[MUSIC PLAYING] – OK. So our last panel is here
to talk about marine life. I don’t know if
anybody ever thought that the supply of
marine life in the ocean was inexhaustible or not
subject to the stresses that humans can put on it. But if not, by now we probably
are keenly aware of this issue. And it only gets more keen. So this panel will
talk about that. And here to moderate
is John Mandelman, who is the vice president of the
Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life and the chief scientist
at the New England Aquarium. [APPLAUSE] – Thank you very much, John, as
well as to the other symposium organizers who’ve done a
tremendous job putting this together, as well as to
Linda Cabot at Anderson for the support
for this symposium. For me personally, it’s been
an absolutely amazing day. I’ve learned a
tremendous amount, and I feel honored and
privileged to be a part of it and to have heard so many of
these distinguished speakers that we’ve had here today. I’d like to just take a second
before I introduce our speakers for this panel to reflect a
little bit on the sessions that we’ve already had,
to tie it in full circle to where we’re about to go now. And I think back to the
origin of life panel that started the day. And then we ended up working
into the physical interaction between the oceans
and our climate. Now we’re going to kind
of come full circle. We’re going to look back
at that life in the ocean, and we’re going to take
a little bit of a look at how these pressures
and impacts, disturbances, acute and chronic–
although I think our panel is primarily interested
in chronic stress, or maybe some acute
disturbances that come along with it– on how that impacts
the oceans, how that impacts the ecosystems and the species
that inhabit our oceans. So one note that I
found really interesting in thinking about the oceans
and reflecting earlier was Dr. Girguis’s talk. He talked about the incredible
diversity in form and function in our oceans. There is, in every
nook and cranny, every possible organism
you can imagine, just in terms of size,
shape, mechanics, physiology, the
ability to withstand some of the pressures of
living in the ocean already. Even without human impact,
it’s not an easy place to live in and evolve. So the ability of to
respirate, salt– osmoregulate, locomotory skills,
all these things. There’s just an amazing
diversity in the ocean. So now you throw in human
anthropogenic disturbances into the mix, and it’s
really quite incredible how much damage that can cause
over a very short time span. And as you’ll see
momentarily, there are case studies from
right here in our backyard. I think it was
Lynne Talley’s talk where she mentioned how
climate change is really– or, I should say, global
warming is really ocean warming as so much of the warming
is reflected in our oceans. And we’ve no better a
case study than right here in the Gulf of Maine. And that’s a good way to
lead into our first speaker for this panel. Dr. Andy Pershing is the
chief scientific officer up at the Gulf of Maine Research
Institute, also known as GMRI. He also runs the ecosystem
modeling laboratory there. And his expertise is looking
at the causes and consequences of climate trends
and climate change here in the Gulf of
Maine and the Northwest Atlantic in general and has
done a lot of amazing work in that realm, which
he’ll talk to you a little bit about today. Moving on to our second speaker,
Dr. Anne Cohen from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Anne is an internationally
renowned scientist who does work looking at the
effects of ocean acidification and warming, as well,
on ocean inhabitants, predominantly coral reefs and
then, as you’ll learn today, some of the animals here
in our own backyard. And then finally, we’re going
to get to hear Dr. Chris Clark. I’m sorry, Chris. I’m going to have to read this. Your title’s a
little complicated. Just Chris. All right. Chris. So Dr. Clark is the IP
Johnson Founding Director at the Cornell Laboratory of
Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program and
a senior scientist in the Department of
Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell. Dr. Clark, I know of
his work because he’s worked very closely with my
close colleague Dr. Scott Kraus at the New England Aquarium for
years looking at the endangered North Atlantic right whale. And while I think Chris’s
basic expertise is looking at acoustic signaling
or communication between organisms,
he’s applied a lot of novel and very sophisticated
acoustic technologies to addressing some of the big
conservation issues facing our oceans, especially on
endangered species, including whales and birds. So it’s a real nice, diverse
mix of speakers today, I think, touching on
some different topics. And I really hope you enjoy it. With no further ado, I’ll
welcome Dr. Pershing. [APPLAUSE] – All right. Thank you for coming, and
thanks for inviting me. And it’s great that everybody
stuck around after coffee. So my name’s Andy Pershing. I’m the chief scientist at
the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which is just up
the road in Portland, Maine. So I’m going to give just
an overview of a few things. I’m going to talk with a couple
of basics of climate change and really try to
pick up some threads that some of the earlier
speakers presented. I’m going to then turn
to our local waters and think about the
impact that we’ve seen of global warming
and the warming trends that we have observed
here in the Gulf of Maine. And then I’ll talk about the
impact of those temperature changes on cod. Lobsters had to be cut. I’ll talk a little
bit about lobsters, but I’m not going to give
the full lobster story today. And then I’ll talk
about how we’re thinking about adaptation
in terms of fisheries and natural resources. And hopefully, it’ll
be a nice complement to the great talk we
heard about adaptation on the human
infrastructure side. So this is the
famous Keeling Curve. Everybody’s seen this unless
you were a caveman who was just recently dethawed,
in which case, this is why you were
recently dethawed. [LAUGHTER] But the previous speakers
did a great job, I think, talking about the consequences
that rising levels of carbon dioxide are having on our
planet in terms of warming temperatures, impact
in vulnerable places like the Arctic, CO2
dissolving into the ocean, and things like that. It’s really easy,
though, to think that these are surprises,
that somehow we’re just discovering this. And, of course,
there are surprises, and it’s really
important that we need to document what’s
going on out there. But one of the reasons
that we’re doing this, that we’re trying to
document all this work, is that it allows
us to actually test models and predictions
that were put together 20 or 30 years ago. And so what I want
to do is actually walk you through a very
quick test of a climate model because I think it’s
really informative to think a little bit that the
science of climate change is not a new science. In many ways, we’re
following threads that were laid down over 100
years ago, as far as the role that carbon dioxide plays in
making this planet habitable. So we’re going to
start by trying to test a prediction by James Hansen. So in 1981, Hansen wrote
a really influential paper in Science magazine,
where he was working with an early climate model. And he made a prediction, based
on the trends in carbon dioxide that he was seeing at
the time and predictions on how people would use carbon
over the next 30 or 40 years, that “anthropogenic carbon
dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level
of climate variability by the end of the century.” So really what
he’s saying is that by the end of the
20th century, that we should be able to look at
the record of temperature on the planet, and we should
be able to clearly see that there’s a warming signal. And we should see that
signal standing out even among the
variability that we have. Then he also made
predictions, and these should sound familiar–
the “creation of drought-prone regions in
North America and Central Asia.” So think about the talk that
talked about the amplification of the hydrologic cycle. And the “opening of the
fabled Northwest Passage.” Think of the previous talk
