UH research vessel Kilo Moana rescues yacht in French Polynesia

On the morning of Wednesday, November 20, French search and rescue authorities received a request to assist the French catamaran Thetis which was in distress. The University of Hawai‘i research vessel Kilo Moana heard the Joint Rescue Coordination Center Tahiti’s request for assistance from merchant ships and responded to the call. The Kilo Moana was located about 200 nm to the south and she immediately diverted to successfully assisting the four crewmembers on board.

Below is a repost of an article from The Maritime Executive:

“On Wednesday morning at 0400 hours, French search and rescue authorities received a request to assist the French catamaran Thetis, which was transiting to the south of the Austral Group in French Polynesia. The sailing vessel, with four crewmembers on board, suffered a water ingress in one pontoon in rough seas.

At the time of the distress call, the Thetis was located at a position about 450 nautical miles to the south of Raivavae. The remote region is technically within JRCC Auckland’s area of responsibility, but as it is closer to French Polynesia, JRCC Tahiti coordinated the response.

The master of the Thetis told JRCC Tahiti that he was attempting to plug the breach and making preparations to abandon ship into a liferaft if necessary. JRCC Tahiti issued a request for assistance from merchant ships, and the American research vessel Kilo Moana responded to the call. The Kilo Moana was located about 200 nm to the south, holding position and conducting a scientific mission to deploy ocean bottom seismometers, and she immediately diverted to assist.

At 0900 hours on Thursday morning, the Kilo Moana arrived on scene and helped the Thetis to carry out emergency repairs. With the assistance of plans provided by the sailing yacht’s manufacturer, the research vessel’s crew fabricated a component that resolved the flooding issue, according to JRCC Tahiti. The Thetis got under way for Raivavae and expects to arrive on November 25.

“This incident illustrates once again the solidarity of the people of the sea, whatever their nationality,” JRCC Tahiti said in a statement. “On this occasion, [we remind] all users of the sea that it is essential to equip themselves with means of communication and survival to cope with emergencies.”

The Kilo Moana is a twin-hull research vessel owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by the University of Hawaii.”

Reef Halos on PBS and BBC

Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology researcher Elizabeth Madin‘s work on coral reef halos was featured recently on BBC’s & PBS’s new documentary series, “Earth From Space” (on BBC) and “Life From Above” (on PBS).

In the US-accessible version on PBS, the halos segment is the second in the episode “Pattered Planet” (starting at 11:38). In the UK-accessible version on BBC, the halos segment is the first in the episode “Pattered Planet”.

“It was great conversing over a few years with the BBC researchers behind the series to help them get the science and the imagery just right!” notes Madin’s website. “They did an amazing job on both fronts and it’s worth checking out the entire, amazing series, all of which is features absolutely stunning imagery and stories from cool phenomena around the world.”

HIMB lab part of first response team on whale, dolphin beach strandings

When whales and dolphins are discovered stranded in distress on Hawaiʻi beaches, the University of Hawaiʻi Marine Mammal Stranding Lab is part of the team of first responders that spring into action. The lab is part of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) and is the only entity in Hawaiʻi authorized by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service to research cause of death in marine mammals.

“Our lab’s role is to be the science providers behind the information we need to best manage marine mammal populations,” said lab director Kristi West. “We are responsible for the cause of death investigations and for a number of different areas of research that help us better understand the conservation threats that face Hawaiʻi‘s dolphins and whales.”

The UH lab performs necropsies, autopsies on animals, to look for signs of human impacts like ship strikes, entanglements, marine debris ingestion and acoustic trauma, which it does extensive research on. Lab researchers also look for evidence of diseases and is credited with, among other things, identifying the diseases morbillivirus, circovirus and Cryptococcus for the first time in Hawaiian marine mammals.

It is also the only lab of its kind in the Pacific Ocean region that processes and archives whale and dolphin tissues for numerous avenues of research. Critical to the lab’s work is the involvement of students from UH Mānoa and Windward Community College, who in turn receive invaluable, hands-on experience.

Read more about it in the UH System News.

Prey-size plastics are invading larval fish nurseries

New research conducted by an international team of scientists from SOEST, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and elsewhere shows that many larval fish species from different ocean habitats are ingesting plastics in their preferred nursery habitat.

