Expeditions

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Coconut Crab in Guam

Jim Haw — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:38:47 +0000

By Emily Lu

Birgus latro is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world, in some cases having a leg span of over three feet and weighing over nine pounds. It is more commonly known as the coconut crab, due to its diet. Coconut crabs are mainly scavengers, feeding on various tropical fruits including coconuts. Their two powerful front chelipeds allow them to tear through the tough husk of a coconut and feed on the flesh. In addition, they can climb trees up to 20 feet high just to reach growing coconuts. But these crabs also have other nicknames including “palm thief” or “robber crab.” These names are derived from the crab’s tendencies to steal human possessions, mistaking them for food. During World War II, these clever coconut crabs gained a reputation for stealing items from the trenches of American marines.

A coconut crab in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (Image courtesy of public-image-domain.com).

The coconut crab is found in abundance on islands throughout the western Pacific and eastern Indian oceans. However, on the island of Guam, the coconut crab has faced a huge decline in numbers. In 1981, Birgus latro was listed as a “vulnerable species” on the IUCN Red List, however the lack of accurate figures has caused the crab to be classified as “data deficient” (Elderedge 1996).

Coconut crab populations across oceanic islands are heavily correlated with the level of human activity. On island nations with larger human populations, coconut crabs are very scarce. On Guam, coconut crab sightings have become very rare. The coconut crab’s population decline on this island can be attributed to two main reasons: human predation and habitat disruption.

Coconut crabs can climb up to 20 feet to reach coconuts (Image courtesy of public-image-domain.com).

Guamanians consider coconut crab meat a delicacy. The local Chamorro people have eaten them for centuries, and the meat holds special significance at important events such as weddings (Fletcher 1993). The local demand for coconut crab meat is so high that the crab population on Guam cannot sustain it alone. Amesbury (1980) reports they were once commonly imported from the Northern Mariana Islands. Their shells also are commonly sold as tourist souvenirs. Unfortunately, these two uses directly compete with one another—because extracting the meat requires cracking the crab’s hard exterior (exoskeleton), the shells cannot be preserved as souvenirs afterward.

Additionally, coconut crabs are threatened by the development of Guam’s coastal zone. They are typically found within a few miles of the ocean, where females have adequate access to the ocean to release their eggs, which hatch only upon contact with saltwater. Recently though, heavy coastal development has modified a large portion of the crab’s preferred habitat. Ultimately, such changes further contribute to the decreasing population of coconut crabs on Guam by reducing the number of breeding individuals (Amesbury 1980).

It is imperative that the coconut crab population on Guam be preserved both for its economic and cultural value. Currently, several measures are in place to protect the crabs: only crabs of a certain size can be collected, and it is illegal to catch any crab carrying eggs. However, more needs to be done to protect these unique and valuable creatures.

At present, the highest crab densities on Guam can be found on military installations, where limited civilian access makes it difficult to hunt crabs (Amesbury 1980). More areas specifically designed to protect the crabs can be created, especially in locations that can protect females and their eggs. Furthermore, establishing moratoriums on crab hunting would allow the dwindling population to regain momentum. A moratorium would also allow larger crabs to flourish, because the larger crabs are targeted first for harvest. While a complete ban on crab hunting is not practical because use of the crab is deeply ingrained in local Chamorro and Guam culture, effective use of these two methods could significantly help reestablish a thriving coconut crab population for the island, and ensure the sustainable relationship between the coconut crab and the people of Guam.

Author photo by Jim Haw.

About the Author: Emily Lu is a sophomore in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences working towards a BS degree in Environmental Studies with a minor in Business. Emily has a strong interest in sustainable business and through her participation in the Guam and Palau course she looks forward to learning more about ecologically sustainable development.

Sources Cited:

Amesbury, S.S. (1980). Biological Studies On The Coconut Crab (Birgus Latro) In The Mariana Islands. University of Guam Marine Lab Technical Report, 66, 1-35.

Buden, D.W. (2012). Coconut Crabs, Birgus latro (Anomura: Coenobitidae), of Sorol Atoll, Yap, with remarks on the status of B. latro in the Federated States of Micronesia, Pacific Science, 66, 1-29.

Elderedge, L.G. (1996). Birgus latro. IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, Version 2011.2. Retrieved from http://www.iucnredlist.org/apps/redlist/details/2811/0

Fletcher, J. (1993). Coconut Crabs. Nearshore Marine Resources of the South Pacific: Information for Fisheries Development and Management. Suva, Fiji: International Centre for Ocean Development. 643-681.

Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (1992). Assessment of the status of the coconut crab Birgus latro on Niue Island with recommendations regarding an appropriate resource management strategy. FAO Corporate Document Repository. 72. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/docrep/field/003/AC281E/AC281E05.htm#ch5.3.1

Editor’s note: Scientific Research Diving at USC Dornsife is offered as part of an experiential summer program offered to undergraduate students of the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. This course takes place on location at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island and throughout Micronesia. Students investigate important environmental issues such as ecologically sustainable development, fisheries management, protected-area planning and assessment, and human health issues. During the course of the program, the student team will dive and collect data to support conservation and management strategies to protect the fragile coral reefs of Guam and Palau in Micronesia.

Instructors for the course include Jim Haw, Director of the Environmental Studies Program in USC Dornsife, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies David Ginsburg,, SCUBA instructor and volunteer in the USC Scientific Diving Program Tom Carr and USC Dive Safety Officer Gerry Smith of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Invasion of the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle

Jim Haw — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:38:53 +0000

By Miller Zou

Marine and terrestrial ecosystems of the Indo-West Pacific are among the most biologically diverse regions in the world. Unfortunately, these areas are often ill prepared to combat non-native intruders, which, in many cases, can easily prey upon and out-compete their neighbors. These so-called ‘alien’ and ‘introduced’ species can quickly become invasive if environmental conditions are favorable (e.g., predators absent, nutrients abundant, etc.). Accordingly, the prevention and management of invasive species is a top priority for many geographically isolated ecosystems, including the Island of Guam.

Guam has a less than pleasant history with introduced organisms. During World War II the brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) was unintentionally introduced while aboard a U.S. cargo ship, and have since caused the extinction of 10 of the 13 native bird species. Around the same time, Cane toads (Bufo marinus) were introduced to control sugarcane pests. Regrettably, the toads didn’t have their desired effect, as they spread to other areas and poisoned native predators with the toxin covering their skin (Fritts and Rodda 1998). Several frog species from Central America also have been detected that could pose a threat to crops. Guam’s biodiversity has been under siege for quite some time.

Adult Oryctes rhinoceros. Photo by Brent Tibbatts

Currently, one of the biggest threats facing Guam’s native ecosystems is the invasion of the coconut rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros). Discovered in the Tumon Bay area in September of 2007, these organisms are notorious for their ability to decimate coconut palms. Adult beetles chew down into the folded, emerging fronds of coconut palm trees to feed on sap (Ridgell 2011). This boring behavior can be fatal to the tree if the meristematic tissue (i.e., where growth takes place) is jeopardized.

In other cases, the tree is left susceptible to secondary infection by pathogens (Hochberg 1991). Coconut rhinoceros beetles favor downed trees as breeding sites, so the mortality of young trees may be the first stage of a developing positive feedback cycle that would be essentially impossible to contain once initiated. To prevent this from happening young trees must be protected and dead ones must be cleared in areas of infestation.

The threat posed by these invasive beetles cannot be overstated. Guam’s native ecosystems lack the various biological factors (e.g., predation, disease) that control coconut rhinoceros beetle populations in their native range. With an abundance of palm trees and nothing to slow their growth, beetle populations are sure to explode if left unchecked.

Feeding damage from adult coconut rhinoceros beetle. Photo by Ernie Nelson (Courtesy of Greenscapes, Inc.)

If this invasive species is not controlled, massive mortalities of both cultivated and wild palms is expected. The coconut rhinoceros beetle has invaded other Micronesian islands before, with devastating results. Palau fell victim to the species in 1942 and on some islands coconut palms were completely eradicated, with overall mortality reaching 50% (Berringer 2007). Although managed by a few introduced infectious pathogens, in some areas the rhinoceros beetle has become permanently established and moved on to banana and sugarcane crops in areas cleared of coconut palms (Hochberg 1991).

Since the presence of O. rhinoceros was discovered in 2007, many methods of eradication and control have been implemented. The primary eradication program is a cooperative effort between the USDA, Guam Department of Agriculture, and the University of Guam.

The integrated eradication program uses pheromone-baited traps to capture adults, various methods to destroy infested and potential host material, and pesticides that can be applied to larvae, adults, or even uninfested trees as a preventative measure (Berringer 2007). Biological control has also been applied, using both green muscardine fungus (Metarhizium majus) and a baculovirus. While the beetles on Guam appear resistant to the baculovirus, the muscardine fungus showed a lot of promise when released in late 2011.

As of April 2011 the beetles are still spreading (Ridgell 2011), but newer methods give reason for hope. In addition to the green muscardine fungus, development is underway for the application of coconut beetle-detecting dogs and audio equipment that can quickly detect the presence of the species within trees (Mankin 2009). Guam’s battle against the foreign coconut rhino beetle is far from over, but at least now it has an arsenal of management tools to use.

Author.

About the author: Miller Zou is a junior working towards a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. He is enrolling in a progressive master’s degree program in environmental studies and plans to take the scientific knowledge he has gained to law school to study environmental law and policy.

Works Cited:

Berringer, Dallas. (2007) Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Eradication Program: Guam. USDA Environmental Assessment.

Fritts, Thomas H. and Rodda, Gordon H. (1998) The Role of Introduced Species in the Degradation of Island Ecosystems: A Case History of Guam. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29:1.

Hochberg, M.E. et al. (1991) A Model for the Biological Control of Oryctes Rhinoceros by Means of Pathogens. Journal of Applied Ecology 28:2.

Mankin, R.W. et al. (2009) Acoustic Characteristics of Dynastid Beetle Stridulations. The Florida Entomologist 92:1

Ridgell, Clynt (2011) Guam Losing Battle Against Coconut Rhino Beetle. Pacific News Center: Guam. April 6, 2011.

Previously in this series:

Following the Ice: Greenland

Ben Linhoff — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:25:14 +0000

The moon rising over Leverett Glacier.)

One night last summer, I rose from my bed, left my tent and walked to the river. It was well past midnight, a full moon had risen over the glacier and in the twilight of the Arctic summer night, I could make out a herd of musk ox grazing nearby. My hair had gotten long, my beard now changed the shape of my face, and my clothes were soaked in dirt, sewn and patched.

A few steps from the riverbank, I slung a climbing rope around my waist and checked the knot at other end secured to a boulder. Then, with one hand on the rope and sampling bottles in the other, I eased my way down the steep riverbank to the water’s edge.

As I approached, the temperature dropped and I could see bear-size icebergs bumping through a train of rapids. So powerful was the river, that I could feel the thunder of boulders bumping over the river bottom through my boots.

I had long ago given up wearing waterproof gloves to sample the freezing water so I plunged my hands in and waited for the first bottle to fill. By now, the sun was coming up, the brief Arctic night was over. Back in my tent I tied a bandanna around my eyes and went back to sleep. It was my hundredth day in camp.

Our team's science tents

This year’s field season will bring new adventures, challenges, and scientific perspectives about the dynamic and ever-changing Greenland Ice Sheet. This will be my second time to Greenland and my second year blogging about it.

Despite the hardships inherent to camping in the Arctic for three months, I’m looking forward to it. Broadly, our goal is to determine how the Greenland Ice Sheet is responding to climate change. Specifically our job is to study the profound impact glacial meltwater has on glacial acceleration.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is massive. At its thickest point it’s almost 10,000 feet thick and it covers close to 80 percent of Greenland, the world’s largest island. It is 1,500 miles from north to south and at its widest point, it is roughly 700 miles across.

Walking across Leverett Glacier. Photo by Lyndsey Mackay

Everyday last summer airliners traveling from Europe to the U.S. drew a line of clouds over our camp. High above us, they made no sound, but their contrails were a constant part of our horizon. Approaching Greenland from the east, passengers on these flights could look out their windows and see an ocean choked with icebergs and, in the winter, a great expanse of sea ice.

All along this coastline, giant glaciers spill into the North Atlantic between tall rocky peaks. Once over the Greenland Ice Sheet, a barren plain of blinding white ice punctuated by occasional mountaintops greets airline passengers.

On the west side of Greenland, glaciers once again cascade off the ice sheet, but instead of emptying into the ocean, these glaciers slide through green hills and rocky mountains almost 100 miles from the coast.

Me setting up sampling equipment at the glacier's mouth or "portal." Photo by Lyndsey Mackay

Narrow, deep fjords crack through this western coast, some reaching all the way to the ice sheet’s edge. It is here, along these fjords that humans have lived in Greenland for thousands of years.

On a small spit of land jutting out into the western edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, our small team of scientists will be living in tents, cooking over a propane stove and collecting data. Without internet or cell phones, our contact with other people will consist of a satellite phone, infrequent helicopter pilots, and a few visits to a nearby village, where we will receive email, regular mail, and appreciate my favorite local delicacy—musk ox burgers.

Though our team will consist of only a handful of individuals, two members of our team will take a helicopter 50 miles from land onto the ice sheet. There they will set up two small tents and for almost three uninterrupted months, they will live and work on ice. For them, a nightly satellite phone call or text to our camp at the ice sheet’s edge will be their only link to other people.

Ice melts when things warm up. Over the last century, burning fossils fuels has rapidly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations to levels the Earth has not seen for millions of years.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere has risen to levels about 40 percent higher than the highest concentrations ever experienced by the Greenland Ice Sheet. Because CO2 absorbs heat from the sun, the Earth’s climate system has been disturbed and the world’s average temperature has gone up.

The front of Leverett Glacier. Photo by Lyndsey Mackay

In Greenland, glaciers are sliding faster, moving massive quantities of ice from the cold, high altitudes of the ice sheet’s interior to the warm subtropical ocean currents that brush up against east Greenland and to the gentler climate in the west and south. The increase in glacial meltwater is raising the global sea level, fertilizing the North Atlantic, and may even be changing ocean currents.

Dave Chandler taking a sample of glacial meltwater. Photo by Lyndsey Mackay

This blog will be about our team’s work, life in the arctic, climate change, and our inevitable adventures. Like last year, blog posts will be flown out of camp on stick drives whenever helicopters transport gear and people to and from our camp, and on every occasion someone is able to hike out to town (an all-day event that involves a river crossing).

