
Focus on Ocean’s Health as Dolphin Deaths Soar - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/us/focus-on-oceans-health-as-dolphin-deaths-soar.html?hp&_r=0
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bbllee
A dead commenter said, "Any startup ideas on cleaning the Ocean? I guess no
country wants to pay for this yet?" and I had two thoughts in response:

There's a reason for the word "tragedy" in the phrase, "the tragedy of the
commons"; "cleaning" probably isn't going to cut it; ocean warming and
acidification will quite possibly cause mass extinctions.

~~~
rosser
_ocean warming and acidification will quite possibly cause mass extinctions._

There's no possibly about it. As soon as the oceans become too acidic for
corals to form, whole ecosystems will collapse.

~~~
Someone
But will they become too acidic so fast that no coral can adapt?

I know we are really good at changing the environment, but the oceans are
huge.

~~~
scarmig
The oceans are huge, but we've already managed to decrease pH by 0.1 in the
past century.

A pessimistic but plausible scenario has ocean pH decreasing by an additional
0.7-0.8 by 2300.

That's pretty fast. It's hard to predict how and how fast coral might adapt,
but those are short time scales to expect evolution to act on.

~~~
ble
Pardon the profanity, but fuck! On a logarithmic scale, a decrease of 0.1 on
the pH is a 25% increase in H+ concentration...

... and a decrease of 0.7 is a 500% increase in H+ concentration. That sounds
apocalyptic, at least for ocean ecosystems.

Warming and acidification are increasing jellyfish blooms, right? Do you know
any good recipes for grilled jellyfish?

------
Someone
The way I interpret this is that we simply don't know what causes these
extinctions. It could well be that they are perfectly normal in the sense that
one gets them about every X years.

A bad year for dolphin food, possibly in combination with a harsh winter may
make large parts of the population get susceptible to a disease that they
normally don't suffer much from.

Predator-prey systems are known to show highly erratic behavior
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka–Volterra_equation)
gives the idealized version for only two species. That is tractable, but
discrete multi-species ones aren't) This _could_ just be an example of such
behaviour, but there could also be a human-induced change that changes that
system to one where we end up with zero fish and, a few years later, zero
dolphins. Or, possibly, the system has been on a course of a catastrophic
event for thousands of years.

~~~
3am
Your interpretation doesn't bear any particular resemblance to the article.
There's no mention in it of any prey shortages, nor anything about extinction.

They do mention several times that they don't know precise why this
morbillivirus outbreak is occurring now, though. But that

"The Indian River Lagoon, a diverse estuary, has been tainted by huge algae
blooms caused in part by too much nitrogen. Research on some of the dead
dolphins in the estuary — 76 died this year, the third series of deaths since
2001 — has showed that some had high levels of mercury, fungal diseases,
antibiotic-resistant bacteria and oral-genital tumors. The dolphins found were
emaciated."

and in some other cases, they have a pretty decent idea, but it's unconfirmed:

"Gulf Coast states and the federal government are still investigating the
impact of the oil spill in the region, and scientists cannot yet say why the
dolphins are dying. So far, it appears that toxins or morbillivirus are not
the primary cause.

“We can’t conclusively say what role oil played at this time,” Ms. Fougeres
said. “But the event is pretty unprecedented in terms of how long the die-off
has been occurring and how many have died as part of that event.”

A NOAA study released last week of 29 bottlenose dolphins that were examined
in Barataria Bay in Louisiana — an area hit hard by the spill — found that
they had lung disease, hormonal abnormalities and other illnesses that are
consistent with exposure to oil."

~~~
Someone
Being an interpretation, you should not expect to literally find it in the
article.

As food for thought: the article doesn't mention what the size of the
population is. A thousand death dolphins could be a disaster, but it also
could be a statistical anomaly. Percentage-wise, the effect could be smaller
than that of 25 years ago.
[http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/health/mmume/midatldolphins2013....](http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/health/mmume/midatldolphins2013.html)
does not mention population count, either. Looking at the linked
[http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/health/mmume/mid-
atlantic2013.ht...](http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/health/mmume/mid-
atlantic2013.html), I find that there are over a 100,000 dolphins that might
be affected. If the deaths are across the population, I don't think any of the
populations is at risk, even if this repeats itself next year. Replacement per
year should be about 2,000 to keep population at 100,000.

And lung disease happens to be associated with Morbilliviruses, too
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocine_distemper_virus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocine_distemper_virus))

Also, as that URL shows, there was a Morbilliviruses epidemic going on with
seals in the North Sea in 1988-1992. At the time, people claimed seals would
go extinct in the Wadden Sea. Now, there are 150,000
([http://www.ecomare.nl/index.php?id=4180&L=2);](http://www.ecomare.nl/index.php?id=4180&L=2\);)
the population in the Wadden sea increased from 150 in 1992 to just over 3000
in 2012 (same link). Is that a sign that all is well with the environment? I
doubt it. As with this article, I read "we simply don't know" between the
lines.

And that's not because I think the scientists working on this aren't good.
They have to make a living and have forget their maybe' sand "it's just one
theory"'s in order to make the paper. Many of the so-called softer sciences
are simply too hard to make accurate predictions about. Maths? Easy. Physics?
AFAIK, all electrons are created equal, but things get difficult hard as soon
as you have many of them. Chemistry? Already a bit harder. Biology? Some
simple models make good rough predictions, but don't expect those predictions
to be even remotely right every time. Psychology? You can almost forget to
make reliable predictions. Sociology? Even harder.

~~~
3am
I don't understand any of the points you're trying to convey. Let me respond
to each of your paragraphs individually:

#2 - you're arguing against a point neither I nor (IMO) the article are trying
to make. The cause of the anomalous mass die-offs is of interest, but there's
no concert it's an existential threat for the Atlantic dolphin population.

#3 - irrelevant. Unless you can tell me more about the nature of the lung
disease [edit: allegedly] from oil & from the virus, I'll assume the
researches can distinguish between the two. That also doesn't address the
hormonal abnormalities or the other symptoms they didn't enumerate.

#4 - again, irrelevant. Same comments from #1 apply. You are arguing against a
point that is not being made.

#5 - If you have some sort of disagreements with the data, or the methodology
of their interpretation, then by all means be specific about it. Otherwise
it's hard to see how this is on topic.

------
bradL
We are probably living in one of Earth's great mass extinctions.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)

~~~
3am
We are _causing_ one of Earth's mass extinctions.

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pilooch
Since they were supposed to be the first to leave Earth, this sounds like
another bad signal for us...