Many of the world’s marine fish spend their first days to weeks feeding and developing at the ocean surface. Larval fish are the next generation of adult fish that will supply protein and essential nutrients to people around the world. However, little is known about the ocean processes that affect the survival of larval fish.

The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was one of the most ambitious studies to date to learn where larval fish spend their time and what they eat while there. The researchers combined field-based plankton tow surveys and advanced remote sensing techniques to identify larval fish nursery habitats in the coastal waters of Hawai‘i.

The team found that surface slicks contained far more larval fish than neighboring surface waters. Surface slicks are naturally occurring, ribbon-like, smooth water features at the ocean surface. They are formed when internal ocean waves converge near coastlines and are observed in coastal marine ecosystems worldwide. The surface slicks also aggregate plankton, which is an important food resource for larval fish.

“We found that surface slicks contained larval fish from a wide range of ocean habitats, from shallow-water coral reefs to the open ocean and down into the deep sea—at no other point during their lives do these fish share an ocean habitat in this way,” said Jonathan Whitney, a marine ecologist for the UH Mānoa Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research and NOAA, and co-lead of the study. “Slick nurseries also concentrate lots of planktonic prey, and thereby provide an oasis of food that is critical for larval fish development and survival.”

Larval fish in the surface slicks were larger, well-developed, and had increased swimming abilities. Larval fish that actively swim will better respond and orient to their environment. This suggests that tropical larval fish are actively seeking surface slicks to capitalize on concentrated prey.

Unfortunately, the team also discovered that the same ocean processes that aggregated prey for larval fish also concentrated buoyant, passively floating plastics. “We were shocked to find that so many of our samples were dominated by plastics,” said Whitney.

Plastic densities in these surface slicks were, on average, eight times higher than the plastic densities recently found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After towing the net 100 times, they found that plastics were 126 times more concentrated in surface slicks than in surface water just a couple hundred yards away. There were seven times more plastics than there were larval fish.

The majority of the plastics found in surface slicks were very small (less than 1 mm). Larval fish prefer their prey this size. After dissecting hundreds of larval fish, the researchers discovered that many fish species ingested plastic particles.

“We found tiny plastic pieces in the stomachs of commercially targeted pelagic species, including swordfish and mahi-mahi, as well as in coral reef species like triggerfish,” said Whitney.

Plastics were also found in flying fish, which apex predators such as tunas and most Hawaiian seabirds eat.

While recent evidence shows that adult fish ingest plastic, this is the first study to show that larval coral reef fish and pelagic species are also consuming plastic, as early as days after they are spawned.

“Larval fish are foundational for ecosystem function and represent the future of adult fish populations,” said Jamison Gove (PhD, Oceanography), a research oceanographer for NOAA and co-lead of the study. “The fact that larval fish are surrounded by and ingesting non-nutritious toxin-laden plastics, at their most vulnerable life-history stage, is cause for alarm.”

Researchers are unclear just how harmful plastic ingestion is to larval fish. In adult fish, plastics can cause gut blockage, malnutrition, and toxicant accumulation. Larval fish are highly sensitive to changes in their environment and food. Prey-size plastics could impact development and even reduce survivorship of larval fish that ingest them.

“Biodiversity and fisheries production are currently threatened by a variety of human-induced stressors such as climate change, habitat loss, and overfishing. Our research suggests we can likely now add plastic ingestion by larval fish to that list of threats,” said Gove.

New study first to reveal growth rates of deep-sea coral communities

A collaboration between researchers at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), Hawai‘i Pacific University (HPU) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed for the first time growth rates of deep-sea coral communities and the pattern of colonization by various species.

The scientific team used the UH Mānoa Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory’s submersible and remotely-operated vehicles to examine coral communities on submarine lava flows of various ages on the leeward flank of the Island of Hawai‘i. Utilizing the fact that the age of the lava flows—between 61 and 15,000 years—is the oldest possible age of the coral community growing there, they observed the deep-water coral community in Hawai‘i appears to undergo a pattern of ecological succession over time scales of centuries to millennia.