Because of bad weather, mechanical problems with helicopters, and a temperamental river crossing, I can’t promise posts will make it out of camp every week, so occasionally several posts will be entered at once after a break. However, I will try to update this blog about once a week for the 12 weeks I will be in camp (May 10 to August 1).

If you’re interested in Following the Ice, sign up for updates to this blog. To see pictures from last year’s field season, you can also check out (and “like”) my Facebook page and read my previous blog. You can follow me on Twitter (@FollowingTheIce).

Foxy Prince- like last year, I'm sure he'll be at the center of at least one story

A musk ox herd in front of Leverett Glacier

Leverett Glacier. Photo by Lyndsey Mackay

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The California Spiny Lobster

Jim Haw — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:06:57 +0000

By Alyssa Dykman

In the cool waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean lies the California spiny lobster. The lobster, Panulirus interruptus, can be found on the rocky substrates of the coastal ocean floor between Monterey Bay, California and the northwestern coast of Mexico. A majority of the population is found off the coastline from Point Conception southwards, to the Channel Islands, and Cortes Bank (Duffy, 1973). In southern California, the California spiny lobster primarily lives in the dynamic kelp forests of the region.

A California spiny lobster hiding in a crevice in a southern California kelp forest. (Photo by Tom Carr)

The California spiny lobster is an irreplaceable member of the kelp forest ecosystem. One of the most important ecosystem services the lobsters provide is maintaining the population of sea urchins, which otherwise consume kelp. The lobsters keep the ecosystem in check by protecting the vitality of its foundation, and by taking on the role of a keystone species. However, since the late nineteenth century, humans have found a keen interest in the recreational and commercial fishing of lobsters. The California spiny lobster has been increasingly hunted, and their average size and lifespan has been significantly reduced, putting an entire ecosystem at risk.

The California spiny lobster has become highly profitable. Due to the lobster’s rising popularity, humans have sought increasingly to catch them legally and illegally. The California Department of Fish and Game have implemented various measures to ensure sustainable lobster fisheries, however the rules are often broken. In terms of illegal lobster catching in southern California, fishermen often get in trouble by hunting in Marine Protected Areas (MPA), which are prevalent throughout the California coastal region.

The Marine Life Management Act, passed in 1999, helps define and manage MPA’s in their distinctive regions (California Department of Fish & Game). The MPA’s seek to conserve the native ecosystem, and they have strict and specific fishing regulations that improve organisms’ size, abundance, and biomass compared to non-reserve locations (Kay, Lenihan, Kotchen, & Miller, 2012). In a recent study, Kay et. al (2012) examined lobster catches in marine reserves compared to non-reserve areas in the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. They found an average of 5.49 more legal-sized lobsters caught per trap in marine reserve areas compared to traps outside reserves, therefore demonstrating the effectiveness of MPA’s (Kay et. al, 2012).

A view of the kelp forest at Big Fisherman’s Cove at Catalina Island. (Photo by Tom Carr)

The California Department of Fish and Game established a Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for the California spiny lobster in 2009, as required by the Marine Life Management Act (California Department of Fish & Game). The FMP mandates the public to get involved in the process of assessing the value of MPA’s to local lobster fisheries (California Department of Fish & Game). Specific to southern California is the Southern California Marine Life Protection Act, which established MPA’s of the region to be effective January first of this year. Thus, lobster hunting in southern California has become more tightly regulated and will be evaluated more often.

The most frequent violations in California spiny lobster hunting is catching more than seven lobsters, which is the daily limit, and having possession of underweight lobsters, or ‘shorts’ (Duffy, 1973). It takes a lobster up to a decade to reach the legal size limit. When the lobsters are overfished, the average age of the take is reduced, compromising mating patterns and future generations of the species.

Another requirement of California spiny lobster hunting is they have to be caught by hoop nets or bare hands, not by any mechanism that allows for large quantities to be caught (California Department of Fish & Game). Scuba divers can easily catch lobsters by hand, especially at night when they are more active. Recently, a southern California citizen became the first person to violate the newly effective MPA guidelines this past January, by poaching 47 California spiny lobsters at the Laguna Beach State Marine Reserve (Department of Fish and Game News). The citizen was fined over $20,000 and sentenced to a week in jail for this crime. (Department of Fish and Game News).

Photo of the author by Jim Haw.

Not only is the California spiny lobster important to the kelp forest inhabitants, but humans have noticed their immense value as well. In order to not exploit another sector of the world’s depleting fisheries, citizens, particularly of the southern California region, must more sustainably manage this crustacean. Next week I am off for a weeklong trip to Catalina to practice research diving methods, before traveling to Guam and Palau for research. I hope to see the California spiny lobster in its native environment next week.

About the Author: Alyssa Dykman is a sophomore in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences working towards a BS degree in Environmental Studies and a minor in Psychology and Law. Alyssa has a strong interest in environmental policy and hopes to pursue a career in Environmental Law.

Works Cited:

California Department of Fish & Game. (2012). California Spiny Lobster Fishery Management Plan. Web. 9 May 2012.

California Department of Fish & Game. (2012). Invertebrates of Interest: California Spiny Lobster. Web. 7 May 2012.

Department of Fish and Game News. (2012). DFG and Orange County Successfully Prosecute First MPA Violation. Web. 10 May 2012.

Duffy, J.M. (1973). Marine Resources Technical Report. California Department of Fish and Game, 10, 1-15.

Kay, M.C., Lenihan, H.S., Kotchen, M.J., & Miller, C.J. (2012). Effects of Marine Reserves on California Spiny Lobster are Robust and Modified by Fine-Scale Habitat Features and Distance from Reserve Borders. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 450, 137-150.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Palauan Mermaids

Jim Haw — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:04:50 +0000

By Christina Irvin

Sirens are mythical, mermaid-like sea creatures that lure ships and seafarers into dangerous waters with their beauty and songs. These legends are rooted in Greek mythology – particularly in Homer’s The Illiad. Interestingly, for more than 600 years after Homer’s time, early explorers believed that the oceans were home to mermaids and monsters. As we know today, these creatures were not imagined, but likely slow moving, herbivorous marine mammals known as manatees and dugongs (native to the tropical Atlantic and Indo-West Pacific Oceans, respectively).

Comoros Island 2009 First Day Stamp Cover commemorating the dugong.

Palau is the only Micronesian island known to have a resident population of dugongs. Known as Mesekiu (Palauan for “sea mermaid), these animals once played a major role in Palauan culture. Traditionally eaten during celebrated feasts and special occasions, specific parts of the dugong skeleton (i.e., vertebrae) signified the rank of chief in Palauan society. Although the killing of these magnificent creatures is no longer permitted, habitat degradation (i.e., loss of seagrass meadows) and hunting by unscrupulous poachers (dugong meat can fetch exorbitant prices on the black market) poses a significant threat. Nearly extinct in Palauan waters and endangered at a global scale, the fate of these organisms is uncertain.

Not surprisingly, under State, Federal, and International Law, dugongs are protected throughout their habitat range, which includes the coastal and inland waters from eastern Africa to the Solomon Islands in the western Pacific. In Palau, the penalties for harming these creatures and destroying critical habitat carries a minimum fine of $10,000 and up to three years in jail.

Author photo by Jim Haw.

In 2011, the Etpison Museum, together with local scientists and officials, initiated a public awareness campaign celebrating the ‘Pacific Year of the Dugong,’ which helped to establish Palauan waters (more than 230,000 square miles total) as a marine mammal sanctuary. Add to this the fact that Palauan waters also are a marine sanctuary for sharks and it is easy to see why the country is viewed as a global model for the protection and conservation of environmental resources. Protection of these shy creatures is important not only for the preservation of the species but also for maintaining a key piece of Palauan culture and legend.

About the Author: Christina Irvin is a senior in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and will graduate with a BA in Environmental Studies. She has a strong interest in marine policy and management and looks forward to pursuing a graduate degree.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Global Sea Cucumber Fisheries

Jim Haw — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:03:29 +0000

By Roxi Aslan

When diving in the Blue Cavern Marine Protected Area off Catalina Island, you can’t help but notice the red-brown warty sea cucumber Parastichopus parvimensis, which lies conspicuously on the sea floor below. This creature (as do all members of the phylum Echinodermata) has the ability to regenerate parts of its body – for example, when physically threatened, P. parvimensis can expel a large component of its digestive tract (which, presumably will dissuade potential predators from eating the sea cucumber itself). Sound appetizing? I didn’t think so either.

The California sea cucumber Parastichopus californicus. Photo by Steve Lonhart / SIMoN NOAA

In many parts of the world, however, sea cucumbers are a staple ingredient as well as important medicinal resource. And, as it turns out, California is one of the primary export fisheries for these organisms. With what started as a fledging fishery off Catalina Island in the late 1970s (on average, less than 50,000 pounds landed per year) is now a multi-million dollar industry with commercial landings exceeding 500,000 pounds on an annual basis.[1]

Now that’s a lot of sea cucumbers! So where is this demand coming from?

I haven’t noticed sea cucumbers in my grocery market or on the menu at my favorite restaurants. Well, it turns out that the majority of warty sea cucumber (P. parvimensis), and California sea cucumber (P. californicus) landings are exported to China, Taiwan, and South Korea where they are marketed as a frozen, pickled, dried, powdered, and sometimes live product.[1]

In Guam and Palau, where I will soon be traveling as part of an intensive 3-week ecosystem management field course offered by the USC Environmental Studies Program, sea cucumbers are often exploited for subsistence purposes. For example, on Guam both Holothuria atra and Stichopus horrens are consumed as a cheap and easily harvested source of protein.[2] In one of the more egregious cases on the island, more than 11,000 sea cucumbers were harvested in a matter of weeks from a specific reef.[3] Although consumed locally on Palau, a moratorium was placed on the commercial fishery nearly a decade ago as local sea cucumber stocks were on a rapid decline.

Until recently, Western medicine has been loath to recognize the medicinal properties of sea cucumbers. Natural products derived from these animals, which include saponins and chondroiton sulfates, are currently used as nutritional supplements as well as pharmaceutical products to treat a range of conditions including high blood pressure and arthritis.[4] With numerous studies and research data validating the medical and health benefits of sea cucumbers, their use is becoming more common in the West. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Asian markets within the United States purchase a significant portion of the California sea cucumber fishery.

Given the demand for this marine resource it is imperative that we ensure that the commercial sea cucumber fishery is sustainable. As pointed out by University of Guam Professor Alex Kerr, “we must raise awareness and manage the population now or over-harvesting could quickly become an issue.”[5] Although the long-term outlook for the global sea cucumber fishery is uncertain, a variety of ongoing management and research plans are in the works (both in California and abroad) to protect this valuable resource.

About the author: Roxi Aslan is a junior working toward a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences with a minor in environmental studies at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. She plans to pursue a career in biomedical research and hopes to hone her science diving skills in Guam and Palau this summer.

Works Cited:

Ono, D., Rogers-Bennett, L., USA. California Department of Fish and Game Marine Region. Fish and Game Commission. Status of the Fisheries Report – An Update Through 2006. Ed. Kristine Barsky (2008)
Friedman, K., Kinch, J., Purcell, S., and Uthicke, S. “Population status, fisheries and trade of sea cucumbers in the Western Central Pacific.” FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper 516 (2008): 7-55
Kelman, B. 11,092 ‘balati’ gathered illegally. Guam Pacific Daily News. August 5, 2010
Borbar, S., Farooq, A., and Nazamid, S. “High-value components and bioactives from sea cucumbers for functional foods – a review.” Marine Drugs 9 (2011): 1761-805
Rising demand may threaten Guam’s ‘balati.’ Marianas Variety. June 25, 2010

Instructors for the course include Jim Haw, Director of the Environmental Studies Program in USC Dornsife, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies David Ginsburg, SCUBA instructor and volunteer in the USC Scientific Diving Program Tom Carr and USC Dive Safety Officer Gerry Smith of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Human Impacts on Mangrove Forests

Jim Haw — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:27:54 +0000

By Stephen Holle

As the global human population continues to increase, many organisms have had to adapt to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat by development. Not surprisingly, global biodiversity has steadily declined, and as Anthony Barnosky, a Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley suggests, “we are witnessing a collision of human impacts and climatic changes that caused so many large animal extinctions toward the end of the Pleistocene.” Many of the impacts that ecosystems experience today are not “natural” occurrences. Rather, they are the result of our lust for modernization and development.[1]

Satellite image of Sasa Bay Marine Preserve, Apra Harbor Guam, which suggests some of the threats from human development and encroachments. Image: Google Earth

Such is the case for mangrove forests, which are one the most biologically diverse ecosystems on earth. Yet, on a global scale, more than 35% of these habitats have been lost over the last two decades due to human activities and climate stressors.[2] Often referred to as a foundation species, mangroves provide an important refuge for both juvenile and adult organisms (marine and terrestrial alike), and are amongst one of the greatest carbon sinks on Earth.[3]

One of the greatest threats to mangrove habitat is human development, which in many regions of the world creeps ever closer these critically sensitive ecosystems. For example, terrestrial runoff (e.g., sedimentation, contaminants, nutrients) has a significant impact on the architecture and function of mangrove root systems that ultimately will lead to a decline on productivity and growth over time. [1]

Red mangroves in Sasa Bay Marine Preserve. Photo by David Burdick (Courtesy of NOAA)

Within the Marianas, the island of Guam is unique in that it sustains a relatively healthy and intact mangrove ecosystem. Almost entirely contained within the Sasa Bay Marine Preserve, this area is recognized by local scientists and the Government of Guam as critically sensitive habitat. Unfortunately, “designated sanctuaries are not immune to external forces such as oil spills and nearby dredge spoils,”[4] and runoff from nearby watersheds.

Although such protected areas are in place to conserve coastal resources, ongoing ecosystem monitoring and enforcement are limited. Coastal management exists to protect environmental resources for both economical and ecological value. Although section 302 of the Coastal Zone Management Act suggests that “important ecological, cultural, historic, and esthetic values in the coastal zone which are essential to the well-being of all citizens are being irretrievably damaged or lost”, competing demands often sacrifice the intrinsic value of nature for human development.

Works Cited:

Hannah, L. (2012) “As Threats to Biodiversity Grow, Can we Save the World’s Species?”

Feller, I.C. et al. (2010) Biocomplexity in Mangrove Ecosystems. Annual Review of Marine Science 2: 395-417

Bouillon, S (2008) Mangrove production and carbon sinks: A revision of global budget estimates. Global Biogeochemical Cycles Vol 22: GB2013

Guam’s Coral Reef Management Priorities (2010-15). NOAA Technical Report

Author photo by Jim Haw.

