How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 074: Assessing Marine Biodiversity for South America
Research Thursday: This week's study compares marine biodiversity among 5 regions within South America. The authors noticed some marked differences among the regions including capacity to survey, funding, scientific expertise, which resulted in differences in biodiversity.
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http://www.speakupforblue.com/session74
And to the speaker for blue podcast session 74 today is research Thursday our second one ever and I'm very excited because that means I get to analyze and communicate to you a research paper that I found interesting that I think you'll find interesting as well. Today we're going to talk about analysis of biodiversity differences within South America. It's going to be really cool. We're going to talk about why biodiversity is important and why it's important in South America and why it's important for them to know the differences within South America. So that's all on the podcast today. Stay tuned. Welcome to the speaker for blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host. He still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the speaker for blue podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakerforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. And I'm excited. I am very excited for today. Not only because this week we've released our patreon page where you can support this podcast and allow me to spend more time on the episodes and more time and bringing you better and better content and always providing you with more. But you can also support the growing content that we are going to provide just in general in terms of bringing out a digital magazine and bringing video into play and traveling to different places to bring you video and really just building this media empire that I want to build for ocean science and conservation. So it's going to be awesome. All you have to do is go to speakerforblue.com/patreon P A T R E O N and you can provide your support right there. So I thank you very much in advance. The other thing I'm excited about is research Thursday where I take a research paper that I find really interesting. And I just kind of explore it. I communicate to you and I tell you why it's important for conservation of the ocean. So today I've been the last couple of weeks. I've actually been exploring P L S O one P L O S one, which is essentially a online journal that it's basically open access. It allows open access for everybody. Normally journals, scientific journals, you have to pay for it to pay a lot of money. A lot of the times when you want to download a PDF of just a normal for profit kind of journal, you have to pay like $40 a paper. It's kind of crazy, but they need to make their money. So that's fine. P L S O one P L O S one came out and provided open access and a lot of scientists are actually publishing there so that they don't so that people can actually get access to the paper because because it is science, we want to share our knowledge. We want to be able to criticize each other, make each other better. And that's how we do it through journal articles. It's very important. This is why I'm bringing journal articles to the podcast is because a lot of people including myself don't really have time to read it. Sometimes the stuff is over my head. I can just imagine to a non scientist. So what I want to do, the idea of research Thursday is to bring a research paper, explain it, break it down so that you can understand. You don't have to worry about, you know, realizing, you know, science or statistics or anything like that. I just give you the breakdown of what the paper is about and its implications for conservation and or management. So today we're going to talk about marine biodiversity in the Atlantic and Pacific Coast off South America. We're going to talk about the knowledge and gaps and why that's important. But first, I want to talk about marine biodiversity. That term biodiversity and marine biodiversity is thrown around a lot when you talk about conservation. And I find it misleading because I have a feeling a lot of people who are not familiar with science or didn't take science in high school university may not know the benefits or the advantages of having a diverse ocean, a diverse habitat in general. So I want to talk about that right now. Essentially, biodiversity is having a number of different groups, number of, well, it could be on different levels. So you can have a number of different ecosystems, you can have a number of different habitats on another on a lower scale. You can have a number of different communities to support that area. You can have for your habitat. You can have a number of different species. And you can have a number of different genetic variety, which we talked about last week with the tuna, the yellowfin tuna, where there was two genetically different stocks of tuna, yellowfin tuna, and that became very important in their conservation implications. So there's different scales of biodiversity, but essentially what biodiversity does is it creates stability in the system. So a great analogy to that is your stocks and bonds. When you invest your money, everybody tells you the safer bet is to invest in a lot of different stocks, a lot of different industries, which is you want to increase your diversity. So a lot of mutual funds will have a number of different sectors that they invest in. That's, that's in one fund. I'm not a huge investor, but I know this. And so, you know, you, the mutual funds tend to be less risky. They may not have a bigger payout, but they tend to be less risky. In other words, they tend to, you tend to lose less money if you are going to lose money, but you won't win as much money, but it's, it provides stability in your investment. So if you want to do long term investment and you, and you're a