretions, other DNA — as it moves. Scientists can now test water and soil for these traces and identify which species left them behind.

The eDNA tester can confirm the genetic presence of a given species in a water sample within three days — a small fraction of the usual month or more involved in the current practice of lab testing for any and all species, or to mount an expedition with nets and analyze the results.

Its creator, Mark Stoeckle, Senior Research Associate at The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment (PHE), says many reasons make authorities want to know when a given marine species is present — to determine for example when to open or close a commercial fishery, or when dredging can be done without harm to marine life. New York Harbor, he notes, restricts dredging if winter flounder are present.

“Go Fish”

He likens his innovation to Go Fish, the children’s game in which a player asks another for a given rank of card, for example: do you have any jacks in your hand? Says Dr. Stoeckle. “In the case of New York, the question would be ‘Where in the harbor do we have winter flounder?'”

The current cost to produce a Go Fish eDNA tool is $15 per sample (1 species); additional species can be added for $8 per sample.

Says conference lead organizer Jesse Ausubel, Director of the PHE: “‘Go Fish’ brings us close to a ‘chatbot’ or small smart personal assistant — like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana — that can quickly identify species from eDNA.”

“Presence of a species is easier to confirm than absence,” Dr. Stoeckle underlines. “Sampling may be conducted on the wrong day or at the wrong depth. Nevertheless, the genetic trail that animals leave behind is helping us find them without having them physically in hand — a breakthrough with major environmental and economic implications.”

National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA

Combined with traditional trawls with nets, tagging, visual observations, and acoustic instruments, experts believe remote eDNA sampling and analysis can one day help create near real-time monitoring of the marine environment.

In the US, several marine eDNA research hotspots have developed, including Monterey Bay, CA, New York / New Jersey, and Seattle, WA.

Expected at the conference are about 100 leading US scientists, officials, inventors, and investors exploring the emerging field of environmental DNA and its application in marine settings.

The event will highlight insights provided by eDNA to date and the potential of this new science to further enlarge our knowledge and inform ocean management.

Major themes:

• Technology development — faster, cheaper, more portable
• Bioinformatics — genetic reference databases, analytic software, data compatibility
• eDNA biology — improving detection reliability, and relating eDNA abundance to species abundance

Organizers aim to initiate a commitment by leading scientists and stakeholders to take up eDNA as a cooperative national or regional research theme.

They also aim to encourage:

• Federal, state, and local governments to incorporate eDNA into traditional ongoing . marine life surveys. (Monmouth University and Rockefeller U scientists are exploring integration of eDNA working with New Jersey Department of Marine Fisheries’ trawl surveys)
• The private sector to collaborate in development of technologies to improve the speed and lower the cost of testing
• Non-governmental organizations to help build genetic reference databases and monitor national and regional hotspots

Priority questions to be addressed include:

• Whether and how the rate of decay of eDNA differs by taxa and context. Do some fish shed more than others? Do fish shed more than turtles? How do water temperature, sunlight, chemical variation, currents and turbulence, pressure, and other factors affect decay?
• How to better calibrate the abundance of DNA in the water column as an index of abundance of specific species of fish and other animals
• How to make eDNA reliable for very rare as well as more abundant species
• How to formally integrate eDNA in the conduct of marine surveys, augmenting nets, cameras, and acoustic fish finders
• What is needed to make eDNA data suitable for regulatory and policy purposes?

Says Paul Gaffney, Vice-Admiral (ret.), former President and Urban Coast Institute Ocean Policy Fellow at Monmouth University: “eDNA opens the door to cheap, frequent, widespread, potentially automated monitoring of the diversity, distribution, and abundance of aquatic life. Government agencies need to take notice.”

Bruce Nash, an innovator in adapting cutting-edge science for authentic student research, stressed the importance in years past of establishing protocols related to DNA barcoding, which identifies species from the DNA of tissue taken from physical specimens. Confirming a continuous chain of custody, time of testing, and other protocols made DNA barcode evidence sufficiently reliable to stand up in court.

To achieve reliable eDNA results, water or filtered material from the water needs to be stored and processed properly.

Dr. Nash will share the development of approachable and affordable methods that support eDNA work, including a new open-access tool developed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center for getting reliable identifications from the multitude of letters in the eDNA sequence data. Users upload their sequence data and then ride the Purple Line of DNA Subway in an appealing and intuitive interface to learn about the diversity contained in their sample.