About the Author: Stephen Holle is a senior working toward a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. With his ENST scientific diving experience he hopes to move on to a career focused on policy and natural resource management.

Instructors for the course include Jim Haw, Director of the Environmental Studies Program in USC Dornsife, Environmental Studies Lecturer Dave Ginsburg, SCUBA instructor and volunteer in the USC Scientific Diving Program Tom Carr and USC Dive Safety Officer Gerry Smith of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Contributions of J. S. Haldane to Dive Safety

Jim Haw — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:21:34 +0000

by Madi Swayne

Every year, millions of people, including myself, make many millions of recreational scuba dives, very rarely with any ill effects. What goes unappreciated by many divers is the scientific basis for their safe exploration of the underwater world. The history of the science of safe diving begins with a research paper published in 1908 by a British physiologist John Scott Haldane.

Title and author listing from the paper of Haldane and co-workers published in The Journal of Hygiene, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Jun., 1908), pp. 342-443.

The self-contained breathing apparatus (SCUBA) was still forty or so years in the future with the work of Jacques Cousteau and others. Haldane motivated his work by stating, “Men who have been working in compressed air, and in diving, preparing foundations of bridges, etc. under water, or making tunnels or shafts through water-bearing strata, are liable on their return to atmospheric pressure to a variety of symptoms generally known as ‘diver’s palsy’ or ‘caisson disease,’ but which may more conveniently be designated ‘compressed-air illness.’” This statement and others in that paper created the very vocabulary of diving accidents.

The origin of “the bends” as a euphemism for decompression sickness may have come from (or at least be reinforced by) Haldane’s observation that the goats he used to test decompression strategies would sometimes emerge with bent forelegs, either as a result of guarding against pain from bubbles in joints or possibly central nervous system injuries. Goats were readily available as experimental subjects and were considered usefully close to humans as models of the physiological responses to too-rapid decompression.

One of Haldane's bent goats. Note the bend in the left foreleg. Source: The Journal of Hygiene, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Jun., 1908), pp. 342-443.

Decompression Sickness is caused by nitrogen absorbed in the body being released too quickly as the pressure surrounding the diver decreases, usually due to an unsafe and rapid ascent to the surface. The pressure at depth naturally causes the tissues within the body to become progressively saturated by nitrogen, the inert gas that makes up 78% of air.

As the diver goes deeper, the pressure increases. Greater time at depth loads more nitrogen into tissues, ultimately saturating them. If the diver ascends too rapidly, super-saturation of tissues ultimately leads to bubble formation in these tissues, leading to a myriad of symptoms ranging from pain or loss of sensation to, in extreme cases, death. This was reflected in Haldane’s work in a terrible toll of injured and deceased goats.

Haldane's paper documents the effects of inadequate decompression strategies in lists of injured and killed goats. Source: The Journal of Hygiene, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Jun., 1908), pp. 342-443.

Because different systems within the body have varying levels of perfusion and hence rates of gas exchange, Haldane modeled the bodies of goats, and by extension humans, as consisting of various theoretical compartments with different halftimes for gas equilibration.

Each compartment with a halftime T on-gassed or off-gassed at a rate given by ln 2/ T. Haldane was able to fit his “goat data” using five theoretical compartments with halftimes of 5, 10, 20, 40 and 75 minutes. Although these compartments were purely mathematical constructs, one could associate efficiently perfused tissues like blood and brain with short halftime compartments, and slowly perfused tissues like bone and ligament with slower compartments. Haldane assumed, with empirical rather than theoretical justification, that tissues could withstand up to 2:1 over-pressurization during ascent without harm, and this provided a basis for cumbersome but straightforward calculations of decompression strategies based on keeping all five compartments within the 2:1 rule.

Later, it was realized the Haldane 2:1 rule was too conservative for fast compartments, and the U.S. Navy created their first dive tables in 1956 based on variations of Haldane’s scheme. The Navy Tables are based on six, rather than five compartments with a maximum halftime of 120 minutes. Instead of a uniform 2:1 ratio, each compartment had its own “M-value”, and these were as large as 4:1 for the fastest compartments. Some of the modern recreational dive tables are closely related to these Navy Tables, and thus their connection to Haldane’s 1908 work is apparent.

Author, photo by Jim Haw

As I am training to be a science diver, I owe a debt to Haldane and his goats. Dive physiology and dive physics has been much of my classroom work for this program. And this has shaped my actual diving. Before making a dive my buddy and I plan our dive. The planning process includes what is known as a SEABAG pre-assessment. Each letter in the acronym refers to a different aspect of the dive plan: S-ite, E-mergency, A-ctivities, B-uoyancy, A-ir, G-ear and go. We then also look at a dive table that corresponds to the gas we are breathing (air or nitrox) to determine the maximum time we can remain at the planned depth without incurring a mandatory decompression stop. While this 5” x 7” plastic card is covered in numerical charts and may initially be very overwhelming, with practice it has become easy to use. Haldane bent his goats so that I can dive with reduced risk of the bends.

About the Author: Madi Swayne is a freshman working toward dual degrees, a BA in Environmental Studies, and a BS in Policy, Planning and Development. She has a strong interest in environmental policy and marine pollution. Her love for the ocean and her concern for its protection come from a lifelong passion for surfing. Madi is actively involved as a guide for SCOutfitters, a student-run outdoor adventure group on campus.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Palau Water Supply

Jim Haw — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:01:21 +0000

By Austin Hay

Water is the oil of the future. It’s a phrase that’s often been repeated in the engineering classes I’ve taken at USC, but it couldn’t be truer than in the case of Palau. The island nation, some 500 miles east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles south of Japan, is completely dependent upon natural sources for its water needs. With an average of 11 inches of rainfall per month, precipitation provides the main source of freshwater to people living in the Republic of Palau.

USC students from 2011 expedition enjoying Ngardmau Waterfall, which is the largest on Palau. Photo by David Ginsburg

However, with no major clean water sources beyond precipitation, and currently no renewable technologies such as groundwater recharge or desalinization, the future of Palau’s water supply is dependent on adaptive water management strategies.

According to the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission, over the next twenty years the demand for water is expected to grow more than 3-fold (from 4.5 million gallons to over 15 million). As a result, the water quality standards that Palau currently has will become more difficult to maintain without a system upgrade to handle larger flows of water through the treatment process.

Ironically, much of the increased demand for water stems from the increased popularity of Palau as a destination hotspot for ocean ecotourism. Such issues have not gone unnoticed by resource managers and local officials who recognize that an increase in anthropogenic activities will likely have a negative impact on the dynamics of local watersheds and coastal resources. For example, the compounded effects of terrestrial runoff (e.g., sedimentation), human pollution (e.g., sewage), and chemical contaminants (e.g., gas, oil) coupled with a higher water demand might result in saltwater intrusion into primary sources of freshwater.

The author (left) encounters an endangered Guam Rail at a captive breeding facility. Photo by Jim Haw

Fortunately, however, these concerns have taken center stage with Palau’s government officials and local activists. Recently, Palauan President Johnson Toribiong endorsed the country’s first National Water Policy. The central aim of the policy is to protect water resources, as well as to ensure access to safe, affordable, and sustainable water supplies and wastewater services.

Will the clean water distribution systems on Palau be expanded to accommodate a growing number of residents and tourists? Only time will tell, but this one question that must be addressed if Palau is to avoid a dire water crisis.

About the Author: Austin Hay is senior in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and will graduate this May with a BS in Environmental Engineering. Austin is an alumnus of the Guam and Palau 2011 expedition, and will accompany the 2012 course as a volunteer assistant. In Fall 2012, Austin will be pursuing a PhD in Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

Sources:

Guam Pacific Daily News

Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber

Jim Haw — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:42:56 +0000

by Gerry Smith

Divers are at risk for a particular set of maladies that are generally caused by rapid changes in pressure. These include decompression sickness (DCS,) commonly known as “the bends”, and air (or gas) embolisms, which result in either gas bubbles in tissues where they don’t belong. The bubbles from DCS areis from gas that has been dissolved in the body’s tissues during the dive and has come out of solution due to too rapid an ascent. Air embolism bubbles come from the rupture of an over-expanding lung, which can result if a diver ascends holding their breath (generally due to panic). Collectively, these two ailments fall under the term decompression illness (DCI). Routinely, divers manage this risk by carefully controlling their depth, dive time and ascent rates so as not to permit dangerous gas build-ups and by remembering to breath normally and never hold their breath. But when things go wrong and DCI strikes, the most effective treatment is that provided in a hyperbaric chamber – an environment where pressure can be precisely controlled for lengthy periods to allow for controlled release of the problematic gasses.

The USC Hyperbaric Chamber. (Photo by Karl Huggins)

The Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber, located at the isthmus of Catalina Island on the University of Southern California’s Catalina Campus, was initially built to support the development of Lockheed’s high altitude SR-71 program. Operating at the edge of space, at altitudes above 80,000 feet, the SR-71 Blackbird pilots were exposed to extreme changes in pressure, and the chamber was built to treat pilots who might suffer from altitude DCS as a result of those changes. When the SR-71 program development was complete, the chamber was donated to USC where it was pressed into service to treat divers’ DCI problems.

Most chambers in the U.S. are used primarily for hyperbaric oxygen treatment for wounds or diabetes and secondarily if at all for diving accidents. They are smaller one or two person chambers meant to pressurize only to the equivalent of a 66-foot depth (3 ATA) in order to improve oxygen saturation to damaged tissues. The Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber has bunks to treat two divers and has been pressed into service to treat as many as four with attendant doctors, EMT’s, and tenders. It can pressurize to 165 feet (6 ATA) in order to squeeze bubbles to their smallest diameter to treat embolisms. It is, therefore, ideally suited to treatment of diving injuries.

USC scientific diving students in the 2012 Guam and Palau program inside the hyperbaric chamber. (Photo by Anna Pastor)

Catalina is one of the top diving destinations in the world, and more than a million dives are conducted each year in the clean cold waters around this island located only 30 miles south of Los Angeles. As such, it provides an ideal location for a hyperbaric treatment facility devoted to divers. Since minimizing time between the onset of the disease and treatment is critically important, having the treatment facility located within minutes of some of the more popular dive sites saves time and lives. While accidents by recreational or technical divers account for the vast majority of chamber treatments, the presence of an on-site hyperbaric chamber also contributes to the safety of USC Dornsife’s Scientific Diving Program, which does the majority of it’s training dives almost in the shadow of the chamber facility.

The chamber is staffed by one full-time director, a part-time technician, and a group of about seventy dedicated volunteers who are on call 24/7 to operate the chamber when needed. On weekdays, it is the University’s staff and faculty, as well as residents of the nearby Two Harbors community, who answer emergency calls. On weekends volunteers drawn from the dive community from across the country come out to the island to support divers in need.

USC provides the physical facility for the chamber and administers it. Funding is shared about equally between the Los Angeles County Medical Alert Center and the local diving community. Annual Chamber Day and Chamber Evening activities are always fully subscribed with the gross proceeds going to support the chamber’s work. Local dive operators donate the proceeds of a day’s diving, and local divers fill up the boats for a day of diving that includes a visit to the chamber.

A typical case might begin with an emergency call to the chamber from the US Coast Guard or perhaps from a boat diving at Catalina Island. The chamber staff immediately begins preparing the chamber for patient arrival, and alert the on-call hyperbaric physician at County-USC hospital. By the time the patient arrives at the chamber by boat or helicopter, the chamber is manned and prepped for treatment.

Chamber volunteer Mike Madden at one of the chamber control panels. (Photo by Karl Huggins)

A chamber crew consists of a tender who will accompany the patient into the chamber and tend to their needs during the treatment, an operator who controls the pressure in the chamber and the attached airlock, a timekeeper who records the details of the treatment and keeps everything on-schedule, and a supervisor who manages the treatment.

On arrival, paramedics from Los Angeles County Baywatch assess the patient in consultation via telephone with the doctor to determine whether the problem is likely DCI. If the determination is negative, arrangements are made to transport the patient to the mainland for treatment. If the injury is determined to be pressure-related a doctor will be flown by helicopter to the chamber. Most often, treatment in the chamber is begun on the doctor’s orders even before he or she arrives on scene. The patient and tender enter the chamber, the doors are sealed, and the chamber is quickly pressurized to the target depth specified by the specific treatment protocol.

Detail of a hyperbaric treatment procedure. (Graphic by Karl Huggins)

On arrival, the doctor uses the airlock on the chamber to enter and make a hands-on assessment of the patient. An interesting detail is that the doctor can make an examination, but won’t prescribe treatment while in the chamber with the patient. The reasoning behind this is that the doctor, along with everyone else in the chamber, is affected by nitrogen narcosis, Jacques Cousteau’s “rapture of the deep”, and could make bad decisions while under its influence.

Throughout treatment the patient breathes 100% oxygen for twenty minutes at a time followed by five-minute air breaks to avoid seizures from oxygen toxicity. Treatment is usually continued as long as the patient’s condition continues to show improvement; it is rarely shorter than about five hours but can last twelve hours or more. At the end of the treatment, the patient and tender are brought slowly up to surface pressure and can then exit the chamber.

To learn more about the Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber, go to http://dornsife.usc.edu/hyperbaric/home/index.cfm.

About the Author: Gerry Smith is the Dive Safety Officer at the USC Dornsife Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island. Prior to joining USC he was a senior IT officer for the Cal State University System. He served in the U.S. Army during the Viet Nam war.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Marine Ecology from Antarctica to Micronesia

David Ginsburg — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:54:07 +0000

Not long ago, I helped a colleague, Dr. Judith Connor from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, on her first scuba dive in Antarctica. This was a bit of change for me, since I’m usually the person who gets to go underwater. On this expedition though, diving under the ice took somewhat of a backseat, as I was busy in the laboratory working on a research project focused on characterizing the presence of amino acid transporter genes in the embryos and larvae of echinoderms.

The author helping Dr. Judith Connor remove her gear as she climbs out of a dive hole in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Photo by Scott Applebaum

Tenders are an important part of the diving operations at McMurdo Station, which is the largest research station in Antarctica. Not only do they help the divers put on their heavy, cumbersome gear (e.g., weight belt, tank, mask, gloves) — but also help take it all off when they emerge back through the dive hole.

This is no small task, as the typical diver going under the ice is wearing nearly 100 pounds of gear! Additionally, dive tenders ensure that all research data and specimens are properly stowed and secured for the trip back to the research station.