little worried about how much you want to risk, a mutual fund is always great. If you want to be a little more risky, you can go to a non mutual fund, which can go up and down quite a bit. And depending on when you want to pay out, for instance, if you want to retire and you want to buy, and you want someone to buy out your stocks, but it would dip below what you originally bought it for, you can lose a lot of money, right? So, keeping that diversity keeps stability. And when you're in the environment and you're in the ocean, you don't want to take risks because the risk can be catastrophic. Just as in a risk in business, you know, risk risking your investment to get a 20% return, but also you can lose 20%. That is risky, but hopefully you can recover from that monetary value. When a complete system becomes destabilized, it can change the makeup of that habitat. For instance, coral reefs provide safety for the shore because it decreases wave energy when waves come over the coral reefs. It provides a lot of fish because it provides a lot of diversity. Those fish play a role and in vertebrates, they all play a role in the habitat. So, a lot of fish, they'll have herbivores fish, you'll have carnivores fish. Herbivores fish will eat all the algae and clean off the corals. So, if too much algae gets on the corals, it'll suffer the corals, the corals won't be able to get the light they need to actually provide them with the energy they need to grow and they'll eventually die. They'll bleach and they'll die and that algae will take over and they'll just get smothered and they'll never be able to recover without those fish. But those herbivores fish will eat the algae, make sure the algae stays off and the light can get into the coral and the coral can build its skeleton. That's a very, very general view, but that's essentially what happens. If, for some reason, the herbivores fish are taken out and a lot of nutrients come in from the shore, because coral reefs are usually found close to shore, that can really destabilize the system and that can cause a lot of algae, nuisance algae, where algae mats just go grow right over the corals, the coral reefs, and then the reefs are gone. That can change everything. So, now your shore is less protected. You have less fish to eat, to fish. Your stability is gone, it changes over and it's hard to change back unless you get rid of that algae and even then it may not come back. So, that's what I mean by it, but you don't want to take too much of a risk when you're talking about habitats and biodiversity. You want to make sure they are stable. So, that's what biodiversity provides. You know, the good thing about biodiversity, say you, for you going back to that coral reef example and you have a number of different species that are herbivores fish. Each playing an important role, but essentially the same role by grazing on the corals to get the algae off the corals. Now, if one species of herbivores fish leaves the area, is extra pated from the area, meaning they're not found in the area anymore, for whatever reason, overfishing, whatever it is. There are still maybe two or three other groups that are herbivores fish that can fill in that role of grazing on the corals and continue to keep algae off the off the corals. Now, if you only have one species of herbivores fish or two species of herbivores fish, now you're getting less diverse because you're not having as many species of that function, of that herbivores function, and one species gone or both those species gone, you have no more grazers, right? And if nutrients keep coming into the shore, or there's some kind of change in the environment that causes nutrients to increase algae growth, you have nothing to get off the algae growth. So that's how why it's important to have a biodiverse system, have number of different species performing the same role to keep that stable. If one species is extra pated from the area, you have all the other species to help out and continue their help and do what they do. That's the importance of biodiversity, and that's why when we talk about marine protected areas, we talk about we want to protect fish from being overfished, and we want to protect biodiversity, because it really puts in that stability. Okay, so that's why biodiversity is important. Now, it was interesting to study, getting back to the study about marine biodiversity on the Atlantic and Pacific coast of South America. There are 10 different countries in South America that border along three different oceans. You got the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Now, each country has a different way of surveying. So a lot of countries, what they'll do is their scientists will go out and they'll survey the area and they'll find out how diverse their areas are, depending on how big the country is and everything like that. Now, there's a lot of variables that go into that, even a survey. You need money to go out and do the survey. A lot of times environment is a luxury, right? If your economy's in the crapper, your environment's also in the crapper, because a lot of the money is going to be trying to build the economy. That's usually how politicians works, usually how the world works. So capacity to actually do the research is one, money and capacity. Equipment, boats, all that stuff that's very expensive to get out into to actually do these dives and these remotely operated vehicles to survey the area, deep sea surveys compared to shallow surveys. A lot of countries are just exploring the deep sea. So you're not going to have, you're not going to know a lot about the area in the deep sea because you can't go down and survey because it's extremely expensive. Even though there are ROVs remotely operated vehicles out there, there aren't many. So not every country has them. So they may not be able to go to the depths and really look at the diversity. Plus, if you look at a country like Chile, which