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In This Issue

• US Embarks on Its First National Ocean Policy
• Storms Briefly Delay Completion of Relief Well, But Cap Holds
• US Sea Turtle Population Numbers in Question
• Overfishing Poses Risks to Sharks, Affecting Ecosystems

Science in the News

US Embarks on Its First National Ocean Policy

Following President Obama's Executive Order last week, for the first time, management of the U.S. ocean, coasts (such as this stretch along the Pacific Coast Highway in Calif.) and Great Lakes, will be overseen by one interagency body, the National Ocean Council. Gerick Bergsma/Marine Photobank

Conservationists, researchers and officials reacted with enthusiasm to the announcement on July 19 that the Obama Administration has established the United States' first comprehensive National Ocean Policy.

"For the first time in our more than 200 years as a maritime nation, we now have a comprehensive roadmap for handling all of the various activities we do in the ocean and the Great Lakes and along our coasts," said SeaWeb President Dawn M. Martin. "This landmark effort seeks to provide a comprehensive structure for managing multiple uses in the ocean, ranging from oil and gas extraction and exploration to recreation and much more."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the new policy would "set the United States on a new path toward comprehensively planning for the conservation and sustainable use of the ocean."

Martin pointed out that prior to the policy's establishment, "the United States had a regulatory jumble of more than 140 different and often conflicting laws pertaining to ocean management, all of which were overseen by more than 20 separate agencies. What this new policy enables is well-thought-out interaction with the ocean, allowing us to protect sensitive ecosystems while still providing avenues for fishing, shipping and developing renewable energy in ways that minimize the impacts on the environment."

Last week's announcement was the culmination of a process that began in June 2009, when President Obama created an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and charged it with developing recommendations to enhance national stewardship of the ocean, coasts and Great Lakes and promote the long-term conservation and use of these resources. That kicked off a year during which the task force held a series of public meetings and published a pair of interim reports before the release last week of the "Final Recommendations of the Ocean Policy Task Force," including the establishment of a National Ocean Council to oversee and implement the national policy. President Obama signed an Executive Order implementing the recommendation following the report's release.

"The work is not done, however," cautioned Martin. "In many ways, the hard work begins now with the charge of efficiently implementing the new policy. As time moves on, we will start to see the true benefits of the National Ocean Policy, a policy that is a great and sorely needed step in the right direction for the health of our ocean planet."

For Further Information: Background information, including the President's Executive Order and the full text of the final recommendations of the National Ocean Policy Task Force, are available at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/oceans

Storms Briefly Delay Completion of Relief Well, But Cap Holds

U.S. Coast Guard personnel transport engineers and others to and from the Deepwater Horizon drill site, as BP works to complete the relief well that it hopes will permanently end the release of oil from the original well into the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew Belson

Engineers resumed their efforts to complete a relief well after storms temporarily caused repair vessels to evacuate the Gulf of Mexico last week. Officials hope this tactic will permanently stop oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig is estimated to have leaked 2,500,000 gallons of oil a day since it sunk in April. By mid-July, estimates of the total extent of the spill were as high as 180 million gallons, 16 times as much oil as was spilled when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989. That makes the Deepwater Horizon accident the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history and the second largest ever recorded.

BP installed a containment cap on the well on July 15, which sealed the well for the first time since oil began gushing into the Gulf. However, the pressure of oil beneath the cap is building, necessitating the completion of the relief well.

Once the flow of oil is eventually stopped, attention will turn to cleaning up the water and coastal habitats of the Gulf and to assessing the extent of the damage caused to the region's environment. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) vessels are already in the area, and last week both Greenpeace and Oceana announced plans to launch scientific research expeditions to study the spill's impact.

For Further Information: Stay on top of the latest information about the spill by visiting SeaWeb's Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Comprehensive Resource Center, providing news updates, SeaWeb briefings and links to external resources.

Science Briefs

US Sea Turtle Population Numbers in Question

Green turtles, such as this one off Hawaii, have been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1973. But a new report says that information on all six U.S. species of sea turtles is insufficient to develop adequate conservation or management plans. Chris Pincetich/Marine Photobank

Government agencies do not have enough information to produce accurate population estimates for any of the species of sea turtles that live in U.S. waters, according to a new report from the National Research Council.