Being that this was Connor’s first Antarctic dive, she was excited. If she was at all nervous, I couldn’t tell. Thinking back to my first ice dive, I was a wreck — what was I thinking, a guy born and raised in Los Angeles, jumping into below-freezing water through a shoulder-width hole in the ice?

Despite my angst, I remember having a great time, and was glad to see a smiling dive tender when I bobbed to the surface. Needless to say, Connor’s first dive was flawless. And, yes, in case you were wondering, I proudly schlepped her gear on and off, and had a great big smile on my face as she climbed out of the dive hole.

The author collecting the sea star (Odontaster validus) under Antarctic ice for later analysis in the McMurdo Station laboratory facility. Photo by Rob Robbins

Fast-forward to the present and not a whole lot has changed. Although, instead of conducting dive operations in below freezing conditions, I’m leading a diving-centric field course to the tropical waters of Guam and Palau to examine coral reef health and biodiversity.

My co-instructor Professor Jim Haw and I lead undergraduate students as they work hands-on with local scientists and resource managers to study ecosystem management strategies, the environmental impacts of a major defense buildup, and invasive and endangered species. Nothing beats diving in 82 degree F water; dive tenders are a nice touch, but there isn’t a whole lot of gear to wrangle when all you’re wearing are swim trunks and a 4-pound weight belt!

Throughout the course, our students spend a lot of time underwater (nearly 25 dives total) performing transect surveys to quantify the abundance and distribution of key benthic invertebrate and reef fish indicator species. Because indicator organisms are not handled and anthropogenic disturbance is minimized, these methods are useful for recording data in marine protected areas, which serve as the primary locations for our research studies.

The author supervising undergraduates underwater while they survey a patch reef in waters off Guam. Photo by Jim Haw

Such surveys provide an alternative to traditional and more disruptive methods such as the collection and removal of organisms from reef habitats for later analysis. This is, in fact, the exact opposite of my role as a science diver in Antarctica in which my goal was to collect and retrieve on a near daily basis sea urchins and sea stars from McMurdo Sound for laboratory experiments.

As my colleague Gerry Smith, Dive Safety Officer at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center, noted in a previous blog post, “[our program] trains students to be effective underwater researchers…as well as safe and reliable divers.” For some students there is clear evidence that the Guam and Palau experience significantly altered their educational trajectory. For example, just this past year alone, new plans were made for graduate studies, study abroad programs, and marine-coastal themed internships. Above or below the water, I find teaching and mentoring students fulfilling because it offers an opportunity for me to engage and collaborate with the next generation of scholars, and I find that I am constantly expanding my own worldviews as a result.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The International Policy Rationale for the Military Buildup on Guam and Some Environmental Drivers

Jim Haw — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:04:29 +0000

by Robert English and Jim Haw

[At this writing, U.S. and Philippine forces are concluding their latest joint military exercise, a mock amphibious landing on Palawan Island. The allies claim there is no direct link between their maneuvers and an incident earlier this month where Chinese military ships drove off Philippine coast guard vessels that were attempting to seize Chinese fishing boats in Philippine-claimed waters. This also coincides with Palau’s release of 25 Chinese fishermen arrested in an earlier incident—one Chinese vessel was destroyed, and one fisherman killed—on the charge of illegal fishing in Palauan waters. And it resembles several other recent Sino-Philippine and Sino-Vietnamese confrontations, including one last year where Chinese fishing boats were driven away by an armed Vietnamese oil-prospecting vessel. Several days ago the U.S. and Japan finally agreed that 9,000 Marines will leave Okinawa, and 5,000 of these will relocate to Guam. These recent events provide the immediate international relations context for the USC Dornsife Scientific Diving students three weeks before they travel to Micronesia.]

Si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This classical dictum—that the best way to deter conflict is to be strong enough to win it—reflects the strategies of the main Western Pacific powers engaged in military build-ups whose collective impact prompts an equally classical rejoinder: Si vis pacem, para pactum. “If you want peace, work for agreement,” since the alternative is arms racing that heightens tensions and risk while leaving everyone in the same relative position, only bearing major economic, social, ecological, and other costs. The U.S. territory of Guam is a prime exhibit of these often-ignored costs, an island jewel once again in the military and environmental crosshairs.

From the U.S. perspective, a longstanding regional balance is being upset by two principal threats: the nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile programs of an unremittingly hostile North Korea; and the seemingly relentless rise of China and its dramatic military build-up. The former is certainly diplomatically vexing, but to some extent a more straightforward challenge since it is primarily military (though scenarios of North Korea lashing out, or collapsing in, are anything but simple) and neighboring states largely agree on the strategy, if not tactics, of countering it. The latter challenge, China’s growing power and assertiveness, is in both its nature and implications considerably more complex. For over a decade, China-watchers have been debating the implications of Beijing’s rise yet remain as far as ever from consensus. Must China’s power be resolutely balanced, its military capabilities directly countered, if not to invite aggression? Or should the response be more measured so as not to provoke an insecure Chinese leadership and instead focus on the moderating influence of expanded political, economic, and cultural intercourse?

The U.S., while continuing to emphasize political and trade agreements, has launched a major effort—a “strategic pivot” toward Asia—to bolster its considerable military capabilities in the region. China’s growing air and naval forces, and especially the increasing number, range, and accuracy of its missile force, are being countered by multiple means: improved weapons systems, increased cooperation and training with regional allies, and new or expanded regional deployments and basing. To see why this is so much more complex than the Korean threat—which mainly concerns Northeast Asia—one must consider the geographical complexity of the Western Pacific-Southeast Asia. For it is not only the multifaceted nature of a rising China’s political, economic, and military challenge to the region. It is the geographic complexity of that region itself—the South China Sea and its many surrounding states, their conflicting territorial claims, its resource wealth, and its critical importance to not only Asian but global commerce.

In American (and Philippine, Vietnamese, Malaysian, et al.) eyes, the crux of the problem is China’s claim to “undisputed sovereignty” over nearly the entire South China Sea basin—including the Spratly and Paracel Islands, as well as the waters above perhaps 200 billion barrels of oil and 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. But that sovereignty is in fact vigorously disputed, which has led to some serious military clashes (especially with Vietnam) as well as multiple smaller confrontations (collisions at sea, threats to oil prospecting vessels, seizure of commercial shipping, etc.) with the Philippines, Indonesia, and others. What no one disputes is the South China Sea’s vital economic importance. Across its waters and through narrow passages such as the Straits of Malacca annually pass fully half of the world’s merchant tonnage, some $ 5 trillion in goods. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China rely on tankers traversing the Sea for between 60 and 80 percent of their energy imports.

From Beijing’s perspective, their claim to the lion’s share of the South China Sea is historically justified and in any case “outside powers” such as the U.S. have no place interfering in disputes that they prefer to settle bilaterally. But the smaller regional states cannot stand up to Beijing’s power alone, which is why they have turned to the U.S. for support, worried about unchecked Chinese “bullying” as Washington’s focus for the past decade has been on distant conflicts in the Middle East. Hence the “strategic pivot” or return to the U.S.’ post-WWII role as guarantor of regional security which—to Chinese eyes—looks like renewed “neo-imperial” meddling in what they consider “their” sea, much as the U.S. has traditionally regarded the Caribbean as “its” sea. Indeed, given its strategic importance, resource wealth, and political and environmental fragility, the South China Sea combines the most volatile aspects of the Caribbean and Caspian Seas.

To keep the sea-lanes open, check China’s advance, and preserve its own influence, the U.S. is expanding its already considerable presence and ”power projection” capabilities in the Western Pacific. Large contingents of troops in Japan (30,000) and South Korea (28,000) will be buttressed by new facilities such as a naval base in Darwin, Australia, that will add another 2,500 U.S. marines to the nearly 22,000 already stationed in the Pacific (including Hawaii). The U.S. Navy, adding the new and unproven Littoral Combat Ships to their fleet of submarines, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, will now find new (or expanded) welcome in the harbors of Singapore and the Philippines. And the U.S. Air Force’s increasing numbers of regionally based fighter, bomber, and surveillance planes are joined by new Navy aircraft such as the anti-submarine warfare Poseidon P8-A and a naval version of the Global Hawk drone.

Figure 1: Geography demonstrates why the American Territory of Guam is the U.S.’ tip of the spear in the Western Pacific. Source Guam Military Buildup Draft EIS.

Part of the concern driving this buildup is China’s increasingly capable navy, now numbering 65 frigates, 62 submarines, 13 destroyers, with a modern aircraft carrier under construction. The Chinese air force has grown apace, but perhaps most worrisome are the increasing numbers and sophistication of Beijing’s missile arsenal. Taiwan has long been concerned about the hundreds of Chinese missiles aimed in their direction, mostly variants of the inaccurate (but deadly) Soviet-era SCUD. But newer missiles such as the Dong Feng 16 (DF-16) feature increased accuracy and range, while the DF-21 poses a new threat conveyed in the sobriquet awarded it by the U.S. Navy—the “aircraft carrier killer.” Combined with the launch of many new low earth-orbit surveillance and targeting satellites, China’s long-range anti-ship and anti-ground missile capabilities now challenge U.S. superiority in the air and at sea. For the first time since WWII, America’s ability to control the skies unhindered and project power rapidly will be at issue with these growing threats to air-base and carrier-group survivability.

It is against this background that Guam figures so prominently. The U.S. Navy secured Guam as a territory of the United States in June 1898, when an arriving warship brought the news to the Spanish Governor of both the outbreak of the Spanish-American war and his instantaneous if bloodless defeat. Over the next four decades the Navy continually made plans to transform Guam into a key base in the western Pacific, but funding from Congress proved elusive. In the run up to Japanese aggression against the United States, the Navy agonized over the vulnerability of marines and sailors on Guam but made few actual preparations. In the hours following Pearl Harbor vastly superior Imperial Japanese forces on Saipan (the Northern Marianas Islands having been sold to Germany by Spain in 1899 and then seized by Japan at the outbreak of WWI) rapidly conquered Guam.

Figure 2: Areas of current or potential military installations on Guam. Source Guam Military Buildup Draft EIS.

Two-and-a-half years of brutal occupation followed until U.S. forces blasted their way back onto Guam and the northern Marianas as well. Guam, Saipan, and Tinian became the airbases for the mass B-29 strikes on the Japanese mainland as well as two atomic bomb missions. WWII was won, Guam was devastated then rebuilt, and the U.S. belatedly granted the native Chamorros of Guam citizenship in 1950. The Northern Marianas eventually become a U.S. Commonwealth with their own constitution, but Guam persists, in the words of the United Nations, as a “non-decolonized territory”, along with two other U.S. territories (American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands), the Falkland Islands, Pitcairn Island, Gibraltar, and seven or eight other vestiges of the age of empires.

The strategic value of Guam has always included prominently one of the finest deep-water ports in the Western Pacific. The Navy substantially improved Apra Harbor around the end of WWII, and it is already the base for forward deployment of three Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarines, a submarine tender, various naval air units and substantial munitions and communications assets. The value of Guam for advanced deployment of attack submarines was laid out in a 2003 Congressional Budget Office Report. Because of the past boom-bust cycle of commissionings, attack submarines built in the 1980s and 1990s are facing retirement over the next decade, and completions of their Virginia-class replacements, beginning in 2003, are not keeping up with need. Since a typical deployment is few months, patrol time in the South China Sea or off of Korea is severely diminished by transiting from San Diego or even Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, the reactors of the newer class are designed for the expected total lifetime of the vessel, and burning through the reactor on transiting versus patrol is inefficient use of very expensive assets. Forward deployment of additional submarines to Guam would seem to be inevitable.

Figure 3: Advanced-deployed Los Angeles class attack submarine leaving Apra Harbor, Guam for patrol in the Western Pacific. (Photo by David Ginsburg)

Similar logic argues for advanced deployment of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, all of which are also nuclear powered. For sometime the Navy has operated one carrier out of Yokohama Japan, and has additionally experimented with transient berthing of a second carrier at a munitions wharf in the outer part of Apra Harbor. In what could be a transition to a second advanced-deployed carrier in the Western Pacific, the Navy wants to dredge 71 acres of coral reef nearer the inner harbor to more favorably support berthing a carrier on Guam on a part-time basis without interference with munitions ships. It is possible that other near-by reefs such as Western Shoals might be damaged by sediment or debris from the proposed dredging operation.

Furthermore, DoD is looking to Guam to solve a long-standing diplomatic problem with Japan. U.S. forces occupied Okinawa in the closing months of WWII and have never left. Several PR disasters including rapes of children by US Marines coupled with sensitivity over land use and a never-ending foreign military presence require at least some U.S. forces be moved out of Okinawa and perhaps a base closure. Already some Marines are to be transferred to Australia, but a controversial plan to relocate many of them to Guam seems to be going forward but with only about 5,000 uniformed personnel, just over half the original plan.

Figure 4: Detail of proposed coral reef dredging for aircraft berthing in Apra Harbor. Source: Guam Military Buildup Draft EIS.

The value of 5,000 Marines and an increased naval presence on Guam as preparation for or deterrence against a full-scale, intense land war in Asia should be measured against the magnitude of the assumed threat. Three scenarios come to mind as examples: a second Korean war, a military conquest (forced reunification) of Taiwan by China, and resource competition in the South China Sea resulting in military conflict between a number of nations, including China. Our best model for such a conflict is the 1950-1953 Korean War (which technically never ended as it was resolved by an Armistice but not a Peace Treaty). Ultimately the U.S., South Korea and allied nations committed nearly one million combatants; North Korea committed a quarter million, and China nearly one million (the Soviet Union also provided aircraft and pilots for combat missions). U.S. and allied forces attained air superiority if not air supremacy after a few months, and neither North Korea nor China had nuclear weapons or much in the way of a navy, yet the U.S. alone suffered 130,000 killed, wounded or missing. An intense conflict in the Western Pacific a decade or two from now would feature a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy with entirely competent blue water and littoral capabilities, with air support from both carriers and airfields on their own shores. If U.S. ground troops became engaged in combat on the Asian mainland they would potentially face the largest standing army in the world.

