Déjá vu all over again
BY JIM HINEY
Concerned by mismanagement of our marine resources and declining habitats along the nation’s coastlines, Congress passed a law mandating creation of a commission to look into the problems and recommend ways of solving them.
The commission, with members from academia, government, business and non-governmental offices, held meetings across the country and met with the nation’s leading scientific minds.
After much thought and discussion, the commissioners committed to paper their recommendations for actions the nation needed to take in order to preserve and better manage our marine resources.
Their report recommended among other things that the nation place added emphasis on research into the world ocean, improve coastal zone planning and management, reorganize all levels of government for more efficient oversight of the marine environment, employ ecosystem-based resource management, achieve sustainable fisheries, expand marine aquaculture, search for marine flora and fauna that could be developed into new pharmaceuticals, and expand global observing systems.
Throughout their report, commissioners paid homage to the ocean’s crucial and indispensable role in providing for humans’ quality of life — or life at all. The commissioners also warned that for too long people have taken the ocean for granted and have abused it in their quest for personal gain.
The report said in part:
How fully and wisely the United States uses the sea in the decades ahead will affect profoundly its security, its economy, its ability to meet increasing demands for food and raw materials, its position and influence in the world community, and the quality of the environment in which its people live…
… Vital though marine economic development is, it must be tempered by other considerations. There is increasing concern over the need to understand our physical environment, of which the oceans are but one part. This concern is based on growing appreciation that the environment is being affected by man himself, in many cases adversely. It is critical to protect man from the vicissitudes of the environment and the environment, in turn, from the works of man...
… Today, man’s damage to the environment too often is ignored because of immediate economic advantage. To maximize the present economy at the expense of the future is to perpetuate the pattern of previous generations, whose sins against the planet we have inherited…
… The oceans and marine-related activities must be viewed in the context of the total land-air-sea environment. In many ways, the oceans are the dominant factor in this total environment. However, intervention by man in any one element produces effects on the others, frequently through processes we do not yet understand. Mankind is fast approaching a stage when the total planetary environment can be influenced, modified and perhaps controlled by human activities. The nation’s stake in the oceans is therefore an important part of its stake in the very future of man’s world…
As forward sounding as the report seems, the truth of the matter is these words were written more than 35 years ago by the 15-member Commission on Marine Science, Engineering and Resources — dubbed the Stratton Commission because it was chaired by Julius Stratton, a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their report — Our Nation and the Sea — set out 126 recommendations as part of a comprehensive, long-term national program for marine affairs. The recommendations ranged from the leasing of “seasteads„ (submerged tracts of land within state waters) to creative entrepreneurs for development of “nonextractive uses„ such as underwater tourism, to the creation of a new federal agency that would become the principal office for administering the nation’s civil marine and atmospheric programs. The agency’s proposed name was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.
Seasteads never caught on as they were envisioned by the Stratton Commission, but the new federal agency did with just a slight name change. By executive order, President Richard Nixon established the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in October 1970.
As the new century dawned, Congress once again took note of trouble off the nation’s coasts. Intensive and little-controlled development was creating environmental woes in bays and estuaries. Some of the northeastern fisheries had completely collapsed and others around the nation were in danger of following suit.
At the same time, people were finding new uses for the ocean and its resources, such as pharmaceuticals, aquaculture, liquefied natural gas operations and alternate energy sources like wind farms. In many instances, entrepreneurs interested in new ocean-related business opportunities did not know where to turn at the federal level because there was no coherent management regime in place.
Eleven of 15 cabinet-level federal departments and four independent agencies (i.e. the Environmental Protection Agency) have jurisdiction over marine activities and thus have a say in making ocean and coastal policy. Too often, however, these entities do not communicate well, if at all, with each other or with state and local governments.
Three decades after the Stratton Commission took the first hard look at the country’s marine problems, the United States still lacked an integrated and cohesive ocean strategy.
Congress sought to solve this shortcoming by passing the Oceans Act of 2000. Sponsored by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), the Oceans Act mandated creation of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (USCOP) — a group charged with making recommendations for a coordinated and comprehensive national ocean policy.
USCOP commissioners were appointed by President George W. Bush. Chaired by retired U.S. Navy Adm. James D. Watkins, president emeritus of the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, the commission comprised members representing academia, government, industry and non-governmental science organizations. In three years of work, the 16 Ocean Com-missioners held 16 public meetings around the country, conducted 18 regional site visits and received comments from 447 people, resulting in almost 1,900 pages of testimony. Their gargantuan task included sifting through information on all of the nation’s coastal areas, the Great Lakes (which the report noted make up the largest reservoir of fresh surface water in the world) and 3.4 million square miles of ocean — an area larger than all 50 states combined — in the nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which extends up to 200 nautical miles from the shorelines of the country and its Pacifi c Ocean and Atlantic Ocean territories. “The message from both experts and the public alike was clear,„ the commissioners wrote in their 455-page fi nal report, An Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century, which was released in September 2004. “Our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes are in trouble and major changes are urgently needed in the way we manage them.„ Among the problems highlighted in the report:
- In 2001, 23 percent of the nation’s estuarine areas were considered impaired for swim- ming, fishing or supporting marine species.
- In 2003, about 18,000 days of beach clos- ings and advisories were issued across the nation, most due to the presence of bacteria associated with fecal contamination.
- Across the globe, marine toxins affl ict more than 90,000 people annually and are responsible for an estimated 62 percent of all seafood-related illnesses.
- Harmful algal blooms appear to be occur- ring more frequently in our coastal waters, and non-native species are increasingly invading marine ecosystems.
- Experts estimate that 25 percent to 30 percent of the world’s major fi sh stocks are over-exploited, and many U.S. fisheries are experiencing serious difficulties.
- Since the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth Rock, more than half of the country’s wet- lands—over 110 million acres—have been lost.
An Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century, referred to commonly as the Ocean Report, detailed more than 200 recommendations to achieve a national ocean policy. The recommendations cover a wide range of top- ics, but most share a cross-cutting theme: continue to do what we are doing, but do it bigger and better.
In particular, the Ocean Commission recommended that the federal government improve coordination and communication between the myriad offi ces and agencies that have jurisdiction over coastal issues, encour- age regional partnerships and approaches to ocean issues and expand ocean education for school children.
The Ocean Commission’s work was vitally important to the nation because “we have more than 50 percent of our population living within 50 miles of the coastline,„ says Paul Kelly, a member of the Ocean Commission. “Our coastal population is expected to in-crease to 60 percent within the next 10 years. At same time, we have a tremendous econo-my that exists today and there is tremendous potential for growth in the future. All of those things are dependent upon good stewardship of these resources and here it is clear that over the past several decades the nation has been falling down in terms of being a good steward of the ocean and coastal environment that means so much to us.„
Many of the ocean issues facing the nation are also issues in Texas, says Kelly, who is also senior vice president of the Rowan Com-panies, a Houston-based oil drilling contractor. “Texas has been subject to the same type of growth and enjoys the benefi ts of an ocean economy in a very large way.„
The Ocean Commissioners estimate the cost of their plan would be $1.5 billion the fi rst year and $3.9 billion annually once all of their recommendations are implemented. Kelly admits these figures seem large at first, but they represent a relatively small investment when you consider that each year the country’s ports handle $700 billion in goods, fishing and trade activities generate $50 billion, cruise ship passengers spend $11 billion and offshore oil and gas development brings in between $25 billion and $40 billion.
In total, coastal- and marine-related activities in the United States generate $4.5 trillion annually — about half of the nation’s gross domestic product — and account for 60 million jobs, according to figures compiled by the Ocean Commission.
Ocean Commissioners suggested that the federal government pay for implementing their recommendations by establishing the Ocean Policy Trust Fund with the $5 billion in oil and gas royalty payments the country receives from offshore producers each year.
President George W. Bush responded to the USCOP report (as the Ocean Act required) with his 40-page U.S. Ocean Action Plan, a recitation of existing federal pro- grams and planned actions that answer some of the Ocean Commission’s recommendations.
Among these actions, the President estab-lished the new cabinet-level Committee on Ocean Policy, which will develop an 18-month work plan to address more of the Ocean Commission’s recommendations.
The Administration will seek passage of legislation that will fi rmly establish NOAA within the Department of Commerce. NOAA never became the national ocean clearinghouse that the Stratton Commis-sion intended. President’s Nixon’s executive order primarily consolidated the ocean and atmospheric activities of several federal agencies under NOAA, but it did not establish an overarching mission for the agency. The new legislation should include language outlining NOAA’s mission and its specifi c functions as an agency.
According to the President’s plan, the federal government will also encourage, support, lead, promote and/or foster a number of actions in furtherance of Ocean Commission recommendations.
The major knock against the Ocean Action Plan is that it contains few new programs and even less promise of federal funding, but it is still considered by many to be a positive sign from the White House. More than a few ocean experts expected the administration to take exception with some of the USCOP report’s recommendations, if not flat out pan them. Instead, the Ocean Action Plan is seen as validation that the problems scientists have been working on for years are rising on the administration’s radar screen.
There are others, however, who view the President’s response as little more than lip service.
“To most of us who are quite familiar with what is going on and what is being planned already, there is nothing new in the Action Plan,„ says Dr. Worth Nowlin, distinguished professor of Oceanography at Texas A&M University. “The Action Plan assembles a lot of different actions which indeed were already planned or were already ongoing and puts those out as a response. To me, that is a non-response. It is not a response to the requirements for change that the commission report sought. I don’t know of anyone who feels differently from that, except, perhaps, those who are within the Administration themselves.„
James Connaughton works within the Administration and disagrees with Nowlin.
“The fact that we had a commission that dedicated more than three years to this subject was new. The fact that they outlined a broad strategy that encompassed every facet of marine activity and tried to figure out the organizational strategies for making further progress is very new,„ says Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “The bulk of the initiatives that came out of their recommendations and that are contained in the President’s Ocean Action Plan are not initiatives that are about federal taxpayer funding. They are initiatives about mobilizing huge sectors of our economy toward the next generation of ocean stewardship.„
Some of the Ocean Commission’s recommendations have budget implications, says Connaughton, but most do not.
