Lobster mousse served at the "Cooking for Solutions" gala.

Recently, I spent a couple of days in Monterey learning about the sustainability of our food chain, noshing on green fish and sipping eco-wines. Yeah, a hard assignment but an important one. The Sustainable Foods Institute is a two day symposium for journalists. Among the issues we covered: the state of the ocean's health, sustainable fishing, the farm bill and America’s obesity epidemic. The conference is a ramp up to the city's biggest event of the year. Cooking for Solutions features sustainable chefs, authors, growers and producers. Both events are hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The two day Sustainable Foods Institute was jam packed with over thirty speakers. Here are some highlights:

• Anna Lappe, author of: “Climate Change at the End of Your Fork” and co-founder, with her mother, Frances Moore Lappe, of the Small Planet Institute.




• Eco-Labels: The road to sustainability?




• Paul Greenberg, author of "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.”




• The history, and future, of the Aquarium's Seafood Watch program




• Deputy Secretary of the USDA, Kathleen Merrigan




• A conversation with Ted Turner; this was a very quirky discussion on land preservation and restaurant issues.




• Trip to Earthbound organic farms




• Panels on the high cost of cheap food and the 2012 Farm Bill

Two things of note: a discussion between Barry Estabrook (Politics of the Plate blogger) and food sovereignty activist, Raj Patel yielded some heavy info. about how the price of our food does not reflect its true costs, and what this really means for society, at large. Raj’s books, “Stuffed and Starved” and “The Value of Nothing,” really get into this concept. Also, recent James Beard winner Estabrook has a new book out called, “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit.” Wow, I am just starting to read this and let’s just say I don't think I can ever buy a supermarket tomato again.

What I learned about the farm bill is that California seems to be getting ripped off. Ninety percent of the state’s farmers don’t get federal farm subsidies yet provide a majority of the fruit and veggies needed to stay healthy.Legislators decide on a new 5-year farm bill in 2012. Certainly, a better farm bill means everyone needs to be at the table. Connected to all of these issues is the obesity epidemic which by 2018 will consume 1 in 5 health care dollars.

The conference ended on a light note with visits from celebrity chef Alton Brown and actress/environmental activist, Isabella Rossellini. If you have not seen her Green Porno videos you are really missing something. We watched three clips with her featuring the plight of shrimp, squid and anchovies.  If you want to see one of the most beautiful, talented actresses in the world elaborately costumed having sex with fish while preaching  sea life sustainability, this series is for you.

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We'd like to thank everyone who participated in our photo caption contest with The Monterey Bay Aquarium! Now vote on your favorite entry, and the winner will receive (2) free tickets to the Aquarium. Voting closes on Thursday, January 13th.

View Poll

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Write a caption for me! Click here for a larger version.

We are running a photo caption contest with The Monterey Bay Aquarium! Submit only (1) caption in the comments selection below by Thursday, January 6th, 2011. Then we'll take all the submissions and have you vote on which one you like best. The winning entry will receive (2) free tickets to the Aquarium.

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Elegant Chilean flamingos help visitors gain a new perspective on our changing environment in the Monterey Bay Aquarium's newest special exhibit: "Hot Pink Flamingos: Stories of Hope in a Changing Sea." ©David Barnhardt/Akron Zoo.

Reported by Marjorie Sun.

The California Academy of Sciences and the Monterey Bay Aquarium have a big advantage that some educational institutions in other parts of the country do not: most of their visitors — who tend to be Californians — believe that climate change is real. That means their global warming exhibits can focus on solutions, for example, rather than laying out the basics of atmospheric science.

Californians’ concern about climate change has translated into political support for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. According to survey results released in July by the Public Policy Institute of California, two-thirds of Californians strongly back the pioneering state law known as AB 32. The law requires a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. And the recent defeat of Proposition 23 by 22 percentage points would appear to affirm that support (though in 15 counties, support for 23 was at least 47%).

Listen to the QUEST radio story When Teaching Climate Gets Controversial.

Californians appear to buck some national trends on climate change issues. A declining number of Americans say there is solid evidence that the world is warming. The number dropped from 71% in April 2008, to 57% in October 2009, according to a study last year by the Pew Research Center. Adults who believe that climate change is a “very serious problem” declined sharply in the same time period.

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer details in a recent, in-depth article that billionaires David and Charles Koch, titans of the oil industry, have been spending millions of dollars waging a covert disinformation campaign to thwart climate change legislation in the United States.

Aboard the Bio-Bus

A local organization has launched a mobile counter-offensive. The Alliance for Climate Education, a non-profit based in Oakland, has created a hip, multimedia presentation spiced with animation and rock music to reach teens. Think "An Inconvenient Truth" goes MTV. The alliance has shown it to more than 420,000 high-schoolers across the nation in the past year. The presentation teaches teens the basics about climate change and urges them to “do one thing” to fight it.