The study, published this week, reported Coralliidae, pink coral, were the pioneering taxa, the first to colonize after lava flows were deposited. With enough time, the deep-water coral community showed a shift toward supporting a more diverse array of tall, slower growing taxa: Isididae, bamboo coral, and Antipatharia, black coral. The last to colonize was Kulamanamana haumeaae, gold coral, which grows over mature bamboo corals, and is the slowest growing taxa within the community.

“This study was the first to estimate the rate of growth of a deep-sea corals on a community scale,” said Meagan Putts, lead author of the study and research associate at SOEST’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR). “This could help inform the management of the precious coral fishery in Hawai‘i. Furthermore, Hawai‘i is probably the only place in the world where such a study could have been performed due to its continuous and well known volcanology.”

“Prior to beginning this work, it was unclear if a pattern of colonization existed for deep-sea coral communities and in what time frame colonization would occur,” said Putts. “When put into context with what we do know about the life history of Hawaiian deep-water corals, the results of this work make sense.”

The fastest growing species with calcium-based skeletons, a ubiquitous building material in the deep ocean, Coralliidae, were the first to colonize and in the largest quantities. Corals with protein-based or partially protein-based skeletons, were seen later in the colonization timeline because the formation of proteinaceous components requires organic nitrogen, a much more limiting resource in the deep sea. Gold coral, Kulamanamana haumeaae, also has a protein-based skeleton but was the last species to be seen within the patter of community development because it requires a host colony of bamboo coral to present and of a large enough size for colonization.

This study has important conservation and sustainability implications regarding these ecosystems that had never before been ecologically quantified. This research also provides insights about recovery of deep sea ecosystems that may be disturbed by activities such as fishing and mining.

“Further,” said Putts, “as the Island of Hawai‘i continues to have periodic eruptions producing very recent deep-water lava flows, the last in May 2018, there are opportunities to study initial settlement patterns and appraise the impact hot, turbid, mineral-rich water from new flows has on coral communities.”

Moon dreams lead NASA-JPL intern from Hawai‘i to search for past life on Mars

Growing up in Hawai‘i, Schelin Ireland used to look up at the night sky and dream of one day setting foot on the Moon. She hasn’t made it there yet, but in the meantime, she’s helping achieve another milestone for space exploration. This summer, as a Space Grant intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ireland was part of the team building an instrument designed to detect signs of past life on Mars.

One of several instruments on NASA’s next Mars rover, SHERLOC will be the first of its kind on the Red Planet. Situated at the end of the rover’s arm, it will shoot a laser into Martian samples and pick up the unique pattern of light waves, or Raman signatures, that result. Scientists can study those light waves to find out what the samples are made of – and whether they contain ingredients for life.

Ireland, a student in the Department of Earth Sciences, spent the summer running a laboratory version of the instrument through practice rounds before the real thing launches next summer on its seven-month journey to the Red Planet aboard the Mars 2020 rover. We caught up with her to ask what it’s like to be part of the team searching for evidence of past life on Mars and find out what her future plans are for exploring the Moon.

Read the interview at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Paul Wessel honored for distinguished research in information technology

The European Geosciences Union announced Paul Wessel, professor and chair of the Earth Sciences Department, as the recipient of the 2020 Ian McHarg medal. The medal is conferred for “distinguished research in information technology applied to Earth and space sciences.”

This award is in recognition of Wessel’s creation, development, and maintenance of the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), a scientific software package widely used in marine geology and geophysics, solid earth geophysics, geodynamics and oceanography, as well as planetary geoscience for processing, analyzing, and visualizing a variety of data. GMT was initially conceived by Wessel and Walter H.F. Smith while graduate students and it is now entering its fourth decade of development by the GMT team lead by Wessel. GMT has been supported continuously by the US National Foundation since 1993.

Wessel will receive the award at the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, in May 2020.

Living whales are worth an enormous amount of money

A great whale is worth $2 million. The size of that number so terrified Ralph Chami, the economist who appraised the whales, that he sought refuge in a church for the first time in 30 years. Inside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in the District, a few blocks from Chami’s office at the International Monetary Fund, the economist said he had “a conversation with the Maker. I said: ‘If you aim to humiliate me, there are other ways of doing it.’”