“Fisheries are not budget issues,„ he says. “They are a major re-thinking and improvement of the way we deal with the over-fishing issue. Fisheries require very limited taxpayer resources but very substantial commitment at the political and sector level to meaningful improvement. When you think about the economic gains that will fl ow from them, they are huge. When people myopically look at what the taxpayer issues are, they are leaving out the bigger picture.„
Of the 212 recommendations in the Ocean Commission’s report, 64 of them asked the Administration to study certain issues and then come up with a solution, which will be part of the task assigned to the Committee on Ocean Policy, says Connaughton.
“The Ocean Commission realized the solutions to some of these problems require complex design and some thoughtful planning, and that’s what this interagency committee is going to be doing,„ he explains.
Even focusing on the budget, the current administration is very sensitive to the importance of the ocean, says Connaughton. “Our oceans budgets are higher than they’ve ever been before, so you are working off an increasing budget line,„ he says. As an example, Connaughton notes that the President has requested a $3.8 million increase in funding for the National Sea Grant Program in his fiscal 2006 budget.
“The Ocean Commission report came out well after our 2006 budget was pretty much locked down, but the President decided to include some new items at the last minute,„ says Connaughton.
Among these late budget additions that were also highlighted in the Ocean Action Plan were $2.7 million to implement coral reef conservation plans, $18 million to convert a U.S. Navy vessel into a NOAA research ship and increased funding for the nation’s Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), although the plan does not specify the amount earmarked.
Those who dismiss the President’s response as underwhelming should take into account that the Ocean Commission took three years to put together its report and recommendations while the White House had just 90 days to respond — and that was following a presidential election, says Connaughton.
“In the Action Plan the Administration wanted to create a document that was acceptable to a broader range of readers to get them to have a clear feel of the actions that can be taken to address the problem identified by the Ocean Commission,„ he says. “What you are looking at in the Action Plan is a frontispiece to what is actually a management matrix that has several hundred items on it. The Ocean Action Plan would have been a reflection of where we were a year from now had we been given that much time to respond.„
Connaughton calls the Ocean Action Plan an “early beginning„ to the Administration’s response to the Ocean Commission report. “The end comes when we have fully implemented, subject to some modifications, the recommendations we’ve received,„ he says. “We fully intend to live up to the challenge of setting a generational strategy.„
In the near-term, neither the Ocean Commission report nor the President’s response will affect the way environmental business is conducted in Texas. The state is either already practicing or moving toward the major items mentioned in both documents — ecosystem-based resource management, increased coordination and integration of governmental agencies, regional partnerships, expanding ocean observation capabilities and obtaining the best research possible to make good science-based decisions about our environment.
What the Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century and the Ocean Action Plan do for Texans is give them a reason to feel good about a state that is ahead of the curve on issues deemed vitally important to the rest of the nation.
Ocean observing
Coastal and ocean observations provide critical information for protecting human lives and property from marine hazards, enhancing national and homeland security, predicting global climate change, improving ocean health, and providing for the protection, sustainable us, and enjoyment of ocean resources. While the technology currently exists to integrate data gathered from a variety of sensors deployed on buoys, gliders, ships and satellites, the implementation of a sustained, national Integrated Ocean Observation System (IOOS) is overdue and should begin immediately. Care should be taken to ensure that user needs are incorporated into planning and that the data collected by the IOOS are turned into information products and forecasts that benefi t the nation. In addition, the IOOS should be coordinated with other national and international environmental observing systems to enhance the nation’s Earth observing capabilities and enable us to better understand and respond to the interactions among ocean, atmospheric and terrestrial processes. — USCOP report
In January of this year, leaders of almost every state Sea Grant Program and the National Sea Grant Office met in Houston at a Texas Sea Grant-sponsored retreat focused on how the Sea Grant Network can best respond to the Ocean Commission’s recommendations.
Their consensus was that the Sea Grant’s best and most important response will be to help develop regional ocean observation systems
Of all the recommendations in the USCOP report, none has the potential for affecting human life more than an improved and expanded ocean observation program.
“If the average person enjoys boating or fishing or uses a beach, the improved forecast of rip currents, tides, waves, visibility and wind will benefit them,„ says Nowlin, one of the people who have been instrumental in developing the Global Ocean Observation System (GOOS). “If the average person is interested in eating seafood, if we can improve our information and prediction about living marine resources so we don’t deplete all of the stocks and can manage them better, then they will benefit. If that person lives in the coastal zone along the Gulf of Mexico or on the East Coast, and we manage to improve the track forecasts for hurricanes and other tropical storms, that person might not have to be evacuated needlessly or might be evacuated and save their lives, although their home may be lost.„
Ocean observing is the term given to a broad range of activities that mea-sure some component of the ocean or surrounding atmosphere — sea height, tides, currents, temperature, humidity and salinity to name a few. The purpose behind GOOS (of which the IOOS is one component) is to make observations that result in products addressing seven key areas of need:
- Detecting and forecasting oceanic components of climate variability
- Facilitating safe and effi cient marine operations
- Ensuring national security
- Managing resources for sustainable use
- Preserving and restoring healthy marine ecosystems
- Predicting and mitigating against coastal hazards
- Ensuring public
“The observations themselves are not what we are interested in,„ explains Nowlin. “We are more interested in the products, services and warnings you can get out of these observations, whether it be a tsunami warning or a flood warning caused by a tropical storm, or a warning for a harmful algal bloom (HAB) like red tide, or warning of an unusually high tide in a harbor, or unusually low water due to winds blowing the surface waters out.„
People have been making ocean observations globally for more than 150 years. Mariners often accurately determined current speeds by how far they were being pushed off course. People also took note of wave heights, the sea temperature and other factors in an effort to predict the coming weather.
Between 1975 and 1985, a network of observation buoys was set up across the Pacific Ocean as part of the Tropical Ocean Atmosphere experiment aimed at detecting and predicting El Niño and La Niña events. The massive array of buoys, now numbering about 50, was extended to the Atlantic Ocean and there are plans to expand the network to the Indian Ocean as well.
Nowlin does not know what the impetus was for starting the GOOS, but it certainly was not a new idea.
“The concept of global observing systems for the oceans had been around for decades,„ he says. “The very famous oceanographer Henry Stommel was one of the first people to espouse this idea. He called it a Global Ocean Watch.„
Members of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) — part of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization — formally accepted a proposal to develop a GOOS in 1990.
Nowlin chaired the first session of the GOOS Steering Committee in 1998 and for five years led the team that planned the GOOS. That plan has now been generally accepted and is being reported on regularly to members of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, which includes people at the ministerial and presidential levels of 25 countries, including the United States.
Those developing the GOOS have installed about half of the probes planned for the system. The probes range from surface floating buoys to sensors located on the sea floor at depths up to 2,000 meters.
Nowlin believes the other 50 percent of the probes can be installed and working in another 15 years.
In October 2000, the federal government created Ocean.US, an interagency group charged with coordinating development of IOOS. Their mission was greatly aided by the Ocean Commission report, which strongly supports a national ocean observing program.
The USCOP estimates that the IOOS will cost between $700 million and $800 million annually, which sounds like a lot of money, “but to put that in perspective, the National Weather Service spends $800 million a year now in the United States,„ says Nowlin. “For further perspective, there is an assessment in the 2004 plan for the IOOS that concludes we are spending $700 million per year in this country on observations and products that would be considered part of the IOOS, so we are only asking for a doubling of the budget. When you consider how complicated all the types of observations in the ocean are and for all of the uses they have, that is not really a lot of money.„
One of the obstacles to creating IOOS is a lack of coordination among the agencies that make the observations. There is a lot of duplicated effort between agencies and even within agencies, says Nowlin.
“We are not all using the same standards of measurement, not all of these data are publicly available, not all of these data are even available from one agency to another,„ he says. “The very first thing we’ve been working on the past few years is to coordinate and integrate the portions of the system that we already have. That will take awhile. It is not easy to get agencies to work together, to get the private sector to work with the federal government and to get the academics to work with anyone.„
The economic benefits of the IOOS will be worth the tremendous effort to make it a reality. It is impossible to make a full accounting of the system’s potential, but the Ocean Commission noted the following impacts of existing observation systems:
- Enhanced El Niño forecasting has saved American farmers $300 million annually and has allowed fishery managers to adjust harvest levels and hatchery production 12 to 16 months in advance. For one small northwestern Coho salmon fishery, the net benefits of these forecasts is estimated to exceed $1 million per year. When all economic sectors are considered, the estimated value of improved El Niño forecasts reaches $1 billion a year.
- Improved wind and wave models based on ocean observations make weather-based vessel routing possible, saving $300 million in transportation costs annually.
- Small improvements in the U.S. Coast Guard’s search efficiency can generate life and property savings in excess of $100 million per year.
- Scientists estimate that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now, compared to 20 years in the future, could result in worldwide benefits of $80 billion, with the United States’ share approaching $20 billion.
The IOOS has some very interesting implications for homeland security. Nowlin is not privy to much of what has been a very secretive government operation, but he can make an educated guess about the system’s potential for protecting ports and waterways.
“We are using acoustics surveillance in some ports and harbors to be able to detect subsurface divers, submarines or anything else near ships,„ he says. “We are also using over-the-horizon and line-of-site radar both for drug interdiction and also for identifying vessels that might be involved in some sort of subversive activity. I believe we can combine that sort of vessel tracking with surface current monitoring using radar. If we can do that, we can combine the surface currents, which boaters, commercial transport, oil and gas and others would like to know, and it would be of use in terms of tracking vessels for drug and homeland security aspects.„
Texas is represented in the IOOS as part of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS), and the state has already seen the value in GCOOS.
Several years ago an oil barge ran aground just inside Galveston Bay, rupturing some of its tanks and causing a very large oil slick.
“Conventional wisdom would have been to place a boom system to the east of that point along the coast because at that time of year usually the currents are going that way,„ Nowlin explains. “Fortunately, we had the Texas Automated Buoy System (TABS) out there that was reporting what the currents were really doing, and they were going the other way.„
The information allowed the Texas General Land Office, which operates the TABS and is the state’s lead agency for oil spill response, to deploy its resources where they would be needed most.