Alliance staffers also have tricked out an old school bus with clean tech, driving it to schools and museums to showcase renewable technology. The blue bio-bus runs on used cooking oil collected from restaurants. Solar panels on the bus charge cell phones and computers on board.

A cow wearing a gas mask created controversy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's climate change exhibit. Photo Credit: Craig Miller

Unmasking the Cow

Meanwhile, keeping the climate change exhibits up-to-date scientifically is a concern for the museums. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, outfitting a life-size model cow with a gas mask was prompted in part by a 2006 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO study said that industrial production of livestock in general, including cattle, pigs, and poultry, accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions. But another FAO study released in April — about the same time the climate change exhibit opened — examined the GHG emissions for the dairy industry alone, not beef production. It concluded that dairy production contributes just four percent of emissions. The study (PDF download), along with howls of protests from the local dairy industry, helped convince the aquarium to unmask the Holstein.

One last tidbit about interactive exhibits: One of the most popular — common to the Academy and the Monterey Bay Aquarium — is surprisingly low-tech. Thousands of visitors write on comment cards about what they can do to fight climate change and hang them on display boards there. One of them, in a child’s handwriting, read “Reduce, reuse, recycle and homework is bad for the environment."

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A walrus takes flight to deal with global warming. Image: Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a fun new video about climate change, called Change for the Ocean, to go with their exhibit Hot Pink Flamingos. Narrated by John Cleese and produced by Free Range Studios, the animated video is cute, funny, and pretty effective at conveying the fact that people can change their ways much faster than sea life can adapt to climate change.

Though their point is that human behavior can change quickly while animal evolution happens more slowly, the video shows some pretty fast animal evolution. Flamingos grow longer legs in a matter of seconds, and walruses instantly and miraculously modify their flippers into wings. If you weren’t listening to John Cleese as he says “Sadly, animals evolve far too slowly,” you might just get the wrong idea about how evolution works.

Evolution is generally a slow process. But, as humans can ride bikes to work instead of driving in cars, animals can make behavioral changes in response to climate change, too. Some animals spend more time in the shade, or move to cooler habitats. Others do more than just relocate themselves. In response to the heat, the Arabian oryx, a species of antelope, becomes less active during the day, when it’s hot, and more active at night, when it’s cooler. Other animals, through changes in their behavior, can actually change their physiological response to high temperatures The intertidal sea star Pisaster ochraceus takes up cold water into a cavity in the middle of the body—and this mass of cold water keeps its body cool during low tide. Scientists at the Bodega Marine Lab found that sea stars take up extra water when conditions are hot, and can thus maintain their body temperature. These kinds of changes are not evolution in action—rather, these animals are modifying their behavior to deal with the heat.

Like the animals, we humans can change our behavior to deal with a warming world. But we have a second option, which the animals don’t have: we can change our behavior—in big ways—to prevent the world from getting quite so warm in the first place.

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A few months ago, the QUEST television program included a segment on various gelatinous marine animals, including jellies, found offshore of central and northern California and featured at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The beginning of the video segment briefly showed one of the most important habitats for these animals — Monterey submarine canyon. Not unlike on land, features of the undersea landscape have a significant influence on the quantities and diversity of animals. Science involved in understanding the relationship of this “seascape” with submarine ecosystems requires quality maps and the technology to create those maps is improving all the time.

For this post, I simply wanted to show a few images of the canyon and beyond. As readers on my regular blog know, I just love showing images of our planet’s seafloor. We are currently in an age of exploration and discovery when it comes to mapping the seafloor — in many ways it’s like sending probes to another planet. Many of the images I show in this post are from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which has not only done a lot of the mapping and science, but has also designed and built the technology to do it. See their page on marine geology, including Monterey canyon, here.

The first image (below) shows the deepest part of Monterey canyon, near the shoreline, cutting across the flat and relatively shallow continental shelf. The yellow arrow represent river sources of sediment that contribute to the longshore currents (red arrows) that funnel the sediment into the canyon and, ultimately, into the deep sea.

In fact, it is the movement of sediment through the canyon that is responsible for creating and sculpting the canyon. Not unlike the Colorado River incising into the Colorado Plateau to create the Grand Canyon, these underwater “rivers” of mud, silt, sand, and water rush down the canyon eroding the canyon little by little. Since I’m bringing up the Grand Canyon, I always like to point out the scale of Monterey submarine canyon with the map below, which compares the two canyon systems at the same scale (also from MBARI).

Grand Canyon (top) and Monterey submarine canyon (bottom); credit: MBARI

Finally, I’d like to point out that there is even more to discover and learn beyond the canyon itself. As the continental slope transitions to the much flatter open ocean floor (greater than 10,000 feet deep) the deep canyon transitions to a subtler feature. The Monterey submarine fan, shown in the map below, is a depositional feature — it’s where all the sediment that cut the canyon (and much more that simply traveled through it) ended up. This is the submarine equivalent of a delta in some ways.