with the very depressing shot of the cruise ship in
the Northwest Passage. So in 1981, this is
the temperature record that Jim Hansen would
have had available. And, in fact, his
group was really instrumental in putting together
many of these global datasets, including this one. And so you can see in 1981 that
the temperature in that year was only slightly higher
than the temperature that was measured in about 1942. And so yes, you could
say, well, maybe there’s a hint of a trend. But there’s also quite
a bit of variability. And it would be very
hard to say that there is a conclusive
trend in that data. 10 years later, some
continued warming. But I don’t know,
maybe it’s going down. Things are cooling off. It won’t be too bad, right? OK, well, of course
it’s worse than that. By the year 2000, we’re now
able to see a very clear trend in this data set. So in many ways,
Hansen was starting to make predictions using some
of the early climate models. And we can now test
those predictions. And Hansen was right. And, of course, it continues. And we’re now faced
with the warmest year ever that humans, at least,
have measured on the planet. And we’re thinking
about the consequences of persistent drought
in the southwest. We heard a great talk
about the consequences of loss of sea ice in the
Arctic and cruise ships going through the Northwest Passage. But one of the reasons why I
include this story in my talks is because I’m going to take
some of the temperature records from climate projections and
start to think about the impact that the predicted temperatures
are going to have on species that we care about. And so that Hansen
story is meant to give you a little
bit of confidence that global climate
models actually can say something meaningful,
that we’re not just making them up, it’s not a Chinese
hoax, that there’s real science behind this and
that we know what we’re doing. So of course, there, I’m
showing two different scenarios. The red one is the high CO2,
business as usual emissions pathway that we’re on. The blue one is a very
optimistic scenario where CO2 emissions are cut way back. And they have very
different pictures of what the future temperature
of the planet will look like. But one of the things
I want to highlight is that over that
first 30-year period, those two lines are
almost exactly the same. It is very hard to
distinguish them. So we really are dividing the
world into these two periods, into this initial period of
the next 20 or 30 years, where we really have to adapt to
the changes that are already baked into the system. One of the things
I like to say is that the temperature that we
have on the planet this year is actually a consequence
of carbon dioxide that was emitted when Nirvana
was on tour in the early 1990s. But then we start to
think about choices that we can make that
will play out, then, towards the end of this century. So I’m going to talk
about a temperature story, and Anne’s going
to pick things up with a story about
ocean acidification. And we just heard a great
talk on sea level rise. So this is the Gulf of Maine. It does bear the
name Maine, but I think it’s really important
to remember that it’s not just Maine, that it’s Massachusetts,
it’s Nova Scotia, it’s New Brunswick, and, yes, even
New Hampshire gets a piece. So it’s a really
important body of water, and it’s been a very important
and influential body of water in the settlement
of New England. So this is the
temperature record from the satellite
data going back to 1982 of sea
surface temperature in the Gulf of Maine. So I’m showing it on
almost a weekly scale, so a lot of variability. That’s that blue line
in the background. If you begin to take
annual averages, you get the gray dots. And you can see there’s
some pattern, right? There’s kind of maybe
a five-year cycle or so that’s going on in the 1980s,
a bit of a jump around 2000, and then things have warmed
up over the last few years. And we can start to
do some statistics. So if we fit a line,
that black line– that black line has
us warming at a rate over this 34-year period of
0.04 degrees Celsius per year. That’s hard to fathom
what that means. That’s four times the
global average rate. The global average
ocean warming rate is 0.01 degree Celsius per
year over this same period. So we’ve been warming
over this period at four times the global average rate. But it gets better. So from 2004 through 2013, I
highlighted this 10 year period because it was a feature
that really stuck out once we started looking at this data. And over that period, we
warmed at almost a quarter of a degree Celsius per year
over that 10-year period. If you map the
trends over that 2004 through 2013 period– so red
in that figure at the top is an area that has a
steep warming trend. Blue would be an area
that has a cooling trend over that 10-year period. You can see that
there’s roughly– there’s a little bit more
red, but it’s probably hard to see, than blue. But the Gulf of
Maine in our region really stands out
in terms of being bright, bright red,
along with places like the– I guess I have a
pointer– the Barents Sea off of Norway, region of Australia. So these all areas
that had similar trends over the last 10 years. But the Gulf of Maine
still stands out. So if you view this
as a histogram, we are way out here
on the right-hand side of that distribution, which
leads to the statistic that over that 10-year
period, we warmed faster than 99% of the global ocean. It was a 10-year warming
trend, a 10-year increase in temperature that very
few large marine ecosystems have ever experienced. So what has been
driving that trend? Well, in the Gulf
of Maine, we’re just this really interesting
place on the planet. We’re right at the
boundary between cold water and warm water and between cold
air masses and warm air masses. And the shifts in those warm
air masses or water masses has a big impact on the
temperature that we have. So in particular, we
have a cold current that comes in from Nova Scotia. We have warm water
that can come in from off the continental shelf. And then we have
the Gulf Stream, which is riding out here off
of the continental shelf. We have seen over the
last few years an increase in the latitude of
the Gulf Stream. It’s been pushing further north. And when that happens, we
get a characteristic series of changes in the circulation. We get a decrease in
that cold current, and we get an increase in
the supply of warm water. So it’s a lot like
a bathtub, where you adjust the temperature
by turning the warm up if you want it to
be warm, and you can turn the cold down if you
want it to be really warm. And so that’s what’s been
going on in the Gulf of Maine. But why has the Gulf
Stream been changing? Why have these
currents been changing? Well, here’s the map that
I previously showed you that showed the warming
trends over the last 10 years. Here’s a map that Vince Saba, a
colleague from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab,
had in his paper. And he allowed me to modify it. And what I did was I took the
warming trends from his paper, where he was running a very
high-resolution climate model, the only
one that actually can resolve the continental
shelf in our area and really get that
shelf circulation that’s so important to
maintaining the temperature in the Gulf of Maine. And it’s the only model
that can get that right. And so what I did was I took
the warming trends out of his that he was projecting, and I
just divided by the mean trend. So the gray area up
here off of Greenland is an area– it’s not
that it’s cooling, it’s just not warming as
quickly as the global average. Whereas the Gulf of
Maine is warming faster than that global average. And so notice the correspondence
between the two images. Both of them have this warm,
cool, warm– warm, cool, warm– pattern. So we are seeing very similar
dynamics playing out right now to what the climate models
suggest we should see over the next century. And the mechanism behind
that that’s in the models and, we think,
also in the data is related to large-scale
changes in the North Atlantic circulation, ultimately tied to
increases in fresh water supply and melting in
Greenland changing this meridional overturning
circulation and causing, instead of the ocean going
