Author: Editorial Board

CSIRO researchers are studying the Torres Strait tropical rock lobster fishery to develop a scientific approach to integrate cultural factors into natural resource management.

“Fisheries management traditionally involves balancing commercial gain and sustainability, but for Indigenous communities cultural and lifestyle factors can be just as important and these factors are more difficult to measure,” says Dr Eva Plaganyi of CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship.

“Globally, small-scale fisheries employ around 38 million people and it’s important to look at the impact of natural resource management practices on their livelihood,” she says.

The Torres Strait tropical rock lobster fishery has many stakeholders, including non-Indigenous commercial fishers and Indigenous fishers who fish for reasons ranging from subsistence to commercial. The social objectives of the fishery are spelled out in a treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea that acknowledges and protects the traditional fishing practices of Indigenous people.

“Often research into fisheries management has focused on commercial businesses and overlooked the unique characteristics of Indigenous fishers. We wanted focus on economic needs as well as socio-cultural rights and values,” says Dr Plaganyi.

The multidisciplinary team of researchers brought together a range of sophisticated methods, from mathematics and modelling to social science interviews. Their results allow managers to understand the potential trade-offs when making a management decision that affects not only a resource but also the people who depend on it.

“Market-based management options might score highly in a capitalistic society, but we found that two key social indicators, namely equity and a sense of self-determination, underpin successful management,” says Dr Plaganyi.

“Indigenous communities have aspirations and cultural considerations that are simultaneously unique and important, and their communities are often communalistic rather than being driven solely by economic considerations. We have developed an objective scientific approach that reflects this and can be applied to natural resource management beyond fisheries,” she says.

The research described here is underpinned by extensive consultations with Indigenous fishers, as well as other sectors and managers. It builds on a long history of involvement in the Torres Strait, with CSIRO divers planning the 25th annual lobster survey this year.

This research was funded by Australian Fisheries Management Authority and CSIRO.

‘Integrating Indigenous Livelihood and Lifestyle Objectives in Managing a Natural Resource’will be published this week in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: Panulirus ornatus, the tropical rock lobster.

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14 January 2013

Phantom fishing targets turtles in northern Australia CSIRO scientists working with GhostNets Australia and Indigenous rangers are identifying hotspots where lost fishing nets are threatening our marine biodiversity.

Worldwide, around 640 000 tonnes of fishing gear is lost or discarded each year. These ‘ghostnets’ can continue fishing for decades, entangling huge numbers of marine animals, including threatened and commercially valuable species.

Ghostnets, originating mainly from fisheries in Asia and Australia, are a particular problem in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, where they can reach densities of up to three tonnes/km, among the highest recorded worldwide.

“Our research goes beyond discovering where ghostnet fishing is taking place, to actually estimating its impact on biodiversity, in particular on threatened marine turtles,” Dr Denise Hardesty of CSIRO said.

“Using a model of ocean currents and data collected by Indigenous rangers on the number of ghostnets found during beach cleanups, we simulated the likely paths ghostnets take to get to their landing spots on beaches in the Gulf of Carpentaria,” Dr Hardesty said.

“Combining this with information about the occurrence of turtles in the area, we found that entanglement risk for turtles is concentrated in an area along the eastern margin of the Gulf and in a wide section in the southwest extending up the west coast,” she said.

“Most ghostnets enter the Gulf from the northwest and move clockwise along its shore. This means we can help protect biodiversity in the region by intercepting nets as they enter the Gulf, before they reach the high density turtle areas along south and east coastlines,” she said.

Australia is home to six of the world’s seven threatened species of marine turtle. During a recent cleanup of ghostnets on beaches in the Gulf, 80 per cent of animals recorded in nets were marine turtles, including Olive Ridley, Hawksbill, Green and Flatback turtles.

“Our predictions of the distribution of turtles washing ashore entangled in ghostnets matched the actual frequencies of turtles found in ghostnets during beach surveys, suggesting our model is accurate,” Dr Hardesty said.

