Tag: oceans

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Eat ‘Em

  • Every march, the Cownose Stingrays migrate into the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic. They come to give birth, mate, and eat. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

We like seafood – a lot. Many
species are disappearing. That’s
causing a ripple effect that’s
changing the patterns of sea creatures.
In the Cheseapeake Bay, it’s an invasion
of stingrays. The cownose stingray
is eating oysters that are commercially
raised there. Some people say: if
you can’t beat them, eat them. Sabri
Ben-Achour has the story:

Transcript

We like seafood – a lot. Many
species are disappearing. That’s
causing a ripple effect that’s
changing the patterns of sea creatures.
In the Cheseapeake Bay, it’s an invasion
of stingrays. The cownose stingray
is eating oysters that are commercially
raised there. Some people say: if
you can’t beat them, eat them. Sabri
Ben-Achour has the story:

In a little boat just off shore of Virginia’s Cone River, AJ Erskine leans overboard. He is using 20-foot poles with gaping jaws full of long needle like teeth to scrape the bottom of the emerald colored river.

“These things are called hand tongs.”

Up comes a pile of oysters. They’re only about a year old.

“We don’t feel comfortable giving them more than one year of a chance.”

That’s because Erskine is worried about stingrays, specifically Cownose Rays. Every march, the winged sea creatures migrate into the bay from the Atlantic. They come to give birth, mate, and eat.

“What they do is flap their wings, put the oysters in a pile, and crunch the shells, and they go through a seed bed of oysters in a weekend.”

Erskine says it’s become a huge problem for oyster farmers.

The rays also damage the underwater environment. They uproot aquatic grasses, destroying nurseries for fish and blue crabs.

Some biologists believe there are more rays because a main predator – the shark – has been overfished out in the Atlantic. Tiger Sharks in this area have declined 99% over the past 30 years.

Other biologists say it’s that strict limits on fishing in the Chesapeake Bay have meant fewer rays caught accidentally in giant nets. Whatever the reason, oyster farmers are looking for a way to control the rays.

A hundred miles inland, in Richmond, Mead Amery thinks he has a solution.

“Depending on how you prepare it, it’s delicious.”

Avery is a seafood distributor. He and officials with the State of Virginia want you to try stingray.

“The texture is wonderful, it has a veal pork type of texture.”

It’s been a tough sell so far.

“People hear ray and think, ‘I don’t wanna eat that!’”

Marketers are trying hard though. They don’t call it Cownose Ray but rather Chesapeake Ray. They’re pushing the ray in restaurants from Virginia to Japan. And it may take off – after all, lobsters used to be considered insects of the sea and only the poor ate them. The popular Chilean Sea Bass used to be a nuisance by-catch.

But, while those cases offer hope for marketers, they carry warnings for environmentalists. Both Sea Bass and Maine lobsters were dangerously overfished because of their popularity. Bob fisher is a biologist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. He knows full well there are risks involved in going after stingrays.

“You remove a top predator like that from the food chain, we don’t know what the repercussions would be.”

He says stingrays are slow to mature and give birth to only one offspring at a time. And no one even knows how many there are. But Fisher is still very much open to the idea of harvesting the rays given the problems they seem to be causing for oyster growers.

“I look at things that are in our oceans as resources, it’s our responsibility to take care of our resources, but it’s also a resource that’s there that can be, and I believe should be, utilized for humans.”

Fisher is working with the Marine Products Board, and the Department of Agriculture to come up with a plan to strictly limit fishing of the ray to what’s sustainable.

So, if the whole thing is successful, you might find Chesapeake Ray on a plate near you.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour.

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New Water Plan for California

  • Two-thirds of California’s rain and snow falls in the north, but two-thirds of its population lives in the south. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

One of the most drought-ridden
states says it’s finally found
a solution to its water problems.
Amy Standen reports:

Transcript

One of the most drought-ridden
states says it’s finally found
a solution to its water problems.
Amy Standen reports:

Two thirds of California’s rain and snow falls in the north. Two thirds of its population lives in the south. So who should get the water?

It took weeks of intense deal making and years of debate in the state capitol to find an answer. But the new law is not without its critics.

Peter Gleick is a water expert at the Pacific Institute. He says the measure fails to force users – especially farmers– to account for what they use.

” We will never ultimately, sustainably manage our water resources if we don’t know who is using how much water to do what. And we don’t, with any degree of accuracy. And that’s still not addressed in this bill.”