“The General Land Office folks told me they thought they saved $250,000 on just that one incident,„ Nowlin recalls. “Considering that we have well over 1,000 small spills per year and tens of larger ones, you can see that this type of system can pay off.„
The Ocean Commission’s support of IOOS — and the rest of the recommendations in the report for that matter — came at what Nowlin characterizes as “a very unfortunate time due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the consequent drain on the budget.
“I can’t even make a guess as to how long it will take to put IOOS in place and how successful we will be in putting it in place, but I think there will be lots of benefits if we can put it in place.„
Tragedy has, unfortunately, aided the cause of funding for the IOOS. Congress has been extremely interested in ocean observing systems since a huge earthquake near Sumatra spawned a tsunami that roared through the Indian Ocean, killing more than 100,000 people.
A plea has gone out from the IOC to the nations of the world for funding to plan and build an ocean observing system in the Indian Ocean capable of detecting tsunamis. So far the IOC has received enough money to plan the system and it has obtained sufficient funding pledges to install the network.
Nowlin says the preliminary system is expected to be in operation before the end of this year.
“The problem with these systems is not in putting in the technology. We already have sensors around the globe for seismic activity,„ he says. “Officials knew within a few minutes after the earthquake in the Indian Ocean essentially where it was and they essentially knew within 30 minutes to an hour where the wave would probably go. They predicted within an hour the transit time across to Madagascar, which was 12 hours to 13 hours,„ Nowlin says. “The problem is not a technical one, but one of how do you get the information to the citizens and what kind of outreach system do you use to explain to them that when the sea starts receding, don’t go out and pick up the fish?„
Best science
The United States has a wealth of ocean research expertise spread across a network of government and industry laboratories and world-class universities, colleges, and marine centers. With strong federal support, these institutions made the United States the world leader in oceanography during the 20th century. However, a leader cannot stand still. Ocean and coastal management issues continue to grow in number and complexity, new fields of study have emerged, new interdisciplinary approaches are being tried, and there is a growing need to understand the planet on a global and regional scale. All this has created a corresponding demand for high-quality scientific information. — USCOP report
At about the same time Congress created the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy through the Ocean Act of 2000, newspaper mogul and philanthropist Ed Harte walked into the office of Dr. Robert Furgason, president of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi at the time, with an idea for a one-of-a-kind research institute and the money to make it happen — $25 million.
When the two men finished talking through Harte’s idea, he had agreed to increase his gift by $21 million to fund Furgason’s vision for the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, based at the Coastal Bend university.
“I think having the Harte Research Institute come along at the same time as this report presents us with a unique and huge opportunity to make a difference for the Gulf of Mexico,„ says Dr. Wes Tunnell, the institute’s associate director.
Several of the endowed research chairs now planned for the institute, which should open the doors of its new headquarters building this summer, are “in line with the overarching themes of the Ocean Commission report,„ notes Tunnell.
Among the research foci of the institute’s six endowed chairs are oceans and human health, biodiversity, and socio-economics — “Everybody knows now that you have to prove economically why it is worthwhile for us to do some of the things to take care of the natural environment,„ says Tunnell.
There will also be an endowed chair focusing on the institute’s basic theme, ocean and coastal law and policy.
“We see the need to impact policy to make things happen,„ says Tunnell.
“Of course we’d like to have 20 endowed chairs to be able to accomplish all that the Ocean Commission report laid out,„ Tunnell concedes, “but we had to pick the areas that we felt would be most effective for the Gulf of Mexico.„
The Harte Research Institute will also embrace another bedrock theme of the USCOP report — regional partnerships. Tunnell says the partnerships will include both foreign and domestic ventures and will allow the institute to tap into a wide variety of resources.
“We’ve already been criticized about why we didn’t hire a physical oceanographer,„ he says. “That’s because Texas A&M is famous for physical oceanography. We don’t want to duplicate what they’ve got, we want to create something new and then work with them. This cooperative and collaborative aspect is something we think will become a hallmark of the Harte Research Institute.„
Shortly after the USCOP released its draft report in April 2004, Florida Governor Jeb Bush wrote a letter to the governors of the nation’s other Gulf of Mexico states urging them to take a leadership role in forming a regional alliance that would become a model for the rest of the country.
The Harte Research Institute’s leaders picked up on Bush’s call to action and began working with Texas Governor Rick Perry to host a Gulf of Mexico summit that would include not only the governors from the American Gulf states, but also those from Mexican Gulf states.
Tunnell says he received word in March of this year that Perry has agreed to host the State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in November.
“This is an incredibly important opportunity to raise awareness of the problems we face in the Gulf,„ Tunnell says emphatically. “The Gulf of Mexico has been on the bottom of the crumb table for the last decade as far as getting federal money goes. The Gulf has gotten about one-eighth of the funding that the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay have received.„
The USCOP report recommends that Congress double the federal ocean and coastal research budget over the next five years, but the U.S. Ocean Action Plan is mum on future funding, although it points out that “since 1980, overall Federal support for scientific research in the life sciences, physical sciences, and environmental sciences including oceanography has increased dramatically from $7.5 billion to $26 billion annually.„
Instead of committing money to ocean research, the Action Plan directed that a subcommittee of the President’s National Science and Technology Coun- cil develop an ocean research priority plan and an implementation strategy by the end of 2006. Neither the research priority plan nor the implementation strategy will include suggestions for the amount of money the federal government should spend on ocean research, says Bob Hopkins, spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Once the research priority plan is finished, the President will decide how much money he will earmark in his budget for ocean-related research.
Coastal Texas 2020
The Ocean Commissioners cited the issue of coastal erosion extensively in their report, but only in the context of broader problems like coastal hazards and sediment management.
Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson took a more direct approach to what is one of the state’s most vexing environmental problems when he launched his Coastal Texas 2020 program in June 2003.
Billed as a long-term statewide initiative to unite local, state and federal efforts to promote the economic and environmental health of the Texas coast, Coastal Texas 2020 seeks to increase the state’s share of federal funds earmarked for erosion control projects and to rally public support to persuade the Texas Legislature to establish a dedicated funding source that will provide up to $15 million annually in matching funds for the federal grants.
Texas’ coastal shoreline is eroding at an average rate of six feet per year and a staggering 15 feet per year in the area of Surfside Beach. Most of the state’s erosion is caused by a lack of sediment in the system from diversion of the rivers, lack of introduction of new sediment to the coast by structures like dams and the interruption of sediment drift along the coast by long navigation channels.
“Those jetties do a great job of keeping the shipping lanes open but they interrupt the transport of sand up and down the coast,„ says Eddie Fisher, Texas General Land Office (GLO) director of coastal stewardship.
Despite having the second longest coastline in the contiguous 48 states, Texas has historically received a pittance in terms of federal funding for erosion projects. In the 95 years since the federal government began funding erosion projects, Texas has received less than 1 percent of the total money available, according to A Clear Vision for Texas, a report on Texas’ erosion woes released by the GLO as part of Coastal Texas 2020.
By comparison, New Jersey received 27 percent of the federal funds available and Delaware received 16 percent.
“It makes my stomach turn,„ says Sam Webb, the GLO’s deputy commissioner for coastal resources. “Obviously the amount of coastline in Texas compared to those two states is not even close to the same.„
To formulate the Coastal Texas 2020 plan, the GLO split the state’s 18 coastal counties into five regions identified by common coastal characteristics and then held public meetings in each region.
“If the coastline changed dramatically, then we created a new region,„ Fisher explains. “We wanted to establish small enough geographic regions that people did not travel too far to the public meetings.„
An executive steering committee comprising 30 people, representing a broad range of stakeholder groups, oversaw the information-gathering process, but regional advisory committees comprising an even greater diversity of members held the public meetings.
The GLO also gathered public input through a 34-page scoping document.
It was, says Fisher, a “bottom-up process„ similar to the way the Ocean Commission addressed its task and in keeping with the commission’s recommendation that governments develop processes that allow a wide range of people to participate in addressing ocean issues.
“We went out and asked people what they thought needed to be addressed,„ says Fisher.
Statewide, bay shore erosion was the number one public concern, followed by wetlands and habitat issues. Gulf beach erosion was also a high priority item.
The large amount of information gathered during formation of the Coastal Texas 2020 report makes it an excellent tool to help educate the public in an effort to pressure the federal government into giving Texas its share of erosion funding.
But in the current budget climate, even public pressure may not be enough, says Webb.
“The President’s budget for coastal erosion projects has been cut by more than half,„ he explains. “Last year there was $106 million available and this year the total is around $46 million.„
In addition to identifying the state’s most pressing coastal issues, the Coastal Texas 2020 report identified specific projects within each region that citizens and their leaders would like to see addressed, including:
- Rebuilding of State Highway 87, which is so severely damaged by erosion that it is closed from High Island east almost to Sabine Pass.
- Restoration of wetlands, sand dunes and shoreline at the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge in Jefferson County.
- Large-scale beach nourishment at the west end of Galveston Island, Surfside Beach and the Boliver Peninsula.
- Protection of Sundown Island in Matagorda Bay. Formed with dredged material, the island is home to the second largest brown pelican colony on the Texas coast, but it is continually threatened by erosion.
- Protection of the historic shoreline at Indianola from bay shore erosion.
- Protection of wetland areas along the Corpus Christi Ship Channel from erosion caused by the wakes of passing ships.
- Beach nourishment at Isla Blanca Park, located at the southernmost tip of South Padre Island.
Where they could, the Coastal Texas 2020 staff tried to estimate the cost of the proposed projects. This was not possible in some cases and in others the estimates varied widely, but the amount of work needed to overcome erosion damage easily exceeds $100 million and could be more than $340 million.
The Coastal Texas 2020 report did not rank the projects in order of importance — on purpose.
“Within each region there are different political jurisdictions and everyone’s projects are important to them,„ says Fisher.
Coastal Texas 2020 is a visionary initiative but not a surprising one in a state that is considered one of the leaders in environmental resource protection. The Ocean Commission report strongly urged improved governance of ocean and coastal resources. Improved governance referred to better communication and coordination between agencies with ocean and coastal jurisdictions.
