Month: September 2017

When a powerful earthquake rocked the Pacific coast of Tōhoku in March 2011, it didn’t just upend life in Japan. A massive tsunami wave swept countless coastal organisms into the open ocean, clinging to human garbage. An “extraordinary” trash-fueled migration from Japan to to North America ensued, the likes of which scientists have never seen.

That is the startling conclusion of a paper published today in the journal Science, which documents nearly 300 Japanese marine coastal species from 16 phyla that rafted across the Pacific, to Hawaii and the west coast of North America, in the six years following Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful quake ever recorded in Japan. Many of these hapless migrants made the long journey on human-made objects—Styrofoam cups, bottles, tires, ships, and pieces of docks—which collectively fueled the “longest transoceanic survival and dispersal of coastal species by rafting.”

It’s a bizarre event, but one we might see more of in the future, as booming, trash-producing coastal cities collide with earthquakes, hurricanes, and potentially, climate change-juiced natural disasters.

“I didn’t think that most of these coastal organisms could survive at sea for long periods of time,” study co-author Greg Ruiz, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, said in a statement. “But in many ways they just haven’t had much opportunity in the past. Now, plastic can combine with tsunami and storm events to create that opportunity on a large scale.”

Just as low levels of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster seeped across the Pacific, debris stirred up by the quake and subsequent tsunami has been washing up on shorelines from Hawaii to Alaska to California since 2012. For the new study, researchers from Williams College, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and elsewhere partnered with government officials, private citizens and coastal cleanup crews to collect and analyze 634 pieces of “Japanese marine tsunami debris” that harbored live animal communities. The authors note that the debris, collected over a five year span following the 2011 quake, represents “only a fraction” of the total junk that washed ashore—many other items weren’t reported, weren’t recognized as tsunami debris, or were in areas impossible to reach.

“What we’re learning is that what happens ordinarily isn’t necessarily the thing that determines what happens globally over the long term. Rare events can have an enormous impact.”

Still, this small sampling of quake-driven flotsam contained an impressive array of would-be colonists: at least 289 living invertebrate and fish species, “none of which were previously reported to have rafted transoceanically between continents,” according to the new study. These critters run the gamut from single-celled protozoans to Asian isopods, shipworms, and enormous colonies of mussels and barnacles. Amazingly, the flow of debris didn’t appear to taper off from 2012 to 2016, although the number of highly-diverse rafted communities declined over time.

“It is surprising that living species from Japan continue to arrive after nearly 6 years at sea, 4 or more years longer than previous documented instances of the survival of coastal species rafting in the ocean,” the authors write, noting that the population structure of the rafted colonies suggests many animals, despite their hardship, still managed to reproduce en route.

Time will tell whether any of these ocean-swept migrants establish themselves on new shores—that question was beyond the scope of the study. But the researchers do note that 35% of the species identified were already known to occur on the Pacific coast, suggesting “a climactic match as well as a broad range of matching habitats.”

Since the time of Darwin, ecologists have been aware that animals establish themselves in new parts of the world by rafting across the high seas. But there’s a longstanding debate over how often this occurs, and how important the process is in shaping global biodiversity. As Lawrence Heaney, Curator and Head of the Division of Mammals at the Field Museum, told Earther, the new study offers one of the richest datasets yet that can help address that question.

“In terms of scientific impact, this is a fabulous experiment,” Heaney, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Earther, noting that the research supports the idea that catastrophic events have a disproportionate impact on the global species shuffle. “What we’re learning is that what happens ordinarily isn’t necessarily the thing that determines what happens globally over the long term. Rare events can have an enormous impact.”

“I simultaneously love and am terrified by the fact that some species reproduced while on their raft”

Bruce Patterson, the MacArthur Curator of Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History, who also wasn’t involved, voiced a similar sentiment. “As a terrestrial biologist, and one fascinated by questions of how and when did the ancestors of New World monkeys and guinea pig-like rodents cross the South Atlantic, rafting offers a critically important if highly infrequent event,” he told Earther in an email. “This article shows how extended those events can be, lasting for years beyond their environmental-geological trigger.”

The fact that so many animals hitched a ride on garbage adds an Anthropocene-era twist to an age old story of species dispersal. As the authors note, many human-made materials don’t decompose readily, meaning they can potentially serve as lifeboats over incredibly long distances and timespans.

“We’ve known for a long time that human debris in the ocean is bad, but normally it’s put in the context of animals eating them or being affected by BPA in the water,” Allison Fritts-Penniman, a marine zoologist at the California Academy of Sciences, told Earther via email. “The idea that it facilitates long-distance dispersal via rafting, and potentially leads to species invasions, is new and fascinating, especially because human-made rafts last longer than natural rafts.”

“I simultaneously love and am terrified by the fact that some species reproduced while on their raft,” Fritts-Penniman added. “I love it because it paints a nice picture of survival for this little island community traveling the world, but it terrifies me because it means these species probably have a good chance of surviving as an invasive species wherever they land.”

The study’s authors seem to agree that more rafting-driven colonization could be in our future, seeing as coastal populations are booming and dumping their garbage into the ocean at staggering rates. While there’s still plenty of research to be done, it’s another plausible avenue by which humans are inadvertently scrambling the tree of life.

It also reminds us that trash is far more than an eyesore—it has become an inextricable part of Earth’s ecosystems.

[Science]

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, close confidant and senior adviser, found himself in hot water this week over the revelation he and other administration staffers used personal email accounts to conduct official White House business—not a good look after President Donald Trump won the election in part by suggesting he might have Hillary Clinton prosecuted for using her own private server to handle her State Department emails.

Among those super steamed about Baby Kush’s private email account, it seems, are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who say he failed to disclose the existence of the account. The committee members are conducting a wide-ranging investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and per CNN, they seem very angry to have learned about Kushner’s email from the news rather than him.

“The Committee was concerned to learn of this additional email account from the news media, rather than you, in your closed staff interview,” Chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner wrote in an official letter. “Please confirm that the document production that you made to the Committee—and any and all searches of email accounts for that document production—included the additional ‘personal email account’ described to the news media, as well as all other email accounts, messaging apps, or similar communications channels you may have used, or that may contain information relevant to our inquiry.”

As CNN noted, the difference between this being a frustrating moment in Kushner-Senate relations and a very serious problem for the boy wonder is whether he failed to turn over documents related to the investigation. Even worse would be if Kushner was attempting to use the personal email to hide anything from Senate investigators—something which there is currently no evidence to suggest happened, but would be stupid in catastrophic terms if it did.

Even worse, news of the Senate letter emerged thanks to Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, who CNN said accidentally forwarded it to the same prankster who earlier this year impersonated various high-ranking White House staff while successfully trolling other members of the administration via email.

The prankster, of course, promptly sent the document to CNN.

For his part, Lowell told CNN the Senate investigators were already informed they had everything relevant.

“It is perfectly normal that the committees would want to make sure that they received all pertinent records,” Lowell wrote. “We did review this account at the time and there were no responsive or relevant documents there. The committee was so informed when documents were produced and there is no issue here.”

[CNN]