up and down, where you’re sinking at the poles and
then rising elsewhere, we’re putting more energy
into going around and around, which tends to kick that
warmer water into our region and reduce the
supply of cold water. OK. So now for the biology, since
this is a biology panel. So I’m going to talk
in depth about cod because it’s arguably the most
important fishery in the United States. It was the first export
from New England. I heard somebody say
that the English made more money off of cod
exported from New England than the Spanish
did off of the gold that they were getting
from their colonies in South America. In the late 1800s,
after the Civil War, the US had a bounty on cod. We were catching over
70,000 tons of cod from this Gulf of Maine
stock in a single year. So remember that number. In 2014, catch limits were
reduced to about 350 tons for the Gulf of Maine stock. So a very, very steep
decline in this population. And here’s what that
steep declines looks like. So we had more fish
in the early 1980s. We had less fish in the 1990s. And then we have
this big decline that started in the late 2000s. Well, what was
driving that decline? Well, one of the
things that we look for when you’re trying to
diagnose what’s going on with a fish population is you
look at the number of new fish that are coming
into the population. We call this recruitment. So this is an estimate
of the number of new fish that are being recruited
into the population. And you can see it
has a lot of parallels with the decline in biomass. But that’s kind
of what we expect. If you have fewer
females, you’re going to get fewer babies. And so in part, some of
that is going on in here. So what we did was we took
the data up through 2004, before the onset of
this rapid warming. And we fit two
statistical models that were trying to predict
the number of new fish entering the population based on
the number of females in the population. And then we fit
another model that included a temperature effect. So we have two different models. Both of them do almost equally
well during this period. But they perform
very differently when we confront them with
the new data after 2004. If we don’t include
that temperature effect, we greatly overestimate the
recruitment in the population. As a consequence, we
greatly overestimate the potential productivity
of that stock. And if we include a
temperature effect, we actually explain
the decline of cod. So temperature was
a major contributor to the decline in recruitment
and to the decline in this population. But it wasn’t just
temperature alone. It was really the interaction
between temperature and people. So fisheries management is
meant to be a negative feedback loop, meaning that if there’s
a change in the population– let’s say there are fewer fish–
we pick them up in our sensors and in our process called
the stock assessment. And we say, oh,
there are fewer fish. We then pass that through
the management machinery. And at the end, we come up
with quotas or regulations that reduce the fishing
pressure on that stock and should allow that
stock to increase. Well, over the last
few years, we’ve been in this cycle where every
time we look at the stock, there are fewer fish than
we thought there were. And not only that, there were
fewer fish the previous year than we thought there were
when we looked at them then. Very, very challenging. And what our study shows is
that the ocean was really changing the dynamics faster
than this human system could keep up. And so we were issuing
quotas, and fishermen were staying within
those quotas, yet overfishing
was still occurring because the science
wasn’t able to keep up with the changes in the ocean. But I don’t think
it’s all terrible. So I’m going to
talk a little bit about the future of the cod. And this is where those climate
models are going to come in. So this is where we are. The black line is
our current level of spawning stock biomass. The dashed line is where
management thinks we should be. This is the goal that the New
England Fisheries Management Council has for the stock. OK. So keep in mind, that’s
about 55,000 tons of fish, where in the late 1800s, we were
catching 70,000 tons of fish. So there’s been a very
big change in scale in our expectations
for this stock. But this doesn’t include
the impact of temperature. So if we add a
temperature effect, we bring down our expectation
for the stock because they’re going to be less productive. So now we’re going to
project things forward. So if we allow a little
bit of fishing and project under our mean warming
from the climate model projections over this
period, we actually can get an increase
in the population. But we never rebuild to
what is our current target. But if we apply the same
temperature to our reference points, to our
management targets, we would actually say
that we could rebuild this stock by about 2028. So not too bad. Not too far outside
of the 10-year horizon that’s the goal in
management right now. But that’s only one temperature. And we know that there’s
a range of temperatures that we could experience. We could have cooler
temperatures– not the temperatures
get cool, but we warm at a more gradual rate. Or we could stay on this
rapid– on our 30-year warming trend, which I’m calling
the warm case down here. And you might look at
this graph and say, wow, we should really
be hoping for warm water because with warm water, we
could say that we could rebuild a few years earlier, that
we could declare victory and go home. Of course, it doesn’t
work that way. You have to take into
account the temperature on the productivity
of the stock, as well. And so in the warming
case, we wouldn’t actually rebuild until about 2034. So there’s this interaction
between management and an interaction
between the ocean. If there were no
fishing, we obviously would increase the
population faster, but at very large
socioeconomic costs, as well. So just a few lessons that
I’d like to highlight. One of the things that I think
we can say in the Gulf of Maine is that global warming is real
and that it impacts things that we care about. It isn’t just some
abstract concept that’s out there
for people to talk about at wonderful
universities like this. It’s real, and it’s
impacting people’s lives. And we’ve seen that especially
with the cod fishery, where communities in
Gloucester are really grappling with a huge amount
of socioeconomic stress due to the decline
of that fishery. Lobster is sort of a
different story, where we’ve seen, basically,
the collapse of the fishery in Rhode Island
and in southern New England. But in Maine,
lobster is booming. The lobster fishery
in Maine alone was worth over half a
billion dollars last year, a huge increase in the
population, a huge increase in the value of that stock. And there’s a temperature story
that’s embedded in lobster. We’ve seen northern
shrimp– very similar global distribution to cod. And not surprisingly, we’ve
had a collapse in that fishery, as well, that’s very
much due to temperature. On the other hand,
we’re seeing an increase in species like black
sea bass, especially here in Massachusetts. We’re seeing longfin squid
moving into the Gulf of Maine. And these are potential
commercial species that may make up for
some of the loss of some of these other things. So the previous talk, I
think, did a great job of sort of laying out that
kind of the adaptation challenges that a city
is having to deal with. We’re trying to understand what
are the adaptation challenges that fishing communities and
that fisheries management has to deal with. And a lot of it has to do with
thinking about decisions that get made by different actors
at different space and time scales. So a fisherman has to
decide whether they’re going to stay in the fishery or
whether they’re going to leave. The fishing community
has to make decisions about their infrastructure. They have to think
about sea level rise, but they also have
to think about are they going to continue to
support commercial fishing, or are they going to put in
a marina and support yachts. For fisheries
management, how can we account for trends similar to
what we’ve done and with cod? Is there a way to
develop forecasts that might be able
to give advice on the medium-term about