Uses: eDNA’s applications to date include

Exploration

• discovering species previously unknown in certain ranges
• discovering rare species and others unknown to science (or absent from genome databases)
• sampling remote, difficult-to-reach, and intriguing places

Assessment

• health and stocks of fish in commercially harvested areas, informing decisions on when fisheries should open or close
• range of marine animals
• effect of protected area designation on fish and other marine animal populations and other forms of ecological restoration
• effect of fish farming operations on native species
• effect of offshore oil and gas operations or wind farms on marine life
• effects of artificial reefs
• effects of severe storms and other disturbances to marine ecosystems such as harmful algal blooms

Monitoring

• presence of vulnerable, threatened or endangered species
• presence of species dangerous to swimmers
• impacts of climate change and variability
• mapping marine animal diversity, distribution, migration and abundance, including invasive species, and species popular with sport fishers

Resolving mysteries (or not, in the case of Scotland’s Loch Ness monster)

Examples:

Sampling intriguing, remote, and difficult-to-reach intriguing places

• Bob Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, and colleagues on an expedition led by Dwight Coleman of the University of Rhode Island this month collected water from sediments from ancient sea caves including, for example, those about 70-100 meters deep on Osborn Bank in the Channel Islands, about 50 kilometers off the Southern California coast. The caves were above sea level 15,000 years ago and the team searched for ancient paleoshoreline features, and will analyse the samples for DNA that might have been left behind by human or other cave dwellers

Jesse Ausubel comments: “In cool, dark, undisturbed environments eDNA could persist long enough in water in the mud to provide clues about the critters, including humans, that lived in a spot thousands of years earlier.”

• Scientist David Burg provided a set of fresh water samples from the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River to the Rockefeller U team, who found DNA of 15 fish species — more than half of known resident species. They include Galilee tilapia (Sarotherodon galilaeus) and blue tilapia (Oreochromis aureus), species that have sustained Sea of Galilee fishers for thousands of years to the present. In a 2006 book, marine biologist Eugene H. Kaplan speculated that one of those species was at the centre of St. Matthew’s New Testament story of the “miracle of the loaves and fishes” (depicted in a mosaic, dated to 420 A.D., in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy). There has been similar speculation that a Sea of Galilee tilapia was “St. Peter’s fish,” referred to in another Biblical passage.

• An eDNA test this summer off Inkwell Beach on Martha’s Vineyard, MA discovered hard-to-spot leatherback turtles. Collection of eDNA at Inkwell Beach is part of the plot of Secrets from the Deep, latest of the popular Devlin Quick teenage detective books whose author, New York’s former sex crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein, will attend the conference.

Last year, several dead leatherback washed ashore on the island, perhaps killed by boats. A GoFish eDNA turtle ‘dipstick’ might alert boaters to take extra care.

• In June 2018, Dr. Stoeckle and colleague Jennifer Miksis-Olds sampled water from 500 meters depth to find elusive mid-water fish — species very easy to miss with nets on expensive trawls.

Tracking and mapping migrations of vulnerable, threatened, endangered and other species

• In a major expedition this year, scientists led by Stanford Prof. Barbara Block at Hopkins Marine Station documented predators and prey in the White Shark Café — an area of the Pacific Ocean about half-way between Hawaii and the west coast of North America mysteriously visited regularly by white sharks. To determine what draws these predatory sharks to these seemingly inhospitable waters, they deployed a combination of satellite tags on white sharks, underwater robots, wind-powered Saildrones, and eDNA sampling to identify how and why animal species use these waters.

• For three years, The Rockefeller University researchers have successfully monitored fish migrations in New York’s East and Hudson Rivers using only eDNA tests on weekly water samples. Over 30 months, the data snapshots created a moving picture of the presence or absence of several key fish species passing through, the results correlating closely with prior migration studies done with fishnet trawls.
• Meanwhile, for 12 years New York City has been trying to coax the Alewife species of herring back to a former breeding habitat in the Bronx River, building fish ladders and reintroducing spawning adults. eDNA sampling of an 18-mile stretch of river this summer turned up no juveniles after the adults left to return the ocean, suggesting the need for further rehabilitation efforts.