Thus, while we agree that Guam is indeed the tip of the spear, the only U.S. soil suitable for a military base in the Western Pacific, the addition of a few thousand Marines, a few submarines and eventually one aircraft carrier is grossly inadequate to the threats that are invoked to justify the buildup in the first place. In that case, the environmental, social, cultural and simply economic costs of the buildup, which might look acceptable on the basis of geography alone (e.g., Figure 1) should be re-evaluated if the magnitude of the buildup is not likely to contribute to any of the putative strategic outcomes. One document that should be of enormous value to lawmakers as well as policy experts is the DoD Master Plan for the Pacific realignment of forces. This document is long overdue and DoD foot-dragging on its release has cost support in the U.S. Senate. DoD is apparently seeking an independent study of U.S. security interests, force posture and deployment plans in East Asia and the Pacific. Release of the Master Plan and as well as a comprehensive and independent review of military planning in the region is urgently needed to protect U.S. strategic interests and provide for an accurate balancing of strategic interests with economic, social and environmental costs.

Traditional security thinking largely neglects the latter. Even as some academic and policy experts have come to embrace non-traditional approaches—e.g., human security, economic or environmental security—governments still overwhelmingly emphasize military security. It’s time that we understood how closely these various approaches, and their respective concerns, are connected. Consider Chinese incursions into the waters claimed by neighboring states, sometimes by military ships but as often oil-exploration or fishing vessels. China is basically serving notice, asserting an offensive territorial claim to the entire China Sea basin—right? Well, consider the defensive argument of the RAND Corporation’s Scott Harold: “Fishing stocks in [China’s] coastal waters have been depleted, which is why you’re seeing Chinese fishermen ranging farther afield into waters claimed by South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.” As China struggles to feed some 1.3 billion mouths, the nearby waters of the East China Sea have been severely depleted and even more severely degraded by a variety of pollutants: inorganic nitrogen and phosphates, oil hydrocarbons, sewage and other organic matter, and heavy metals — in short, the usual agricultural and industrial wastes.

To a considerable extent, then, China’s military-territorial assertion is also motivated by economic necessity born of environmental degradation, which in turn provokes a military response in locales as distant as Guam that are themselves threatened by environmental degradation as a consequence. What better illustration could there be of the growing interdependence among military, economic, and environmental security? Until this interdependence is taken seriously by policy-makers on all sides, the old strategic instability caused by action-reaction arms racing will only be compounded by new economic and environmental instability of perhaps even graver long-term consequence.

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About the Authors:

Photo of authors Rob English (right) and Jim Haw by Lisa Collins.

Robert English is Deputy Director of the School of International Relations at Dornsife College, University of Southern California. Educated at Berkeley and Princeton, he is a specialist in Russian politics and post-Soviet international relations. He previously taught at Johns Hopkins University (School of Advanced International Studies) and also worked as a policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1982-1986) and the Committee for National Security (1986-1987).

Jim Haw is Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Dornsife College, University of Southern California and Irani Professor of Chemistry. He is co-instructor of the Guam and Palau Program, which for the third consecutive year will be taking a group of scientific diving students to Micronesia to study a complex set of problems including the interplay between a military build-up and ecosystem management.

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Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Crown-of-Thorns Outbreaks and Anthropogenic Pollution

Jim Haw — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:38:23 +0000

by Max Martinez

Coral reefs across the Indo-Pacific Ocean attract thousands of scuba divers from around the globe on an annual basis. However many of these highly diverse and biologically rich ecosystems are at a risk by a seemingly unlikely predator – the crown-of-thorns sea star Acanthaster planci, which makes a living by consuming the polyps of stony corals. Unlike its distant cousin the sun star Pycnopodia helianthoides (commonly found in the waters off Southern California), the surface of A. planci is covered in venomous thorn-like spines, which serve as an effective defense against potential predators (humans included!).

CAPTION: Crown-of-thorns sea star moving across coral rubble in the Ngederrak Marine Conservation Area, Koror State, Palau. (Photo by Jim Haw; May 2011)

Under normal conditions, A. planci can help to improve coral reef biodiversity by eating a variety of fast-growing species of corals, giving the slower-growing ones an opportunity to reach full maturity. However an entire horde of these creatures has ability to devour several acres of reef in a single sitting (Birkeland & Lucas 1990).

Across the Pacific, recent studies suggest that select populations of crown-of-thorns are increasing at an alarming rate (Brodie et al. 2004). For example, more than one thousand A. planci have been found living on a discrete patch of reef at a single time (Keesing & Lucas 1992, Guam DAWR). Considering an individual can eat up to six square meters of living corals per year (Burdick et al. 2008), the potential threat that population outbreaks of crown-of-thorns impose on coral ecosystems is cause for concern.

Although the definitive cause of crown-of-thorns outbreaks is not fully understood there is little debate that blooms of A. planci have increased in both frequency and severity over the last several decades. One of the primary culprits of these outbreaks is attributed to the increasing problem of terrestrial runoff, which includes a concoction of nutrients, sediments, and pollutants that are regularly swept into coastal waters (Fabricius 2005).

Concomitantly, other factors believed to impact crown-of-thorns outbreaks include the removal of their natural predators, which in effect, has allowed them to feed on corals with impunity. On Guam, the most severe outbreaks are believed to arrive in the wake of severe storms such as heavy rains and typhoons (especially those following drought conditions) (Birkekand 1982). With more than 80% of the Guamanian population living along the island’s coastal zone (Burdick et al. 2008) the possibility that anthropogenic pollution can aggravate outbreaks must be addressed.

CAPTION: USC Student holding a Triton's trumpet snail on Guam during the 2010 expedition. (Photo by Jennah Caster)

The two main predators of the crown-of-thorns on Guam’s reefs are the Triton’s trumpet snail (Charonia variegata) and the napoleon wrasse (Chelinus undulatus), both of which are heavily involved in marine trade despite being recognized as species in need of conservation and/or protection (Guam DAWR). “Curiosity kills the wrasse,” or so they say, as this large, slow-swimming fish is known to directly approach divers underwater, making it an easy dinner. The Triton’s trumpet shell is a highly prized commodity amongst the international shell trade – in some cases, fetching prices upwards of $150.

Overall, crown-of-thorns outbreaks are a major threat to the health of coral reef ecosystems and according to research done at the University of Guam Marine Lab, these population booms “have had, and are continuing to have, a severe impact on many Guam’s reefs” (Burdick et al. 2008, Guam DAWR). Urban runoff and overfishing also have the potential to destroy Guam’s reefs, especially considering that little of the island’s terrestrial and marine areas are protected by local and Federal law.

Works Cited:

Birkeland, CE (1982) Marine Biology 69:175

Birkeland, CE, Lucas JS (1990) CRC Press, Boca Raton, 257

Brodie, J et al. (2004) Marine Pollution Bulletin 51:9

Burdick, D et al. (2008) NOAA Technical Report

Brodie, J et al. (2004) Marine Pollution Bulletin 51:9

Burdick, D et al. (2008) NOAA Technical Report

Faabricius, KE (2005) Marine Pollution Bulletin 50:125

Guam DAWR: http://www.guamdawr.org/

Keesing J, Lucas JS (1992) Journal Experimental Marine Biology Ecology 156:89

About the author:

Photo of author by Jim Haw

Max Martinez is a senior in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and will graduate this May with a BS in Environmental Studies. Max has a strong interest in marine science and looks forward to pursuing a graduate degree in resource management and conservation.

—

Previously in this series:

SnowSTAR-2012: Convergence

Matthew Sturm — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:01:39 +0000

Sometimes in science everything just comes together, but not often. This time it did. What could have gone wrong in the campaign? Lots. The two biggest possibilities were that the weather could have been bad (Fig. 1) during the five-day window when the airplane was with us, grounding the plane and making it impossible to obtain the crucial airborne LiDAR data. Or a big snowstorm could have occurred between when we made thousands of hard-won ground-based measurements and when the airborne measurements were made, making the ground measurements null and void. Either would have been enough to sink the project.

Other bad things that didn’t happen: serious equipment malfunctions, frostbite, incidents while trailering and un-trailering heavy snowmobiles, and accidents on the narrow and icy Dalton Highway, a dirt road mainly driven by semi-trucks in a big hurry to get to Prudhoe Bay, or back home to Fairbanks. Cracked windshields from flying rocks on all four of our trucks testify to the rugged nature of this road (see also Season 3 of Ice Road Truckers).

Figure 1: This is what bad weather looks like on the North Slope of Alaska. Three snowmobiles can barely be seen in the middle distance through the ground blizzard, but we had nothing like this during the campaign, thankfully.

First the numbers: The 16 of us took more than a 100,000 ground-based snow depths spread across a 200-km swath of Northern Alaska, dug 20 detailed snow pits, obtained 286 snow cores that were weighed for snow water equivalent (ave. density was 283 kg/m3), produced 19 ground-based LiDAR maps, and collected more than a hundred square kilometers of airborne LiDAR mapping in a swath about 200-m wide (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Maps showing where data were collected.

If all goes well as we begin to crunch the data we will find that when we subtract the summer LiDAR surfaces (which we will measure in June) from the winter snow-covered surfaces, we will produce maps of snow depth that compare well with the depth measurements we made on the ground. Using the snow cores, we will then develop a simple regression equation that will let us convert these snow depths into snow water equivalents, and when all is done, we will have maps of snow pack across the study region.

The challenging part is that the snow cover in this Arctic region is thin….ranging from a few to about 150 centimeters. . .so the signal-to-noise ratio for the airborne LiDAR must be kept as high as possible. The noise in the airborne LiDAR measurements is on the order of tens of centimeters, but by using the road surface and other fixed targets like metal sheds (Fig. 3), concrete structures, and the Alaska Pipeline (also Fig. 3), we believe we can reduce this noise, giving us extremely useful results.

Figure 3: A fixed green metal shed near the Trans-Alaska pipeline (lower edge of photo), one of the ad hoc control points for the airborne LiDAR.

What will it mean if all the analysis proves successful? I would like to think that using our results we might be able to convince oil companies, State and Federal regulators, agencies, wildlife biologists, and hydrologists to collaborate in developing an operational program that uses LiDAR technology to better map and assess the North Slope snow cover year after year. This could produce both management-useful maps and a climate record of snow cover that will allow us to understand how climate change is altering winter precipitation, as well as the patterns of that change.

Of course, there were many intangible results too, these more personal than scientific. The first was the spell the Arctic cast over all of the team, veterans and newcomers alike. The sky, the aurora, the Brooks Range looming to the south day after day (Fig. 4), the animals (see previous posts), and of course the endless fascinating snow cover (Fig. 5). All of these wove a spell that captured all of us.

Figure 4: The Brooks Range at twilight.

Figure 5: Frost feathers against a background of surface hoar.

The second was the camaraderie of our group. The cold and hard work made for big appetites and lots of good-natured barracks-room humor. We introduced Sveta, our Russian colleague, to the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (remember Natasha and Boris?), competed for the highest ‘N’ (number of measurements) each day, and taught two novices to drive snowmobiles, a learning process that never fails to delight all involved. Kelly and I got to compare notes on the snow crystals found in an Arctic snow pack as opposed to one in Colorado, where he normally works, and Mark S. got recharged for another year of running the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, where he is the director. Perhaps Allison, the newest member of our team, started a scientific relationship with snow that will influence what she does on her Ph.D. thesis. For myself, in my 28th year of working in this area, and my 39th year in the Arctic, I have to say it still feels special to work in the North, and it is still a privilege to get to do this sort of work with such fine companions (Fig. 6).

Figure 6: The SnowSTAR-2012 team.

Till next year, when perhaps there will be some notes from SnowSTAR-2013…

Previously in this series:

Alaskan North Slope Snow LiDAR Campaign: SnowSTAR-2012
SnowSTAR-2012: Hoars and Drifters
SnowSTAR-2012: Questionable Monuments and Widespread Cratering
SnowSTAR-2012: Big “N” – The pursuit of snow data and high honor

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: My Walden South of Los Angeles

Jim Haw — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:40:50 +0000

by Laura Walsh

Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau sparked a cultural movement with a paradox; an introspective, self-preoccupied book that taught the lessons of humility and human triviality. Naturally, Walden became more recognizable as the reading requirement of so many high school students, the main domain of traffic for Sparknotes.com, and a has-been phenomenon preaching the distant messages of a less indifferent time.

I was one of twenty who resentfully scanned the book during midterm season at USC. 400 pages. Five other classes. Didn’t my professor know I had work to do and sleep to sleep? I would read the thing, but I’d do it in the span of a few-too-early mornings over a large coffee and something sugary. And I wouldn’t be happy about it. As I flipped through the pages, I was humored by the language but distracted by the sunlight, and it wasn’t until I came across the chapter on ‘Economy’ that I was really paying attention.

“If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences,”

wrote Thoreau,

“I would not pursue the common course… to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made”

I glanced down at my packaged croissant.

“or mechanics and not learned how it is earned;”

I tapped my fingers on my $4.25 Starbucks macchiato: surely going for the recyclable cup and waking up early qualified as ‘earning.’

“to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes—”

I actually had to put the book down. Here I was, literally with sleep in my eyes, trying to inhale a book about slowing down and digesting so that I could regurgitate the message’s bones on a piece of paper.

“…to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.”

Okay, phew. Clearly I was off the hook as a female.

I read on, and finished the book. In time for the test, even, which I did well on, strictly speaking. I told my teacher he had a taste for irony, and he laughed. I went home after a long week, switched off the fluorescents, and crawled into bed.

A view from above the USC Dornsife Wrigley Marine Science Center looking north in direction of Los Angeles evokes the pastoral spirit of Walden Pond. (Photo by Jim Haw)

When I woke up, I was hit head on by a combination most college students leave behind sometime in between registering for twenty something units of classes, sprinting to band/track/intramural practice, printing out hundreds of pamphlets for the environmental movement/political debate/global cause of this week’s revolution, finding a functional printer to promote/denounce said revolution, and trying to stay sane.

What I had that week after midterms was a strange calm of time and determination. I needed to accomplish something meaningful; something that gave me a reason for knowing and a story to tell.

I told my roommates I was going to build a cabin in the woods, they said they’d believe me when they saw it. I told my dad I was finding myself outside of college — he told me I was disowned. I was idle, and all was total entropy.

Luckily, my brief romance with transcendentalism met headfirst with a class that I had signed up for during the prior semester. ENST 298, Integrated Ecosystem Management in Micronesia was sending me along with 25 other USC undergraduates to Guam and Palau to conduct research in the summer. In preparation for soaking in the warm waters of the tropical Pacific, our instructors corralled us into Big Fisherman’s Cove on Catalina Island for a swimming proficiency test in 55 °F water — without a wetsuit. It was so cold. I spent the longest twelve minutes of my life distracting myself from the cold by intellectualizing hypothermia. But it was the 13th minute that had me. I failed the test.