how to manage fisheries? And what are the
strategies that we can take to manage for resilience? So just some quick
summary points. The Gulf of Maine
is warming rapidly. The warming has already impacted
human and natural communities. The adaptation
requires, first of all, acknowledging that climate
change is having an impact. But good management
can build resilience. So there is an
opportunity to make sure that the fisheries that we have
can be sustainable in a warmer climate, as long as we
knowledge that the climate is going to be warmer. So thank you. [APPLAUSE] – Hi, everyone. It’s great to be here today. So I want to thank the
organizers for inviting me. And I also want to
thank you for being here to share with us some
of the work that we’re doing to understand the
impacts of ocean acidification on marine life. My name is Anne Cohen. I’m from Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution. As we are pumping huge
amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
through human activities, we’re not only warming the
atmosphere and the oceans, but we’re also
changing the chemistry of the ocean in significant
and measurable ways. And specifically what I
want to focus on today is the decline in
ocean pH that’s occurring as the ocean is
taking up excess carbon dioxide. And this is a process,
an ongoing process, that is referred to as
ocean acidification. But I want to
start my talk today by introducing you
or reintroducing you to two organisms that
you know very well, but you might not recognize them
because they were just born. They were just fertilized. So on the right here is
the larva of a shellfish. And on the left is a
planula larva of a coral. That’s what baby
corals look like. They’re just a blob
of fat, not much else. And these babies are about
24 hours post fertilization. And over the next
24 hours, they’re going to do something
absolutely remarkable. They’re going to
completely transform. The baby coral is going
to transform into what we call a primary polyp. It looks not much different
from a sea anemone. It has tentacles that
have stinging cells that can capture prey. It has a central mouth. And underneath that polyp, a
skeleton, a beautiful skeleton, is beginning to form. And this is within 24
hours of that larval stage. And that baby
shellfish that you saw earlier is busy enveloping
itself in a shell of calcium carbonate. And by becoming calcifiers
within the first 48 hours of being fertilized,
what these organisms are doing are joining a myriad and diverse
array of marine organisms, plants and animals, that
build calcium carbonate shells and skeletons. And they are ranging from
microscopic plankton that are photosynthesizing and
providing a lot of the oxygen that we breathe
to corals that are building geological-scale
structures that we know as coral reefs. And what all of these
organisms have in common is that day in and day out, 24
hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year, they
are pulling calcium ions and carbonate ions
from the seawater, and they join them together
to make calcium carbonate molecules. And from these
molecules, they’re building calcium
carbonate crystals. And as you can see,
the calcifying plant– this is Halimeda– kind
of throws its crystals together all haphazardly
to build its skeleton. When you look at the corals
in the scanning electron microscope, they’re a
little more organized. They’re building radiating
arrays of crystals that are eventually going
to build the coal reef. But nothing quite compares
to the amazing organization of the mollusk nacreous
layer, the layer that we know– that
iridescent layer in the inside of the mussel shell. We can’t build anything
like this in the laboratory. This is a carefully
organized process of calcium carbonate building. Now, from a calcifier’s
perspective, what you really care about in that ocean is the
carbonate ion concentration. Because as you can see
from this schematic that I’ve put
together, there’s a ton of calcium ions in seawater. They’re not going anywhere. But for every 25 calcium ions,
there’s only one carbonate ion. And it’s actually really easy
to change the carbonite ion concentration of seawater. All you have to do
is change the pH. So here’s a schematic of
a pH scale– more basic on the top toward more
acidic on the bottom. Seawater before the
Industrial Revolution– this is prior to
about 1850, when we started to pump a lot
of CO2 in the atmosphere– the seawater pH was around 8.2
Carbonate ion concentration, very abundant in seawater. You can see that you just need
to change the pH by about 0.3 units– not a big
change– to more than half the carbonate ion concentration. How do you change the pH? A lot of you, if you have a
SodaStream in your kitchen, which I do, are changing the
pH of your water every day by injecting a few squirts of
CO2 from the SodaStream bottle. But that’s a bottle, a
very small amount of water, relatively. How do you change the pH of
the global ocean, quintillion gallons of water in there? Well, we’re doing a
pretty good job of it. This is a data set published
by the Global Carbon Project. They’re keeping track
of how much carbon dioxide we’re emitting into
the atmosphere every year. On the x-axis are CO2 emissions. Now, this is gigatons
of carbon per year. A gigaton is a billion
tons of carbon. And this is just the data since
1990, so the past 25, 26 years. And there’s two things that
I want you to notice here. One is the sheer
amount of CO2 that’s going in from human
activities– 10 billion tons a year at this point. And the other thing to
notice is that the pace or the rate of these emissions
is actually accelerating. We’re not slowing down. So that at this point, 2013,
when these data were published, was the highest number
of the past 25 years. Just to put that
in perspective, you may have seen this
plot earlier today. This is the 400,000-year-long
record of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. And prior to very recently,
most of that information comes from measuring
CO2 trapped in bubbles that are trapped in ice cores. And what you see
from this plot is that, yes, carbon
dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have
changed quite dramatically over the past 400
years as the earth cycles between glacial
and interglacial periods. But here we are today. We are at the
highest concentration that the earth has seen in the
past, at least, 400,000 years. And more recent data suggests
at least 800,000 years. So the ecosystems, the marine
ecosystems that we know today are adapted to these levels,
not these levels and rising. Where does all
this excess CO2 go? Well, the trees are
taking up about 27% of those 10 billion tons a year. 47% is hanging out
in the atmosphere. And that’s what’s causing
the atmosphere to warm. And the ocean is taking
up quite a bit– hundreds of billions of tons since
the start of the Industrial Revolution, around 26%. Now, when the ocean
takes up carbon dioxide, the CO2 doesn’t just sit there. It actually reacts with
water, with the seawater, to form carbonic acid. But the carbonic
acid is not stable, and it dissociates
pretty quickly into free protons– these
H-pluses– and bicarbonate. And the increase in
these free protons is what is causing
the pH to decline. But as far as calcifying
organisms in the ocean is concerned, it is not so
much this decrease in pH that’s a problem. It’s the fact that those
free protons, a lot of them, go around like little Pac-Men
looking for carbonate ions to bond with. So those few
carbonate ions– 10% of the total carbon
in the ocean exists as carbonate ions– are
falling victim to bonding by these voracious protons. So what ocean
acidification is is the decline in pH
and, at the same time, the decrease in the
carbonate ion concentration. The ions of all those
calcifying organisms, from the coccolithophores
to the lobsters to crabs to shellfish to
corals to coral reefs, all need to build
their skeletons and skeletal structures. Now, the chemistry of
ocean acidification is actually pretty
straightforward. You put CO2 into the water. It disassociates. It forms carbonic acid,
dissociates, pH goes down, carbon ion
concentrations go down. We actually have, this for
about the past 30 years, moorings out in various stations