Health and safety

• Researchers have used eDNA to ‘sniff’ for sharks around beaches, and this year confirmed that a California boy’s shark bite was delivered by a Great White.
• New York high school students drew 1 litre samples of water weekly from the fishing pier at Coney Island during the spring and summer of 2017 and discovered 34 species of marine life had passed by, including sharks and rays.

Invasive species

• Foreign invader and pest species — both plant and animal — can be located and monitored quickly, easily and less expensively using eDNA instead of traditional methods. Examples of species already targeted in this way include lionfish in Bermuda, Asian black-spined toad and red-eared slider turtles in Australian waters, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, and clams in the lakes of California and Nevada.
• In Wisconsin, researchers documented five invasive species of marine zooplankton in the ballast water of ships plying Lake Superior, including the eDNA of a “bloody red shrimp” originally from the Black Sea area.

Encouraging citizen science

• Students from Boynton Middle School are in a collaboration with Cornell University to find invasive fish species in their part of upstate New York.
• And a Westchester high school senior spent the past year tracking water-loving mammals — river otter, muskrat, racoon, and beaver — by testing eDNA in streams in upstate New York and Rhode Island.

Limitations

Finding the eDNA of some species might not indicate its living presence in the vicinity. In their study of fish migration in the rivers surrounding Manhattan, for example, The Rockefeller University researchers found the DNA of species thought to have passed through humans and the wastewater treatment system — tilapia, salmon, red snapper — species you shouldn’t find swimming in the Hudson River. eDNA could therefore help identify vulnerable or threatened species being sold as food in local stores and restaurants.

Meanwhile, experts expect newer technologies will better detect the amount of DNA in a water sample but high concentrations might not indicate an abundance of animals passing through the water. It might be caused by an animal that is spawning, wounded or decaying, for example.

Says Alison Watts of the University of New Hampshire: “Modern genetic and acoustic tools provide complementary data identifying organisms at a range of distances, to comprehensively detect aquatic species. eDNA and passive acoustic monitoring are evolving technologies which may transform our understanding of marine communities.”

At the conference, Dr. Watts and co-author Jennifer Miksis-Olds will present a new paper (available at http://bit.ly/2zuyrqo): “The Ocean as a Living Sensor: Environmental DNA and Acoustics for Detecting Marine Life.”

Among many new eDNA-related technologies

Researchers working towards the automation and simplification of eDNA sampling are pursuing several interconnected technological directions. For example:

• Using drones to collect water samples
• Extracting eDNA from a water sample in the field (as it is easier to store DNA (a bit of goo on a filter) than the much larger water sample
• Sequencing and analysing DNA in situ on board a sampling device, such as a remotely controlled glider, with digital results stored or relayed by satellite

Cold Spring Harbor “subway lines”

This is an innovation for analysing sequence data, with free and open access for all. It works for more than just eDNA sequences (microbiomes, etc.) but it works great for sequences eDNA’ers generate. (See https://dnasubway.cyverse.org/ and https://learning.cyverse.org/projects/dnasubway_guide/en/latest/step8.html)

At the University of Maryland, meanwhile, 3D printing is being deployed to create an ocean floor device that houses a water filter and pump that can collect eDNA samples at any depth.

California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute is trying to integrate and automate collection of water, filtering of eDNA from water, and sequencing of the filtered DNA. Autonomous underwater vehicles and gliders could collect the water samples over large areas without sending humans out to sea.

Potential illustrations:
http://bit.ly/2FCqHZy
http://bit.ly/2P5R4qi

Background: eDNA

Almost 20 years ago, ecologist Pierre Taberlet of the Laboratoire d’Ecologie Alpine in France envisioned noninvasive sampling allowing genetic studies of free-ranging animals without the need to capture or even observe them.

After a decade of work, the technique emerged in papers such as: Species detection using environmental DNA from water samples, by Gentile Francesco Ficetola, Claude Miaud, Francois Pompanon, Pierre Taberlet, August 2008.

Taberlet’s fellow pioneers included Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev, who obtained ancient DNA directly from ice cores, and American marine biologist, Ann Bucklin, whose “Zoogene” project initiated in 2000 created a database of DNA type sequences for about 300 species of zooplankton.