Ghostnets are a global problem, capturing seabirds, marine mammals and sea turtles worldwide. Lost or abandoned fishing gear makes up only 20 per cent of marine debris but has a disproportionate effect because it is designed to capture wildlife.

“Our research shows that combining models of marine debris with species occurrence data could identify global hot spots for impact, helping pinpoint where prevention and clean-ups could really make a difference to biodiversity,” Dr Hardesty said.

This research used information on ocean currents generated by the BLUElink Ocean Data Assimilation System to simulate the paths of ghostnets.

‘Ghostnet impacts on globally threatened turtles, a spatial risk analysis for northern Australia [external link]‘ was published by CSIRO and GhostNets Australia in the January 2013 online early issue of Conservation Letters [external link].

Image: A turtle washed ashore caught by a ghostnet (Image: Alistair Dermer)

“Monster” outflows of charged particles from the centre of our Galaxy, stretching more than halfway across the sky, have been detected and mapped with CSIRO’s 64-m Parkes radio telescope. Corresponding to the “Fermi Bubbles” found in 2010, the outflows were detected by astronomers from Australia, the USA, Italy and The Netherlands. The finding is reported in the Jan 2 issue of Nature.

“These outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy — about a million times the energy of an exploding star,” said the research team’s leader, CSIRO’s Dr Ettore Carretti.

But the outflows pose no danger to Earth or the Solar System.

The speed of the outflow is supersonic, about 1000 kilometres a second. “That’s fast, even for astronomers,” Dr Carretti said. “They are not coming in our direction, but go up and down from the Galactic Plane. We are 30,000 light-years away from the Galactic Centre, in the Plane. They are no danger to us.”

From top to bottom the outflows extend 50,000 light-years [five hundred thousand million million kilometres] out of the Galactic Plane. That’s equal to half the diameter of our Galaxy (which is 100,000 light-years — a million million million kilometres — across).

Seen from Earth, the outflows stretch about two-thirds across the sky from horizon to horizon. The outflows correspond to a “haze” of microwave emission previously spotted by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes and regions of gamma-ray emission detected with NASA’s Fermi space telescope in 2010, which were dubbed the “Fermi Bubbles.”

The WMAP, Planck and Fermi observations did not provide enough evidence to indicate definitively the source of the radiation they detected, but the new Parkes observations do.

“The options were a quasar-like outburst from the black hole at the Galactic Centre, or star-power — the hot winds from young stars, and exploding stars,” said team member Dr Gianni Bernardi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our observations tell us it’s star-power.”

In fact, the outflows appear to have been driven by many generations of stars forming and exploding in the Galactic Centre over the last hundred million years.

The key to determining this was to measure the outflows’ magnetic fields.

“We did this by measuring a key property of the radio waves from the outflows — their polarisation,” said team member Dr Roland Crocker of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Australian National University.

The new observations also help to answer one of astronomers’ big questions about our Galaxy: how it generates and maintains its magnetic field. “The outflow from the Galactic Centre is carrying off not just gas and high-energy electrons, but also strong magnetic fields,” said team member Dr Marijke Haverkorn of Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands.

“We suspect this must play a big part in generating the Galaxy’s overall magnetic field.”

The genes of long-living and virus resistant bats may provide clues to the future treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancer in people, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization ( CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, said in a report on Friday.

This research, published in the journal Science, was a global effort involving researchers from China, Australia, Denmark, the United States and Singapore. It provides an insight into the evolution of bat’s flight, resistance to viruses and relatively long life.

Researchers at CSIRO and the Beijing Genome Institute led a team sequencing the genomes of two bat species – an Australian mega bat, the black flying fox, and a Chinese micro bat, David’s Myotis. They then compared the bat genomes to those of eight other mammals, including humans, to find similarities and differences.

“A deeper understanding of these evolutionary adaptations in bats may lead to better treatments for human diseases, and may eventually enable us to predict or perhaps even prevent outbreaks of emerging bat viruses,” said Dr. Chris Cowled, post-doctoral fellow at CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory.