around the world’s oceans that are actually making these
measurements in [INAUDIBLE]. And those data are coming
back from various parts of the oceans. And what we see everywhere is
exactly what we would expect. The carbonate ion
concentration of the oceans everywhere has been
declining for as long as we’ve been measuring it. What we do in my lab–
and I don’t do this alone. I have colleagues that I work
with, both at NOAA, at WHOI, and at other universities. What we do is try to understand
not only the local processes that are exacerbating or
modulating ocean acidification, but also how these changes are
impacting the organisms that we care about, even those
that we don’t care about. Well, I think we care
about all of them. I want to focus today on
one of these organisms. This is the sea scallop,
Pacopectin magellanicus. You might know it from
the grocery store. It’s delicious, especially
wrapped in bacon. I shouldn’t say that. I’m a Cohen. But the sea scallop is one of
the most valuable fisheries in the US. In fact, I think it
is, at this point, the most valuable fishery
on the US east coast. It’s about a $500 million
fishery, employing thousands of people from the fisherman all
the way to the restaurateurs. So the scallop itself
is enormously valuable. But it also is one
of the major prey items of other
valuable fisheries, such as squid, lobster,
and the animal that Andrew was talking about, the cod. And Andrew, I don’t think
you took into account the impacts of
ocean acidification on the cod’s diet. But impacts of ocean change on
the sea scallop, for example, would have major ramifications
not only directly to humans but also indirectly through
its effects on other organisms. The sea scallops is abundant
along the North Atlantic Bay and also in the Gulf of Maine,
specifically on Georges Bank. We actually have
data now coming in, largely through NOAA’s
efforts, on what the pH conditions
in the Gulf of Maine are during sea
scallop spawning time. So these are the actual
data that are coming in. This is October, November,
December, on average, pH. And as you can see, in
some period of sea scallop spawning time, we’re already
at pH’s that are quite low– so 7.85. You remember my
earlier slide showing that you don’t need to
change the pH that much to change the carbonate ion
concentration quite a bit. And by the time we get
into this pink zone here, that is where the
carbonate ion concentration is so low that we would
expect the shelves to stop dissolving at this point. So from these data,
NOAA’s actually starting to make projections
under various emissions scenarios, what would the
future pH in sea scallop habitat is going to look like? And this is one example. So, for example, if we continue
on the current emissions track, by 2060, the pH in
sea scallop habitat will look like this, below 7.85
for most of the spawning time. And then by the
end of the century, we’re basically in a zone where
for most of that spawning time, the pH is so low that the
shells will start to dissolve. Why are we so interested
in the spawning time? Well, it turns out that the
adult shellfish and the baby shellfish make their shells out
of different forms of calcium carbonate. The adult makes its
shell out of calcite, and the baby makes its
shell out of aragonite. And it does that
because aragonite is much easier to make. If I was going to make
a shell in seawater, I would choose aragonite. Much easier. I could just lay back there
and just build my shell. No energy required. The problem is that
it’s easy to make, but it’s also easy to take away. So aragonite is a
much more soluble form of calcium carbonate
than calcite. And that means that
the baby shells are much more vulnerable
to ocean acidification than their parents. Now, we recognized
this fairly early on, that this is
potentially an issue. But we needed to
understand better in order to inform policymakers,
to inform our colleagues at NOAA what the sensitivity,
potential sensitivity, of these larval shellfish
are to ocean acidification because we have no idea. We know that if you decrease
the carbonate ion concentration, they’re going to have a harder
time building their shells. We need numbers. So what we started to do
was work with our colleagues at the Marine
Biological Laboratory, bring in adult sea scallops
from Cape Cod Bay– males and females– and entice
them, very gently, with music and warm up the water a little
bit, create some ambiance, entice them to spawn. And we had a few failures,
more than I care to mention. But eventually,
we got this right, and we had fantastic
success with spawning. We collected the fertilized
eggs in a bucket. And then at this stage,
at the trocosphere stage, we introduced our
larvae into conditions in the lab that
mimic the pH in 1960, the pH today, the pH
in 2060, and the pH by the end of the century to
see how they’d deal with it. What’s absolutely
remarkable is that some of those babies, even though
they’re growing in conditions where the shells really
shouldn’t grow– and if they do grow, then they
should just dissolve– there are some, a few
percent in each batch, that manage to come out perfect. They just know how
to deal with it. And this is something
we need to figure out. How do they do it? But this is an absolutely
perfect nine-day-old D-shell. It’s it’s about 50
microns in diameter. We can’t see it
with the naked eye. We have to put it under the
scanning electron microscope. Absolutely perfect. Grew in a pH where the
shell just shouldn’t grow. But the problem is that the
majority of those babies either don’t form
shell or they form knot shells that can’t close, so
they can’t protect the animal. Or they’re so
deformed that there’s no way that they’re ever
going to live to adulthood. So we can quantify
those deformities. And what we see is that as
we lower the carbonate ion concentration and the pH of our
experimental water, the numbers of babies with
deformities so severe that they’re not going to–
let only reach adulthood, they’re not going
metamorphose, they’re not going to settle–
increases dramatically. So by the time we get to
conditions in the Gulf of Maine that are projected to occur
by 2060, more than 80% of our larvae have
deformities that are incompatible with life. This is a massive,
massive impact. Now, some of my colleagues at
WHOI and at Ocean Conservancy have been working with NOAA on
integrated impact assessments. And what they do is they build a
model including various factors like how the pH is
going to change, how fishing is regulated to try
to project the impact of ocean acidification and warming
on biomass, on landings, on the economy that
surrounds this fishery. So this is one
plot that actually appeared in a recent paper
led by Sarah Cooley in 2015. And this is the
projection– biomass on the y-axis over
time, up to 2050. If emissions stay or
CO2 concentrations stay at present level versus
a business-as-usual CO2 emissions– so we keep pumping
as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we are now– this is the
projected decline in biomass in sea scallop habitat,
with implications for impacts on landings. But these data,
these projections were made not with
data from sea scallops because we didn’t have
them at that point. They were made with data from
oysters or estuarine organisms that are seeing naturally
large fluctuations in the pH in their environment. If we put our data in
there, the implications are much more stark. We’re seeing a 50%,
25% to 50% decline in the biomass in sea
scallop habitat just over the next few decades,
just as a consequence of ocean acidification. And that’s one organism
that we’ve studied. There are myriad
organisms out there, a lot of them upon
which we depend not only for the oxygen that
we breathe but for the food that we eat. And we’re just starting
to understand and study the consequences or potential
consequences of the ocean acidification. I want to end on a– although
I don’t feel particularly optimistic today, I do want
to end on an optimistic note by reminding you that we do see
some babies in our experiments that for some reason can
deal with these conditions. So it’s probable that there
are populations out there that for some reason are adapted
to dealing with much lower pH conditions. The target now is to go