Taberlet’s applications occurred mainly in freshwater habitats (paper here: http://bit.ly/2TNF0xM). In the US, champions of the technique have included David Lodge of Cornell University, also mainly in a freshwater context. Lodge appreciated the charisma of eDNA in titles of his papers such as Conservation in a cup of water: estimating biodiversity and population abundance from environmental DNA, and ‘Sight unseen’, detection of rare aquatic species using environmental DNA.

In April, 2018, Taberlet co-authored with Aurelie Bonin, Lucie Zinger, and Eric Coissac the first book about eDNA: Environmental DNA For Biodiversity Research and Monitoring. The book aims to demonstrate the power and potential of environmental DNA as a research and conservation tool; describe available techniques and protocols; and guide researchers in efficient production of high-quality eDNA data and facilitate proper analysis and interpretation.

Marine eDNA 101: a Primer click here: http://bit.ly/2FDOBnC

Comments

“eDNA can turn millions of people into trustworthy environmental detectives.” – Linda Fairstein, New York lawyer and author of the Alexandra Cooper detective books

“Over 1,000 miles from shore we were able in 48 hours to identify the presence of white sharks in the water column beneath the ship using nanopore eDNA sequencing at sea. Censusing our oceans — knowing what is there or what we are losing — will be easier to document in the next decade with these powerful techniques.” – Barbara Block, Prothro Professor in Marine Sciences, Stanford University

“The Mid-Atlantic region is a leader in developing and deploying eDNA science and technology, and can benefit enormously because of the importance of marine fisheries and other living marine resources, and the need to minimize conflicts with navigation and proposed offshore wind farms that contribute to our Blue Economy.” – Tony MacDonald, Director, Urban Coast Institute, Monmouth University

National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA

Nov. 29-30, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Ave, New York, NY

Speakers, agenda, click here: http://bit.ly/2zqxOPj

To conclude the conference, Monmouth University will recognize the president of the National of Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marcia McNutt with its Champion of the Ocean award. As director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Dr. McNutt invested heavily in genomics and technologies for ocean observation that now cause the revolution in eDNA.

Organizers

• Jason Adolf, Monmouth University
• Liz Alter, York College, CUNY
• Jesse Ausubel, Rockefeller University
• Chris Chambers, NOAA
• Sam Chew Chin, York College, CUNY
• Alison Cucco, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Keith Dunton, Monmouth University
• Paul Gaffney, Monmouth University
• Jeanne Garbarino, Rockefeller University
• Thomas Herrington, Monmouth University
• Yuan Liu, NOAA
• Tony MacDonald, Monmouth University
• Christine Marizzi, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Bruce Nash, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Thomas Noji, NOAA
• Beth Phelan, NOAA
• Megan Phifer-Rixey, Monmouth University
• Howard Rosenbaum, Wildlife Conservation Society
• Mark Stoeckle, Rockefeller University
• Dennis Suszkowski, Hudson River Foundation

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About the Monmouth-Rockefeller University Partnership

In 2015, Monmouth University and The Rockefeller University entered into a five-year agreement to pursue collaborative activities supporting ocean research, education and marine policy. The partnership is the fruit of Monmouth University’s successful philanthropic Marine Science and Policy Initiative Challenge Grant campaign, and an especially generous gift of Joan and Robert Rechnitz.

Collaboration between Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute (UCI) and The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment (PHE) offers a rare opportunity for timely, flexible support of influential marine science and policy. Speedy, reliable, affordable use of environmental DNA fragments, or eDNA, to detect the presence and abundance of marine species is one focus of the initiative.

The National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA is the third of four annual conferences in the Marine Science & Policy Series, which are alternating between the campuses of Monmouth in West Long Branch, N.J., and Rockefeller in New York City. Prior conferences addressed the nation’s priorities in Ocean Exploration and the region’s Blue Economy.

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Coverage:

National Geographic,

• English (8 million): New DNA tool ‘changes everything in marine science’, click here
• Italian (236,000): I progressi della genetica rivoluzionano la biologia marina, click here

Vineyard Gazette, Swimming With the Fishes, Naming Them Too, click here

Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Bulletin, Leading Practitioners Of eDNA Science Gather To Discuss New Tool’s Possibilities, click here

IndoAsian News Service, New ‘Go Fish’ tool to study marine life, click here

News release in full, click here

Full coverage summary, click here