I willed every fiber in my body to go faster, but my limbs just dragged. When I finally clawed up the stairs to the dock, I was in shock for more reasons than one. Not only did I fail the swim test. I tried and failed. In my hundreds of experiences being monitored by a tired looking proctor and an oversized clock, I had never met with such numbing (literally) disappointment. I couldn’t sleep. I went to sleep that night absolutely dreading a physical challenge for the first time since sixth-grade dodge ball.

But for the second time in the academic semester, I finished something I didn’t want to. I must have been pushed into the water at 7:00 a.m. the next morning, but somehow I finished the test regardless. I collapsed on land tired, shivering, and delirious, but surrounded by a completely new sense of accomplishment.

I became a certified recreational diver a month later. I did something very few people get the chance to do, and even less take advantage of when it is offered. I had finished a test that challenged me in a completely new way, but for the first time in a long time, I was rewarded with a real sense of purpose. For passing, I get to learn scientific diving in Micronesia this spring, and research the natural and social environments. I will help advance larger projects, and hopefully help preserve one of the last great regions of biodiversity on the planet.

The lessons don’t end there. Stealing away from the classroom and diving head first into the ocean will forever be a part of me, not just when I am allowed to dive beneath the world’s waters, but when I encounter new and changing obstacles. Learning that opportunity really does lie in the middle of difficulty, as Albert Einstein would have it, has been the difference between having dreams and building them.

Surely this revelation would seem a little ambitious, for the college student who nearly cried after taking a swim at Catalina Island. So here, I turn to Thoreau, who never found it excessive to prescribe imagination to any life when he wrote:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Getting academic credit from USC Dornsife is just the icing on the cake.

Author photo by Jim Haw.

About the Author: Laura Walsh is an undergraduate student at the University of Southern California. She is a double major in political science and environmental studies, and hopes to pursue a career in environmental lobbying and campaigning.

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Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Why Experiential Learning is Vital to Academic Life

Jim Haw — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:57:20 +0000

By Kali Staniec

You can’t always tell from photos, but Garibaldi can give a mean staring contest. I have seen pictures of this famously highlighter-orange California State fish in countless books and brochures on Southern California marine life, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized how much more there is to this fish than meets the eye. The same goes for an appreciation of their entire native ecosystem; and, I would argue, the world.

A garibaldi (Hypsypops rubicundus) stares down the camera lens. California's state marine fish is found in shallow waters off the Southern California coast and Mexico. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Growing up in Los Angeles, I spent my fair share of time snorkeling throughout the California’s Channel Islands. It wasn’t until last summer, however, when I had the chance to become a recreational SCUBA diver, that I fell in love with the new perspective afforded by being underwater. I never dreamed what a valuable tool scientific diving would be in my academic career before I joined the USC Dornsife Guam and Palau Maymester offered by the Environmental Studies Program.

It seemed unreasonably lucky that I would be able to dive for college credit, but in reality it makes perfects sense. No matter how many lectures students attend on marine biology, they will never fully appreciate the scope of underwater environments until they have the chance to see and swim with them, an immersive experience if you will. This notion – that first hand contact is the best way for people to gain a life-changing understanding of the natural world – is one of the cornerstones of experiential learning.

Incorporating hands-on education, independent decision making, and personal reflection after handling new challenges, experiential learning brings students outside the classroom, away from the filter of computer screens, text books, and text messaging, to participate in real life scenarios (in this case, science diving off of Catalina Island).

USC Guam and Palau students and instructors return from a dive in the Blue Cavern State Marine Reserve off of Catalina Island. Photo by Anna Eliza Pastor.

While participating in these projects students have to adapt on-the-spot to real problems while being able to apply background information. For example, how do you count schools of quickly moving fish or cryptic invertebrates along a transect line?

The Environmental Studies Guam and Palau Maymester provides students the guidance, tools and information necessary to feel comfortable with a topic, but also allows them to make their own decisions and form their own opinions about how to best apply that knowledge.

At a university with multiple missions and priorities, the time and funding spent planning and executing experiential learning projects might seem excessive, especially with some academic institutions feeling the squeeze of difficult economic times.

The truth of the matter is that these programs are irreplaceable in bridging the gap between successful liberal arts undergrads and confident individuals who have the competence to successfully apply their education to careers. But perhaps just as importantly, experiential learning is fun: and any program that sparks passion in students, inspiring them to leave a positive mark on the world, is an endeavor well worth pursuing.

When I’m hovering above the ocean floor, watching sunlight stream through 40 foot tall columns of swaying kelp, I wonder how many students actually get the opportunity to be “in their element”, to come eye-to-eye with the subject of their studies. After experiences like these it’s encouraging to see how the knowledge I already posses relates to the real world, but sobering to realize just how much I still have yet to learn.

My immersion in the environments of Catalina and Micronesia will attach new meaning to the many pages I will write, the long hours I will spend in the library, and the cups of coffee I will drink by the time I graduate. This experience has already encouraged me to forever maintain a curiosity for learning, by giving me the gift of seeing the world and my place in it – things I thought I understood well – as if for the first time.

Author photo by Emily Lu

About the author:

Kali Staniec is a sophomore in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences working towards a degree in Anthropology with a minor in Environmental Studies. By participating in the Guam and Palau course she hopes to gain new perspectives on the ways different cultures interact with the natural world.

—

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Why USC Dornsife was the Right Decision For Me

Jim Haw — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:27:25 +0000

By Dawnielle Tellez

Along the rocks of Big Fisherman’s Cove off Catalina Island, I wove in and out of the towering kelp beds as curious Sheephead and Garibaldi edged ever closer to me. It was my first dive as a certified NAUI Open Water Diver, on the pathway to scientific diver, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment and pride as I explored the near-shore ocean.

California Sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) swimming amongst giant kelp off Catalina Island. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Adventuring slightly deeper than I ever had before, I gazed up through 40 feet of seawater to the surface. It was then I realized how fortunate I was to be at that exact time and place. If not for USC David and Dana Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, it never would have happened.

This time last year I didn’t know that I would be attending USC for the 2011-2012 academic year. I was a freshman Biology major at another private university in California, where I felt lost as a lone marine biology student in a mob of pre-med hopefuls in my classes. I applied to USC as an Environmental Studies major with a concentration in Oceans, Life, and People so that I could actually enjoy my classes as an undergraduate while having an educational experience more tailored to my interests.

The coral reefs of Ngederrak in the Republic of Palau are home to a great many fish species. (Photo by Jim Haw)

During the Fall Semester, on my first day of classes at USC, I heard about the ENST 480 Maymester course: Integrated Ecosystem Management in Micronesia. Immediately, I knew that not only did I have to do everything possible to take the course, but also that I had made the right choice in transferring to USC.

Thus far, the joint courses, ENST 298 Scientific Diving and ENST 480 Integrated Ecosystem Management in Micronesia, have proven to be much more than average academic classes. On paper, these courses make up six-units of my semester, but in reality they have affected greater aspects of my life in many ways.

For instance, this course provides the opportunity for undergraduates to conduct research that will contribute to the application of Palauan waters (in Koror State) to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which would make it an internationally recognized marine protected area. With only authorized resource managers and scientists allowed in the marine sanctuary, we are incredibly fortunate to have access to the area where we will be conducting environmental measurements of ecosystem health by identifying key invertebrate and fish indicator species.

One of our Micronesian sea cucumber indicator species lies conveniently close to the transect tape on 2011 survey of Ngederrak Reef. (Photo by Jim Haw)

On a more personal note, this course will allow me to delve into aspects of my life outside of the academic realm. As I am half Filipino, I look forward to visiting Guam and Palau due to the affinities of their cultures to my own. I have not yet traveled to the Philippines, so this course will provide me with my first exposure to Asian-Pacific island culture.

Additionally, this course has deepened my ties to the USC community overall. Coming in as a sophomore transfer student, I felt disadvantaged because I missed making connections within the school community during my freshman year. However, upon meeting the other 24 students in this course, I knew I will always have friends to rely upon at USC.

USC students back-rolling off the dock into the waters of Big Fisherman Cove in March 2012. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Over the three weekends we have spent together on Catalina Island and during our class lectures, we have forged friendships while diving, hiking, and learning together. My Guam and Palau Maymester peers are not just potential dive buddies or study group partners for our other ENST classes, but are a part of my college family.

I have been challenged personally, physically, and academically in ways that I never imagined a college course could accomplish. Specifically, it has allowed me to fulfill my goal of becoming a science diver while also propelling me towards furthering a career in the marine sciences. The discipline of scientific diving has strengthened my personal character, confidence, and tenacity. As much as I enjoyed my freshman year at another school, I made the right decision in transferring to USC. I cannot imagine another university providing me with the type of well-rounded education that has fostered such academic, intellectual, and personal development.

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Author photo by Jim Haw.

About the Author:

Dawnielle Tellez is a sophomore Environmental Studies major in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Dawnielle has a strong interest in marine science and looks forward to pursing a career in veterinary medicine with a specialty in marine mammal care.

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Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: The Devaluation of Ecosystem Services

Jim Haw — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:23:14 +0000

By Stephen Holle

The United States Territory of Guam is the focal point of a military realignment strategy within the western Pacific Ocean. However, the plan has a number of shortcomings in relation to its environmental impacts, which could seriously threaten the health of certain biomes in the region, especially coral reefs.

Image of proposed berthing sites. Image from U.S. Department of Defense Environmental Impact Statement "Guam and CMNI Military Relocation," July 2010.

What is not considered in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Guam is the true value of ecosystem services, such as the ability of coral reefs to support marine biodiversity and provide a basis for tourism revenue in this region.

A report conducted by The World Resources Institute suggests that healthy reef ecosystems worldwide provide 797.4 billion dollars in net present value, 9 billion of which is from tourism alone. Since coral reefs occupy less than 2% of the ocean’s surface, these resources need to be preserved wherever possible (Cesar 2007).

Situated on the western shore of Guam adjacent to an already heavily developed area, Apra Harbor will face further impaction through proposed developments. The Department of Defense (DOD) outlines these impacts as “shore-side improvements creating a new capability in Apra Harbor, Guam, to support a transient nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (DEIS).”

Elephant Ear Sponge - Ianthella basta – on Western Shoals Reef. In Guam this sponge is restricted to Apra Harbor. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Currently, the DEIS proposes three methods of berthing a nuclear aircraft carrier. The first two alternatives are the most impactful measures and would require the dredging and removal of sixty acres of coral within the harbor. In order to justify this sort of development, the DOD contracted out species surveys of the Apra Harbor reefs to evaluate the diversity of the region.

However, when Brent Tibbatts (biologist at the local Aquatics and Wildlife Agency) and his colleagues repeated the surveys, they found that there were nearly 100% more coral species than originally projected. According to Brent, “the original surveys highly underestimated the diversity of the area in relation to coral, fish, invertebrates, and other natural resources and appraisals done in relation to the economic value of the area in 2007 highly undervalued the region’s natural resources.” Brent also suggested that it is known that some of the species of corals are endemic to Apra Harbor and are found nowhere else on Guam (Tibbatts 2012).

USC Students surveying Western Shoals Guam Reef in Apra Harbor in 2011. (Photo by Jim Haw)

While environmental resources such as healthy coral reefs in Apra Harbor provide one of the bases for revenue in the region (tourism), this factor is not taken into consideration in the DEIS. In the past the income stream for Guam was primarily based on Federal and military investments (75%) but, as of 2003 that number has dropped to 30% and tourism now contributes over 60% of the revenue on Guam, or approximately 1.35 billion dollars per year.

One of the bases for tourism revenue is from activities that directly involve Apra Harbor. It has unique dive sites found nowhere else on the island and if a nuclear aircraft carrier were berthed in the harbor certain dive sites would not be accessible for an additional 40 days out of the year due to security concerns.

Yet while the United States military sees an imminent need to develop Apra Harbor, it is fair to suggest that people visiting Guam are not there to see the latest in missile defense systems, nuclear aircraft carriers, and the newest trends in military technology. People go to Guam for pristine reefs, tropical ecosystems, and to explore the wonderful diversity of the ocean (Invest Guam 2012, Tibbatts 2012).

Sources Cited

Cesar, Herman, Lauretta Burke, and Lida Pet-Soede. “The Economics of Worldwide Coral Reef Degradation.” Cesar Environmental Economics Consulting (2003): 1-24. Online.

Invest Guam: Business Resources, 2012. Web. 3 April. 2012.

Tibbatts, Brent. Personal Interview. 3 April. 2012.

The author exiting the ocean at the USC Dornsife Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Thank you Sarawak

Wayne Maddison — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:51:44 +0000

In our last few days in Borneo, Edy and I gave a public lecture at the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre, a research institute that specializes on bioprospecting potential pharmaceuticals from forest plants and other organisms, using both traditional knowledge and high-tech testing methods. It’s an impressive facility from a scientific perspective. I was so pleased to have the opportunity to tell the public directly about what we found. If I have any regret about this trip, it’s not finding more opportunities to tell the people of Sarawak about the great spiders they have. Well, the Internet and lots of photos will eventually solve that.

It’s time to say our thank-you’s for the expedition, and sign off. The Sarawak Forestry Department and the staff at Gunung Mulu, Lambir Hills, Kubah, and Bako National Parks offered their collaboration through permits and logistics, which made the entire expedition possible. The infrastructure available to us at our field sites was excellent. At Mulu, where we concentrated our sampling, our work was made considerably easier by the assistance offered us by Brian Clark, Jeremy Clark, and the other park staff. Andyson Laman was a great guide on our Camp 1 foray. Our work was made more fun by our chats with Syria Lejau Malang and Magdalena Sorger, though with the latter I will have to disagree about the beauty of salticids versus ants. Especially ants that bite.

Ch’ien Lee helped us arrange the expedition in the first place, and introduced us to the Bornean forest. I would like to thank most especially Alex Ang, who took a month off of his normal life in Kuching to accompany us into the forest. Alex made an important contribution to our success. I also can’t forget a big thank you to NSERC Canada, for the funding that enabled this expedition.

Sarawak was good to us in many ways. It was easy to get around, safe, with friendly people. We found professionalism, cleanliness and good organization everywhere.

Finally, and you might have seen this coming, I’d like to thank the spiders. I can’t individually thank all 175 species of jumping spiders that I estimate we found in Sarawak, but I will show you some of their faces. As you look at these, think about my previous post about the music of biodiversity, about variations on a theme. And, remember the eyes. That’s how you know it’s a jumping spider.

