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| |  |  | VOA Online Discussion: Ocean Census
| Guest: Paul Snelgrove, Census Synthesis Group
Date: 19 Nov 08
Moderator: Erin Brummett |
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| | Erin: Welcome to T2A as we learn about efforts to gather data on the ocean's inhabitants and plants from a global network dedicated to this work. The Census of Marine Life includes researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. We’re talking with Paul Snelgrove, a marine scientist who leads the Census Synthesis group. The group is gathering conclusions from the 17 projects that comprise the Census.
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Erin: Ocean Census. Very Interesting. I'll be happy to know more about life in the Ocean. Write us about your findings, researches..etc,. Many thanks for your time. regards, A.C.rathinavel, India (email)
Paul: The Census of Marine Life is a 10-year program that started in 2000, so it’s going to come to fruition in 2010. And the idea of the program is to document the biodiversity of the oceans; how much of it there is, how it’s changed over time, and what it’s going to look like in the future. So we’re dealing with things as small as microbes, and as large as large sharks and tuna, and everything in between.
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Hannah: What is the urgency behind the information that you’re gathering?
Paul: Part of the urgency is that a lot of this biodiversity is completely undocumented. There are areas of the ocean where we can go where half the species in our sample are new to science. And the urgency arises because we know that some of these environments are threatened by various activities. We know all sorts of things are happening in terms of climate, and in terms of other activities relating to humans. So we’d like to know what’s there before we lose it, in essence. So we’re trying to get something of a baseline from as many environments as we can, as quickly as we can.
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Hannah: Another important aspect of what you're doing or what the Census aims to do is “investigate the past, assess the present, forecast the future,” so what has the history of marine life told you about the current state of our oceans, and how has underwater life changed over time.
Paul: Well, the look backward actually has been very sobering, because some of the discoveries that those working in that area have made are quite striking. The problem is that we don’t have scientific data going back very far. And so, when we tried to figure out what the oceans looked like before human presence there, we don’t have a lot to go on. But these investigators have used a whole variety of approaches, anything from restaurant menus or paintings at the turn of the century, to looking at bone collections in early settlers. And what we’re finding is that the oceans looked a lot different than they do now. We’ve lost a whole lot of particularly mobile-type species that used to represent the apex of the food pyramid. So what we’re seeing now, is that we’ve really chopped off the whole top end of that, and created a very different-looking ocean. So it’s very disconcerting, and even in our lifetimes, there have been major changes. Not just extinctions, but also a lot of local extirpations where things disappear, and real changes in terms of the way ecosystems operate. So, there is a lot of bad news if we look backwards.
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Erin: Talk about a few specific examples of how human activity is affecting marine life in terms of helping it, or hurting it.
Paul: In terms of hurting it, there’s certainly lots of examples one can think of, but in terms of the key ones that’s gotten a lot of interest from people is the removal of a lot of top predators. And so if we think of things like large sharks, that are disappearing from a lot of different ecosystems around the world, and the effect that has on the food chain below it, that’s one of the things that’s had a really clear and measurable impact on the state of the oceans. In terms of a positive effect, it’s a little harder to think of examples. Although, I would say that the Census itself is a good example, because we’ve created quite a bit of buzz about how much diversity there is in the oceans, and there’s a lot of excitement to be had from discoveries in the oceans, so I think that’s a good thing.
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Erin: Talk about how you go about how you go about forecasting the future. What is it that you take into consideration when you’re trying to predict what should come next. And based on what you’ve seen, what does the future of marine life look like?
Paul: I would suggest that one of things we typically use in trying to forecast forward is looking for trends. So how are things changing as a function of time. So when we have a good historical data set dating up to the present, it’s much easier to forecast forward from that data set. What I would say we predict is going to happen in the future is that we’re going to see more and more of a decline of commercial fisheries. I think collapses will become even more commonplace than they are now, and I think the capacity of the oceans to provide food for humans is going to be compromised quite a it if we don’t change our fishing practices very soon.
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Erin: Talk about some of the recommendations that are being made as the Census continues, based on the data that is gathered. Can you give an example of a recommendation that is being made to save a particular part of marine life that is in acute danger of disappearing?
Paul: The people involved in the Census are largely scientists, so what we’re trying to do is present the facts, and recognize that policymakers are going to make decisions based on those facts, but based on other ones as well. So, we’re certainly trying to alert policymakers to the fact that a lot of these fish populations are in trouble, that there are certain types of activities in the ocean that we can say are damaging habitats. As to whether these activities should be limited or moved elsewhere is really beyond what we can say as scientists, but we can certainly say what the impacts are, and that they are significant.