is very long, has a lot of coastline, you may not be able to survey the entire coastline because it's so damn long. So there are a lot of, as you can see, there's a lot of, there are a lot of variables for each country to actually go in and do the work just to get the funds and the capacity to do the work. Now, on the other hand, you also have, I lost my train of thought. On the other hand, you also have the, like, the ways, the methodologies of actually getting things done. So everybody has certain procedures to identify a species we call taxonomy. When you're looking at diversity, you want to identify all the species you can. Some countries have experts in specific guilds or specific families or specific taxonomy, whether it be fish or corals or mollusks, which is basically squid, snails, mussels, and so forth and clams. And you've got a kind of nadirms, which are basically starfish and so forth. You've got a lot of, you may have, you know, some countries maybe have higher expertise in identifying corals, nadiria and echinoderms, the starfish, and then you have others that are better at fish. So there's a lot of differences between these 10 different countries because they'll have different expertise and they'll have different capacities to actually go out and survey. So this study made a comment on that and said, well, let's try and look at all of the diversity, try and standardize all the studies and all the results and all the data and try and come up with a conclusion of what is the distribution or what is the diversity, the assessment of diversity in South America on a regional on a continental scale, right? Because you got different scales again, you got a continental scale, you got a regional scale or a national, you got a national scale, then you got a regional scale could, which could, the regional scale, sorry, it go, I'm sorry, goes continental, regional, which, what continental will take up all the South America, you got regional scale, which will take up, could include one or more countries or two or more countries, then you got the national scale, right, then you got the sub-regional scale, which is essentially a little smaller than the national scale. So all the little regions within the nation, either the country, and then you've got sort of the municipal region, right? So like the really local region. So all those different scales, so this study was looking at the continental scale and really comparing the different regions within the continent. So they identified five different regions, and I'm going to tell you them in just a sec here, once I find it's a really long article. So they had five different regions. There was, hold on a sec, I'm just opening up. Okay, so there's the Brazilian shells, which is on, of course, obviously on the Atlantic side, the western Atlantic, you've got the Caribbean, which is above Venezuela, and a bit of Colombia. You've got the Humboldt current system, which is the Pacific side, so stemming from Peru all the way down to Chile. You've got the Patagonian shelf, which is on the Atlantic side, which includes a little bit of Chile, I believe, Argentina and the southern Uruguay. You've got the tropical East Pacific, which is at the top, the north, the northeast part of South America, which includes Colombia and Peru, and then the northern Peru, and then you've got the tropical West Atlantic, which is essentially Guyana, a little bit of Brazil, and the eastern part of Venezuela. So you've got five different regions that they looked at, and over the continent. Obviously, there's overlapping boundaries on there, country boundaries, but five different regions. And the interesting part, the interesting part is the solution, the results that they found, which was, I found, this was probably the most interesting that I found, said, an analysis of endomism, which is essentially, and to be an endemic species, you're only found in that one spot. They said a 75% of the species are reported within only one of the South America regions. And while about 22% of the species of South America are not reported elsewhere in the world. So there's 75% among the regions that are only found in one region. And 22% of all those species found in all those regions aren't found anywhere else in the world. So within South America, within the world, South America has 22% of its species are only found in South America. Regionally, 75% of the species are only found in one of the regions. Now I think that's quite interesting. I just, and I, of course, the tropical areas tend to be more diverse. Now, from a management implication, right, endemic species are probably more vulnerable than non endemic species because they're only found in a particular area. So 22% of the species on a continental scale are only found in South America. So from a management point of view, you want to make sure those species, which make South America unique, are protected at some level. That diversity are protected at some level. Then you want to look at the region that has 75% of the species and say, Hey, why is this so important? And we need to protect this area because they're not found anywhere else. And I'm sure there's a lot of the species that are found that are not found anywhere else in the world that are within that that region. So from a management perspective, in terms of endemic species, you want to make sure you protect those species because it makes South America unique, it makes that region unique. And it's important to protect those species. So maybe you want to focus your marine protected areas on those specific areas in that specific region, especially if a lot of the 22% of those species found nowhere else in the world are in that region. So you want to make that a priority, right? And I find it interesting in terms of looking at the diversity, and especially when they compare it to the authors here, which are all around the authors are a conglomerate of people that