Agorius male

Bathippus female

Pystira male

Spartaeus male

Unidentified, possibly Ligurra, female

Myrmarachne male

Hyllus male

Orthrus female

Agorius male

And to you humans out there, thanks for following our expedition. Next time, look back at a jumping spider when she looks up at you.

Previously in this series:

SnowSTAR-2012: Big “N” – The pursuit of snow data and high honor

Matthew Sturm — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:48:07 +0000

By Chris Polashenski and Simon Filhol

It has been a very busy time for us the last few days. After about 8 days of prep work, our aircraft arrived in beautiful weather. Our pilot, Paul, and Dr. Chris Larsen started flying airborne LiDAR immediately, and as will be seen, collecting enormous amounts of data. Meanwhile the rest of us were working feverishly on the ground to collect data against which the airborne LiDAR could be compared.

A schematic of the whole campaign appears in Figure 1. Note the snow scientist labeled ‘E”. He is using a device invented by CRREL called a MagnaProbe, which measures snow depth and a GPS position at the same time (Fig. 2). At peak, we have had 8 of these devices out at once, measuring snow depth in a variety of areas. Nonetheless, despite this herculean effort, the “probers” efforts pale in comparison to those of the LiDARians, as explained by the two young scientists doing the ground-based LiDAR who take up the story now.

Figure 1 – A schematic of the SnowStar 2012 Campaign by Matthew Sturm, compare to the photo in Figure 18 to see how we did!

Figure 2 – Sveta collects snow depth measurements with a Magnaprobe

“N” is a very important concept to scientists here on the SnowStar 2012 campaign. To us, a person’s “N” is a measure of his/her gallantry, the quality of their character, and their general worthiness as a scientist. “N” is the number of data points a person collects in the day and a high “N” is a sure sign of a lion-hearted individual.

The teams measuring snow depths with the automatic snow depth probes (see Fig. 1 and 2) are engaged in a stiff competition to show their mettle with ever higher “N”s each day. The highest reported N in the campaign so far has been about 4000 in a day. One legendary effort, still discussed with awe by snow scientists, resulted in an “N” that approached 11,000 over the course of a very, very long day (and on sea ice so the snow was thin). So far in this campaign no one has come near that figure due to the large field area, the deeper snow, and the long commute to each site.

The ground-based scanning LiDAR collects that awe-inspiring 11,000 points in less than half a second. Hence we (the ground-based LiDAR team) have been averaging between 20 and 30 million points at each site, and we’ve knocked out as many as four sites in a day. In the world of snow measurements, LiDAR is to a snow probe as dynamite and steam drills were to hammers and chisels in the old railroad days. And while we shed a tear for all the John Henrys out there still breaking stones by hand, we have not been shy when bragging about how our LiDAR could handily best the snow prober’s ‘N’ any* day of the week. (*Windy, foggy, or snowy days excepted – see Figure 3).

In all seriousness, Big “N” means that LiDAR holds real promise for revolutionizing our work by making it possible to measure snow with less manpower, more accurately, and over much larger areas, but we still have to work out the kinks in the system. This program is all about just that – figuring out how we can better measure snow and comparing new methods like LiDAR with the old fashioned ways.

Figure 3 – LiDAR fails as the snow flies.

LiDAR (which stands for Light Distance And Ranging) is a technique that uses a laser rangefinder to measure surfaces. Basically, you fire a pulse of laser light at a surface, and with an extraordinarily precise stopwatch, time how long it takes to get back to you. Using the speed of light, we can then use the time-of-flight to calculate the distance that the pulse traveled, divide by two, and have the range to the surface.

If we know exactly what direction the pulse was ‘fired’ at, we can use this range to calculate the location of the snow surface as a specific point in space. By firing the laser over and over again in slightly different directions, it is possible to collect many samples of the snow surface. Putting all of these point measurements together gives the LiDAR’s product: a 3-D map of the snow surface topography.

The 3D surface maps that our LiDAR produces are incredibly high resolution (at least a few hundred points per m2) and super accurate (within about 1 cm) – over areas the size of a couple football fields. Aside from being scientifically useful, these 3D maps are just plain awesome to play with. Check out this video flying around in the 3D world created from scans we took at a site in Fairbanks just before this trip. Also in the screenshot shown in Figure 4 from this campaign, note that small twigs and even the ptarmigan tracks in the snow that have been picked up by the LiDAR.

Figure 4 – A screenshot of LiDAR data collected on this trip, note the snowmobile track and footprints across the bottom of the image, and the ptarmigan tracks wandering around the snow surface.

The LiDAR that we are using is considered a terrestrial or ground-based LiDAR, complicated speak for the type of LiDAR that you use from a tripod sitting on the ground (Figure 5). Because the LiDAR works by hitting the surface with its laser pulses, it can only scan what it can see. Since the LiDAR is positioned about the height of a person’s eyes off the ground, the back side of even small hills within the scan area may be out of sight from the LiDAR’s perspective and therefore missed in the scans.

To fill these in, we set up the LiDAR in different positions around an area of interest, making scans first of one side of hills, then of the other, and overlay the scans to build a full surface. In order to overlay the scans accurately, we put targets out around the site and use the scanner to locate them from each position (Figure 6). The data collected at each site is then rotated and shifted until all the targets line up, allowing us to very precisely tie the scans collected from different viewpoints together into a single surface map.

Figure 5 – Simon operating the ground based LiDAR

Figure 6 – Scanning a reflector target with the LiDAR to overlay the scans. The green dot is the LiDAR laser.

One of the key measures of snow that we are after is simply its depth. The LiDAR does not, however, measure snow depth, just the surface position. To calculate the snow depth, we will have to come back in June after the snowmelt and re-LiDAR the same locations to create a second surface. Subtracting the ground surface from the snow surface will give us a map of the snow depth with a really big “N” and accuracy that is likely as good or better than the snow probes, but only if we can come back to exactly the same spot. Accurate GPS positioning is crucial to this process.

Despite having this new tool, Simon and I have been working some rather long days (Figure 7). This is proof in my mind that scientists aren’t really all that smart after all. Prior to now we had a tool that would take 11,000 points in a day with a lot of hard work. Now we have a device that takes 30,000 points a second, and instead of letting it run for a few seconds and taking the rest of the week off, we still scan all day and well into the night, all in the pursuit of bigger ‘N’.

LiDAR scanning isn’t such bad work though. During the data collection process, there is a period of about 20 minutes at each scan position when the scanner is acquiring data at the speed of light, but there really isn’t a whole lot for us to do except try to stay out of the way and not block the scanner’s view. Some might view this free time on the tundra as little more than a good way to get cold. Instead, it is our favorite part of the process.

Simon notes that “you have to imagine being in middle of this gigantic white landscape with few hills around and an astonishing mountain range in the background, few herds of caribou grazing, ptarmigan flying from bush to bush, a couple of wolves cruising, a lonely musk ox we’ve named Uncle Jacquis Alfred Dalton (for many reasons we will not mention here…) and two young snow scientists, one American and the other French.

In this situation we usually take one of three options: admire the surrounding nature (Figures 9-13) and explore the wonder of our favorite element (snow of course), discuss and argue on all sorts of topics with a preference for cultural contradictions between our respective heritages, and finally let our imaginations create little games or warm up dances (Figure 8). Before you know it, work calls back and we move to a different site position.”

Figure 7 – The sun sets as Simon gets the GPS base station set up to start another site, committing us to another 3-4 hours of work.

Figure 8 – Simon dances through LiDAR downtime.

Figure 9 – Not a bad view from LiDAR site 9.

Figure 10 – A fox looking a bit guilty with a Ptarmigan feather in his mouth visits the LiDARians.

Figure 11 – Uncle Jacquis Alfred Dalton demonstrates the effectiveness of long fur for showing wind direction.

Figure 12 – A pair of wolves investigate the LiDAR team just north of the Brooks Range.

Figure 13 – The Northern Lights are a good reward for working late.

For all of our bravado about the power of our ground-based LiDAR scanner for collecting big N, there is another type of LiDAR out there that makes our results pale in comparison. The Airborne LiDAR! It is the carpet-bomb of all snow measurements, if it can be made to work. An airborne LiDAR unit is flown looking down out of the belly of a plane and runs continuously as the plane flies, collecting 10-100 times as many returns in a day as our best ground-based efforts.

There is a trade-off, however: the airborne LiDAR has a lower accuracy; ~10cm rather than ~1cm. Nonetheless, yesterday the ground LiDAR team’s ‘N’ was humbled by this device in just 4 hours, when the airborne team returned over 300 million points before lunch, to our 65 million all day. Adding to our jealousy, the Airborne team also gets to trade our already pretty awesome snowmobiles for an absolutely amazing 1000hp, turbine-powered single otter plane (Figure 14).

Figure 14 – The airborne team takes to the skies

Figure 15 – Controlling the airborne LiDAR from the cockpit.

Figure 16 – The airborne team passes by the ground team

The struggle for data collection superiority will continue for a few more days, but for now we are all excited to say that good weather and a stellar team is leading to ‘Big N’ for everyone on the trip. Better still, our efforts to coordinate the different teams (Figure 17) have been going quite well. Our goal of collecting a huge dataset of snow measurements over the same areas using a number of different techniques is really coming together (Figure 18). We will have some mighty data processing to do when we get home!

Figure 17 – Coordinating the teams

Figure 18 – The whole campaign coming together.

About the Authors:

Chris Polashenski has been working to better understand snow and ice in the Arctic since 2005. He graduated with his PhD in June 2011 and now works as a researcher at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Laboratory developing new methods to study snow and sea ice. He is a native of Pennsylvania, but currently lives in Hanover, NH with his partner Norah, chickens, rabbits, and a free spirited beagle named Tracks. He can be reached at christopher.m.polashenski@usace.army.mil.

Simon Filhol has previously worked in the Arctic in Norway, Svalbard, and other parts of Alaska. He hails from Chamoix, France and is currently working on a PhD in geology and geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with Matthew Sturm. He can be reached at svfilhol@alaska.edu.

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Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Finding My Career Through This Course

Jim Haw — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:19:23 +0000

By Iñaki Pedroarena-Leal

As a student and developing scholar, I consider my transition from the classroom setting to the real world—as many mentors and peers matter-of-factly call it. One of my majors, Environmental Studies, is figuring in this transition as I accumulate knowledge from course work and research. I am developing my own scientific persona as well as environmental concerns, which blended with my family’s century-long history of agriculture in Baja California, México, motivates me to enter the marine aquaculture industry in Latin America. I intend to take full advantage of this course, as I prepare with my fellow students for our expedition to the coral reefs of Micronesia.

The author preparing for his first NITROX dive in practice for an extended bottom time, allowing for more research (Photo by Iñaki Pedroarena-Leal)

My participation in USC Dornsife’s Environmental Studies Maymester course is teaching me rigorous scientific theory and practice relevant to marine ecosystems such as coral reefs. This is my first experience where the issues I regularly listen, learn, and study about in class are directly applied with an eye toward a real world perspective.

This expedition has become a singular opportunity for research diving, collecting valuable data and proposing ideas that will allow me to be at the forefront of what, as an environmental studies student, I should be concerning myself with—paving a transition to a career with science and empirical application. The time and effort I have invested into my university study is coming to fruition.

USC Guam and Palau SCUBA instructor Tom Carr laying a transect line along a specific compass heading on Santa Catalina Island. This transect will provide the starting point for a student navigation exercise. (Photo by Jim Haw)

What is more significant about this field program is that the class work and data collection will not just simply determine a course grade. These data will form the basis for solutions to problems facing marine environments today. This is a turning of the tides for me as a scholar, as this course allows me to become part of the solution.

The opportunity and privilege to contribute to the scientific community also holds true for my classmates and peers. This course is designed in such a manner that members and staff of the dive team form profound connections that will certainly lead to grander opportunities, motivating me to begin formulating career-related concepts.

Tuna farming industry off the coast of Baja California, México; a portrayal of my professional goal in Latin America. (Photo by La Esquina Azul)

In collaboration with one of my dive team members, Nick Leonard, an entrepreneurial diver in his junior year, we have found a common cause in which we will both construct our professional futures in the aquaculture industry. We are taking skills acquired through this course, such as those demonstrated in the research diver portion, and further developing them as we enter the marine aquaculture industry in the near future.

This course is proving to be instrumental in my professional future. It is allowing me to not only transition from the academic world, but also to begin contributing to significant research that may very well generate answers to questions that can no longer be ignored. Now that I am immersed in a serious environmental problem, I am empowered to be an environmentalist. USC Dornsife’s Environmental Studies Maymester course is providing the tools for us to actualize our professional and entrepreneurial futures.

About the Author: Iñaki Pedroarena-Leal is a current Junior in the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. He is pursuing a double B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies. His family’s agricultural history in Baja California, México, and his deeply rooted passion for the ocean, are both instrumental in his goal of practicing the aquaculture industry in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Time traveller

Wayne Maddison — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:42:47 +0000

How many of us have dreamed of using a time machine to see living dinosaurs in their Mesozoic prime? We are left with only lifeless fossil bones. How wonderful it would be to bring back a living dinosaur, or at least a preserved specimen, or even a photograph, or even the memory of a glaring eye! We can’t of course, because they are long gone, and we don’t have time machines.

In 500 years we will wish we had time machines to come back to 2012. We will look at the early third millennium as the last days of the Garden of Eden, the last days when biodiversity was largely intact. In 500 years, we may very well find ourselves in a post-biodiversity world. Intense rainforests, vibrant deserts, and bustling coral reefs will probably seem as distant to us as big dinosaurs are today.

Some days, I imagine that I am a time traveller, come back from 500 years in the future. I have a few years in which to do my field work before I return. How lucky I am to have been entrusted by my 26th century colleagues with this task, but how frustrating that I will have time to just scratch the surface. So many locations, so many species, will remain unsampled.

Once I am done sampling, I need to send the specimens 500 years into the future. I can’t send them live, but even to send good quality specimens is wonderful for 26th century biologists, for species that would otherwise be known from fossils, or in the case of small spiders, not at all.

What does my time machine look like? Well, I have good news for you. There is a time machine to send specimens 500 years into the future. It’s called a natural history museum. Those who work in natural history museums do indeed think in terms of centuries — they see theirs as an almost sacred task, transcending the fluctuating fashions of the decades. But, I have bad news. It will take 500 years of curatorial salaries to get the specimens to the 26th century. It’s not much compared to the expenditures of space exploration or molecular biology, but science funding agencies normally don’t focus on centuries-long projects. How do you think we’ll feel in 500 years if we fail to preserve specimens of 2012 biodiversity?

