The Flip Side of Tilapia

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the costs and benefits of factory farmed tilapia and they zoomed in on Nicaragua.

Dr. McCrary has spent the past decade studying how a small, short-lived tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake — the entire lake!” he said of the farm, which existed from 1995 to 2000.

Waste from the cages polluted the pristine ecosystem, and some tilapia escaped. An aquatic plant called charra, an important food for fish, disappeared, leaving the lake a wasteland. Today, some species of plants and fish are slowly recovering, but others are probably gone forever, said Dr. McCrary, who works for the Nicaraguan foundation FUNDECI.

Read the entire article, which reminds us that choices we make here affect ecosystems near and far.

We’ve just received a press release from our friend Wallace J. Nichols:

As ocean pollution experts meet in Hawaii, disturbing new report chronicles effects of decades of plastic pollution on sea turtles—and what we can do about it.
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Experts on plastic pollution from around the world, determined to solve this growing problem, have gathered this week for the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, a mecca for green sea turtles.

Now, in a recent editorial published in the Marine Turtle Newsletter, marine biologists Colette Wabnitz, PhD, of the University of British Columbia and Wallace “J.” Nichols, PhD, of the California Academy of Sciences, lay out the entire disturbing history of plastics in the ocean, from the first scientific report to the latest surveys, to call attention to the concerns from 1972 to today. The report is grim, but provides a ray of hope in the form of proactive steps that can and should be undertaken to curtail overproduction and careless discard of single-use plastics.

The authors were careful to acknowledge that certain plastics have done much good in the world. The report firmly lays the blame at the feet of so-called “disposable” plastics: commonly used beer cups, water bottles and caps, grocery bags, plastic utensils, and so forth, intended to be used just once and thrown away. While these plastics are cheap and convenient, they are also durable and buoyant—making for a potent and deadly combination in the water.

Though plastics like these do break down from exposure to sunlight and other elements, the molecules of plastic never fully biodegrade—they just break into smaller and smaller pieces but never completely disappear. Eventually, many of these small particles get blown or washed into tributaries that feed rivers which flow to the ocean where plastics coalesce in ocean currents. Here they swirl in the eddying currents forming a sort of plastic soup where they float virtually forever and are often—the whole pieces and broken bits—ingested by the creatures of the sea. Once in the guts they can do great harm, or even kill, animals such as sea turtles.
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“Sea turtle researchers and conservationists have a unique role to play in our cultural evolution away from plastic pollution, as we have watched the havoc the surge of plastic has caused first hand”, notes Dr. Colette Wabnitz of the University of British Columbia.

“Sea turtle researchers from around the world have been submitting photos of interactions with plastic to the Image Library on Seaturtle.org. Given the amount of disposable plastic I see alongside the road everyday and the garbage my kids pick up whenever we go to the beach, the results are not surprising”, added Dr. Michael Coyne, founder and director of SeaTurtle.org.

Learn more: http://www.seaturtle.org/plasticpollution/

Liza Gonzalez, Paso Pacifico’s national director, has received a scholarship from the Ocean Conservancy to attend the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference in Hawaii later this month.

Liza will represent Nicaragua at this annual symposium which brings ocean conservationists together from around the world to:

• Heighten global understanding and appreciation of the threats posed by marine debris, the cost to coastal communities and marine biodiversity, and the sources of marine debris
• Highlight recent advances in marine debris research
• Encourage sharing of strategies and best practices to assess, reduce, and prevent the impacts of marine debris
• Provide an opportunity for the development of collaborative solutions to real problems, including specific bilateral or multi-country strategies
• Emphasize the importance of individual behavioural change in preventing marine debris

From this weekend’s Science Roundup:

One of the major uncertainties about global climate change is the effect of clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, but also warm the climate by trapping heat that might otherwise escape. So as the planet warms, will clouds change in ways that counter warming by greenhouse gases (a negative cloud feedback), or further amplify it (a positive cloud feedback)?
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Although the data only cover the past decade, and therefore represent short-term climate fluctuations, they do corroborate several leading global climate models that yield a similar feedback and an increase in global temperature of several degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The report is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6010/1523.short

From this month’s Science Roundup:

Sustainably managing common natural resources, such as fisheries, water, and forests, is essential for our long-term survival. Conventional analysis assumes that groups struggle to manage common natural resources because of free-riders and people who will maximize short-term self-benefits at the expense of long-term sustainability (the so-called “tragedy of the commons”).  However, behavioral laboratory experiments have shown evidence that “conditional cooperation” — individual cooperation contingent upon the cooperation of others — can produce shared, long-term benefits.

Building on the work of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, the authors of a study published in this month’s Science combined results from experimental economics labs and surveys of different groups of forest users in Ethiopia with biological assessments of forest health to conclude that “voluntary cooperation in commons management is not a pipe dream but an empirical fact.”

Working on the ground in Nicaragua for over five years, we aren’t surprised. Thanks to the combined efforts of hotel owners, large landowners, fishermen, partner NGOs, and more, we have seen watched endangered species returning to the dry tropical forests, mangroves, and waters of southwestern Nicaragua. While we work with local governments and MARENA (the Nicaraguan environmental ministry), our coalitions for conservation are voluntary, meaning these individual people and entities are making a choice to cooperate for the long-term benefits of local communities and ecosystems.

The authors warn that such cooperation is fragile, as people are likely to sacrifice short-term self-benefits for long-term sustainability only when they see others making the same sacrifice. Working for over five years to combine cutting edge research in both the natural and social sciences, we provide individual incentives for conservation with community empowerment to create a culture of conservation in Nicaragua.

Among the other factors Ostrom and Vollan suggest contribute to success in managing commons? “Evidence from field experiments shows that resource users responded prosocially to environmental appeals made by park rangers.” Another reason to support Paso Pacifico by making a donation to our ranger program.

ScienceNow has good news for those of us planting trees:

“Research shows that deciduous tree leaves, such as those from the maple, aspen, and poplar, suck up far more atmospheric pollutants than previously thought.”