New research has generated the first global estimate of the number of fish and invertebrates within the Marine Aquarium Trade (MAT), as a way to incentivise industry sustainability and coral reef conservation.
Every year 55 million organisms are sold — worth $2.15bn at retail — placing the MAT on par with global fisheries, such as tuna, in terms of economic significance.
The paper, published in Science Advances, estimates there are currently over 8,000 retailers globally and 6.7 million marine hobbyists. This number is expected to increase to 45 million by 2100 based on population increases and as countries increase their wealth.
Species traded for aquariums are worth more money per kilogram, compared to fish for food. For example, the average price achieved by the fishers for the MAT is $148 per kg, whereas tuna is $3 per kg.
More than 25 per cent of all known marine species — including high value fish and organisms — are found on coral reefs. These ecosystems are crucial to millions of people as they provide a quarter of all the fish caught by developing countries that border the reefs.
However, scientists warn the aquarium trade is at a crossroads forced by threats from global climate change and other stressors.
Lead author, Professor Gordon Watson from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “We know that MAT puts stress on key habitats, but it can also help stimulate enthusiasm for marine conservation, and it is a valuable source of income for many communities.
“Aquariums are a great way to educate people about how critical coral reefs are to a healthy and productive planet.”
This paper estimates there are around 500 species being regularly traded in the MAT; 210 fish, and 296 inverts. Twenty-five were identified as being at extremely high risk of being overfished, including species of snails, hermit crabs, and the Bangaii cardinal fish. Indonesian and Sulu-Celebes Seas are the areas most exploited.
“The Marine Aquarium Trade is a hugely valuable industry that has the leverage to generate change, providing a framework for fishers and governments to protect reefs, and as a result the communities that rely on them,” added Professor Watson.
“But data gaps are amplifying demands for an international ban on the trade. Our study goes some way to fill in these grey areas.”
Despite a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of the MAT, the authors warn if nothing changes it will transform into an aquaculture-dominated industry. This would see species farmed away from the reefs and associated coastal communities who rely on them to sustain their economy, or moving to more destructive methods of fishing.
Professor Watson said: “The trade finds itself at a crossroads with near-future governance decisions being critical for its long-term future. These choices can be distilled into a ‘business-as-usual’ approach or a ‘MAT positive’ one.”
The study has outlined a number of ways the MAT can become more sustainable:
- Species stock assessment of those most at risk and put in stock management
- Address mortality in the chain of custody
- Support local coral reef protection and restoration programmes
- Governance structures needed, similar systems to the tuna
- Successful introduction of the Fairtrade/MSC certification-style system to help implement these things
The paper concludes by saying a ‘MAT-positive’ future is imaginable, but requires real action on climate change, evidence-based management, consumer education, sustainable practice incentivisation, and over-exploitation assessments to ensure that the MAT becomes a ‘force-for-good’ and paradigm of sustainable coral reef fisheries.
A team of sustainability scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the journal PLOS ONE that they have developed a community-based framework, founded on extensive local and traditional knowledge, to help assess and respond to the kinds of ecological threats that are widely dispersed across a varied landscape and whose solutions are not immediately obvious. The framework, which was developed to address watershed issues in Honduras’s Lake Yojoa, is widely applicable to a broad range of threats facing ecological commons wherever they may occur around the world.
“One of the biggest issues facing international sustainability efforts is that smaller, less economically developed countries often don’t have the resources to conduct nuanced, in-depth surveys of local people and the local environment in the threatened area,” says Ana Quiñónez Camarillo, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “And so environmental organizations often wind up pushing a top-down conservation strategy, which may or may not be acceptable to the local people. If the strategy isn’t acceptable, then it may fail, costing time, money, goodwill and further endangering ecological and social health.”
This is especially true of ecological issues that are widely dispersed, have multiple causes and result in an array of negative effects.
Quiñónez Camarillo and her co-author, UMass Amherst Professor of Environmental Conservation Timothy Randhir, point to Honduras’s Lake Yojoa watershed as an example.