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Hio Tiao Lim: Good mroning Erin! Good morning Paul! How did the Population of the Ocean change within the last decade? With what Man is doing to the environment, maybe the last frontier will be either the Ocean or Outer Space
Erin: Hello and welcome back! Paul and I were just discussion your very question so hope you can see that part of the dialogue.
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Erin: Talk about some of the challenges that have been encountered along the way during this Census. Obviously there are operations underway in international waters, and territorial waters; talk about some of the obstacles or potential obstacles as data is being gathered.
Erin: I would say the biggest obstacle of all is the magnitude of the problem, that is the amount of diversity in the oceans. One of my colleagues here did a talk last week on the rates of discovery of new species, that it’s going to take about 750 years to describe the diversity of the oceans at the current rate of description. And that doesn’t even get to the microbes, which are another level of difficulty that is just now being recognized. In the case of the microbes in the past, the only way we could really distinguish among them was to try and grow them. And unlike animals, which have a lot of characters that we can try and use to differentiate them, microbes don’t have that. But now have new molecular tools that allow us to get a good handle on microbial numbers, and they’re pretty frightening, just in terms of the work ahead for those interested in trying to describe that microbial diversity.
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Erin: How is the public becoming familiar with this Census, and becoming educated on how to better use the oceans and marine life?
Paul: Certainly one thing we’re trying to do is to communicate our findings as effectively as we can to the public, and so we have a team that’s very good at doing that. There is a lot of excitement when we talk about new species and new environments that we find in the oceans. And that I think has done a lot to raise the public’s awareness about diversity in the oceans. In terms of advising the public on marine biodiversity issues, I guess be supportive of efforts to try and protect biodiversity, and be enthusiastic and supportive of efforts to describe it, and really get a better handle on it.
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Erin: Tell us about your particular background and role with this effort.
Paul: I’m a scientist living in Newfoundland, Canada, and I became involved in the Census because they recognized a need to try and bring all the pieces of the Census together. So they asked a group of us to form a committee that would think about a strategy to organize the results toward 2010, when the Census will be completed. And so, I char that group, and we meet regularly, and talk to all the different groups involved in the Census. And our slogan, if you like, is that the sum of the Census should be greater than its parts. And the idea there is that we have many scientists scattered around the world, working in different environments. And we think that trying to bring those scientists together, not just in terms of their own environments, but in a more global sense, is going to increase what the Census can do as a program and in terms of marine diversity.
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Erin: Tell us about the unique nature of this effort.
Paul: I guess I would say the Census has been a very unique program, in that it’s brought together somewhere around two thousand scientists from around the world. And what’s unique about that is that many of these people were involved in some way in marine biodiversity research, but in a completely uncoordinated fashion, everybody doing their own thing. So what the Census has allowed us to do is to really organize ourselves, come up with a community strategy to address marine biodiversity questions. I’d also add two other points. One of the things that the Census has shown that’s very striking is that there’s a lot of bad news about the ocean, a lot to be concerned about. But there’s also a lot to get excited about as well; the opportunities for new discoveries are just immense. I think a lot of people are really shocked by the amount of new life that we’re finding in the oceans. There are lots of areas of the oceans that have never been sampled before, by anybody, at any time.
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Hio Tiao Lim: 2000 scientist to cover the Ocean? that's a tall order :)
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Erin: It's really hard to imagine what it takes to gather all the information for this 10-year effort. Hopefully the Census will establish a solid baseline for the future. We'll look forward to its release in 2010.
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Kashif: tell me about differences in temperature
Erin: Great question. I went to the Census of Marine Life website coml.org and its Census Projects section on Abyssal Plans talks about temperature with regard to climatic change. Paul had to go but we don't think he'll mind if we refer you to the website. Here's a quote from that section I just mentioned. 'Climatic change will reach the deep sea considerably later than other marine environments, but the effects of bottom temperature and the productivity of the surface waters on the environmentally sensitive fauna that live there are expected to be dramatic.'
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Erin: That wraps T2A with marine scientist Paul Snelgrove, who is helping to map the ocean’s plants and inhabitants for the 10-year Census of Marine Life. Our thanks to Paul and to you for joining us. We hope you can come back on Wednesday, November 26th at 1800 utc, when we meet the leader of an important effort to vaccinate against Malaria. The PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) with PATH Director Christian Loucq. The global anti-malaria project is aimed at accelerating development of vaccines and ensuring they reach those in need. That’s Wednesday, November 26th at 1800 utc, right here on voanews.com See you then!
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