Six of the seven species of sea turtle—loggerhead, olive ridley, Kemp's ridley, leatherback, green and hawksbill—occur in U.S. waters and are listed as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. (The seventh species, the flatback, is found only in the waters around Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea). The report points out that for officials to predict and understand changes in populations and create successful management and conservation plans, they require more key data about them, such as birth and survival rates and breeding patterns—data that is presently lacking.

"The biggest obstacle to assessing the status of sea turtle populations is that we know little about key characteristics of these creatures, such as what size they are at different ages, the average proportion of turtles that will survive through each year, and their growth rates," said the University of Florida's Karen Bjorndal, chair of the committee that wrote the report, in a press release.

Currently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate sea turtle populations primarily by counting nests and mature females on beaches. But the report's authors point out that this paints an incomplete picture.

For example, although monitoring of nesting beaches showed a 43 percent decrease in Florida's loggerhead population over the past decade, it didn't provide any clues as to why that should be. Absent information about the cause of the decline, designing a management plan to counteract it, notes Bjorndal, is "very difficult."

The report's authors underlined that sea turtles' long life spans and their wide-ranging migrations make them difficult to monitor: for example, after hatching, some species spend 30 years at sea before returning to nesting beaches. The report also noted that some difficulties are hampering the collection of key data, including a permitting process that can provide "unnecessary obstacles," and that some of the data that has been collected is scattered among disparate databases that are not always easily accessible.

The report recommends an increase in studies of sea turtles in the open ocean, in the form of tagging and aerial and boat surveys, expediting the permitting process for such research and developing a program to safeguard and make accessible as many sea turtle databases as possible.

For Further Information: The full NRC report, "Assessment of Sea-Turtle Status and Trends: Integrating Demography and Abundance," as well as supporting media and contact information, is available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12889.

Overfishing Poses Risks to Sharks, Affecting Ecosystems

Large sharks, such as this great white, are highly vulnerable to even limited fishing, and declines in their numbers can have cascading effects throughout marine ecosystems. Dr. Dirk Scmidt/Marine Photobank

Sharks are naturally abundant and diverse, but even light fishing pressure is enough to cause sharp population declines in vulnerable species, finds a recent study in the journal Ecology Letters. The study, authored by a team led by Francesco Ferretti of Dalhousie University, also concludes that such declines have sometimes led to cascading ecosystem changes.

Because most shark species grow more slowly, become sexually mature later and produce fewer offspring than bony fishes, they are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation. One illustration of the sensitivity of shark populations to even relatively small catches is the impact of shark-netting programs along parts of the coast in South Africa and Australia. These programs deploy small nets that capture sharks and prevent their escape, causing them to drown. The intent is not to reduce shark numbers overall, but to limit their attacks on swimmers. Even so, in New South Wales, 10 years after shark nets had first been installed in the 1930s, catches had dropped by 94 percent. In Queensland, catches have decreased by 85 percent in the 45 years since its program was established in the 1960s.

Given such sensitivity, it is not surprising that with the development of commercial shark fisheries, large sharks in particular have, as the authors write, "experienced rapid declines over the last decades." What ecologists are only beginning to unravel, however, are the cascading ecosystem changes that result. Data from research surveys conducted from 1970 to 2005 in waters reaching from Florida to Maine revealed that, as large shark populations declined, 12 small sharks, skates and rays increased, with the abundance of one ray species, the cownose, growing so much that it reduced the numbers of its prey species, the bay scallop. From 1956 to 1976 along the coast of Kwala-Zulu Natal in South Africa, large sharks being caught in nets decreased their populations, while smaller shark populations increased and then reduced the populations of bony fish on which these smaller sharks fed.

Ferretti and colleagues write that a variety of factors are likely involved in determining the extent to which large shark declines may affect other species. For example, in ecosystems in which large sharks have a wide variety of prey or in which their prey species have a wide variety of other predators, the impacts are likely to be less significant than where large sharks are the principal predators of a small number of other predatory species. In addition, commercial fishing plays a significant role in affecting ecosystems. For example, the aforementioned decline in bay scallops may have been at least as attributable to fishing pressure as to increased predation by cownose rays.

The authors conclude that "large sharks can exert strong top-down forces with the potential to shape marine communities, [but] more empirical evidence is needed to test the generality of these effects throughout the ocean."

Source: Ferretti, F., et al. 2010. Patterns and ecosystem consequences of shark declines in the ocean. Ecology Letters 13: 1055-1071.

Contact: Francesco Ferretti, Dalhousie University. E-mail: ferretti@dal.ca

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