As part of its federally approved Coastal Management Plan, the state established the Coastal Coordination Council, which Webb describes as “an assemblage of all of the relevant state agencies and then some public members to oversee the actions of the individual state agencies to say an action is consistent with the state’s laws and the council’s rules on beach policy.„
The Coastal Coordination Council administers the state’s Coastal Management Program and is chaired by the Commissioner of the GLO. Council members include representatives of every state agency that has jurisdiction over activities in the coastal zone, the director of the Texas Sea Grant Program (who serves as a non-voting member) and four gubernatorial appointees who reside in the coastal zone and represent local government, business, the citizenry and agricultural interests.
In his role as an Ocean Commissioner, Kelly spoke before the council on several occasions regarding various issues, including non-point source pollution. He vividly recalls one such meeting when he had the opportunity to speak with a council member who represented Texas’ agricultural interests.
“He told me that they realized long ago that non-point source pollution was a problem that began inland but affected the coast, so agriculture was given a seat on the Coastal Coordination Council,„ Kelly remembers. “That really made an impression on me. As I looked around at the Council’s membership, there were representatives from the Texas Department of Transportation, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and others. It was the kind of cooperation already in place that the Ocean Commission was recommending.„
Ecosystem-based management
U.S. ocean and coastal resources should be managed to reflect the relationships among all ecosystem components, including humans and nonhuman species and the environments in which they live — USCOP report
Nutrient-rich runoff flows from agricultural operations in the Midwest into the Mississippi River and out into the Gulf of Mexico, where it is believed to help create the hypoxic zone — an area of extremely low dissolved oxygen that spans 12,000 square miles at its peak each summer.
The Florida Everglades are drying up and the wetlands of coastal Louisiana are being drowned in saltwater because humans diverted the watercourses that created them.
Earlier this year a red tide appeared off South Padre Island and the brown tide that plagued the Laguna Madre for seven years during the 1990s returned.
Mercury emitted into the atmosphere by coal-burning power plants ends up accumulating in the tissues of marine fishes.
Clearly, the problems facing coastal and ocean ecosystems do not happen in a vacuum.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) was in the process of converting to an ecosystem-based management system when the Ocean Commission released its report. The shift to ecosystem-based management has been decades in the making but is picking up momentum, says Dr. Larry McKinney director of coastal fisheries with the TPWD.
“Ecosystem-based management is something that academics recognized some time ago,„ he says. “But it takes some years in bureaucracies — both state and federal — to make a shift of this magnitude.
“I hope the Ocean Action Plan will spur us on to focus on some of the elements that we will have to work on with other states in order to address our problems,„ he continues. “We can’t deal with the mercury deposition issues from a fish and wildlife standpoint, but clearly, as a state, we have to work with other states to get that addressed. Managing fisheries outside of our estuaries, we have to work with other states and federal agencies.
“We all realize that we have all of the tools we need to manage a fishery, but the real driver on the future of fisheries in this state and the Gulf of Mexico are those broader ecosystem issues of habitat, water quality and other aspects,„ McKinney concludes. “We are trying to shift our focus and make sure we are addressing all of those elements that affect the fisheries and other areas for which we have management responsibility.„
Both the Ocean Commission report and the President’s response support implementing individual fishing quotas, often referred to as individual transferable quotas (ITQs). ITQs are seen as a preferable alternative to current “derby„ fisheries.
In a derby fishery, the regulating governmental authority sets a maximum limit for the amount of fish or shrimp that can be caught during a given season but does not limit the catch for individual fishermen.
The result is that a large number of fishermen pounce upon the population of a given species when the season opens in an effort to land as big a portion of the limit as possible.
ITQs assign a specific portion of a given limit to a particular fi sherman who can land his or her catch at anytime during the season. The pressure to catch as much as possible as soon as possible is gone.
“That is the future of commercial fisheries for us,„ says McKinney, whose agency oversees commercial fishing — the majority of which is bay shrimping — within the state’s territorial waters.
ITQs are already working well in places like Alaska, says McKinney, “You just have to make sure the industry is comfortable with it and the fishermen are in charge of it. As a tool, once people get over their initial concern, they really see some value in it.„
In an effort to move toward ITQs, sometimes referred to as a limited entry system, TPWD started buying back licenses from bay shrimpers. To date, TPWD has bought back about 1,200 licenses and has decreased shrimping effort in Texas’ bays by about 40 percent.
McKinney says he was generally pleased with the way the Ocean Commission and the Administration treated ecosystem-based management, but he was disappointed that neither plan addressed the importance of freshwater inflows to bays and estuaries.
Freshwater inflows are considered the lifeblood of coastal nursery grounds and their diversion for human uses are among the factors starving Texas’ coastal wetlands of the sediment needed to stave off wetlands destruction due to erosion.
“Our wetlands losses are frightening,„ says McKinney. “We’ve already lost half of our wetlands and continue to lose more. Erosion is contributing to that in a major way. Over the past 10 years TPWD has been able to find $3 million to $5 million annually to put into erosion control projects that include wetlands restoration, but that may not continue.„
Ironically, President Bush celebrated Earth Day 2004 in the wetlands of Maine as the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that, for the first time in history, America had reversed the annual net loss of wetlands on the country’s farms. The United States had been losing almost 500,000 acres of wetlands per year over the past 30 years, but the net loss has decreased dramatically, according to department spokesmen.
President Bush seized the opportunity to announce that he wants to move beyond his policy of no net loss of wetlands to a policy that calls for an overall increase in wetlands each year.
“Thankfully, Coastal Texas 2020 gets at some issues like freshwater inflows that affect wetlands,„ says McKinney. “That shows the value of a local approach to ecosystem- based management. We talk about all of the attention paid to the Ocean Commission’s report, but the role of the local and state entities on these issues is critical because they are right there on the ground and they have to deal with these issues every day. You can’t manage from the top down. You have to provide mechanisms from the stakeholders up to make sure that issues are addressed.„
McKinney believes that Coastal Texas 2020 helps the state make a strong case for receiving additional federal funds because “some of these issues cut across state lines.„
The five Gulf of Mexico states have one other thing in common — they each cited the need for increased federal funding in the responses they submitted to the preliminary draft of the Ocean Commission’s report. “Don’t just identify problems and expect the states to come up with solutions, and then not fund those solutions,„ McKinney says sternly. “If the feds take that approach, it’s not going to happen.„
Greening the budget
The nexus between activities in federal waters and the programmatic, regulatory, and management responsibilities they engender is clear. The actions recommended in this report are all linked in some way to our use of the ocean. The critical nature of the nation’s ocean assets, and the challenges faced in managing them, justify the establishment of an Ocean Policy Trust Fund in the U.S. Treasury to assist federal agencies and coastal states in carrying out the comprehensive ocean policy recommended by this Commission. — USCOP report
Prying money from the federal government may be difficult now, but there are signs the budget may be greening a bit. How much it becomes environmentally friendly remains to be seen.
Ocean Commissioner Paul Kelly remembers attending a social event earlier this year and meeting a couple of people who talked about the January 2005 accident involving the U.S. Navy submarine USS San Francisco. The sub ran head-on into an unmapped undersea mountain about 350 miles south of Guam, killing one sailor and injuring 23 others.
“They were saying the incident brought home the Ocean Commission’s call for more ocean exploration,„ says Kelly. “I’ve seen numbers where people have said that less than 5 percent of the sea floor has been explored around the globe.„
The President has made a commitment to implementing the Ocean Commission’s recommendations in the near-term through actions like transferring $18 million from the U.S. Navy’s budget to NOAA to convert the USNS Capable into the first research vessel dedicated to deep ocean exploration, says the CEQ’s Connaughton.
“From the beginning, the transfer of this ship represents a great value to the U.S. taxpayer and when converted, it will provide significant and long-term benefits to ocean exploration and research,„ said retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., NOAA administrator, when the transfer was announced last fall.
The ship will be equipped for ocean mapping, deployment of unmanned submersibles, scientific work in onboard laboratories, and real-time transmission of images and data collected during ocean expeditions. The ship will carry multidisciplinary teams of scientist-explorers who will investigate unknown or little known areas of Earth’s oceans.
Some of the funds that benefit coasts and oceans are a bit more hidden, in a manner of speaking, in agricultural programs. The Ocean Commission placed much emphasis on the fact that responsibility for conserving coastal and ocean resources falls to all 50 states, not just those with waterfront property, and cited non-point source pollution from agricultural operations as one of the biggest threats to marine ecosystem health.
“There are 38 states in the Gulf of Mexico watershed,„ says Connaughton. “This Administration has more than doubled the amount of money available as incentives to farmers for conservation measures. That will have a huge benefit in terms of avoided sediment and runoff pollution into coastal systems.„
Over the next 10 years, $40 billion in incentives will flow through a number of federal programs to agricultural producers. Not all of the $40 billion will benefit the coasts, Connaughton admits, but a large portion will.
Since 1997, Texans have received almost $410 million in agricultural incentives through a variety of programs, including those that keep grasslands out of crop production — thus reducing non-point source pollution — preserve wetlands and reward farmers for using cutting-edge technology to make their operations more environmentally friendly.
“With the help of some of the research and technology programs, many farmers are going to no-till farming and are able to do precision fertilization,„ notes Connaughton. “Through new technology development programs and tax incentives for technology deployment, you will see a new generation of highly advanced agriculture. Farmers will conduct precision application of nitrogen, for example, and it will be the amount their crops need so there will not be an excess that could then find its way into runoff.„
The Ocean Commission suggested setting up the Ocean Policy Trust Fund because “it seems logical,„ says Kelly. “We’re talking about funds from non-renewable sources being used in many ways for renewable resources. We thought there was a beautiful logic in having that as a source of funding. The White House has not responded to that yet. I think it signals that the administration is being very careful about how money is spent. We see that the President’s new budget is proposing cuts in many areas, so we think the budget issue will be a very challenging one. At the same time, we are talking about a program that, if everything was implemented, would cost about $1.5 billion in the first year and then it would level out at around $3.5 billion annually after that. To you and me, that is no small change, but in the grand scope of the federal budget, it is not that much. If you look at the projected expenditures to send a mission to Mars, the ocean budget would be peanuts. We hope our report puts all of this in perspective and convinces the Administration and Congress that it would be wise expenditure of funds to make these changes and advances in the years ahead.„
Texas Governor Rick Perry agreed in his letter accompanying the state’s response to the Ocean Commission report.