Lake Yojoa is the country’s largest natural lake, and its watershed covers 337 square kilometers of forest and mountains. It is adjacent to two national parks; a major highway runs nearby, and dozens of towns and villages are located within the watershed, some right on the lake’s edge and other tucked up in the mountains. The watershed is rich in biodiversity and has become a popular tourist destination. Aside from tourism, fishing is a major industry, as well as mining and aquaculture.
Many in the region are concerned about water quality, but what water quality looks like depends upon which part of the watershed you are in — and the method of protecting water quality may, on the surface, look like it has nothing to do with water. For instance, in the mountainous highlands, a concern for water quality may mean changing logging or mining practices, since deforestation often leads to silt-filled streams which empty into the lake, which then effect fish and the people who rely upon them for their livelihood. “If you were to tell someone in the mountains, ‘don’t log in this way to protect the fish in the lake,’ it wouldn’t make any sense” says Quiñónez Camarillo.
To help make these connections visible and expedite planning, Quiñónez Camarillo and Randhir adapted a sensitive, flexible and complex framework, called a multiscale ecological framework, to focus on the local perception of threats, consequences and solutions (TCS).
“Academic experts in sustainability all over the world are faced with the challenge of how to use extremely theoretical scientific frameworks to engage the public,” says Randhir, who has been a pioneer in such environmental frameworks. “Our TCS framework makes thinking across multiple scales more approachable for local communities by focusing on the three big areas — threats, consequences and solutions — that are familiar to how people live their daily lives.”
To test the TCS framework, Quiñónez Camarillo and Randhir conducted 224 surveys across 12 communities within the Lake Yojoa watershed, as well as engaging 24 other stakeholders, which ranged from private companies to the National parks and which were selected by the local commonwealth for the Lake Yojoa Watershed, AMUPROLAGO. The surveys were conducted orally in Spanish. The surveys were designed in conjunction with AMUPROLAGO and, in addition to standard demographic questions, focused on threats, consequences and solutions to the loss of forests, wetlands, wildlife, fishing resources, water quality and water quantity.
From the rich data that the researchers collected, they were able to generate a series of detailed tables assessing a wide range of threats, consequences and solutions for the various locales in the Lake Yojoa watershed — grass-roots information which the team hopes will serve as a valuable baseline for conservation and governmental organizations at work in the Lake Yojoa region.
“With the TCS framework,” says Quiñónez Camarillo, we can design better solutions that will be more effective because they are more equitable and acceptable to local people. This framework can help show how big solutions actually affect the things that people really care about at the grass roots.”
This research was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Department of Agriculture, the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station, and the National Science Foundation.
The ocean is a critical life-support system for our planet through its role in global climate regulation. It absorbs most of the carbon emissions and heat trapped in the atmosphere which are a result of human activities. Over the years, this has led to ocean warming (OW), ocean acidification (OA), and ocean deoxygenation (OD). Moreover, increased anthropogenic-nitrogen-deposition (AND) has largely influenced marine environments. As part of these consequences, the gases nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) are largely controlled by ‘prokaryotes’ or microbial organisms living in the ocean. While several studies have analyzed these processes in detail, their concurrent impact on ocean ecosystems has not been investigated.
In a recent study, a team of researchers led by Prof. Il-Nam Kim, Associate Professor of Marine Science at Incheon National University, evaluated the prokaryotic population changes and metabolic modifications due to the concurrent impact of OW, OA, OD, and AND across the Western North Pacific Ocean. Their findings were published online in Volume 196 of in Marine Pollution Bulletinon November 1, 2023.
“Climate change leads to marine environmental changes and this study can enhance our understanding of their impact on human life,” Prof. Kim says.
The authors simultaneously studied the effects of climate change across the surface layer (SL), intermediate layer (IL), and deep layer (DL) of the ocean. The microbial community and their functional potential in regulating the N2O and CH4 cycles were evaluated using biogeochemical analysis and microbial genome-sequencing.
The results indicated that prokaryotes from SL to DL are closely associated with climate change drivers. During the long-term, the sensitive marine ecosystem in WNPO can be adversely affected by an increase in N2O production with subsequent pH alteration, ultimately increasing CH4 emissions. These findings deviate from the currently assumed potential of prokaryotes and biogeochemical processes related to climate change. It also realigns the focus on how climate change impacts the open ocean ecosystem. Dr. Kim concludes, “This research will contribute to raising the awareness about the severity of climate change and the importance of the ocean resources.”
