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FEATURE STORY

The Rise of Slime

Naomi Lubick

Americans consumed 4.5 billion pounds of seafood last year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But those fish dinners represent just one of many human impacts on the world's oceans.

Another is eutrophication: the addition of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff. The algals blooms this causes sometimes produce toxins deadly to fish-eaters such as seals and humans. Massive aggregations of blooms also block sunlight, and as these tiny dinoflagellates die, their decomposition consumes all the oxygen in the water. Without sun or oxygen, such basic ecosystem pillars as seagrass beds, which support larger species of fish and marine invertebrates, decline. The result, says Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and a senior researcher at the Smithsonian Institute of Tropical Research in Panama, is the rise of slime. Journalist Naomi Lubick asks Jackson some questions about slime and the future of the oceans.

Naomi Lubick: What is slime?

Jeremy Jackson: Slime is graphic shorthand for describing eutrophic communities of bacteria, other microbes, and planktonic algae that occur in great abundance where nutrients are super-abundant—a rich microbial soup. The waters below are commonly anoxic and lack fish. Such places, often called “dead zones,” support few fisheries other than jellyfish.  

NL: I’ve heard you say that the rise of slime is inevitable.  

JJ: We treat the ocean as a sewer. We’ve made very little progress in stopping the influx of nutrients and toxins. Input from the land is turning the ocean into a cesspool. There are enormous ironies in this. Fishing and fish farming—the two industries that by all logic only exist at the levels they do in the ways that they do because of subsidies—are headed for a train wreck. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens. Who’s going to eat fish that’s been raised in a cesspool? There isn’t a large estuary in the world that hasn’t faced eutrophication, which is the fancy word for the rise of slime. San Francisco Bay, North Carolina’s Pamlico Bay, Chesapeake Bay: all those places have seen an enormous increase in the abundance of phytoplankton. Most people have discounted the extent to which this can happen in the open ocean, but the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico tells a similar story. It shows us that the same thing is possible anywhere you have a river and destructive fishing and farming thrown together. How long will it be before eutrophication happens off the Nile, the Amazon, or the great rivers of China? I personally believe that the way things are going, we could wake up 50 years from now and see slime all over the place.  

NL: What creatures are likely to do well in this environment? Do you see them as a future diet for humans?  

JJ: Following the collapse of the fin fish industries, people have been switching to jellyfish. We’re eating jellyfish big time. There’s a huge market in China and Taiwan and people are making a living fishing jellyfish. We’re also on the verge of causing the extinction of the leatherback turtle—the accidental victims of long-line fishing. They weigh half a ton, and eat nothing but jellyfish. When people open turtles up, they’re full of jellies. We’re killing the turtles, so the jellyfish are thriving. The extra nutrients that cause eutrophication also feed the population explosion of jellyfish. It’s a beautiful example of unintended consequences and cascading effects. But if we turn the ocean into a bunch of slime there’ll be nothing to eat because it’ll all be toxic.  

NL: What’s going to survive?

JJ: When you destroy an ecosystem, what people don’t want is what’s left. “Who will be the rats and roaches?” What’s left is the seaweed, toxic dinoflagellates, dogfish, jellyfish. It’s not a very pretty list.

NL: How much of that is caused by overfishing? Or pollution? Or global warming?

JJ: That’s a great question, but I’m not going to answer it. Every situation is different. We know that this is a huge problem and that there are different components. You can think of all these places as swimming pools. Why do swimming pools get dirty? Because we’re slobs and let dirty rainwater flow in, or because the filter breaks. In the Chesapeake Bay, there’s clear evidence that eutrophication began before massive inputs of synthetic fertilizers. Negative effects began in the 1930s and 1940s, but the huge synthetic chemical applications didn’t start until the 1950s. We know that oysters once filtered the bay, but the oysters are now largely gone from overfishing. It’s naïve to think that you can only deal with one part of the problem. Increasingly, there’s going to be much less to filter the water while we’ll keep adding to the pollution load.

NL: There’s lots of evidence there has been overfishing of the world’s oceans. Are there any signs of major fishing nations curtailing their practices?

JJ: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is pushing to get the reef rezoned to get a much greater restriction on fishing. Up until now, there’s been few restrictions. If Australia goes ahead and does this, they once again will be in the forefront. They were certainly the first nation to look at their enormous coral reef as a resource and do something about saving it—they declared the entire Great Barrier Reef a marine park for the protection of coral reefs. At the time they were not thinking about fishing, but about oil spills and other pollution. Now people recognize that fishing represents a great threat to the reefs. In the Florida Keys, there was enormous resistance initially in terms of setting aside areas for complete protection. Now people tell me there’s more sympathy for the idea. Meanwhile, the European Union continues not to take any action on fisheries problems and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service insists American fisheries are in great shape. The overwhelming message is one of business as usual—except, of course, where fisheries have totally collapsed, like on Georges Banks. Canada has shown brilliant restraint in stopping cod fishing—now that the fish are gone. If there aren’t enough fish, how come the price is so cheap? Go to your neighborhood Costco: the fish comes from places most people in the United States have never heard of. The European Union, American, Canadian, and Japanese fishermen bought fishing licenses from African and South American countries. The developed nations highly subsidize their fishing fleets to keep prices down and then send the boats far afield to fish out the resources of poorer countries.

NL: Will aquaculture help over the long term?