“Considering the financial struggle experienced by most states, continued federal funding is critical to ensuring the sustenance and protection of our natural resources,„ Perry wrote. “We applaud your resolve not only to provide solutions for protecting our oceans but to also provide a viable funding source with the Ocean Policy Trust Fund.„
There is a point of no return when dealing with the environment. Throw all of the money in the world at a problem, and it will not get any better.
“I think we’re getting close to that point,„ believes McKinney. “We’ve seen it more in Louisiana than we have here. There are points where you get so much saltwater intrusion causing a breakdown in an ecosystem that it falls completely apart, and restoration is maybe out of reach economically. We’re talking about spending $10 billion to $15 billion in Louisiana by re-plumbing the Mississippi River into those wetlands. In the Everglades it will cost another $8 billion to $10 billion to re-plumb them — a mistake we should have never made in the first place. When you start talking about those kinds of dollars for those kinds of programs, you begin to think that they might not happen. That is a huge amount of money.
“We’re not to that point in Texas yet,„ McKinney continues. “With freshwater inflows, for example, we’ve got an opportunity to avoid repeating history. But if we don’t watch out, perhaps in the next 10 years we will be at an Everglades and Mississippi River type problem. I hope we don’t get there, but we sure could.
“We’ve got all of the tools in place. If these reports help motivate us to use the tools, then I think we’ll do well,„ McKinney says.
Just as important, the USCOP report is seen by many as a validation of the warnings that scientists have issued for many years about the consequences humans face if they continue to ignore environmental problems.
The report could help sway legislators who heretofore were hesitant to approve funding for environmental initiatives — that is when money is available.
“I think funding will be a challenging issue in today’s environment, at least so long as the war on terrorism is going on it will be a challenge,„ says Kelly. “The President’s Ocean Action Plan is a response we feel is good in so far as it goes. It is a good starting point and White House staff has said that it is not the end of their plans. They are getting committees organized to implement more of the report than is covered in the Ocean Action Plan, so we hope to see expanded activity starting at the White House level. Even during the course of our work, as we identified problems and issues, we saw government agencies taking actions that anticipated our recommendations. We think in many ways the ball has already started rolling.„
The Ocean Commissioners titled their report a blueprint for the 21st Century for a reason, says Kelly. They made it comprehensive enough to be germane for two or three decades because no one knows when the next Ocean Commission will be formed.
“We wanted our report to have a lasting life,„ says Kelly. “We are hopeful this report will stimulate positive legislation for at least a decade and impact our stewardship of our ocean and coastal environments for much longer than that.„
Sea Science by Cindie Powell
Croaker check gives clues
to ecosystem health
Think of the Atlantic croaker as a kind of canary.
Like the birds coal miners used to provide an early warning about deadly gases deep beneath the surface of the earth, the reproductive health of the Atlantic croaker, which is found from Cape Cod south to the Bay of Campeche in Mexico, can be a valuable indicator of the health of estuarine ecosystems.
Dr. Peter Thomas of The University of Texas Marine Science Institute has studied croaker reproduction for decades, and with his colleagues at UTMSI is working to discover biomarkers in the fish that can be used as an early warning of threats to croaker populations from degradation of their environments.
In two recent studies, Thomas examined croaker in Galveston and Corpus Christi bays for signs of reproductive problems from chemical pollution, and in Pensacola Bay in Florida for the impact on the fish from reduced levels of oxygen in the waters there.
In the Texas survey, funded by the Texas Sea Grant College Program, Thomas was looking for evidence of feminization in male croaker. Feminization, or the development in males of female characteristics, can occur when estrogenic chemicals, including PCB metabolites, are present, resulting in impaired reproduction. Feminization of male fish in estuaries in Japan and Europe has been identified through the discovery of high levels of vitellogenin, a yolk protein, in the blood plasma of male fish.
“I wanted to see if the concentrations of estrogenic chemicals in Texas estuaries were high enough to cause yolk production in males, which would be an indication that they are in sufficient quantities to potentially disrupt reproduction of estuarine and marine fish in Texas,„ Thomas says.
He notes that there have been studies focusing on rivers, particularly where there are high flows of treated sewage, but not much is known about the impacts of these compounds on fishes in bays and estuaries.
“In most of the rivers in England, you can detect yolk in male fish. Of course males normally do not make yolk, and in some of them you can even see eggs forming in the testes,„ he says. “This is very interesting, but an important question is, is it really of concern to fish management people in Texas? We’ve an extensive bay and estuary system in the state, do we have any evidence that there’s a similar problem here?„
Thomas selected “hot spots„ in Corpus Christi and Galveston bays for study.
“In Corpus Christi Bay I went to places that were more likely to be contaminated, near sewage outfalls and industrial sites, and in Galveston Bay I went to the upper reaches of the Houston Ship Channel, which has some of the more highly contaminated sites in the state.„
The Houston Ship Channel sampling was a follow up to a study he did in the area in 1982-83 that found evidence of reproductive impairment in croaker.
“The Houston Ship Channel historically has been heavily impacted with a wide variety of chemicals, and the degree of contamination tends to increase as you go up the channel.
“I intensively sampled these sites in the 1980s,„ he says. “We found as we went up the ship channel that croaker showed greater induction of the enzymes used to metabolize these foreign chemicals in the liver, and we also found an increase in incidences of fin deformities.„
Thomas’ plan was to return to see if the situation in the ship channel had changed in the intervening decades. However, the weather patterns in the past year hampered his plans.
“The idea was to go back and see if it has improved, but we’ve had a lot of rainfall recently resulting in major floods, so I don’t have a really strong data set yet,„ he says. “It looks as if there’s still some reproductive problems, and there still are fin deformities, but in comparison to those earlier years, it appears to be diminished.
“But you have to be careful — it is not meaningful to compare those results with drought years, it may just be that the pollutants are more diluted, „ he says. “As far as detecting the yolk protein, vitellogenin, in the blood of male fish, we didn’t see particularly high levels at any of the sites.„
He says he got similar results in Corpus Christi Bay with regards to vitellogenin levels.
“It doesn’t mean that estrogenic chemicals are not present, merely that they are not having an observable feminization effect on male croaker,„ he says.
The Texas results are a contrast to the data he collected in Florida with Dr. Saydur Rahman and James Kummer of UTMSI during fall 2003 under a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. High rainfall earlier that year resulted in extensive and persistent hypoxia throughout East Bay in the Pensacola Bay system. Gonadal growth in both sexes was impaired in sites with low dissolved oxygen levels, to the point that Thomas says the likely result is complete reproductive failure — no future generations produced by the fish in the hypoxic areas in 2003.
“I’ve studied fish collected from many highly polluted estuarine sites, but I’ve never seen reproductive effects as profound as I found at these hypoxic sites. The effects usually are much more subtle with chemical pollution. And perhaps that’s not surprising — exposure to low oxygen is a severe stressor for most fishes that dramatically alters their metabolism and physiology,„ Thomas says.
“Hypoxia is a growing problem around the world and according to some reports has tripled over the past 30 years. Currently, there is a lot of interest in the consequences of urbanization and of agricultural practices in causing coastal zone hypoxia. Climatic changes due to global warming, such as more extreme rainfall patterns, could also potentially be a contributing factor.
“Although we know that hypoxia, if it’s severe enough, kills animals, we have a poor understanding of the long-term effects on fish of sub-lethal, moderate hypoxia, which is the more typical environmental problem,„ he says. “We found in the Florida study that it caused subtle changes in croaker — we didn’t see any effects on growth, so the fish were experiencing relatively moderate hypoxia, but it was sufficient to completely shut down reproduction. And of course reproduction is important because it has a major impact on the future survival of the population.„
One of the most noticeable effects of low oxygen in the fish was clearly visible changes in the egg development. Hormones produced in the fish’s pituitary gland called gonadotropins regulate the production of estrogen by the ovaries. The estrogen then stimulates the estrogen receptor in the liver, signaling it to activate a gene that produces vitellogenin, the precursor of yolk.
“The growth of the egg and the production of viable eggs is largely dependent on uptake of this yolk. If the eggs don’t have enough yolk, they’re not going to be viable, because they can’t provide enough nutrition for the newly hatched larvae,„ Thomas explains.
“We found in croaker collected from these moderate hypoxic sites that estrogen hormone levels were reduced, causing declines in estrogen receptor and vitellogenin concentrations. The decreased production of this yolk protein resulted in a marked reduction in the growth of the eggs. And this resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of viable, large enough eggs, and also changes in the structure of the ovary.„
However, in an adjacent bay with normal levels of oxygen, the fish had normally developed ovaries.
“We looked at the males as well and we found the same pattern – that the testes in these hypoxic sites had very poor development. Our overall conclusion was that the hypoxic bay probably produced negligible numbers of reproductively mature fish that year that could contribute to the spawning population.„
He says he was surprised at how well the croaker performed otherwise in the low oxygen environment. There were plenty of fish, they hadn’t migrated elsewhere, and apparently they were growing because they were about the same size as fish from the adjacent bay, which had normal oxygen levels.
“It’s a refuge away from the larger fish predators, and they’re also taking advantage of the plentiful of food organisms there. Low oxygen causes some of the animals living in the mud to come up to the surface — so low oxygen can actually favor feeding.„
To ensure that their results were caused by hypoxia and not other environmental factors, Thomas set up experiments in the laboratory with the only variable being different levels of dissolved oxygen.
“We found exactly the same hormonal changes and also the same changes to the ovaries and the testes – the ovaries had lots of small eggs that didn’t develop and the testes produced only a few sperm. And we found that if we tried to spawn these fish, they produced hardly any offspring.„
In the laboratory, the researchers also were able to study the next stage of development, which they weren’t able to survey in the field because they couldn’t find any mature eggs to sample.
“The next stage is final ripening of eggs before spawning, called maturation, and egg maturation and sperm maturation were both dramatically affected by hypoxia. We found that the motility of the sperm was decreased, and we think this was due to a reduction in the level of the hormone that controls motility. So it all suggests that these reproductive changes are due to disruption of their hormonal system,„ Thomas says.
So how do low concentrations of dissolved oxygen cause these changes?