This pioneer study has the potential to shape future marine ecosystem research. Policies aimed at reducing ocean acidification and warming can help in the stabilization of these vital microbial communities and greenhouse gas cycles.
The ocean’s capacity to store atmospheric carbon dioxide is some 20% greater than the estimates contained in the latest IPCC report1. These are the findings of a study to be published in the journal Nature on December 6, 2023, led by an international team including a biologist from the CNRS2. The scientists looked at the role played by plankton in the natural transport of carbon from surface waters down to the seabed.
Plankton gobble up carbon dioxide and, as they grow, convert it into organic tissue via photosynthesis. When they die, part of the plankton is transformed into particles known as ‘marine snow’. Being denser than seawater, these particles sink down to the seabed thus storing carbon there and providing essential nutrients for a wide range of deep-sea organisms, from tiny bacteria to deep-sea fish.
By analysing a bank of data collected from around the world by oceanographic vessels since the 1970s, the team of seven scientists were able to digitally map fluxes of organic matter throughout the world’s oceans. The resulting new estimate of carbon storage capacity is 15 gigatonnes per year, an increase of around 20% compared with previous studies (11 gigatonnes per year) published by the IPCC in its 2021 report.
This reassessment of the ocean’s storage capacity represents a significant advance in our understanding of carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean at the global level. While the team stresses that this absorption process takes place over tens of thousands of years, and is therefore not sufficient to offset the exponential increase in CO2 emissions caused by worldwide industrial activity since 1750, the study nonetheless highlights the importance of the ocean ecosystem as a major player in the long-term regulation of the global climate.
Notes
1 IPCC Climate Change 2021 Report, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 5, Figure 5.12: Figure AR6 WG1 | Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis
2 From the Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Environnement Marin LEMAR (CNRS/UBO/IFREMER/IRD)
The cool of the forest is a welcome escape on a hot day. This is especially true for mammals in North America’s hottest regions, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. The study indicates that, as the climate warms, preserving forest cover will be increasingly important for wildlife conservation.
The study, published today in the journal PNAS, found that North American mammals — from pumas, wolves and bears to rabbits, deer and opossums — consistently depend on forests and avoid cities, farms and other human-dominated areas in hotter climes. In fact, mammals are, on average, 50% more likely to occupy forests than open habitats in hot regions. The opposite was true in the coldest regions.
“Different populations of the same species respond differently to habitat based on where they are,” said lead author Mahdieh Tourani, who conducted the study while a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis and is now an assistant professor of quantitative ecology at the University of Montana, Missoula. “Climate is mediating that difference.”
Tourani points to the eastern cottontail as an example. The study showed the common rabbit preferred forests in hotter areas while preferring human-dominated habitat, such as agricultural areas, in colder regions.
Not one-size-fits-all
Her example illustrates “intraspecific variation,” which the study found to be pervasive across all North America’s mammals. This runs contrary to a longstanding practice in conservation biology of categorizing species as those that live well alongside people and those that don’t. The authors say there is growing recognition of ecological flexibility, and that species are more complicated than those two categories suggest.
“We can’t take a one-size-fits all approach to habitat conservation,” said senior author Daniel Karp, a UC Davis associate professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. “It turns out climate has a large role in how species respond to habitat loss.”
For example, if elk are managed under the assumption that they can only live in protected areas, then conservation managers may miss opportunities to conserve them in human-dominated landscapes.
“On the other hand, if we assume a species will always be able to live alongside us, then we might be wasting our effort trying to improve the conservation value of human-dominated landscapes in areas where it is simply too hot for the species,” Karp said.
A pathway for conservation
For the study, the authors leveraged Snapshot USA, a collaborative monitoring program with thousands of camera trap locations across the country.
“We analyzed 150,000 records of 29 mammal species using community occupancy models,” Tourani said. “These models allowed us to study how mammals respond to habitat types across their ranges while accounting for the fact that species may be in an area, but we did not record their presence because the species is rare or elusive.”
The study provides a pathway for conservation managers to tailor efforts to conserve and establish protected areas, as well as enhance working landscapes, like farms, pastures, and developed areas.