The deal calls for greater efficiency, especially in cities.

But nothing happens until voters agree to chip in for the plan, with an 11 billion dollar bond measure to pay for a new distribution system.

For The Environment Report, I’m Amy Standen.

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Americans Using Less Water

  • We use about 410-billion gallons of water a day in the U.S. (Photo courtesy of the US EPA)

Even as the population grows, the
US is using less water. Lester
Graham has the numbers from a new
report on water use from the US
Geological Survey:

Transcript

Even as the population grows, the
US is using less water. Lester
Graham has the numbers from a new
report on water use from the US
Geological Survey:

We use about 410-billion gallons of water a day in the U.S. But, water use per person is down. And, total water use for the nation is down about 5% from 1980 to 2005, the latest year covered by the report.

Susan Hutson is one of the authors of the Geological Survey report. She says there are a lot of factors affecting water use.

“Water conservation education, a public policy that supports that water conservation, and inovative technology, primarily in irrigation and the generation of thermo-electric power, the use of water for the cooling.”

There are still some problems. Some agricultural areas are using water faster than aquifers can be replenished. And, as we build more power plants -the biggest users of water – it will mean more demand in the future.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Size Does Matter, Research Suggests

  • Some scientists blame global warming for larger and more intense hurricanes. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

When it comes to hurricanes,
apparently size does matter.
New research suggests the bigger
the storm, the more tornadoes it
spawns. Tanya Ott reports:

Transcript

When it comes to hurricanes,
apparently size does matter.
New research suggests the bigger
the storm, the more tornadoes it
spawns. Tanya Ott reports:

Last year, Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas and the Midwest. It was a
relatively weak Category 2 storm. But it spun off a lot of tornadoes and
caused 32 billion dollars in damage.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of
Technology say they have a new model for predicting how many tornadoes a
hurricane will cause. Dr. Judith Curry says storm size – not intensity –
is the key.

“A lot of time people just think, oh it’s Category 5 or
it’s a Category 2, and they immediately calculate the risk to damage in
their head and the 5 is bad ande 2 isn’t so bad.”

But, Curry says, sometimes a 5 can be small and tight, and a 2,
especially one like Ike, can be big and produce a lot of tornadoes.

The study is published in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters.

Some scientists blame global warming for larger and more intense hurricanes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

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Shrinking Salmon Populations

  • A close view of salmon eggs and developing salmon fry. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A federal judge says the Obama
Administration soon has to come
up with a plan to restore endangered
salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest’s
biggest rivers. Ann Dornfeld went
gill net fishing on the Columbia
River to find out what’s at stake:

Transcript

A federal judge says the Obama
Administration soon has to come
up with a plan to restore endangered
salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest’s
biggest rivers. Ann Dornfeld went
gill net fishing on the Columbia
River to find out what’s at stake:

(sound of a boat moving through water)

Gary Soderstrom is a fourth-generation Columbia River salmon fisherman. Even though it’s his work, on a sunny summer day there are few places he’d rather be than casting a gill net on this tranquil bay near the mouth of the Columbia.

“Just being this far from the dock, it’s just a whole different world! All the nights and the days I’ve put out here, I still feel good when I get out here.” (laughs)

Soderstrom – or Suds, as he’s better known – says gillnetters today catch salmon pretty much the same way his great-great-grandfather caught them. The main difference today is motors help fishers lay out and reel in their nets.

(sound of reel squeaking as net is laid)

“See how he’s layin’ up the bank here, and then he’s gonna go across. That’ll create a trap for the fish if he leads ’em over to the beach, and they might get confused.”

The technique might not have changed much. But this river has. These days, a dozen species of salmon and steelhead on the Columbia are listed as endangered. One of the biggest factors is the hydroelectric dam system that provides most of the power to the Pacific Northwest. Those dams keep young salmon from making it to the ocean. Suds says that’s why his son won’t be a fifth generation fisherman.

“There used to be several thousand fishermen on the Columbia at one time. Now there’s a couple hundred of us that are still active. Most guys like my son and them have went and got other jobs to try and raise families on.”

Federal law requires the government to restore the endangered salmon runs. For years, fishers and environmental groups have been calling for the removal of four dams on the Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia.

But the Clinton and Bush Administrations backed other plans to restore salmon runs. Those plans ranged from spilling a small portion of water through the dams to trucking baby salmon around the dams. Federal courts rejected those plans as insufficient. Now a federal judge has told the Obama Administration it has until mid-September to come up with a plan that goes far beyond the scheme President Bush proposed last year.