“What we’re trying to do now is see if we can come up with the mechanism by which it happens, and I think we’re going to have a very exciting story to tell. We hypothesize that hypoxia acts by a very specific mechanism in the brain to shut off reproduction. This could have severe consequences for maintaining fish populations, particularly since incidences of hypoxia are increasing due to climate changes and other human activities.„
The reproductive system is controlled by the pituitary gland, which produces the gonadotropins that act on the gonads to regulate the production of sex steroid hormones. The sex hormones in turn can feed back on the brain and the pituitary to influence gonadotropin secretion, so it is a self-regulating system. Thomas theorizes that reproduction is impaired because gonadotropin secretion is decreased.
“In other words, it’s initiated in the brain. The brain, we know, is the most sensitive organ to oxygen,„ he says, pointing to incidences of stroke in humans. “Maybe the brain is sensing low oxygen and is sending a signal to the pituitary gland to alter the secretion of gonadotropin.„
Thomas and his coworkers also obtained initial evidence that exposure to low oxygen levels may increase hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF), a protein important in the regulation of many metabolic genes.
“The protein is usually broken down, but when the oxygen levels drop the protein levels stay up, and then it goes to the nucleus and switches on all of these genes that help the animal respond to low oxygen, such as genes involving glucose metabolism, because they have to start burning glucose anaerobically,„ Thomas says. “Dr. Rahman in my lab cloned these genes from croaker, and we have preliminary data suggesting that we can determine whether fish have been exposed to hypoxia by measuring HIF.
“Environmental scientists already have several good biomarkers for chemicals. We may now also have a good biomarker of exposure to hypoxia.
“It would be very useful for biologists studying the physiological effects of hypoxia because the metabolic pathways influenced by HIF are well known. But it also could be valuable for resource protection managers because it would provide a clear indication that low levels of oxygen in the environment are physiologically affecting fish populations.„
Thomas had intended to return to Pensacola Bay in fall 2004 to do further sampling and confirm his results, but the weather intervened in the form of a series of hurricanes. Instead, he went to Mobile Bay, which was still problematical because of the disruption in that bay as well from the storms.
“We got data, but as I suspected, the next time we went there the conditions were completely different.„
The Mobile Bay trip was helpful, he says, in the collection of data independent of hypoxic conditions.
“It was useful because I was able to correlate vitellogenin in females with their gonad size, independent of hypoxia, and there was a very good correspondence,„ he says. “So it confirms our predictions on the interrelationships among these indicators.„
The information is another piece of the puzzle in understanding how Atlantic croaker reproduction is controlled, which Thomas’ lab at UTMSI has studied for more than 20 years.
“The hormonal control of the reproductive system and also how it is perturbed by chemicals and other stressors has been extensively studied in croaker,„ Thomas says.
Now, with the additional understanding of how a physical stressor, hypoxia, also perturbs reproduction, the researchers’ understanding of overall consequences for the population also increases.
“What we want to be able to do is go out in the field, take some croaker samples, and be able to tell by some relatively straightforward measurements whether there is likely to be a reproductive problem that could threaten maintenance of the population,„ he says. “We understand that monitoring programs cannot routinely do all the measurements we do — it’s very expensive. However, we if could design an initial screening assay involving some simple measurements that would indicate if there’s a potential problem, it would alert resource protection agencies of possible environmental degradation at certain sites. They could then focus their efforts on these sites and undertake a more intensive study that may indicate the causal agents by measuring additional biomarkers.„
The advantage of such a technique would be to get results back to a regulatory agency relatively quickly, so that the agency could then take steps to mitigate the causes of the problem. Thomas says the simplicity of the screen is the key.
“My experience from field studies suggests that some rather simple measures can often give you a good clue of the health of fish populations. It’s something that can be done fairly quickly without having a molecular biology lab, for example.
“For example, you can cut open the fish, take out the ovaries, put them into buffer solution, and store them in the ice chest. Then when you get back to the lab, you can take one ovary and measure how many eggs there are, and snip a piece off the other one and send it off to a company that makes slides so that the development of the eggs can be examined,„ he says. “With just information about the size of the gonads, one can learn quite a lot and determine whether there’s likely to be a reproductive problem at the site or not.„
Under another grant from the National Sea Grant College Program, Thomas and co-principal investigators Drs. B. Scott Nunez and Izhar A. Khan are currently developing a more sophisticated screening technique — a microarray of the croaker reproductive system. DNA microarrays, also called DNA arrays or gene chips, use the fact that complementary sequences of nucleotides — the basic units of a gene — “stick„ to each other. Known genetic material is placed on the microarray, which is then used as a “probe„ to detect a fragment of DNA or messenger RNA, the molecule that is produced when a gene is turned on, with the complementary sequence.
“We’ve cloned a number of important genes in the croaker reproductive endocrine system, and we can put them on the chip. So if you have a site where you think there’s a reproductive problem, one can extract RNA from fish tissues, which can be done fairly easily, and run the microarray to determine which genes are altered,„ Thomas says.
“It could provide a second level of understanding of what components of the reproductive system are disrupted, and also may give you a clue of what environmental stressor is causing the disturbance.„
He says the microarray could be used by a contract lab or by government agencies or regulatory bodies responsible for monitoring and managing fish populations, particularly those agencies that already do genetic surveys. Many of these agencies also have experience in population modeling, which is the next step in the use of the information collected through the screening.
“It is important to use biomarkers that measure a critical function such a growth, reproduction or disease resistance, so that we can determine the potential hazard to wild fish if they are altered and whether this is cause for concern. We also want to have a biomarker of exposure to know what might be causing the disturbance. Therefore, we would want to use a suite of indicators. However, probably the most useful biomarkers for resource protection are those that can be used to predict how changes in individual fish might affect the long-term population.„
Thomas’ group is currently working with two modelers, Dr. Kenneth Rose and Cheryl Murphy of Louisiana State University, to estimate how gonadotropin changes from environmental stressors such as chemicals and hypoxia affect egg production in individuals, and then to use the results as input into a model to predict the long-term effects on croaker populations.
“I foresee my biomarker measurements being integrated with the modeling efforts to estimate the effects on population dynamics,„ Thomas says. “Researchers have been measuring a wide range of biological responses to stressors for a number of years, especially these short biochemical changes. However, the broad significance of these biological changes is often unclear. There is a growing awareness that we must begin to estimate what the population consequences of these changes are.„ ■
Coastal Legend: Dr. Rezneat M. Darnell Jr.
The great synthesizer
BY JIM HINEY
To those species of plants and animals which have vanished by the hand of man. To the native American flora and fauna, lest they be forgotten — Dedication in the book Ecology and Man by Dr. Rezneat Darnell
Dr. Rez Darnell pours over papers that are neatly clipped together on the table in the living room of his College Station home. He checks draft illustrations he drew of fishes of the Gulf of Mexico with proofs of the final drawings he just received from the artist. The pictures will be part of his book summarizing all of the existing scientific knowledge about the Gulf of Mexico.
Aside from the work on the table and a painting of an angry shoreline hanging above a piano, there is very little evidence of the ocean within easy sight. Instead, the room reflects the other eclectic interests of this professor emeritus of oceanography (a title bestowed upon Darnell by The Texas A&M University Sys- tem Board of Regents in 1995).
Immediately behind Darnell, a bookshelf holds several dozen volumes on various aspects of human history, beginning with pre-history in the Mediterranean area and India, and continuing forward in time and east in geography to the Atlantic Ocean. Among the volumes are ones titled Ancient Law, The Etruscans, The Hittites and Book of the Dead.
Across the living room, another bookshelf holds volumes covering many aspects of language — several different languages — and linguistics. One book in particular stands out: The World’s Great Speeches.
“I had four years of Latin in high school and studied ancient history there,„ Darnell notes without looking up from his work. “It set me up for studying languages and ancient history.„
With a bit more prodding, Darnell confides that he speaks Spanish (learned during several research projects in Mexico), can read most of the European languages and knows something conversational in more than 20 languages, including Korean, two dialects of Chinese, Thai, Greek and Swahili.
He is also a music buff who has played clarinet, oboe and English horn. Darnell played four years in his hometown Memphis Symphony Orchestra and sang in the chorus of a light opera performed there.
The piano that sits prominently in the room, beneath a painting of an angry shoreline, is not just a decoration. Darnell is largely self-taught on the instrument, although he readily admits “I had a month of lessons back in the fourth grade.„
He writes songs, mostly for himself, and has no intention of copyrighting them, with one notable exception. Darnell hopes a children’s Christmas song he has written will become a time- honored classic.
“All of this science I do is terribly important, but it has a very short half-life, and then it is replaced,„ he says. “But if you do something like write a song, it can go on forever. This is a legacy you can make, when you write a song for little kids.„
Darnell makes a very strong first impression. The best word to describe him is “Wow.„
“’Wow’ is a good way to put it,„ says Dr. Bob Rogers, one of Darnell’s former graduate students and now supervisor of the Biological Sciences Unit in the Mineral Management Service’s (MMS) Gulf of Mexico regional office in New Orleans.
“Rez is hard to put into words,„ adds Dr. Jim Simons, another of Darnell’s former graduate students and a marine ecologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Corpus Christi. “He is obviously very intelligent. His memory is astounding and he has an incredible breadth of knowledge about many subjects.„
Darnell has the ability to talk about virtually any subject, says Rogers. “When you are out with him in public, he does talk with everyone about everything rather than just the areas he is a specialist in. He is very outgoing and has a genuine interest in people.„
Dr. Rick Defenbaugh, deputy regional supervisor of the MMS’s Gulf of Mexico Regional Office, recalls that Darnell was “a bit intimidating, but he was never difficult„ when Defenbaugh studied under him at Texas A&M in the early 1970s. “When you went into his office he had a sign on his desk that read, ʻBe brief.’ He made it clear that his time was valuable. You needed to get to the point and move on.
“He also stood out in a crowd,„ says Defenbaugh, drawing attention to Darnell’s height (6 ft. 3 in.) and the white hair and goatee he had even then. “Rez has always looked like Col. Sanders.„
The office Darnell still visits regularly in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M is another mass of books, reports and studies. He has nine bookshelves full of texts, archives of bulletins dealing with ocean issues around the world and scientific discourses on a variety of marine topics.