Next time you are standing along the coast in Santa Cruz or Monterey and looking out into the ocean remember that there is an entire landscape on the seafloor as beautiful and complex as what we see on land.

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- Image comparing Grand Canyon and Monterey Canyon courtesy of this MBARI publication (link opens a PDF)

- First and last images created in GeoMapApp, a free web-based software for creating topographic/bathymetric maps

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Pacific sardines at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: Adventures in Librarianship.

It’s back to school—for students, and for Pacific sardines. Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax, were once wildly abundant along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. From the 1920s to through the 1940s, they supported the largest fishery in the United States—millions were caught in and around Monterey Bay. (In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was once a sardine canning factory.) Though the Pacific sardine population crashed in the mid-1940s, it’s on the rise again.

While overfishing may have played a role in the population crash in the 1940s, oceanographic conditions were also very influential. The size of the Pacific sardine population fluctuates; their numbers increase when water is warm, and decrease when water is cold. This has been happening for quite some time; fish scales from sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin show that the sardines have been going through a boom-and-bust cycle for the past 1700 years.

In recent years, Pacific sardine numbers have been increasing steadily. Fishing started up again in California in the 1980s; by 2000, fisheries had been re-established off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, too. These days, Pacific sardines are doing fine. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide lists sardines as a “best choice.”

However, another schooling fish, Atlantic Herring isn’t doing quite as well. Many species of schooling fish are caught not for human consumption, but to feed poultry, livestock, and fish in the aquaculture industry. They’re processed into fishmeal and fish oil. This is a bit of a problem. Schooling fish (called clupeoid fish, for all of you aficionados) are an important part of the food web. They eat plankton, and in turn are eaten by larger predatory fish, marine mammals, and birds. Taking schooling fish out of the ocean, so they can be food for our other food, has serious repercussions for the marine food web.

Fish swim in schools to protect themselves from predators. But this strategy doesn’t really work when humans are the major predator, with our purse seines and spotting planes. Pacific sardines have recovered because of good fisheries management and favorable ocean conditions. Hopefully other fish will have a similar opportunity to go back to school.

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The longest animals in the world aren’t what you’d imagine.

What are the longest animals in the world? Hint: you’ve most likely never heard of them. They glow in the dark and have many stomachs, mouths and tentacles – sometimes hundreds. They’re about the width of a broomstick, but they can grow to be more than 100 feet long. So although blue whales are bulkier, some species of this marine animal are longer.

They’re called siphonophores (that’s pronounced sigh-FAWN-oh-for) and they’re cousins to the jellyfish you can see at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Aliens, giant caterpillars, tropical flowers: siphonophores resemble all three. And in today’s QUEST television story you’ll have a unique opportunity to see footage of the siphonophores that live in the Monterey Bay, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

This week’s story also features a behind-the-scenes visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s jellyfish exhibit. And I can promise you that you’ve never seen the orange sea nettles in the giant blue tank quite like you’ll see them in this story.

Watch the Amazing Jellies & Siphonophores television story online.

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Science on the SPOT goes behind the scenes at local San Francisco Bay Area labs, follows breaking discoveries, and gets you special access to obscure science locations and collections.

Our First Episode

In our first installment of the series, Suiting Up For Science: Swimming with Sharks we get in the tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to meet the intrepid dive team who keeps the enormous Outer Bay Exhibit spic-and-span while swimming in 40 pounds of stainless steel, shark-resistant armor. For your viewing pleasure, we've embedded a blog-sized version here. If you'd like to embed it on your blog (pretty please), go to the story page and grab the embed code.

Share Your Ideas

Do you know someone who has to wear special gear for your job in science, engineering, or technology? Are you that person? Leave a comment below if you have an idea of which science fashionista we should visit next. Suiting up for Science is just one type of story we'll be doing, so other ideas are welcome, too.

How to Watch Science on the SPOT

We'll be tweaking things a lot (both technically and editorially) over the coming weeks so stay tuned. Well, not exactly tuned, as you won't see these segments broadcast on KQED-TV. To see all episodes of SOTS, you can go the main SOTS page:

http://science.kqed.org/quest/series/sots/

They are available for streaming here on the QUEST website (look stories with the green corner stripe), via our main QUEST Video Podcast (both iTunes and RSS), on YouTube, and our first foray into High Definition video podcasting, the Science on the SPOT High Definition Podcast (iTunes and RSS). For the record, our current HD podcast spec is 1280 x 720, 5mbps H.264 video, 128k AAC audio. Let us know how it looks. I personally think it looks incredible on Apple's iPad, but YMMV.

And you can make story suggestions for Science on the SPOT, as well as QUEST radio and TV, at anytime.

Great for Teachers

One reason we're making a few different download options available is that we want teachers to have easy access to the stories, even if they can't stream our stories on the web due to a slow connection, or have a totalitarian regime school district that blocks YouTube. And at 3-5 minutes in length, we're hopeful they'll be easy to incorporate into classroom curricula.