How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 052: Toxic Algae Ravaging The Pacific Ocean
Warming oceans are bring more frequent toxic algae blooms to the Pacific delaying the Dungeness crab fishery indefinitely. I talk about other events that were related to toxic algae during the podcast.
Shop for the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/shop
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session52
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast session 52. Believe it or not, I found another consequence of climate change in the Pacific. Stay tuned and you'll find out on this episode of the Speak Up For Blue podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, he thinks the bakita is the most adorable mammal on the planet, Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Speak Up For Blue podcast, your voice for the ocean. My name is Andrew Lewin. I am your humble host of this podcast. I am also the founder of Speak Up For Blue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. And today, we've got a very special show because I'm going to talk about another ocean issue. I know you're probably sick of it. You're probably sick of the fact that Andrew, you always talk about these ocean issues. But you know what? They're issues because there's a problem. And we have many problems facing the ocean. And I have to talk about the ones that Nitto talked about all the time. I don't like talking about them. I don't like the fact that they exist. But the fact is, we need to talk about it. I don't want you to get depressed. I don't want you to get overwhelmed. Everything has a solution. And so does this. So we're going to talk about this in just a sec. But before we do, I want to ask you a question. Do you feel overwhelmed when I talk about issues like this and you don't know what to do? You want to get involved in ocean conservation, but you're having problems on where to begin? Well, that's why you've come to Speak Up For Blue because this is what we do. We help you get involved with ocean conservation. And to help you even further, if you don't know anything about ocean conservation, or you know a lot about ocean conservation and you want to help, you can do so by buying some of our merchandise. And I'll tell you why. If you go over to speakupforblue.com/shop, you can shop your heart away on all of the different merch that we have. We have t-shirts, we have travel mugs, we have at home mugs, and we have iPhone cases that have specific sayings on them that will start a conversation on ocean conservation. So for instance, we have one shirt or one saying that goes on all the different items that says keep calm and conserve the ocean. Well, I've worn that t-shirt and it's helped people come to me be like, hey, I like your t-shirt, what's it all about? Or why are you wearing that t-shirt? Where did you get it? What are you doing about it? And I tell them, I tell them all about ocean conservation. I said, do you have three hours? Sit down. Or I just say, do you have five minutes? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about ocean issues and how to solve them. And so it's a great way to bring about awareness to other people that you may not even figure have don't don't have that same awareness. The other thing that it does is every all the revenue that we get all the proceeds that we get go directly to our partner organization. It's a charity charitable organization nonprofit organization called sea turtles forever. And you can get find more information on sea turtles forever at speakerforblue.com forward slash partner. But essentially what sea turtles sea turtles forever do is they protect sea turtle. It's right in their name. Isn't that awesome? They're very creative. But no, really, they do some fantastic work in Central America. They protect sea turtle nests from poachers. They also work with local communities and convert poachers into ecotourism operators, or they work with ecotourism. So what they do essentially is they will go in and they have a great time working with with other local communities. They teach them how ecotourism works. They teach them that ecotourism is actually more sustainable to not only the ocean but their community their actual revenue. Because the more turtles you have the more sea turtles you have the more people that want to come and see those sea turtles either as dive operators or maybe on a boat or maybe they come and they watch the sea turtles come to the beach do not touch but they watch them come to the beach. And if you've never seen a sea turtle live it's one of the best experiences possible. So it's a great way to explore this kind of thing but you get to support them in doing their research. They're a small organization but they have a very big impact and we want to help them continue that by financially supporting them so that they can grow and they can protect more sea turtles. They also are very innovative. They have this very cool tool that helps filter out small microplastic in the beaches. So when you do a beach cleanup it's very difficult to pick up every piece of microplastic. The problem is these pieces of microplastic can kill some type of marine organism whether it be a marine mammal sea turtle sea bird fish invertebrate doesn't matter it can actually hurt them or kill them even worse. So what this does is they actually come up they actually filter out this with it they use a tool to filter out this microplastic on the beach and it's so good it's so good that state governments in the US are starting to purchase them to implement in their beach cleaning process. Again we want to help them continue that program we want to help them make a big impact on ocean conservation so we are going to take all the proceeds from the shop the merchandise store online at speakupforblue.com/shop and give it right towards to Mark Ward a president of sea turtles forever. I'm going to cut them a check every month when we get proceeds coming in and we will support that organization. We'll also give you updates on how that organization is doing or what they're doing with our money. So anyway let's get back into the show because this is one of the best. Wow this is one of the things that I like to talk about it's an ocean issue it's serious it's depressing yes but it's also the more you're aware of it the more you want to do something about it. So we're going to talk about toxic algae and there's been toxic toxic algae blooms off the coast of California that's actually indefinitely postponed this year's dungeness crab season. So there's a big history for dungeness crab it's in the Bay Area in San Francisco Bay Area and their actually officials are actually delaying it indefinitely because there's such a high toxic high concentration of toxic algae and they're in blooms of course and that's affecting the dungeness crab. So these toxic ocean conditions could become commonplace throughout the North Pacific as the ocean becomes warmer. Why is this important is because we're in El Nino year not only are we in El Nino year but the pacific decadal oscillation current that I've spoken about before it's this big current in in the pacific that actually switches so for the past 10 years it's been on a cold motion or excited of a cold level and now it's becoming more in a warm level plus the El Nino process makes it even warmer plus there's this thing in the North Pacific called the blob which is a making even things warmer. So there's a big warming in the North Pacific or in the Pacific Ocean in general that's causing a lot of changes that we are not used to. One of these is an increase of toxic blooms. So the Department of Fish and Wildlife postponed the start of dungeness crab season indefinitely until levels of demoic acid a neurotoxin found in local crabs have returned to safe levels. So these crabs have this demoic acid in their bodies in their in their systems however when it comes when it gets up above