A framed quote hanging on one wall proclaims, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get,„ which seems incongruent with a man who for so many years juggled so many different projects and publications.
The most striking features in his office are the 360-plus unused yellow legal pads occupying parts of three bookshelves. Most of the pads are still plastic wrapped in stacks of 12. Darnell is confident he will use every one of them, and then some.
“My life has just started as far as writing goes,„ says Darnell, who will turn 81 in October.
He also has many boxes of pens and more than 2,000 4 x 6-inch index cards he uses to list references for his works. Of his voluminous office supplies he says, “They’re like loaves of bread. I eat them up.„
The legal pads are Darnell’s trademark. Every publication he writes is done longhand on legal pads. Technology may have ushered in the era of the computer, but Darnell refuses to embrace the electronic revolution.
“I found out years ago that I can’t compose on a typewriter because I hunt and peck,„ he explains. “So much of my mind has to concentrate on finding the keys that I can’t concentrate on the text. My thoughts don’t flow very well through my fingers on a keyboard. When I’m writing, I totally forget I have hands. I think and it appears on paper, so it does not interfere with my thinking processes at all.„
His latest publication project is perhaps his most ambitious. The 10-year work in progress is a synthesis of all scientists know about the Gulf of Mexico. Darnell began the book intending only to write about the ecology of the continental shelf, but the project soon grew to include every area he could find information about, including research done by Mexican scientists and written in Spanish.
Completed chapters focus on topics like the Gulf’s historical background, marine science, origin and history, the Gulf of Mexico basin, physiography and sedimentary environments, meteorology, physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, phytoplankton and the hypoxic zone.
The much-anticipated book lacks its final chapter, but it already comprises almost 800 pages of text and several hundred more pages of figures, tables and photographs.
The Gulf of Mexico book is a good example of the types of projects Darnell completed throughout his career.
“There are very few people around now who are such generalists that they have a grasp of that breadth of knowledge to be able to put this book together,„ believes Rogers.
His abilities allow him to pull together diverse information on a topic, synthesize it and put it in a form that people can understand and use. For instance, Darnell and Defenbaugh collaborated in the early 1980s with a scientist from the National Marine Fisheries Service to produce the Northwestern Gulf Shelf Bio-Atlas, a 438-page synthesis of the distribution patterns of all of the fish and shrimp found on or near the floor of the Gulf of Mexico along the continental shelf from the Rio Grande to the Mississippi River.
The bio-atlas includes 345 pages of maps showing where each species is most likely to be found, broken down by season.
His repeated trips to New Orleans to work on the bio-atlas, combined with his experiences in the city when he taught there early in his career, led Darnell to wander from his ecological roots and publish a visitor’s guide to New Orleans. As he wrote about himself in the guide, “Unable to locate a good, up-to-date ready reference guide to the world’s most interesting city, (the author) decided to write one.„
True to his nature, the guide goes beyond naming the best restaurants and nightspots. It is a synthesis of the city that includes information on the its history, the flora and fauna found there and definitions of common terms, like “Dixie„:
The name ultimately applied to the South is reported to have originated in New Orleans. Ten dollar bank notes issued by the Citizen’s Bank of Louisiana on Toulouse Street had the value of the note printed boldly in both English and French (“Ten„ and “Dix„). These notes became popular among river boatmen and upstream merchants. New Orleans was the source of the “Dixie,„ and the term which referred to someplace in the south eventually was applied to the South in general.
In the mid-1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) required contractors to submit environmental impact statements for any projects involving wetlands, but the agency did not have the background to interpret the reports, says Darnell. Seeking a way to alleviate its shortcoming, the EPA awarded Darnell a contract to help out.
He first had the Dean of Engineering at Texas A&M write a report on how engineers complete a number of construction projects, from dams to roads and even including strip mining.
Darnell then searched scientific literature for studies on the environmental impacts of those construction projects. He synthesized all of the information into a construction impact manual that Darnell calls one of the EPA’s all-time best sellers.
“These contractors may not be able to understand the science behind the manual, but they can certainly follow the charts I made that showed if you did this action, it would have this impact upstream, downstream and far downstream,„ he says.
“I am the writer and the bringer together of things,„ Darnell continues, smiling broadly.
Along the Gulf Coast, he is often referred to as The Great Synthesizer.
Rezneat Milton Darnell Jr. was born Oct. 14, 1924, the second of three sons in an affluent Memphis, Tenn., family. His mother’s family had parlayed cotton farming and wise stock market investments into a small fortune while his paternal grandfather operated a profitable lumber business.
Darnell traces the unusual name he shares with his father to his paternal grandmother.
“What is Rezneat spelled backward?„ asks Darnell, still teaching almost a decade after leaving the classroom. “It is Taenzer, which is the Americanized form of my grandmother’s maiden name, Tänzer — German for ʻdancer.’
“Everyone has always just called me Rez, so mother liked to ask, ʻHas anyone ever seen Rez neat?’„ he says with a slight chuckle.
The Darnell Lumber Company harvested white oak, cypress and red gum trees from company land in northern Mississippi and hauled the wood to its mill via an elevated railroad. Rez’s grandfather found that if he sawed the red gum a certain way, it gave the finished lumber a wonderful grain.
“He could not supply enough red gum to meet the demand of the cabinet makers in the European markets,„ says Darnell, obviously still proud more than 75 years later. The lumber company failed in 1930, due in part to the stock market crash a year earlier. Rezneat Darnell Sr. turned to farming on the lumber company’s land and moved his wife and three sons there from Memphis.
“Mother tried farm life for a while, but she moved us back to Memphis when my older brother got sick. We were all raised in Memphis, and Mother and Dad finally divorced in the 1930s. Neither one ever remarried,„ says Rez Jr.
Like many others during the Depression era, the Darnells had little money, but the three boys were blessed with determination and intelligence. All three went to work to support the family and managed to put themselves through college.
“Mother’s three boys all did something with their lives,„ Rez beams.
The oldest of the brothers, Rowland Darnell, studied architecture and urban planning. He spent the majority of his career working in Marin County, Calif., just north of San Francisco, but he also holds the distinction of developing the master plan for the Hawaiian Islands.
“It was going to become a state and they were worried about all of these tourists and other people moving in, so they needed to do a master plan,„ says Darnell.
Rez’s younger brother, J. Millen Darnell, became a minister and spent several years as a missionary in Ecuador.
Rez became a scientist.
“I knew from an early age that I wanted to study biology and that I wanted to become a college professor,„ he says in a strong, hearty voice. “One of my students once asked me how I got so far in life. Without hesitation I said, ʻI picked my goals early and I used every day to get there.’
„Early is right. Darnell went to school continually from the time he was 3 (“I had to go to kindergarten a second year because I flunked the first year,„ he laughs) until he received his doctorate in 1953.
During the summer between his senior year in high school and his freshman year at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Darnell spent a lot of time in the local library reading books and trying to figure out where he belonged in the many fields of science.
“At the end of the summer I asked myself what types of books I had read, and they fit into three categories: biology, anthropology or archaeology,„ he remembers. “Biology was the only subject of the three that I could major in at Southwestern College, so I did that.„
Darnell graduated with distinction from Southwestern College in 1946 and won a fellowship to study at what was then called Rice Institute in Houston — now Rice University. He received a master’s degree in biology, specializing in genetics, from Rice in 1948 before pursuing a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, which he completed in 1953.
“Within the field of biology I had to move around until I found what I wanted to do,„ says Darnell. “I found that environmental science was my favorite and I really wanted to study ecology. For my doctorate, I decided that if I was going to be an ecologist, then I needed to go into the field where the ecology was.„ In 1950 Darnell traveled to a ranch owned by American Everts Storms in Mexico, at the base of the Sierra Madres. Storms regularly welcomed graduate students to visit and conduct research there. It was the first of two spring quarters Darnell spent immersing himself in the ecology of a river.
“We knew a lot about prairies, forests, deserts and even lakes, but very little about flowing water,„ remembers Darnell. “I decided to study the ecology of a river. There was a beautiful little river in Mexico, inland from Tampico, in the jungle. We didn’t have any monkeys, but we had everything else. Many ornithologists and herpetologists had studied down there before me, but I was the first ecologist.„
In a manner reminiscent of early environmental writer Rachel Carson, Darnell recounted his experience in the jungle in the prologue to Ecology and Man.
His description of his surroundings included:
The first rays of morning stream across the eastern plains and kindle the mist-shrouded mountains which tower above our camp. These are the majestic Sierra Madres rising abruptly from the plain a mile to our west. Below the forest canopy, we stir in our jungle hammocks, and water droplets, remnants of the night’s downpour, fall to the wet soil.
His observations of the river included:
Upstream the river includes a series of such riffles (shallows) alternating with deeper, wider pool areas, each with its characteristic inhabitants. The pools act as settling basins, and the riffles serve as filters. Together, they maintain the clarity and purity of the water which we drank for breakfast and which we shall drink again several times during our day’s journey.
Of the ecosystem he wrote:
The call of the jaguar fades into the night. Rain begins to fall. Drop by drop we hear it at first, then the downpour. The jungle is at peace as it has been, night after night, for eons of time. This is an ancient and beautiful world, a world of balanced harmony. Each creature has its role in the scheme of things.
Darnell also wrote of returning to the area 20 years later to find cornfields in place of the jungle and the native settlement had grown into a village. The river was running low, bore an unpleasant odor and was muddy, prompting him to pen a grim epilogue:
As we drive away, we realize that we have experienced a vanished world and that we must set down in print what we have seen and what we have experienced so that a new generation of students will understand how it all got this way. Theirs will be the task of correcting the mistakes and excesses of our generation.
Darnell return again to the base of the Sierra Madres in the early 1980s, this time accompanied by Rogers. The pair had been at a meeting together in Corpus Christi and drove to Mexico because Darnell wanted to see how the area had changed. Rogers was eager to see the place Darnell talked about so often.
Rogers had to rely on Darnell’s memories of the jungle, because when they arrived they found even more open agricultural fields than Darnell had seen 10 years earlier.
“Rez was very cautious when he walked through the fields, talking about venomous snakes and dangerous critters,„ recalls Rogers. “He described what it had been like so well that it made me think what an adventure it must have been to be a graduate student who came down from Minnesota.