are all around South America. Sorry, I'm used to saying North America so much. But essentially what happens is when you look at human disturbance, human influence, which is usually negative on the ocean, and you compare it to regions that have a high diversity of species and a low diversity species, you really want to focus on protecting the areas that the regions that have a low diversity species, especially if there's a high influence of impact, a high human influence, whether it be overfishing, whether it be pollution, whether it be nutrients, it doesn't matter. Whether it be even environmental, like climate change, it doesn't matter. What we need to do from a management point of view is look at those species and make sure that those species are protected, right? If they're found somewhere else, maybe allow those things to protect it, look at the connectivity between regions of those species to make sure that they're protected, that there's a regeneration of species coming into the area. You know, there's all these little factors that come into play. But the fact is, is you have to know what species are in your area. That's why doing these surveys, these species surveys, these community surveys, where they essentially try and create databases for as many species as possible. So we know how many and what species are in South America or in a continent so that we can manage them appropriately. And we can find out gaps in our knowledge and focus future surveys on there. We can look at strengths and say, okay, well, these this region is a lot more ahead because it has a lot more. The countries have a lot more, I'll have a higher capacity to go out and survey. So we surveyed more of the animals. So it doesn't necessarily mean that there's more animals in one particular region in another. It just could mean that those countries actually have more money or the ability to go out to survey these areas. So if there's gaps in knowledge in other areas and showing less species, then maybe we need to go out and do and go out and survey those species. It's actually quite interesting. In my master's degree, I did a species area curves for some places on Scotian shelf in Canada. And what we did, these curves, what they do is based on the area and the number species you've already found, it can predict how many more species you're missing. So it's like it's a curve that goes up and it eventually reaches an asymptote. So eventually levels off. And that's the number, when it levels off, that's the number of species that you're essentially going to max out at in a particular area. So if you know a specific area of a region and you've surveyed a certain amount and you know how many species you get, you can actually extrapolate, okay, if I've done 10 kilometer, surveyed 10 kilometers squared and I found 10 species, well, what if the whole area is 44 kilometers squared, how many more species am I missing? And then you can estimate how many more species you're missing. And then you can go out and look for those species and figure out where abouts you are on that. It's actually kind of cool. It's not perfect, but it's a good estimate. So these are the things that you that that what the research does in these big surveys do, they bring about results and conclusions where managers can actually take and say, okay, we need to focus our areas in these regions or we need to focus areas on finding more species in these regions or protecting this area more because there's a high diversity of species in here. So that's that's the paper today. You know, I think it's I think it's cool. I think the fact that PLOS 1 provides these open access papers are fantastic. If you ever want to read these things, you can just you can you can Google PLS or PLOS 1, two separate words, and then just put in like marine conservation and you can have all these different papers and you can read them. And what I suggest if you're not, if you're worried about all the math and all the statistics that go into it, read the introduction and read the discussion and even the abstract and you'll get a sense for what this paper is all about. And I highly recommend all the Speak Up for Blue community members to read that. Okay, so that's it for for today. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it. You can look at a summary of this of the of this study on our show notes at www.speakupforblue.com/session74. These sessions are going so fast. It's awesome. We're doing so we're pumping out so much content. It's fantastic. But what you can do is you will link to the article so you can actually read the article yourself. You can see all the different it's really cool because now it's online. You can actually click on all the figures independently and it's really it's really neat. You can add comments and so forth. So you can we can do that on this on the show notes. And also, if you like what we're talking about on this podcast and you want to hear more, you can join our Patreon community. It's at speakupforblue.com/patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N. There'll be a link in the show notes as well for sponsoring us here. The more people that sponsor, the more we hit our goals, the more time we can spend on the articles, we can provide different types of media. There's digital magazines that I'd like to put out. There are videos that I'd like to put out. It's just just an expansion. Essentially creating an ocean science and conservation media station. That's essentially what the goal is. Starting off with this podcast, starting off with you. It's for the people, by the people. That's what I'm trying to create. That's what we're trying to create as a team, as a community. So the more we do that, the more you support the closer we can to get to those goals. So thank you very much. You've been listening to Speakup for Blue Podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy Thursday and happy conservation. [Music]