a certain level they can't be fished they can't be consumed because it can actually harm it can harm us humans and it can harm wildlife as well. So now this normally this rock crab this commercial rock crab fishery is normally open all year round however the season really opens no bit recreationally November 7th and commercially November 15th but it's actually been delayed indefinitely just because of these toxins. So one of the the one of the marine scientists at the center of biological diversity Dr. Abel Valdivia said that this is another wake up call that our oceans are in trouble need help and need it soon waters warming than usual are becoming more frequent in this region just talking about the bay area and studies have showed that these toxic conditions may become more common unless we change our ways there's just too much at stake to ignore this problem and we hope it goes and hope it goes away. So again we you know a lot of politicians are ignoring climate change they're ignoring that this is an actual warming however it's happening you can't ignore it forever and we're seeing changes already imagine what's going to happen in 10 years when this things happen when these things happen more persistently. This affects not only just the fact that we can whether we can consume rock crabs or fish or anything out of the ocean on a regular basis it affects the economy in that local area plus the economy worldwide as more and more of these things these sort of events occur. So the NOAA the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration suspects that demoque acid poisoning is what caused such events as is the sea lion strandings and bird deaths along the west coast along with as well as 30 deaths of large whales off the coast of Alaska. So this is this is just a quote from the article that I got the CBS San Francisco Bay Area article. This is just one of those things like okay we found that there's a lot of toxins we found that there's a lot of sea lions that are dying because of toxins there were mass strandings back in the summer or back in the winter we didn't know really what it was caused from NOAA suspects it's actually these toxic levels these demoque acid what happens is these dudginess crabs and these lower sort of animals on the food chain get this high level these high levels of demoque acid because of this toxic algae those and animals those crabs get eaten by sea lions they'll get eaten by um oh it's how the tip of my tongue uh shoot anyway they get eaten by fish they get eaten by marine mammals they get eaten by sea otters that's what i was looking for they're getting eaten by sea otters they get a lot of larger mammals larger fish um that are in this that are in these habitats that accumulates in those in those animals and then the more they eat the worse this level the higher this level gets and it actually causes a problem fatally in a lot of these cases these are the things that happen that we don't normally hear about this is why i'm trying to cover it you know i've talked a lot about how speed i talked a lot about other things that we don't know what happens like how species distribution changes in a warming ocean how warmer uh warmer or colder species species used to cold water will actually go more north and shift away like it's happening in the northeast where cod is actually recovering north of land and cod is recovering in Newfoundland however it's not recovering that well in the Gulf of Maine that's not that far off in terms of latitudes but it's and then they both used to be very abundant in in both sets of water however because the water is warming the cod and the Gulf of Maine are not doing as well plus the the fishing the fishing pressure however in the pacific you're even getting more of a warming because of all these combined forces that i mentioned earlier in the show and it's just it's causing these problems to happen it's causing more toxic algae this is not just going to be in the pacific it's going to be all over the place and it's going to affect fisheries it's going to affect toxins uh that's going to affect the lower food web and then that's just going to bio accumulate in the in the species in the large in the higher in the food food webs we're going to see a lot of apex predators get killed we're going to or be affected the populations are going to go down our whole system is going to start changing this is what's going to happen this is not just you know me just talking out of my butt this is actually going to happen it's actually happening so we got to be careful with this we have to do things about climate change now like we have to stop this this is not just a fact of oh well when you have the time you know maybe we should use less energy or we should reduce our dependence on fossil fuel no we need to actually switch and there are certain countries out there that are actually switching sweden is in the process of going uh fossil fuel free for energy in the future now it's a smaller country of course than the states then canada and things like that however you know it's still a very populated area and they're making a more and more of an effort to go fossil fuel free will we see that happen in all countries probably not anytime soon this is one of the first countries that's that's saying that it's going to do so and will it do so i have no idea i haven't read the article yet it's going to come up on the podcast soon but we're getting more and more towards that because we have to switch we have to switch from putting too much carbon in the air and getting more dependent on carbon and fossil fuels uh then and for energy then we do on alternative energies and sustainable energy so we really need to switch from that so i highly recommend you do some research i highly recommend you start switching yourselves to less dependent on fossil fuels less dependent on on energy that we see now and more dependent on other things to try and find alternatives try and find just different things to use you know reduce your plastics because that uses fossil fuels to to create the plastics go more towards reusable items uh things like that right check out our pdf which kind of it's a great way to segue into our pdf because that's really the end of the show but really let's look at the top 10 things you can do to help to live for a better ocean i have 10 things that's very easy to switch in your daily life and depending on how much you want to commit to ocean conservation you can do all these 10 things right uh you can get the that pdf by going to the show notes which is speakupforblue.com/session51 or session 52 sorry uh session 51 was monday's podcast which you can still get the pdf from that one as well there'll be a little a little image out there it says here get the get the click here to get the pdf or if you're on your smartphone you can go to uh the text of the number three three four four four and text the word all one word conserve my ocean and you will get access to this pdf right away it's 10 way quick ways to get involved in ocean conservation live for a better ocean just at home starts at home that's where it all starts if more people do things at home we will live for a better ocean i promise you that but uh yeah so toxic algae toxic algae it's a thing it's happening because of warming water we're going to see it more often be careful the seafood that you eat make sure that it hasn't been affected by toxic algae uh be by being aware what's going on in the ocean use so check back with speakupforblue.com you can always get all your stuff there but that's it for us today on this Tuesday i hope you're having a great day and i hope you have the great rest of the week we will keep in contact we have an interview coming up i haven't had one for a while on wednesday so i'm very excited about that but until then i will see you later you've been listening to the speakupforblue.com podcast i'm your host Andrew Lewin happy conservation day! so