“The strange thing was that as we were walking along we met this group of people and before we knew it he was having a conversation with them in Spanish and they still remembered him 30 years later.„
As Darnell neared completion of his doctorate in 1953, he began looking for his first job as a non-student. Tulane University in New Orleans hired him as an instructor and, more importantly to Darnell, gave him a research position. His affiliation with Tulane lasted just three years, but it was long enough to allow the Louisiana Fish and Oyster Commission — now the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries — to seek Darnell’s help with a sticky problem. Sports fishermen complained to the state that commercial shrimpers were dragging their trawls in Lake Ponchartrain and the activity would ruin sport fishing there.
Darnell and colleague Royal D. Suttkus agreed to do a survey of the lake and he found that “there was almost no sport fishing done in Lake Ponchartrain,„ he says with a hint of a smile. “But the state also did not have much information at all about the lake, so we did the baseline ecological survey of Lake Ponchartrain.„
In 1955, Darnell left Tulane to teach biology and conduct research at Marquette University in Milwaukee. During his 13 years at Marquette, Darnell received research grants from the National Science Foundation that allowed him to continue marine-related work he began at Tulane. He spent four summers away from Marquette at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in North Carolina doing follow-up work on the research he conducted at Lake Ponchartrain.
Darnell also embarked on a mission for Marquette that the university had been unable to complete before his arrival. It was the era of Sputnik, when the US feared it was lagging behind Russia in the area of science. School administrators wanted to host summer science institutes for high school biology teachers, but they could not get the federal funding they needed. Darnell told his superiors that if they gave him a summer free from teaching duties, he would put together a grant application.
Darnell got the summer off from the classroom and put together a proposal that the federal government ultimately funded for two years, at $50,000 per year. The program, which Darnell calls a “very rewarding experience,„ paid all of the expenses for about 50 biology teachers from all over the country and from as far away as Alaska and Jamaica.
“I’ll never forget the one day that a little old nun came up to me and said, ʻSir, I am just saturated with science,„ he says, laughing deeply.
As his reputation as an ecologist grew, Darnell was asked to serve on the Wisconsin Scientific Areas Preservation Council. The council had been established to advise the state’s Conservation Department on land and aquatic areas deemed to be of ecological importance around Wisconsin.
At the time, the council met only once a year and had succeeded in getting about 20 areas under preservation protection. Darnell recalls standing up during one of the annual meetings and scolding his fellow council members.
“I told them that they had an important job to do and if they were not willing to do it better, I would leave and give my job to someone else,„ he says sternly as he relives the moment. “I told them they needed to meet at least once a month and that they needed a clear definition of their goals.
“So, guess what?„ he says quizzically. “They made me chairman of the council.„
Darnell served as chairman for about five years. Under his leadership, the council drafted a clear set of goals, developed funding for an annual budget, hired full-time personnel and formally became part of the Wisconsin Department of Conservation. By the time Darnell left Wisconsin, more than 80 areas were under preservation protection.
Today, the number is more than 160.
“The natural genetic resources of the state are being preserved up there,„ Darnell says with great pride.
His success with the council in Wisconsin led to him joining an effort sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences to locate critical environmental areas across the country. He moved from heading the aquatic portion of the program to leading the entire project, which resulted in a massive report for the Conservation and Ecosystems Program of the International Biological Program. The report synthesized all of the information known to that point about more than 3,000 environmentally critical areas and pointed out the importance of establishing a national system of natural areas.
Darnell spent two summers working in Washington, D.C., as he compiled the report in the early 1970s. While there, he took his knowledge of ecology to Capitol Hill, where he testified before Congress and spoke with Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall.
“Ecologists had to get involved in those early days,„ says Darnell. “The whole point I was trying to make was, ʻWe cannot afford to preside over the demise of nature.’ I had to get involved in helping save some of these areas. If you study ecology, it becomes a moral and ethical imperative to make sure some of these areas are left for future generations.„
That moral and ethical imperative led Darnell to write Ecology and Man — a discussion of natural systems and how man affects them — at the request of a friend in the publishing business.
“The world was going to hell and ecologists were all called communists,„ says Darnell a bit angrily. “I said to myself I have to explain to the world what is going on, like Rachel Carson did. It took me six weeks of evenings and weekends to write the first half. The human part of it I did in another six weeks.„
When he wrote Ecology and Man, Darnell had already been on the faculty in Texas A&M University’s Oceanography Department for about five years. He was lured away from Marquette in 1968 by a call from Texas A&M oceanographer Willis Pequegnat (“Pequegnat is a French-Swiss name that means ʻsmall,’„ explains Darnell in an aside that exemplifies his penchant for languages. “Ironically, Willis was a very big man.„). Pequegnat had read Darnell’s writings on marine issues and asked his department head to invited Darnell to give a talk to the rest of the Oceanography Department.
The morning after his talk, Darnell was in the office of Dean Horace Byers contemplating an employment offer. He accepted the deal and has been in College Station ever since.
“I started off working on rivers,„ says Darnell, recalling the path his career took. “Then I moved out and started working on Lake Ponchartrain and the bays and estuaries of Louisiana. When I finally came down (to Texas A&M) and started working in oceanography, I got a letter from a friend of mine at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. It said, ʻCongratulations on your change in salinity.’ I just got saltier as time went on.„
Darnell taught mostly graduate-level classes at Texas A&M, and he is best known for his course on the ecology of the continental shelf. When he arrived at Texas A&M, Darnell saw that the Oceanography Department offered courses on standard subjects, like phytoplankton and benthic ecology, but he wanted to develop a course that looked at the total ecology of a specific area. He chose the continental shelf.
“That’s the part that we use,„ explains Darnell of his decision to focus on the continental shelf. “We don’t use the deep ocean; it doesn’t amount to a hoot. All of the pollution from land flows out of the bays and hits the continental shelf. One-third of the surface area of the Gulf of Mexico is underlain by shallow water — less than 200 meters deep.
“Except for Alaska and Florida, Texas has the greatest part of the continental shelf off its coast. That’s where the shrimping is, that’s where you catch the menhaden and other fishes, that’s where the coral reefs are and for a long time that’s where they got all of the oil and gas.
“The continental shelf is where the issues are, and so I trained a generation of people about the continental shelf,„ he continues. “Those people are now throughout academia, federal and state agencies and so on. Those are the guys who are making the rules and regulations now.„
Rogers says Darnell was an outstanding teacher whose course on the ecology of the continental shelf “was such an integrated overview that it really put together the pieces. So often you see the trees and not the forest, but he had a teaching style that approached the big picture and laid it out in a context that gave you a real feel for the overall ecology.
“He gave you a lot of latitude to pursue what you wanted to do, but he was very controlling if you strayed from that and went in a direction that did not have much focus to it. He definitely kept you focused on the task rather than wandering off, as so many graduate students will do when they are trying to find what they should be doing research on.„
Defenbaugh agrees, adding that Darnell “expected a certain amount of accountability from his students. If you said you were going to do something, he expected you to do it. But I think he was also willing to let you waddle off the edge of the Earth and fail if that was the approach you took. He wasn’t going to be there to save you, necessarily, although he would try to steer you toward success, but he wasn’t going to make your success his obligation.„
Darnell says he does not have just one accomplishment that he regards as his proudest achievement — he has many. He includes among those his work preserving critical natural areas, his research on the environment, his manual on the impacts of construction activities and the students he has trained.
“Through my students I’ve really gotten the word about ecology out,„ he beams.
Throughout his life, Darnell has continued to develop what he refers to as his environmental conscience and environmental dignity.
“The dignity of the human race is dependent to some extent upon the dignity with which it treats nature,„ he says. “The guiding principals of my life are dignity and reverence for life, humility and stewardship of the environment. Those are my ethical, moral and religious missions, so to speak.
“My professional life was not long enough to study everything in the Gulf of Mexico and, after the Gulf, the world,„ Darnell says almost in defeat, before squaring his shoulders as his eyes narrow in a steely glare. “But at least I made a mark.„
Brown tide returns to Texas coast
It’s official — the algal bloom currrently in the Lower Laguna Madre has been positively identified as Aureoumbra lagunensis, the same species that darkened bays along the Texas coast in the 1990s. And its return has raised new questions about what causes the organism to reproduce at a rate that results in brown tide-level concentrations.
The last Texas brown tide began in December 1989 and early 1990 and lasted until 1997. Dr. Ed Buskey of The University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) analyzed a sample of the current organism from the Lower Laguna Madre using an antibody test developed to identify the algae back in the late 1990s — a procedure he hadn’t needed to do in five to 10 years, he says.
“The brown tide is back. It’s definitely Aureoumbra lagunensis,„ Buskey says. “This is a really small, nondescript-looking cell, so you really can’t make a positive identification of it without either using the antibody or doing electron microscopy. It just looks like a little bump — it’s not very distinctive at all.„
Dr. Tracy Villareal, another UTMSI researcher, was also among the scientists who studied the last brown tide.
“I got some true color satellite images from Dr. Richard Stumpf, a colleague of mine at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and you can definitely see the brown, discolored water in these images,„ Villareal says. “It seems to be pretty widely distributed in the Lower Laguna Madre.„
Fishermen in the Baffin Bay area started reporting discolored water in late February, he says. The organism has spread south past Port Mansfield to below the Arroyo Colorado.
The last bloom also originated in Baffin Bay, but environmental conditions in the Laguna Madre are not the same as they were in late 1989 and early 1990.
“What is very different about it this time, and this is a surprise to both Ed and myself, is that the last time it started, we were in a great drought, so the Laguna was hypersaline,„ Villareal says. “That’s not the case now. We’ve had a huge amount of rain.
“This is kind of a mystery to us, because all our paradigms were developed around this hypersalinity concept, but that’s the problem with having a small sample size (of one bloom) — you don’t really have a chance to investigate alternative hypotheses,„ he says.
“It’s really quite a concern, because at least if it was just drought-related you could feel fairly certain that when it started to rain again the thing would go away, but if it’s starting to appear now in non-drought conditions, we have to fundamentally re-evaluate our ideas about cause and effect.„
The brown tide does not pose a threat to humans, unlike a red tide, which can cause neurotoxic shellfish poisoning and respiratory dist |