Ann Dornfeld: “What do you think is the chance that they’re gonna take out the dams?”

Gary Soderstrom: “Well, about like me winnin’ the Powerball! (laughs) I mean, don’t think it’s ever gonna happen, but realistically, it’d work.”

Suds says he’d also like to see tougher restrictions put on farmers who irrigate their crops with water from the Columbia.

“Irrigation systems, a lot of them are still water hogs. I think they should be forced into using the least amount of water they can get by with.”

It’s been about 15 minutes, and it’s time to reel in the nets.

(sound of reeling in nets)

We’ve brought in one 17-pound coho.

(sound of salmon hitting the floor)

But like most of the other fish caught on the Columbia these days, it was raised in a hatchery upstream.

Suds says for years he’s been volunteering his time on advisory councils and boards throughout the state to try to restore the habitat that once brought millions of salmon down the river the natural way. But what he’d really like to do is meet with President Obama and explain the river’s history to him firsthand.

“But in my situation, being a peon fisherman, you’ll never get to talk to a guy like him. Y’know, if you could bring him out here and show him what I’ve shown you today, maybe he’d have a clearer understanding of what’s going on out here.”

Suds Soderstrom says he wants the president to make good on his promise to let science dictate his policies, rather than politics – which always seem to favor development.

“Sooner or later you’re either gonna have fish or people. And the people seem to be winning.”

The new Administration has until September 15th to propose its plan to save endangered salmon. The federal judge who’s been overseeing the process for years has made one requirement: this time, the plan has to work.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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More People, Fewer Fish

  • A little girl holds a minnow in her hands. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

For decades now, we’ve been pushing
the limits on how much fish we can
catch. Mark Brush has been looking
at the recent trends:

Transcript

For decades now, we’ve been pushing
the limits on how much fish we can
catch. Mark Brush has been looking
at the recent trends:

If you look at the news, you get the picture. Declining salmon runs in British Columbia. Herring season cancelled along the West Coast. And tuna populations nearing collapse.

Over-fishing and damage to the environment are big problems in the world’s oceans, but you see declining fish stocks in the nation’s freshwater bodies as well.

Bill Carlson’s family has been fishing the Great Lakes since the 1870s. They catch fish called chub. But the chub are in serious decline.

“The chub population has just taken a real plunge, but we’re not sure what we’re experiencing is just a change in their habitat.”

These fish go through boom and bust periods. But since the chub’s main food source has disappeared, some biologists think the chub will have a tough time making a comeback.

So between over-fishing and environmental damage, the only good news seems to come from areas where there are strict rules in place – giving these fish stocks a chance to bounce back.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Rebuilding the Lower 9th Ward

  • Pam Dashiell is with the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. The Lower 9th Ward is in the background. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

When Pam Dashiell moved back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, she couldn’t believe what people were saying about her neighborhood.

“People were saying, well, the 9th Ward should be a drainage ditch. There’s no way it can possibly come back.”

Dashiell is the co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. And after the storm, she became one of the leaders demanding the city be built back exactly as it had been before. New houses put up wherever old ones had been knocked down. Social services restored to all neighborhoods. And most importantly, levees. Levees big enough and strong enough to protect the city from anything a hurricane could throw at it.

“That was the fundamental argument and discussion back then. That was the battle.”

But Dashiell’s thinking has changed over the past couple of years. The levees that were promised after Katrina still haven’t been completed. Dashiell says eventually she gave up on them and started looking for other solutions.

“You’ve got to move. You’ve got to go forward. At this point we are not protected. So we gotta act like that and deal accordingly.”

“Levees and stuff like that are great, but they’re not going to be the salvation of this area.”

That’s Marco Cocito-Manoc. He’s with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. They’re one of the groups involved in rebuilding the city.

“We can’t just lobby for bigger walls, higher walls. The truth is that New Orleans can never be sufficiently protected from flooding. So everyone has to adopt what in this area is a brand new mindset.”

Cocito-Manoc calls that new mindset “resilience planning”. That’s making small, local changes to help the city manage flood water, rather than trying to hold it back at all costs.

It’s a strategy that’s being implemented in the Lower 9th Ward by Pam Dashiell’s group and others. A lot of these groups have moved away from pushing for more levees. Instead, they’re building raised houses on higher ground, and making sure they’re properly weatherized. They’re perfecting evacuation plans, so when evacuations do happen, they’re quick and orderly. And they’re installing permeable surfaces and rain gardens to reduce surface water. These kinds of changes won’t prevent flooding, but they’ll limit the devastation that sometimes goes along with it.