Chami had, after all, veered outside his lane to make a first-of-its-kind claim. He studies macroeconomic policies in developing countries, not ecology. After deleting his whale calculations three times, and three times arriving at the same answer, Chami enlisted an IMF researcher, Sena Oztosun, as well as two outside economists, Thomas Cosimano and Connel Fullenkamp. They consulted whale scientists and research papers. The world population of whales is worth more than $1 trillion, the researchers concluded in a recent report, due to whale tourism, the nutrients whales disperse and the carbon captured by their massive bodies.

Climate change separates wildlife into survivors, including vines that thrive when carbon dioxide levels rise, and victims, such as bird species that are threatened by habitat loss and other disruptions. A few species are emitters, such as methane-belching cattle. Great whales occupy another category: sequesterers. An average great whale, a hypothetical animal that blends the characteristics of large baleen whales and sperm whales, traps 33 tons of carbon dioxide in its body, Chami said. A car releases about 4.6 tons of carbon dioxide a year.

And when whales die, they sink.

Most whale carcasses drop to the sea bed because whales with emptied lungs are slightly negatively buoyant. That process, known as a whale fall, delivers carbon to the ocean depths.

An ecosystem blossoms from the whale’s flesh and bones. “By dying, they’re creating something new — a new kind of life,” said Craig Smith, a professor in the Department of Oceanography and whale fall expert. Obscured by the deep ocean, whale falls are rarely spotted by humans. Scientists have observed only about 75 of them, Smith said, including experimental whale falls (in which beached whales are towed to sea, weighted and sunk). The Navy found eight in the 1990s while searching for a lost missile off the California coast.

Smith and his colleagues predict whale falls are actually abundant, considering whale mortality rates and the persistence of whale remains. Bones, jutting from an otherwise flat ocean bottom, can serve as habitats for decades. “There are clearly hundreds of thousands of whale fall ecosystems on the bottom of the ocean,” Smith said.

Read more about it in the Washington Post. UPDATE: read about “What Happens After a Whale Dies”, which discusses Craig Smith’s work, and watch the video report at NPR.

Ruth Gates’ passion lives on through interactive coral documentary

The late Ruth Gates’ amazing contributions to science, communication and coral research come together in a new interactive documentary Lost Cities. Gates passed away October 25, 2018 while serving as director and researcher at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB). The online documentary reveals the hidden lives of corals, and Gates’ voice completely transforms the experience.

“The loss of such a brilliant scientific mind and wonderful human being is made more bearable by this posthumous gift,” said UH Mānoa Provost Michael Bruno. “Lost Cities delights and educates at the same time and it is great to be able to hear Ruth’s voice once again.”

Unlike a film viewed in a theater, Lost Cities uses the web to create an interactive experience. Viewers can move through 13 short films in the order they choose, and access entry points to dive deeper into the themes through additional clips and photographs. The project is a collaboration between the Gates Coral Lab, CaravanLab and Belle & Wissell Co. It contains the last recorded interview with Gates, a powerful and visionary voice for corals.

Read more about it in the UH System News. Experience Lost Cities here.

Eyes on the reefs

The sediment in Anini’s shallow lagoon on Kaua‘i could be saturated with heavy metals, according to results from a study conducted through volunteers with the nonprofit Reef Guardians Hawaii.

Sediment samples were taken from the Anini reef on Kauai’s North Shore in August after underwater photographer Terry Lilley documented a coral-bleaching event in the area. The reef holds just some of the corals in Hawai‘i waters that are experiencing bleaching in the midst of a marine heat wave that has encompassed the islands.

The sediment test is one of many research projects with multiple organizations and universities worldwide, all working toward the same end goal of understanding how corals are impacted by not only marine heat waves, but by other factors in the environment.

Ocean-goers and scientists started seeing bleaching in May 2019. In September, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology released what they called the largest study of coral communities, which identified ways to protect coral reefs. The study cites climate change and human impacts as major threats to the reefs, specifically increasing carbon emissions, overfishing, pollution and unsustainable development. Authors also suggest three ways to combat those threats — protect, recover and transform.

“The study provides a roadmap for reef managers to identify areas that can benefit from active management practices at a local scale while also preparing for potential future impacts from increasing climate hazards,” stated Erik Franklin, co-author of the study and assistant research professor at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), in a release about the study.

Read more about it in The Garden Island.