out and find them, and then protect them to make sure that
we have these organisms around for our children and
our grandchildren. Thank you very much. Wrapped in bacon. [APPLAUSE] – This is a very meaningful
moment for me in many ways. I was born on Cape
Cod and raised in a town called Wellfleet on
an island called Bound Brook Island, where I ran free as
a young boy over the hills, then barren of trees, learned
how to find water in sand. And I grew up in an environment
where we were surrounded by animals and wildlife. There was an old ship captain’s
parrot up in the grape arbor above the porch,
goats, sheep, et cetera. So for me to be here today
and to listen to people talking about the
ocean is a real treat. And so before I really get
into the presentation formally, I’m going to read you
something from Aldo Leopold. And I hope to also
give you a sense of who I am as a person because I
think the connections we all have in this room are,
in many ways, driven by our connections, the affect,
and the emotional connections we share and our passion. This is from A Sand
County Almanac. Some of you may
have read this book. “There are some who can live
without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights
and dilemmas of one who cannot. Like winds and
sunsets, wild things were taken for
granted until progress began to do away with them. Now, we face the question
whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in
things natural, wild, and free. For those of us in the minority,
the opportunity to see geese is more important
than television, and the chance to
find a pasqueflower is a right as inalienable
as free speech. These wild things, I
admit, had little value until mechanization assured
us of a good breakfast and until science disclosed the
drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils
down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a
law of diminishing returns in progress. Our opponents do not.” That was written in 1949,
the year I was born. You may have seen
some connections to the situation today. Each day, our sun gives rise
to a resounding chorus of life that continues around the globe
24 hours a day, 365 days a year for millennia. These sounds are not
some random collections. These sounds are the
living reflections of evolution’s economy,
the costs and benefits imposed by living in a
biological and physical environment. I’m a bioacoustics engineer. It’s a multisyllabic summation
of who I am, I guess. I listen and study the sounds
and songs of life in the air, on land, and in the ocean. My work has taken me from
the Arctic to Argentina to the Central African
Republic to some of the most remote places on this planet. In 1972, when I was asked by
two of the world’s leading whale scientists, Roger and Katy
Payne, just not too far west of here in a town
called Lincoln– I was asked to join them on a
National Geographic expedition where they were about
to start studying the endangered
southern right whale. This was in
Patagonia, Argentina. There’s a beautiful
picture of two right whales in shallow water. We lived in tents
along this beach. We ate out under the
Southern Cross every night around a campfire. And we awakened in the morning
to the sounds of whales, sea elephants, and penguins. It was in this magical place
that Roger explained to me his hypothesis that he
had just published– this was in 1971
he published it– that prior to the advent
of modern shipping and all the noise
that ships make, the songs of blue whales and
fin whales– these are two of the largest
animals ever to live on this planet– those songs
could be heard across an ocean. Now, I was a little skeptical
that the songs of whales could travel thousands
of miles across an ocean or that the noise from
ships could actually drown out those voices. But I was sufficiently
intrigued that it changed the course of my life. So in 1992, I was
given the opportunity– I was selected by the US
Navy as their marine mammal scientist, who would be
given access to the US Navy’s sound surveillance system. That was a classified
term called SOSUS. But this was in a rather
enlightened period in the recent political
history of our country when Senator Gore, Senator
Kennedy, Senator Stevens, Senator Nunn helped form
a program that we refer to as Swords to Plowshares. And the US Navy offered
its SOSUS system as a way of studying
marine life. So the first time I got
into the SOSUS system to listen to blue whales,
all I heard was a giant hum. So I thought my
equipment was broken. I went around and tried to fix
everything and make sure it was all plugged in right. And I knew it was working. I knew there were
whales out there singing because I could see
their voiceprints on the Navy displays. And then it hit me. Of course I couldn’t hear a blue
whale singing because my mind and my ears were completely out
of tune and out of touch with a blue whale’s. But I knew how to fix it. I had to speed up the song. And when I sped up
the song, voila, I heard the whale singing. So this is a voiceprint
of a blue whale singing in the Atlantic Ocean. And a voiceprint is very
much like a musical score. Time runs along the
bottom, from left to right. And pitch is low at the
bottom and high at the top. Now, in this case, pitch
of 10 hertz and 20 hertz, it’s below your
hearing threshold. So that’s why I
couldn’t hear anything. I just heard stuff. So I’m going to play this
back to you at 30 times faster than I originally recorded it. [WHALES SINGING] When I first heard
this song, the hair went up on the back of my neck. And I still get chills
remembering that moment because that was
the moment, in 1992, that I knew Roger’s hypothesis,
as crazy as it was, was true. So consider this– a
blue whale singing off the Grand Banks of Canada
can be heard all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It was in these
early days in SOSUS that I met a young lieutenant
named Chuck Gagnon. Chuck was a wizard at
tracking submarines and at how sound
travels in the ocean. So I asked him,
Chuck, what would you do if you had a voice as loud
and as low as a blue whale? He didn’t hesitate to answer. He said, I could
illuminate the ocean. Now, you see what he did? He took the acoustic radiance
from the voice of the whale and translated it into an
image of how that image would allow him to see the ocean. So I said, Lieutenant Gagnon,
could you show me an image? Could you show me what
this would look like? He said, sure. This is what he showed me. OK? The tail at the
bottom of the screen is where the blue
whale is singing off of the Virgin Islands. The dark radial bands
radiating out from the whale represent how loud
the voice of the whale is throughout the Western
North Atlantic Ocean. Notice how those lines
outline the continental shelf along the United States,
from Florida all the way up to the Grand Banks of Canada. The blue dot in the middle
is the island of Bermuda. And notice how the island
casts a white acoustic shadow to the north in which
no song appears. Notice to the right
the jagged edges of the song outlining something
an underwater mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. I was pretty amazed,
but I figured I might as well push my luck. So I said, OK. So, Chuck, can you actually
follow one of these whales and track it
throughout the ocean? He looked at me, and
he said, piece of cake. This is an animal
putting out 185 decibels. This is six orders of magnitude
greater than a submarine. So a few months
later, Chuck showed me this track of a blue whale. He called it Ol Blue. Ol Blue is a male singing
across an ocean to find a mate. Chuck tracked Ol
Blue for 43 days as it sang and swam
1,700 nautical miles. That’s pretty much
the distance from here to California,
throughout the ocean. So this changed my
perspective and started to change my perspective
on space and time. I couldn’t hear the
whale, so it wasn’t there. I couldn’t see the whale,
so it didn’t exist. But we had this system
in which it was exposed. This is a one-year voiceprint
from the Pacific Ocean, halfway between San
Francisco and Honolulu. 20, at the bottom– 20
Hertz– is the lowest pitch that humans can hear. And 440 is orchestral A,
for those of you– I presume there are some musicians here? I hope? That’s orchestral A. The yellow striations