“If we’re trying to conserve species in working landscapes, it might behoove us to provide more shade for species,” said Karp, whose recent study about birds and climate change drew a similar conclusion, with forests providing a protective buffer against high temperatures. “We can maintain patches of native vegetation, scattered trees, and hedgerows that provide local refugia for wildlife, especially in places that are going to get warmer with climate change.”
Additional co-authors included Rahel Sollmann of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Jorge Ahumada of Conservation International and Arizona State University, and Eric Fegraus of Conservation International.
The study was funded by Conservation International.
No 10 has appointed a wealthy Scottish landowner accused by ramblers of restricting public access to his estate as a new environment minister by making him a peer.
The government made the surprise announcement on Friday afternoon that the king was giving the title of baron to Robbie Douglas-Miller, allowing him to enter the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as a minister.
It gave no biographical details about Douglas-Miller, but he is believed to be a Scottish businessman whose family owned the Edinburgh department store Jenners.
Douglas-Miller has long worked on conservation projects and was awarded an OBE for services to wildlife conservation in Scotland. He is managing director of Moorfoot Capital, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Douglas-Miller also chaired a charity called the Atlantic Salmon Trust, where Scottish secretary Alister Jack sat on the board and King Charles was the patron.
He has attracted criticism from Ramblers Scotland for apparently making it difficult for walkers to access a site at East Lothian’s Lammermuir Hills, which is part of his Hopes estate.
The area became increasingly popular with walkers during the pandemic, but the estate brought in a new car park and put up a gate, with access reportedly allowed only three or four days a week and requiring permits bought in advance.
In a statement last March, reported by the National, Ramblers Scotland said: “Our members reported that there were only 14 permits a month to be sold, despite the car park having space for 20 cars, and these had immediately sold out.
“We do not believe it is sustainable to continue to create a car park which is only available on certain days and on purchase of a permit.
“This is an indirect obstruction to public access given there is no public transport to this site and it is a long walk from Gifford or surrounding settlements.”
Jon Moses, from the Right to Roam campaign, criticised the appointment. “The government have put yet another unelected major landowner … in charge of our environment and rural affairs. Defra increasingly resembles a genteel medieval court.
“Meanwhile its long awaited access reforms appear to amount to little more than taxpayer handouts to landowners in exchange for permission to access a few woodlands.”
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The apparent approach of the new minister towards access to nature is in contrast to comments from Steve Barclay, the new environment secretary, to journalists at the Country Land and Business Association conference in London on Thursday.
He said he wanted to open up “responsible access” to the countryside to allow people to enjoy the fresh air.
Barclay said he wanted to “support farmers and landowners with access schemes”, adding “we are looking at the detail but I think people want to be able to access nature, but to do it in a responsible way”.
Defra sources said at the time that Barclay was passionate about social prescribing and getting people outdoors to help their mental and physical health.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was approached for comment.
Children must be taught more about the importance of plants if education about climate change and sustainability is to be effective, experts have warned.
Botany should feature more heavily in the school curriculum, and be a greater focus of educational policy, the study says.
It warns neither the importance of plants for sustainability or the threats facing many of them are adequately represented in science education. While the problem has been identified for some time, attempts to address it have often struggled to gain a foothold in science education practice.
Dr Bethan Stagg from the University of Exeter and Professor Justin Dillon from UCL argue teachers should get support and training to challenge their existing assumptions about plants and their importance, so they can demonstrate the critical role of plants in the environment.
Plant diversity is crucial to ecosystems functioning effectively but many species are vulnerable to extinction, mainly due to habitat loss, direct exploitation, and climate change. The researchers have previously found people’s plant awareness develops where they have frequent interactions with plants that have direct relevance to their lives.
Dr Stagg said: “Plants provide an excellent opportunity for developing nature connections, since wild plants are ubiquitous in even the most built-up environment and can be reliably accessed at all times.
“But connecting with plants does not just have to be part of outdoor learning. Plants in the classroom are a valuable resource and can include local wild plants to foster connections with the biodiversity that children encounter every day.
“Focusing on learners’ local environments may render their experiences with plants more relevant and meaningful and allow for a growing appreciation and empathy towards plants.