Of course, it would be far better to keep habitats intact and biodiversity alive in the wild. But, I’m not counting on our having even half the necessary wisdom. And so, next chance I get, I’ll be lacing up my boots, strapping on my bags, grabbing my beating sheet and stick, and heading down the trail.

Previously in this series:

USC Dornsife Scientific Diving: Moving Forward to Guam and Palau 2012

Jim Haw — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:43:17 +0000

by David Ginsburg and Jim Haw

With this post we launch coverage of the USC Dornsife Environmental Studies 2012 Guam and Palau expedition. This program is challenging to execute from both a logistic and academic perspective. Now in its third year, it is finally beginning to feel like a completed body of work. In 2010 we had 14 very-high-achieving students who did not mind that we (the course instructors) were sometimes planning course activities on less than a day’s notice.

2011 Guam and Palau students pose for the camera on a reef in Guam. (Photo by Jim Haw)

Last year’s class of 24 saw a much more polished product, and those students will recognize that what we are doing this year are largely refinements, but the refinements have made a difference. The Guam and Palau Program currently consists of two linked courses, which account for a total 6-units of academic credit: Environmental Studies (ENST) 298 ‘Introduction to Scientific Diving’ and ENST 480 ‘Integrated Ecosystem Management in Micronesia.’

ENST 298 is a 2-unit class taught during the ‘traditional’ Spring Semester, and is comprised of 1 hour of lecture and 2 hours of lab per week. Lectures are focused primarily on diving physics and physiology but these periods are occasionally preempted by extended laboratory periods or incorporated into weekend excursions to the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island. Four lab periods were held in USC’s indoor pool facility where students practiced and demonstrated basic SCUBA skills prior to their first ocean dives. Several other labs were devoted to first aid training. The American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS) requires that all science divers be certified in basic first aid, CPR, automated external defibrillator (AED), oxygen administration, as well as trained to OSHA standards on the handling of compressed gasses such as Nitrox.

Part of our 2012 class prepares to enter Big Fisherman Cove at Catalina accompanied by instructor Bradley Walker (wearing red hood). (Photo by Jim Haw)

All of this is in preparation for ENST 480, which is offered as a 4-unit Maymester course, meaning that even though the class begins immediately after commencement it is part of the students’ Spring Semester tuition and fee bills. However, what makes this course unique is that months before the official start of Maymester, course participants must complete a series of weekend ‘dive-training’ sessions on Catalina Island. A typical dive weekend consists of in-water swim exercises, course lectures, writing workshops, and up to four SCUBA dives. On any given Saturday, we begin our day with an ocean swim before breakfast, complete a couple of dives with a lunch break in between, and end the day with a lecture well after dinner. The pace is intense, but come Sunday afternoon many students are sad to leave the island.

USC Dive Safety Officer Gerry Smith provides SCUBA instruction with assistance from Riverside County Sheriff’s Office Reserve Captain and public safety diver Tom Carr – both of whom accompany the class to Micronesia. This year we had another very experienced SCUBA instructor join our class, Bradley Walker, whose first career was in the U.S. Navy as an officer on the SEAL Team. These instructors are supported by a group of other dive professionals including the authors, USC postdoctoral researcher Anand Patel, USC graduate student Chris Suffridge, and several undergraduates from last years’ class who are interning as Dive Master candidates under Bradley.

On Monday, May 14 we will return to Catalina for 5 days of advanced dive training and lectures on coral reef ecology and the natural history of Palau and Guam. We leave Catalina on Saturday, May 20 and fly to Guam early the next morning, crossing the international dateline in the process. This year we will spend only 5 days on Guam so that we can spend more time collecting data as part of a long-term monitoring project in Palau. After nearly 3 weeks in the field, we depart Palau in the early morning hours of June 3, arriving home in Los Angeles a little more than 24 hours later, but on the same calendar day we depart Palau.

Blogging has been part of the course since the first year it was offered (Summer 2010) to provide a reflective component of experiential learning. One of the major refinements for the 2012 course was to enlist Professor Geoffrey Middlebrook from the USC Writing Program to help organize and deliver a workshop on academic blogging. The majority of student blogs will be personal reflections, field reports based on both research and experience, and others will be in the style of persuasive Op-Ed pieces. One of the essential goals of the ENST Maymester Program is to cultivate “prepared minds experiencing teachable moments”, and we hope this will be reflected in the blog. Early blog posts will emphasize preparation for the trip, either field research in preparation or dive training, as well as content related to the southern California marine environment. Once we reach Micronesia the posts will reflect either a blend of prior research on hands-on experience in the field or spontaneous posts based entirely on our encounters.

Another refinement for 2012 includes a trip to the Masso Reservoir, which is located in the Asan-Piti Watershed on the southwestern coast of Guam. Constructed by the U.S. Navy in 1945 for the storage of drinking water, Masso Reservoir was abandoned shortly thereafter due to excessive siltation. Until recently, the Masso site was overgrown by exotic and invasive plants, and was an example of a failed water project of the past. In 2007, Masso Reservoir was included in a watershed restoration plan (led by Guam and Federal resource agencies) as mitigation for the loss of coral reef habitat in Apra Harbor due to dredging and other development activities.

Partial map of Palau highlighting the location of the Ngederrak Conservation area. Adapted from “The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of Palau” published by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2005).

Working with our colleague Brent Tibbatts, an aquatic biologist with the Guam Department of Agriculture’s Division of Aquatics and Wildlife Resources, students will participate in several ongoing research projects being conducted at the Masso site. These projects include the monitoring and removal of invasive plants, measurements of water quality and flow, and surveys of aquatic and marine organisms. Restoration efforts will directly contribute to the recovery plans for endangered species found in the area. For example, Masso Watershed is one of the last known nesting grounds of the Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus guami). Listed as critically endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fewer than 50 individuals of this species currently reside on Guam.

The final leg of the ENST Maymester Program takes us to the Republic of Palau where students and faculty will participate in a multi-day survey of marine resources in the Ngederrak Conservation Area. Closed to all recreational and fishing activities since 2001, this site was historically fished for a variety of high-value subsistence and commercial invertebrates and fishes. Working closely with Ilebrang Olkeriil and King Sam from the Koror State Government-Department of Conservation and Law and Enforcement and Paul Collins from the Coral Reef Research Foundation, our group will assist in ongoing efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of conservation and enforcement activities in this area.

2011 Guam and Palau Expedition students surveying coral reef ecosystem health in Ngederrak Conservation Area, State of Koror, Palau. (Photo by Jim Haw)

This is the third year our field course has teamed up with local resource managers and scientists from Koror State, which has one of the most active marine conservation programs in Palau. Home to some of the highest levels of marine and terrestrial biodiversity in Micronesia (and the Indo-West Pacific as a whole), Koror State officials recently submitted a proposal to include the Rock Islands (which includes the Ngederrak Conservation Area and other areas that students will visit during this excursion) to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Several USC Dornsife students in the 2012 Guam and Palau program will introduce themselves and their interests in the nest several posts.

About the authors:

Dr. David Ginsburg is a marine biologist and lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program in the USC Dana and Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Guam and has conducted scientific diving in both Guam and Palau for a number of years. His scientific diving experience includes under-ice specimen collection in Antarctica.

Dr. Jim Haw is Ray R. Irani Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Environmental Studies Program in the USC Dana and Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He is also a scientific, technical and recreational diver.

David Ginsburg (left of center) and Jim Haw (right of center) pose with graduating scientific divers following USC’s May 2011 Commence exercises. (photo by Naomi Martinez)

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Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Top ten animal encounters

Wayne Maddison — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:26:00 +0000

A tropical rainforest is so biologically intense that you can’t help but have many meetings with its inhabitants. Here, some of my most memorable encounters with animals in Borneo, presented as a top ten list.

10. Pill millipedes are big — maybe 4 cm long — and heavy, and yet they roll up when disturbed, just like the pill bugs back home in Canada. They aren’t closely related. Pill bugs are crustaceans, while pill millipedes are, well, millipedes.

Pill millipede

9. This lizard sat on a tree trunk, inches away from me as I brushed the trunk for spiders.

lizard

8. A cicada lands on my rice at the Mulu cafeteria.

Cicada

7. Edy, Alex and I each received wasp stings. Mine was on my lip, and provided a more dramatic photograph than Edy’s and Alex’s swellings. I was stung simply walking down the trail.

Wasp

6. At Camp 1 in Mulu, inside the shelter, there was this dry leaf carefully hung against the wall. A female Gelotia, one of our jumping spiders, had made a nest and was tending her babies. We left her unbothered, as our camp mascot.

Gelotia

On the morning we left to return to park headquarters, I was considering whether to collect her, but discovered that in her place was now a different jumping spider, a notably fat Bavia female. The nest and babies of Gelotia were gone. We don’t have enough evidence to convict, but the Bavia is strongly suspected of eating both the mother Gelotia and all of her babies.

Bavia

5. Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterflies were common every day on the main trail north at Mulu. Beautiful.

Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterflies

4. On our last day at Mulu, expert guide Syria Lejau Malang led us to Deer Cave, a spectacularly enormous cavern with millions of bats chittering and producing guano. The guano on the cave floor is deep enough for a human to swim in, but the only swimmers in the guano were the millions of cockroaches and other small creatures. Here’s a photo taken by Syria — the reddish material on the ground is guano.

Deer Cave

3. Leeches. Can’t forget the leeches.

Hmmmm. No need to show another photo…

2. I posted about unexpected things that fall when we shake vegetation to find spiders. One of the last days at Mulu, I shook a tree to get spiders out, and debris fell on my head. Suddenly I felt something in my ear — something was trying desperately to scurry back into a hole. It was the strangest sensation, feeling something rooting around in there, sounding very loud as it struck my eardrum. I brushed at it and shook my head, and this is what fell out. A 4 cm long centipede.

centipede

1. And, for my top encounter, another animal dropping from a tree. After shaking a tree for spiders, I felt something wriggling under my shirt. I lifted the bottom of my shirt, and this fell out.

What is this?

What is it? My first thought was, oh no, not another leech. It twitched and wriggled, but not like a leech. It felt too firm. I looked at it more closely, and realized what it was. It was the tail of a lizard. With the tail still twitching, the living lizard body must be nearby. I opened up my shirt further, and out dropped the gecko.

Gecko

The gecko must have fallen down my shirt, felt squeezed as if by a predator, and autotomized its tail as a diversionary tactic. I assume that it is out in the forest, working on regrowing its tail, as I write this.

Previously in this series:

Catching up with Scientific Diving at USC Dornsife: What is Scientific Diving?

Jim Haw — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:30:39 +0000

By Gerry Smith.

Diving is an inherently risky activity when compared to taking notes in a classroom. First and foremost is that it happens by definition in a locale that doesn’t support human life any better than the surface of the moon. Risks include drowning, hypothermia, decompression illness, and injuries from water movement, heavy equipment and sea life.

The author prepares to lift a massive experiment package from the bottom of Big Fisherman Cove, near the USC Dornsife Wrigley Marine Science Center. (photo by Jim Haw)

These risks are mitigated with high quality training. In order to offer the protections that students in our care deserve we believe that the highest quality of training is required before being released to dive on their own.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration considers all diving done in return for compensation (monetary or otherwise) to be commercial diving and so should follow guidelines established for oil field divers, salvage workers and underwater welders. These guidelines are not compatible with the typical activity of an underwater researcher so a group of universities sought and received an exemption from commercial guidelines in 1982.

The exemption enabled a standard that better matches the type of diving we do as researchers. The standard is set by the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS) and requires that university scientific diving programs be autonomously administered by a Diving Control Board composed of a majority of scientific divers, follow a Dive Safety Manual accepted by AAUS and managed by a Dive Safety Officer who reports to the Diving Control Board.

The standard far exceeds the level of training typically offered by recreational dive certification agencies (PADI and NAUI) and specifies what kinds of training are required. It was adapted from a curriculum developed at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and used for more than 30 years in a program with an enviable safety record.

The author prepares to enter the ocean with a group of USC undergraduate students making their fourth ocean dive. (photo by Jim Haw)

USC Students prepare for the Guam and Palau program by taking a semester long prep course that includes basic dive training, classroom lecture, confined water training (pool sessions) and three weekends at our Catalina Island field station. They finish the prep program with basic diving certification, First Aid, CPR, Emergency Oxygen Administration and AED (automated external defibrillator) certifications and ten to twelve open ocean dives. They have honed their swimming skills to pass a 400 meter/12 minute swim test. They have learned to plan and execute simple scuba dives.

During the succeeding Maymester they spend a full week on Catalina honing dive skills and learning some basic research techniques. They also learn more about diving physics and physiology, and get certified to dive with an alternative breathing gas (Nitrox). They plan and execute more complex dives with tools for measurement and data gathering. This gradual increase in the complexity of their diving is the key to the training program. The student is never overloaded, but constantly challenged by a task load that builds throughout the course.

The author (left) supervises a USC student practicing one of the skills used to sweep for and recover a dislodged regulator. Students become safe and comfortable divers by repeatedly practicing such skills, permitting them to shift some of their attention to their research mission. (photo by Jim Haw)

Then it’s off to Guam where they dive on coral reefs threatened by the military buildup on the island and compare natural reef structures with the artificial reefs created when the military dumped tons of surplus war materiel in Apra harbor. In Guam the students spend a lot of time in the water laying transect lines and surveying the sea life along those transects. In past programs we’ve seen animals that were said to have been wiped out in the locations that we dived.

In Palau we have a cooperative arrangement with local government scientists to assist them in monitoring specific reefs. These reefs are in protected areas where only research is permitted. These are not the most spectacular dive sites that the archipelago has to offer but the data we collect on our training dives support their conservation effort.

At the end of their week on Palau the students have completed about 130 hours of training including approximately 30 dives during the course. The University can confidently allow them to conduct their underwater research in a manner that will keep them safe while they collect reliable data.

The USC scientific diving program trains students to be effective underwater researchers while providing a safe and regulated environment for that training. Students learn to collect data and make observations while keeping track of depth, time, air supply and the other factors that make up a safe dive.

Editor’s note: Scientific Research Diving at USC Dornsife is offered as part of an experiential summer program offered to undergraduate students of the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. This course takes place on location at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island and throughout Micronesia. Students investigate important environmental issues such as ecologically sustainable development, fisheries management, protected-area planning and assessment, and human health issues. During the course of the program, the student team will dive and collect data to support conservation and management strategies to protect the fragile coral reefs of Guam and Palau in Micronesia.

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