dripping from the top represent the energy
from ocean storms. And that glow you see
in the lower right represents the collective
voices of singing blue whales and singing fin whales. That chorus lasts for
about three or four months, from September into mid-January. So again, what
I’m hoping to show you is scales, ocean scales. Biggest animal on
earth, big scales. Low voice, very, very loud. These are the kinds of insights
you can get into the scales. Chuck and I have been
working together now for about 26 years. We’re still doing this. And it was Chuck who taught me
to think of the SOSUS system as an acoustic telescope. He discovers interesting
objects in the telescope’s visual displays, and I drill
down into those voiceprints to listen and discover
what they are. These discoveries span enormous
periods of time and space. So I can actually track
whales throughout an ocean basin for months at a time. And this is a really
important point I want to get across to you. This fulcrum of
awareness took me from knowing
something– and Anne, this is something we were
talking about earlier. You know something because
you read it in a book. I took classes. I was a postdoc. I was a graduate student. I had all the epaullettes
and the things that you wear to show
how cool you are. But until I actually
experienced this, I had no idea, really,
no understanding of the scales of space
and time and frequency which were operating in the
ocean– not in Cape Cod Bay. I love Cape Cod Bay. I love Gulf of Maine. I love Western North Atlantic. But it’s the ocean. Oh, and I have to
tell you, I basically grew up running
around on Cape Cod, and I’m in love with
the living world. I have a love affair
with the living world. I’m very passionate about it. So what I’d like– I played
you the song of the blue whale. Now I’m going to play you
some other songs of whales in the ocean or sounds
of whales in the ocean because I want you to be aware
of this sort of quick holiday tour of the voices
of the animals. The blue whale is infrasonic. I’m going to take you all the
way up to the beaked whales, which are working at very
high ultrasonic ranges. This is a voiceprint
of a bowhead whale. A bowhead whale– this
is an Arctic species. It’s the right whale that went
north and never came back, and it lost all of its
mascara and make-up. There are no
markings on the head. This animal sings
with two voices. And this is what you
hear if you take a paddle and you put it against the ice. [WHALE SONGS] This is one animal. [WHALE SONGS] We still don’t know how
they make these sounds. [WHALE SONGS] OK. Now I’m going to play you
sounds from a collection of melon-headed
whales bouncing over the highlands of the [INAUDIBLE]
down in the Caribbean. [WHALE SONGS] These are mostly ultrasonic. But a lot of the voice
is in the audible range. And what these animals do,
these are highly fission-fusion societies. They are constantly
inventing new sounds. So an individual in a group
bouncing over the highlands– I think of Monty Python. Click, click, click, click. And they’re inventing
sounds all the time. It reminds me of someone
outside of Grand Central Station blowing up balloons and twisting
them into little animals and handing them off,
just making things. And I will make something. And then John, you
would imitate it. And then Andy would imitate it. And this is our social currency. This is how we maintain
our social group. Because remember, the blue
whale is 90 feet long. It can barely see
its tail, but it can communicate with another
whale 3,000 miles away. A herd of melon-heads,
which might be bouncing over the highlands
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the way they
communicate, the way they maintain their social
structure is through sound. So they’re constantly
playing with sound. They’re highly social animals. Now I’m going to play you the
sounds from an echolocating, foraging beaked whale. This is an animal that dives
one mile down into the ocean, hunts in complete darkness
trying to find bags of water called squid. And that’s how it
makes its living. So it’s sending out slow
pulses, just like a bat. [CLICKING] And then [SQUEAL]. That’s what the squid
hears just before the– [LAUGHTER] [CLICKING] [SQUEAL] OK, that’s it. That’s pretty much
what these guys do. But this click that I’m
playing to you at fast– this comes from a device
that was attached on the back of the
animal– it’s ultrasonic. It’s living in a space of
sound that you and I can’t hear and we can barely appreciate. Space– I’m going to now show
you an animation of fin whales, singing fin whales, males. You see where we are. There’s Nova Scotia. OK, there we are. Right here. We’re sitting right there. OK. So I’m tracking
singing fin whales. I’m not seeing them. I’m tracking them. And I’m animating it. So I’m showing over time,
and your eye will see tracks. This is their space. 100,000 square miles,
200,000 square miles. They don’t live in
these little places such as we observe them in. If you go out on a
whale-watching cruise and you see some whales, you
think, oh, there they are. Nuh-uh. It’s much bigger. So this is their space. Cape Cod Bay is where we work. So we put in an array of
underwater microphones. This is my poor man’s US
Navy array in Cape Cod Bay. And here’s what happens
when we track right whales. This is happening
at night, mostly. And what you’re going
to see is you’re going to see some little
worms moving around. That’s these animals
calling back and forth. They call antiphonally. They maintain their social
cohesion with sound. There is that little insight
into their three days in the life of right whales. We may have only had
20 whales in the bay, but they’re acoustically
extremely active. So the point is,
acoustics is their world. OK, this is how
we– as a scientist, I try and represent what I
hope you experienced in terms of listening to it
in that spatial scale into a three-dimensional space,
which is defined by frequency, the pitch of the sounds; the
range over which these animals are using those
sounds for maintaining communities,
communicating, navigating, finding food, defense; and the
time over which they use these. So notice that here’s the blue
whale, this little juju bee up here. And here’s the beaked
whale, restricted down here in this
space-time-frequency domain. All marine animals
studied to date– whales, seals fish, shrimp–
all produce and use sounds for all the basic
activities of life– communication, navigation,
defense, finding food, maintaining social networks. Acoustics is the
modality of choice. It’s very efficient. Light does not transmit very
far at all in the water. You can’t use these
big acoustic telescopes without being brutally
aware that all of our activities in the ocean,
human activities in the ocean, are creating a din,
a lot of noise. We use sound in the
ocean– humans use sound in the ocean– for
all of our basic activities in the ocean. We use sound for communication. We use sound for navigation. We use sound for defense. We use sound for finding food. Another way we use
sound is we use sound to find oil
and gas hydrocarbon deposits beneath the sea floor. So I’m going to play you
the sounds of an air gun array in which we
set off explosions every nine to 10 seconds for
many weeks and many months at a time. These are very, very loud. They’re so loud that they
basically boil water. They create a partial pressure. [EXPLODING SOUNDS] You also hear the sonar from
the ship’s navigation system. So off of Boston, we’ve
had an LNG terminal built. And one of the questions
was, in all this noise that we’re generating by our
shipping and our LNG terminals, could that be affecting
the acoustic ecology of our endangered right whales? So I’m going to change
my pitch a little bit, and I’m going to
appeal to people who are creative artists,
who are videographers, who translate science
into visualizations that people can
understand because one of the most difficult
concepts that I’ve had is the acoustic
footprint of a ship or the acoustic footprint
of a seismic survey vessel. So this is a visualization
where the little– this is sort of Starry Night, van Gogh. These dots represent
the acoustic space of an individual right