“Bats are a natural reservoir for several lethal viruses, such as Hendra, Ebola and SARS, but they often don’t succumb to disease from these viruses. They’re also the only mammal that can fly, and they live a long time compared to animals similar in size,” he said.

The research also reaffirms bats’ ancient and important place in the eco-system, particularly as pollinators and controlling insect numbers.

image source

An innovative global observing system based on drifting sensors cycling from the surface to the ocean mid-depths is being celebrated by scientists today after reaching a major milestone – one million incredibly valuable ocean observations.

12 December 2012

From 10 drifting robotic sensors deployed by Australia in the Indian Ocean in late 1999, the international research program has been quietly building up a global array which is now enabling new insights into the ocean’s central influence on global climate and marine ecosystems.

The initial objective was to maintain a network of 3000 sensors, in ice-free open ocean areas, providing both real-time data and higher quality delayed mode data and analyses to underpin a new generation of ocean and climate services. The program is called Argo.

“We’re still about 50 years behind the space community and its mission to reach the moon,” says Argo co-Chair and CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientist, Dr Susan Wijffels.

“The world’s deep ocean environment is as hostile as that in space, but because it holds so many clues to our climate future exploring it with the Argo observing network is a real turning point for science.

“In its short life the Argo data set has become an essential mainstay of climate and ocean researchers complementing information from earth observing satellites and uniquely providing subsurface information giving new insights into changes in the earth’s hydrological warming rates and opening the possibility of longer term climate forecasting,” Dr Wijffels said.

Although the one millionth profile of the upper ocean, measured from the surface to a depth of two kilometres, was achieved in early November, oceanographers around the world are today celebrating this critical benchmark in ocean monitoring which delivers data to a scientist’s desk within 24 hours of sampling.

Celebrations included a series of high-level international presentations by senior scientists involving Dr Wijffels, her Argo co-Chair Prof Dean Roemmich from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, oceanographer Dr Josh Willis from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr Jim Cummings from the US Naval Research Laboratory.

The Argo array has risen to now number more than 3500 sensors, the largest there has ever been. The average lifetime of the floats has improved in the past decade greatly increasing the efficiency of the operation.

Presently 28 countries contribute to the annual A$25M cost of operating the program. The US is the largest provider of sensors to the network, with Australia, led by CSIRO with the Integrated Marine Observing System and the Bureau of Meteorology, maintaining more than 300 profilers for deployment mainly in the Indian and Southern Oceans, and Tasman Sea.

The 1.5 metre tall robotic sensors cycle vertically every 10 days, sampling temperature and salinity. At the surface, the sensors despatches its data via satellite to national centres across the globe, where analysts then check it, package it and send it to synchronous assembly centres in France and the US.  The sensor’s ascent and descent is regulated by a hydraulic pump, powered with lithium batteries. Their life expectancy is between 4-9 years, averaging more than 200 profiles per sensor as they drift with the currents and eddies.

Data are collected at the impressive rate of one profile approximately every four minutes, (360 profiles per day or 11000 per month) and on 4 November 2012 Argo passed the symbolic milestone of collecting its one millionth profile. To put this achievement in context, since the start of deep sea oceanography in the late 19th century, ships have collected just over half a million temperature and salinity profiles to a depth of 1km and only 200000 to 2km.  At the present rate of data collection Argo will take only eight years to collect its next million profiles.

Dr Wijffels said almost 1200 scientific papers based on or incorporating Argo data have been generated since the start of the program. Prominent findings include:

• Analysis of ocean salinity patterns that suggests a substantial (16 to 24%) intensification of the global water cycle will occur in a future 2° to 3° warmer world.
• A more detailed view of the world’s largest ocean current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
• An insight into changing bodies of water in the Southern Ocean and the way in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.
• Isolating the effect of ocean warming and thermal expansion on the global energy and sea level budget.

Dr Wijffels said Argo data is now also being widely used in operational services for the community, including weather and climate prediction and ocean forecasting for environmental emergency response, shipping, defence, and safety at sea.

Provided by Csiro