Cocito-Manoc says measures like these could actually set an example for other cities that will face rising sea levels in the next century. Think New York, or Miami, or Boston.

“I know that it’s difficult to see New Orleans as leading in much. But I think this is really our opportunity to become a global center for learning how to cope with water, and use water as an asset rather than as something that threatens our existence.”

As for Pam Dashiell, her focus right now is on the Lower 9th Ward. I asked her how she imagined the future of her neighborhood.

“I would see rain gardens. Strong green infrastructure. I see a new sewer system. I see the lower 9th ward recognized as a community that helped lead the way to a more sustainable future. (Laughs) I got good dreams.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Thinking Beyond Levees

  • New Orleans on September 9, 2005. Crews worked on areas where there had been breaks in the levee in order to avoid additional flooding. (Photo by Jocelyn Augustino, courtesy of FEMA)

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. A big reason it was so bad is because the levees holding back the water crumbled.

There’s a big effort to build up the levee system, but the National Academy of Sciences says the city should not solely rely on levees to protect it.

Jeff Jacobs headed up the report for the National Academy.

“There is no levee system that can provide absolute protection. There’s always the danger of over-topping. And there’s always a possibility of levee failure. And that holds true for the best maintained and the best inspected levee systems in the world.”

The New Orleans area has a particular problem. The ground can sink over time. That’s not good for levees.

The Academy recommends that people relocate to safer areas. Or, if people are going to stay, that homes be elevated – so that the first floor of a home is higher than the floodwater.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Where Nothing Can Survive

  • Shrimpers have seen their catches dwindle down from thousands of pounds of shrimp a day to very little due to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Transcript

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Imagine for a moment you’re a shrimp fisherman. Every day you send out your fleet to the same waters you’ve fished for decades. And your boats pull in a lot of shrimp- thousands of pounds a day, millions a year. And then one day, a normal summer day, you send the boats out, and they come back empty.

“You go from about 5000 pounds to nothing. It’s dead. That’s why they call it the dead zone.”

That’s Dean Blanchard. He runs the largest shrimp company in America- Dean Blanchard Seafood. 


Blanchard started seeing the dead zone about five years ago, but it’s not a new phenomenon. For a long time, nutrient fertilizer from upstream has run into the Mississippi River and from there, into the Gulf. It fertilizes big algae blooms– and when the algae decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water, making it impossible for fish to live there.

What’s new is how much fertilizer there is now.

“It’s not natural.”

Nancy Rabalais is a marine biologist at LUMCON. That’s Louisiana’s center for marine research. She says that over the past several decades there’s been a surge in fertilizer use in the Corn Belt states. That eventually ends up in the Gulf.

“We’re having 300 times more than we did in the 1950s. And it’s just over loaded the system.”

Rabalais predicts this year’s dead zone will be almost three times as big as it was twenty years ago – more than 8000 square miles.

Of course, the bigger the zone, the further out shrimpers like Dean Blanchard have to send their boats. That means a lot of wasted time, fuel, and wages.

And the zones might mean even bigger problems. Don Scavia is a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

“There’s a half a billion dollar shrimp industry in the gulf. And the shrimp depend on that habitat. And what we’re concerned about is that if the dead zone continues or even grows, that fishery may collapse.”

Congress is taking some measures to address the problem. Conservation programs in the Farm Bill work to reduce how much fertilizer farmers use, and how they apply it.

But there’s something else in the Farm Bill too – a lot of subsidy programs. Those pay for ethanol production. Which means more corn. Which means a lot more fertilizer.

“And what is debated every 5 years is how much funding will go into those conservation programs, relative to funding going into subsidy programs. And, by far, the subsidies win.” (laughs)

Scavia says for every $1 spent on conservation programs in the Corn Belt, $500 go to subsidizing crops.


Shrimper Dean Blanchard says he’s not sure how long he can live with that balance, especially as he watches the dead zone grow.

“How big is this thing going to get? If we kill the oceans we have problems. We have serious problems.”

But Don Scavia is hopeful. He says we know exactly how to reduce nutrient runoff – in fact, the basic programs are already in place. It’s just a matter of Congress choosing the right funding priorities.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Interview: From the Pacific Garbage Patch

  • Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling vortex of trash that has accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Transcript

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?

Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.

Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?

Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.

Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?

Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.

Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

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