whale that’s communicating with other right whales. These larger meteorite
things, these are the footprints
of commercial ships. This is where the
LNG terminal was. So right now,
there’s an LNG ship on this date and time that’s
offloading LNG into Boston. This is a relatively small
boat coming out of Boston. There’s some off of Gloucester. That’s a commercial ship. So I’m going to animate this. This is real data. We had 19 recorders in
the area for five years. We know the ship speed. We know all the
information about the ship. We know the noise footprint. We know the whales. So I’m just animating this. And what you’re going
to see is the footprints of the ship traffic. This is just commercial shipping
coming in and out of Boston. And when the light of
the whale disappears under the footprint of
the ship, that whale loses all possibility
of communicating with another whale. And what this has
led us to model is that these animals are losing
over 65% of their opportunities to maintain
communication system. That is, we are constantly
tearing and ripping apart their social mechanisms for
maintaining communication space. Seismic exploration–
this is a big issue because there’s
been a strong effort to open up the east coast
all the way down to Florida to seismic exploration. Here’s a visualization of a
seismic exploration activity’s impact on 100,000 square
miles in the ocean. These red dots that
you’ll see the flashes represent singing whales. Here is– when I now
put seismic surveys and ship noise into
that map, notice the scale, the space that
is occupied by the shipping noise and the seismic surveys. It’s enormous. So this is an
attempt to quantify, create a model by which we can
assess how noise in the ocean is actually impacting the
ecological systems of life in the ocean. So why should we care? This is similar to other
questions we’ve heard today. Why should we care if all the
noise we’re making in the ocean is impacting ocean life? I have a hypothesis. It’ll take me two minutes. As Chuck was using the
acoustic telescopes to look into the ocean
for interesting objects, he discovered a phenomenon. It was an acoustic
glow of energy that showed up in
the voiceprints. This glow showed up after
sunset and lasted for many hours before going away. When I listened to it,
there was nothing there. But we knew it was there
because we could see the glow in the voiceprints. It turns out we were listening
to sea anemones, thousands and thousands of sea
anemones scraping algae off rocks along a
coast of a coral reef where we were pointing
the telescope. This made us very interested. And so Chuck continued
to look for other glows of acoustic energy that
we could not explain. And he found one. And it wasn’t sea urchins
because this time, he was pointing the
telescope into the deep ocean where there were no islands. There were no coral reefs. There were no sea anemones. I think I know what it is. I think we’re observing
a phenomenon that happens every day when
billions and billions of tiny organisms– some of them
surrounding you on the walls or in this room, and
you’ve heard about today– move up toward the surface
of the ocean at night and then descend and disappear
into the depths of the ocean during the day, every
day, 365 days a year, but for millions and
millions of years. This phenomenon was first
detected by the US Navy during the Second World War
using antisubmarine sonar. It’s called the deep
scattering layer. We are detecting the
deep scattering layer in the voiceprints when
the ocean is quiet. These organisms depend on
tiny, microscopic exotic forms of life, such as you see here
on the walls that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. You’ve heard about this. And I think everybody
in this room now knows that every
other breath you take comes from this phenomenon, the
respiration of these organisms. So we are literally witnessing
the voice of the living ocean breathing. This is more than amazing. This is literally
our breath of life. We are wise to pay attention
to the light we can’t see, to the sounds we can’t hear,
and to the life we know is there and on which all
our lives depend. Thanks very much. [APPLAUSE] – Thank you very much, Dr.
Clark, and to our whole panel for these excellent
presentations. So now we have time,
before our final session, for two questions
from the audience. Adam Sacks again, since
nobody else is here. I want to ask Dr. Clark
about your findings among the animals whose shells
are just being defective. Aren’t we seeing natural
selection right in front of our very eyes there? And over generations, have
you done a longitudinal kind of study over generations
of those creatures– I don’t know if it’s possible–
and see if you develop a population that’s
resistant to acidification? – I think the
question is for me? – Yes. – Is this on? – Yes – Yes. – That’s a really good question. I think we are. Humans are definitely performing
a natural selection experiment. The question is, is
it going to work? I mean, the level of
uncertainty there, I think, is one of the scary
parts of this. Natural selection
also usually happens over very long time periods. And what we’re doing is
really escalating the rate at which things are happening. As far– your
question with respect to have we grown these organisms
out through several generations to see if natural
selection can occur, not with the sea scallops. And in fact, ours was the first
successful ocean acidification experiment with
sea scallops just because they’re so
difficult to rear under experimental conditions. And so we actually
invested several years into figuring out how
to actually grow them in the laboratory so that we
did have a successful grow out under ambient conditions,
and then started to introduce them to
treatments after that. So in fact, even though
I’m sort of showing the end results of these
experiments, it takes a long time, a lot of
effort, quite a bit of money to come up with
really robust results that we feel confident that we
can put into these projection models. So we’re kind of at
the cusp of this. There also isn’t an
endless amount of money. This is another thing
you have to understand. I mean, NOAA, who is running
the ocean acidification program, who actually funds
our sea scallop experiments, they’re cut. And funds are thin,
spread thin on the ground. So we’ve submitted a
proposal to an open call to do exactly that, to test out
different populations of sea scallops to see whether we
can see natural variability and sensitivity across
different populations. I’m going to have to
submit that proposal again. – Right. But they’re not going to wait
to evolve for you to get funded. – I know. Damn. – I absolutely
support the study. But if the acidification
is increasing, then you’re going to
get that selection. It’s going to be
gradually increasing along with the increasing
ocean acidification. And evolution with
fast-growing animals– I mean, we see these things with
industrial moths in England and that sort of thing. They change pretty quick. And I don’t know– – Well, we have examples from
history, from geologic time periods, of mass extinctions of
calcifiers under elevated CO2 conditions. We know that these things
have occurred at least six times in the past. But the time scale for
those organisms to come back is a hell of a lot
longer than you’re going to wait around for the
sea scallop in the restaurant– tens of thousands of years. So we’re talking about a
brink of a mass extinction. Organisms, yes, they’re
going to come back. Some organisms are
going to adapt. But the time frame
that we’re looking at is not the time frame
that we’re operating on. – But what’s their
reproductive cycle? I mean, you have 10% of
them who are surviving. And they’re the ones who
are going to reproduce. – [INAUDIBLE]. – We’re going to move
on to our last question. Thank you. – We can continue
the conversation. – I just wanted
to ask Dr. Clark– I see Cornell on your resume. And I was wondering,
could you tell us one anecdote about
the most amazing thing you heard from birds? – Dinosaur call. – Yeah, that’s good. Dinosaur calls. – All right. Thank you again
to our speakers– – [INAUDIBLE]. – –and to all of you for the
wonderful session and symposium so far. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]