PLANKTON POINTS TO CLIMATE CHANGE
International experts gathered at Auckland’s Maritime Museum last month to discuss how climate change is affecting plankton – one of the sea’s smallest but most crucial life forms.
Organised by the non-profit organisation Plankton Planet, the event featured international scientists from New Zealand, France and the USA, as well as experts in Māori waka sailing.
Among them was Frenchman Dr Colomban de Vargas – a member of the Roscoff Marine Research Station and founder of Plankton Planet. Climate change and ocean acidification, he says, “are already impacting plankton populations. The only chance we have to measure the changes is with significant innovation in the way we conduct the science.
“Plankton is the basis of the food chain for the entire ocean and beyond. It produces more than 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe. It is also a major climate regulator, absorbing manmade CO² emissions. Ranging from viruses to animals, the biodiversity of plankton is vast, largely unexplored, and little understood.”
Plankton Planet’s mission is to provide data to enhance the understanding of the evolving planet at a critical juncture. By combining this dynamic biological information about plankton populations with new models of our ocean’s systems, says de Vargas, we will be able to better predict changes to our blue planet.
The research relies heavily on help from ‘citizen scientists’ – Planktonauts. They collect plankton samples as they sail the open ocean and send them back to the laboratory for analysis. It is the first citizen science programme based on mass sequencing of DNA barcodes from extracts of plankton samples. A team of scientists combines the information about plankton populations with new models of our ocean’s systems.
Adds National Geographic Explorer, Dr David Gruber: “With bioluminescence and biofluorescence, whether it be plankton, corals, or sharks, we are discovering a secret world of marine life that has existed for millions of years that we are only now beginning to notice. We need to make people aware of the illuminating treasures in our ocean before it is too late.”
Japan’s Parliament has just passed a bill which enshrines future funding for the heavily-subsidised whaling industry. It says the legislation “lays down the necessary matters to carry out scientific research whaling in a stable and continuous way, in order to carry out commercial whaling.”
Earthrace Conservation’s Pete Bethune says Japan continues to make several dubious claims about its whaling. “They argue it’s a cultural issue for them, but their large-scale commercial whaling didn’t start until after WWII.
“Prior to this it had always been small-scale and limited to coastal regions. Within Japan whaling is increasingly portrayed as a nationalist issue and mines public discontent over perceived cultural imperialism by Western countries.”
Japan also says growing whale populations are eating too many fish. At its most basic level this is correct – whales do eat fish. But whale populations remain tiny compared with historical numbers. They are also simply part of a balanced and healthy ecosystem.
Japan also says it is unfairly singled out over whaling, querying why Iceland, Norway and Greenland have not seen protests over their whaling programmes. A key difference is those countries hunt whales in their own territorial waters.
“I may not agree with it,” says Bethune, “but from a legal perspective, given they are not signatories to the IWC, there is limited legal basis to challenge their programmes. The Japanese, in contrast, hunt whales in international waters, and Japan is a member of the IWC.
“The IWC established the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary which makes any commercial whaling in Antarctica illegal. So the situation for Japan is far different from that of the European whaling nations.
“When Australia and New Zealand won their court case in the International Court of Justice a few years ago, I thought we’d seen the last of Japan’s whaling in Antarctica. The following year Japan’s harpoon vessels remained home, but since then have sadly resumed their annual pilgrimage south to hunt whales.
“With this recent bill, it seems Japan is intent to resume full-scale commercial whaling.”