“Embedding plants in sustainability education is no small challenge, since biological diversity and the ecological crisis are already sidelined in many sustainability policies and debates. Biodiversity is often treated as a sub-topic to climate change. The problem is evident in society more generally. We therefore need educational approaches that raise awareness about biodiversity more broadly.”
Professor Dillon and Dr Stag have been championing this approach in a series of webinars and a forthcoming open access course for educators.
Professor Dillon said: “Understanding plants’ role in sustainability requires more than knowledge of species and awareness of their importance — it requires practical skills ranging from identification to habitat management and horticultural production, as well as a personal motivation to take action, and a social commitment to support others in wider-ranging activities, whether that be citizen science, food growing or protecting pollinators.
“Knowledge alone does not modify behaviour. We cannot expect the current approach to plants in education to either foster plant awareness or contribute to action. Yet, many educational interventions continue to focus primarily on improving cognitive learning gains while paying limited attention to impacts on actions. But it is the behavioural change we need for both addressing the lack of plant awareness and developing learners’ ecological literacy and agency.”
Everything is connected. One change leads to 10,000 others. When we talk about quality of life, it’s not just about one of us or our communities, but the entire world.
Today’s quote comes from English-American stage actor George Holland, “Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans.”
Earth911 inspiration posters: Post them and share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.
The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, as shown in this illustration, is the first global mission surveying Earth’s surface water. SWOT’s high-resolution data helps scientists measure how Earth’s bodies of water change over time. Credit: CNES.
As part of the long-standing partnership between NASA and Google, NASA worked with Google Arts & Culture and artist Yiyun Kang to create an interactive digital experience around global freshwater resources titled “A Passage of Water.” This immersive experience leverages data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites and new high-resolution data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission to illustrate how climate change is impacting Earth’s water cycle.
A digital version of “A Passage of Water” will be released online on Thursday, Nov. 30, ahead of the beginning of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP 28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Google also will host a physical installation of the visualization project in the Blue Zone at COP 28.
“NASA is the U.S. space agency that provides end-to-end research about our home planet, and it is our job to inform the world about what we learn,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor in Washington. “Highlighting our Earth science data in the installation of ‘A Passage of Water’ is a unique way to share information, in a digestible way, around the important connection between climate change and the Earth’s water cycle.”
For six decades, NASA has been collecting data on Earth’s land, water, air, and climate. This data is used to inform decision-makers on ways to mitigate, adapt and respond to climate change. All of NASA’s Earth science data is available for scientists and the public to access in a variety of ways.
“NASA studies our home planet and its interconnected systems more than any other planet in our universe,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division. “‘A Passage of Water’ provides an opportunity to highlight the public availability of SWOT data and other NASA Earth science data to tell meaningful stories, improve awareness, and help everyday people who have to make real decisions in their homes, businesses, and communities.”
A collaboration between NASA and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), SWOT is measuring the height of nearly all water on Earth’s surface, providing one of the most detailed, comprehensive views yet of the planet’s freshwater bodies. SWOT provides insights into how the ocean influences climate change and how a warming world affects lakes, rivers, and reservoirs.
“The detail that SWOT is providing on the world’s oceans and fresh water is game-changing. We’re only just getting started with respect to data from this satellite, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the information takes us,” said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The Google project also uses data from the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On missions –the former is a joint effort between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), while the latter is a collaboration between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). GRACE tracked localized changes to Earth’s mass distribution, caused by phenomena including the movement of water across the planet from 2002 to 2017. GRACE-FO came online in 2018 and is currently in operation.
As with GRACE before it, the GRACE-FO mission monitors changes in ice sheets and glaciers, near-surface and underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, as well as changes in sea level and ocean currents, providing an integrated view of how Earth’s water cycle and energy balance are evolving.
“A Passage of Water” is the most recent digital experience created under NASA’s Space Act Agreement with Google, with resulting content to be made widely available to the public free of charge on Google’s web platforms. This collaboration is part of a six-project agreement series that aims to share NASA’s content with audiences in new and engaging ways.
Learn more about SWOT, GRACE, GRACE-FO, and NASA’s Earth Science missions at:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth
To learn more about NASA Partnerships, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/partnerships
News Media Contact
Katherine Rohloff
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Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
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