Coral reefs on the Eco-Doom beat

Caribbean Reef Octopus Takes a Stand

ObCephalopod: Cayman Islands reef octopus faces down boring vertebrate (Creative Commons photo by Pete)

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress is taking place right now in South Korea, and a report from Friday’s session is trickling through various social media, including The New York Times’ Green blog: Caribbean coral reefs are in trouble.

From the WCC’s coral reef workshop’s Executive Summary (PDF):

Some Caribbean reef ecosystems are relatively intact compared to average conditions in the region. For example, many reefs in the Netherlands Antilles and Cayman Islands have 30% or more live coral cover, little macroalgae, and a moderate (albeit strongly depleted) abundance of fish. In contrast, reefs in Jamaica  and the US Virgin Islands have well below 10% live coral cover, abundant macroalgae, and virtually no fish larger than a few cm.

When local reefs that are 70% dead qualifies as “relatively intact compared  to average conditions in the region,”  headlines like NatGeo’s “Caribbean Coral Reefs Mostly Dead, IUCN Says” stop seeming quite so alarmist.

The issue with macroalgae is that they encroach on coral reefs and compete with the coral organisms. They’re often present in healthy reefs, kept in control by algae-eating animals. When those fish aren’t there for one reason or another, or when a reef gets a big shot of extra nutrients from on-shore fertilizers or eroded soil, the algae can get out of hand.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute assembled 36 scientists in Panama to assess the region’s coral reefs, and the results of that work are what were presented at the WCC Friday. Researchers are pinning the damage on human interference. The precise mechanism by which we’re killing  the reefs is open to question, but they have some prime suspects:

Caribbean reefs with the highest surviving coral cover and least macroalgae tend to be characterized by little land-based pollution, some degree of fisheries regulations and enforcement, moderate economic prosperity, and lower frequency of hurricanes, coral bleaching, and disease.

The team will have a more complete analysis of their data by mid-2013, and plan to expand their survey to other oceans’ reefs by 2016.

This isn’t a surprise: the degradation of Caribbean reefs has been talked for decades. Coral reefs serve as nurseries for commercially important fish species, they absorb wave energy and thus shelter coastlines from storm damage, and they’re just full of fascinating critters. Reefs can recover from our damage if we start to protect them: parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef recently recovered from bleaching events a lot more quickly than scientists had hoped.

But it’s still awful news.

An email FYI

So you want to get in touch with me? That’s been getting harder and harder as my email gets busier and busier, and also because my email software finally up and died in protest at the load last month, so I had to make some major changes.

My email is now split. If you’re trying to contact me at my umn.edu address, don’t. I sort that out separately and handle it at my office, and have filters in place that prioritize messages from other umn.edu addresses. That is so students and colleagues get priority and their email doesn’t get buried in all those other sources. Of course, if you are a student or colleague at UM Morris, you should use that address.

All you strangers and friends out there should use pzmyers@gmail.com. It peels out all my professional/job mail, so it has slightly less volume now. Only slightly. And it also has a ruthless set of filters on it, so even there it may not work to contact me. Sorry. I may also be setting up a third public address specifically for those of you who want to contact me about speaking engagements, and I’ll put that in the about page when it’s ready.

As for all you trolls and haters: write it on a piece of paper, eat it, crap it out, and flush.

That’s a new one

Apparently, I am now a whore. I can’t be insulted by the accusation, though, since it seems to be applied in the same way as the frequent accusations that I’m gay and Jewish — neither true nor particularly offensive to me, although it does say a lot about the person trying to do the insulting.

Also, it comes from the awful Paul Elam, who seems to use “whore” as every other word. He has…issues.

But atheists can be secularists

Jacques Berlinerblau just really dislikes atheists. I don’t know how else to account for this bizarre article in which he announces that Secularists are not atheists. Oh, yeah, I say? We know. I’m a big fan of Americans United…and I know full well that it is not an atheist organization. I also know that the history of church-state separation in the US, and that it was driven not by atheists (who were nearly nonexistent until the last century), but by diverse religious interests.

So why is Berlinerblau complaining? Because of two factors: fundamentalist Christians who want to make secularism synonymous with atheism to demonize the cause, and because atheist organizations have risen in strength and numbers enough to have built lobbying organizations that fight for secularism. Who is the villain Berlinerblau will chastise? Guess what: it’s not the Christian fanatics who abuse the term. It’s atheists who dare to speak up in support of secularism.

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Satoshi Kanazawa is back

Now he’s got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he’s a terrible scientist. I’m no big fan of evolutionary psychology, not because I think its premises are wrong (evolution did shape how our brains work), but because it is trivially easy to find lazy, bad scientists who have hopped on the bandwagon because it is an easy path to media sensationalism — and Kanazawa is the kibitzer dancing in the locomotive cabin, constantly yanking the chain to make the whistle blow.

Kanazawa is the guy who claimed to look objectively at the data and thereby determined that black women are ugly (he also thinks Africans are stupid), and whose data were examined and found to have been selectively extracted. He got a lot of flak for that, and while he wasn’t kicked out of Psychology Today, where he had his column, he hasn’t posted anything there in over a year, so I suspect there was some pressure applied. Which is too bad…every time he opens his mouth, he’s a great target for beating up bad science.

So now he’s at Big Think, and his first column is…the same old thing all over again. The first half of it is all defensive bluster, in which he claims he’s just a dedicated scientist following the data where ever it might go, and his enemies are all Politically Correct cowards and leftists (yeah, he’s also a vicious right wing nutter). And then he goes on to defend, once again, his claim that black women and Asian males are ugly.

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Crown Clade of Creation

I’ve been writing at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for nearly a decade, and in the decade’s worth of archives there are a handful of posts that really seem like they ought to live here. So every month or two I’ll dust one of them off, if it’s not too horribly outdated, and put it here for your delectation or dissection.

This one is a 2006 review of the abysmal “biology” “textbook” Biology: God’s Living Creation, published by the creationists at A Beka Books.

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I can learn more from an ant than I can from Christianity

Answers in Genesis gets email, and they recently published a critical message which they then thoroughly rebutted. Not.

Their critic pointed out the absurdity of believing the earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived together, and also made the point that an indifferent nature is not influenced by biblical beliefs. AiG answered, and it’s actually rather interesting as a condensed summary of their fallacies.

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