JJ: Aquaculture is an enormous business. If you fly over China or Taiwan or Japan, you see massive fish farming. The whole world is doing it. A lot of aquaculture is irresponsibly done. Irresponsible aquaculture has scared off many environmentally responsible people. Farmed salmon are fed high protein fish meal manufactured from wild fish that is commonly obtained by trawling that destroys seafloor habitat. But much of the aquaculture is extremely well done, too. Yes, there are huge problems, but it’s going to happen anyway, and wouldn’t it be better to have it done responsibly? On land we chopped down the forests and killed all the big animals. We reduced the complexity and diversity of the biosphere on land, but we got something we were after in return: the agricultural revolution that gave us the rice, wheat and corn that sustains humanity. But when we do the equivalent of cutting down big forests in the oceans, we end up with slime. We don’t get the payoff. Fishing is really hunting and killing wild animals, it’s not harvesting. Fishing is like driving the buffalo off the cliffs of the West. There’s very little control, and enormous variability. We stopped hunting wild animals on land a long time ago; if we expect their analogs to survive in the ocean, we need to stop the killing there too.

NL: Can the seas be partially protected and remain relatively healthy?  

JJ: In his acceptance speech for the Kyoto Prize (for Extraordinary Lifetime Acheivement in Basic Science), Daniel Janzen [a University of Pennsylvania biologist and MacArthur award recipient] talked about the “gardenification of nature.” If we want wild animals and plants to still be around, we have to abandon our ideas of wilderness—which hasn’t existed for a hundred years—and do the best we can. And this is coming from someone who tries to be optimistic. I feel the same way about the ocean: We have to accept the reality of the enormous damage we’ve done, and set aside near wilderness areas—the equivalent of Yellowstone and other national parks. In California, for instance, we are starting to see some change. There was a terrible battle before the Channel Islands Sanctuary was established. I don’t think the protection that’s been achieved is nearly enough, but it’s important that debate happened and that action was taken. At the same time, we have to figure out a way to deal with the inevitable fact that we will continue to extract resources from the rest of the ocean.

NL: What will it take to change fishing policies?  

JJ: What it’s going to take is making the oceans matter to people. It’s not just a question of eating less fish. It may be a matter of not fishing at all over very large chunks of the ocean for a long period of time. Actions like that, which are believed by many people to be the views of the radical fringe, I think are common sense. We are losing these ecosystems. Beyond that, I think it’s a political process. Citizens can look at the different organizations that are concerned about the health of the oceans and get involved. For example, surfers are tired of having beaches closed and of getting sick when they go in the water. Now Surfrider Foundation members show up at public meetings. They don’t just write checks. What Daniel Pauly [a Canadian biologist who has documented the loss of fish biomass in the oceans] says is that we know what we need to do but there is no political will to do it. The most important thing we can do is become informed citizens and demand of our elected representatives that they protect our ocean environment. If we don’t ask our representatives, they will not take the initiative because they are responding to the million and a half other things they are being asked to do.

NL: So how did you come to this point? Isn’t this a topic that academics generally don’t feel comfortable addressing?

JJ: I went to Jamaica in 1968 as a graduate student. I saw the exquisitely beautiful coral reefs of Jamaica, and I had the great good fortune to go there and work with Tom Goreau, who was really the father of modern coral reef ecology. It never occurred to me then that there were no fish swimming around on those reefs any bigger than a sardine. It just didn’t occur to me at all. The coral was beautiful; the living cover of coral was 60, 70, 80 percent. In retrospect, that was pretty dumb. The fishes were all gone. We all knew at some level that a lot of fishes had been there, but there were all these beautiful corals and that was what we were interested in. And it was only when these calamities happened—like the disappearance of the sea urchins—that we realized that the sea urchin was the last living lawnmower in the system, that all the grazing fishes were gone and that that was why the algae was overgrowing the coral so rapidly. The same thing has happened in Panama because of the loss of the sea urchin and coral disease. We realized with 20/20 hindsight that we’d been ignoring the absence of a major component of the ecosystem. Every system I’ve ever studied in my career has changed almost unrecognizably from the way it was when I first studied it. I did my master’s research in Chesapeake Bay in 1966 in a little bay that had beautiful seagrass meadows that are now entirely gone. I worked in Florida Bay on the ecology of clams and snails living in seagrass beds, and most of those seagrass beds are gone. Sometimes I feel like the character in the Peanuts cartoon with the dark cloud that follows him around everywhere he goes. What I’m trying to communicate is the extraordinary magnitude of change that’s taken place in the oceans due to people, and how little of that change we’ve observed as scientists because our science is so young. Ten or 15 years ago, people would have said someone like me was mad, but in the last 50 years, we’ve reduced large fish in the oceans by 90 percent. When I talk to my colleagues about overfishing, some of them admit to having the same kinds of feelings. You wake up one day and you think, what am I gonna do? Am I going to ignore it? Study it until it disappears? (There’s good reason for doing that, in a way, for basic knowledge.) Or am I going to try to do something? I believe scientists have abrogated their responsibility to talk about facts as they see them. If I give a talk and someone from the fishing industry or a sports fisherman stands up and says, “Well, that’s your environmentalist opinion,” I say, “No, that’s not an environmentalist’s opinion. That’s my scientific reconstruction of what’s happened. You may not like the information that I have discovered, but I have discovered that information. You can agree or disagree with the implications as I have interpreted them, but you have to accept that something happened.”

NL: Does that happen often?

JJ: I’ve been challenged aggressively a couple of times. But there are a lot of very smart people in the fishing business who understand that there’s a crisis, and like all the rest of us, they’re confused about what we should do.

NL: Do you still have hope for the oceans?

JJ: I have a lot of hope. It’s sometimes discouraging to see how slow some people are to catch on, so I don’t allow myself to think about that too much. But there are very few species in the oceans that have gone completely extinct. And of the large keystone species that matter so much, I think there really is hope to bring them back. That’s why I spend so much time working to communicate the problems of the ocean to the public. Jeremy Jackson reaches the public through his web site Shifting Baselines (www.shiftingbaselines.org) and through public service announcements on television describing the plight of the oceans.

Copyright Naomi Lubick 2004. This story may not be reproduced without permission.