Very depressing, and fills me with an inchoate anger. What is to be done?
Udhay
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,6670018,full.story
PART ONE
ALTERED OCEANS
A Primeval Tide of Toxins
Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion
of primitive organisms. This 'rise of slime,' as
one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.
By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer
July 30, 2006
MORETON BAY, AUSTRALIA — The fireweed began each
spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across
the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.
When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out
in searing welts. Their lips blistered and
peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water
that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.
"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph
Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are
pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel
them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."
As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the
last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark
purple and left them coated with a powdery
residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the
webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.
After one man bit a fishing line in two, his
mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he
couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made
an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash
the residue from their hands before relieving
themselves over the sides of their boats.
For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking
publicly about their condition. When they finally
did speak up, authorities dismissed their
complaints — until a bucket of the hairy weed
made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab.
Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so
strong that professors and students ran out of
the building and into the street, choking and coughing.
Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a
microscope and peered at the long black
filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she
identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria,
an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that
flourished 2.7 billion years ago.
O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar
with these ancient life forms, but had never seen
this particular kind before. What was it doing in
Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast?
The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya
majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other
places around the globe. It is one of many
symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.
In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the
shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords
of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of
ocean life are struggling to survive while the
most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish,
corals and marine mammals are dying while algae,
bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked.
Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists
evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse,
returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.
Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and
paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."
For many years, it was assumed that the oceans
were too vast for humanity to damage in any
lasting way. "Man marks the Earth with ruin,"
wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. "His control stops with the shore."
Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical
discharges and other industrial accidents
heightened awareness of man's capacity to injure
sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary.
But over time, the accumulation of environmental
pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas.
The causes are varied, but collectively they have
made the ocean more hospitable to primitive
organisms by putting too much food into the water.
Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with
basic nutrients — the nitrogen, carbon, iron and
phosphorous compounds that curl out of
smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from
fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic
tanks and gush from sewer pipes.
Modern industry and agriculture produce more
fixed nitrogen — fertilizer, essentially — than
all natural processes on land. Millions of tons
of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by
burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.
These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.
At the same time, overfishing and destruction of
wetlands have diminished the competing sea life
and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.
The consequences are evident worldwide.
Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of
cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a
stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call
"rhubarb soup." Dead fish bob in the surf. If
people get too close, their eyes burn and they have trouble breathing.
On the southern coast of Maui in the Hawaiian
Islands, high tide leaves piles of green-brown
algae that smell so foul condominium owners have
hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning.
On Florida's Gulf Coast, residents complain that
harmful algae blooms have become bigger, more
frequent and longer-lasting. Toxins from these
red tides have killed hundreds of sea mammals and
caused emergency rooms to fill up with coastal
residents suffering respiratory distress.
North of Venice, Italy, a sticky mixture of algae
and bacteria collects on the Adriatic Sea in
spring and summer. This white mucus washes
ashore, fouling beaches, or congeals into
submerged blobs, some bigger than a person.
Along the Spanish coast, jellyfish swarm so thick
that nets are strung to protect swimmers from their sting.
Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the
fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for
eons. They emerged from the primordial ooze and
came to dominate ancient oceans that were mostly
lifeless. Over time, higher forms of life gained
supremacy. Now they are under siege.
Like other scientists, Jeremy Jackson, 63, was
slow to perceive this latest shift in the
biological order. He has spent a good part of his
professional life underwater. Though he had seen
firsthand that ocean habitats were deteriorating,
he believed in the resilience of the seas, in
their inexhaustible capacity to heal themselves.
Then came the hurricane season of 1980. A
Category 5 storm ripped through waters off the
north coast of Jamaica, where Jackson had been
studying corals since the late 1960s. A majestic
stand of staghorn corals, known as "the Haystacks," was turned into rubble.
Scientists gathered from around the world to
examine the damage. They wrote a paper predicting
that the corals would rebound quickly, as they had for thousands of years.
"We were the best ecologists, working on what was
the best-studied coral reef in the world, and we
got it 100% wrong," Jackson recalled.
The vividly colored reef, which had nurtured a
wealth of fish species, never recovered.
"Why did I get it wrong?" Jackson asked. He now
sees that the quiet creep of environmental decay,
occurring largely unnoticed over many years, had drastically altered the ocean.
As tourist resorts sprouted along the Jamaican
coast, sewage, fertilizer and other nutrients
washed into the sea. Overfishing removed most of
the grazing fish that kept algae under control.
Warmer waters encouraged bacterial growth and further stressed the corals.
For a time, these changes were masked by
algae-eating sea urchins. But when disease
greatly reduced their numbers, the reef was left
defenseless. The corals were soon smothered by a
carpet of algae and bacteria. Today, the reef is
largely a boneyard of coral skeletons.
Many of the same forces have wiped out 80% of the
corals in the Caribbean, despoiled two-thirds of
the estuaries in the United States and destroyed
75% of California's kelp forests, once prime habitat for fish.
Jackson uses a homespun analogy to illustrate
what is happening. The world's 6 billion
inhabitants, he says, have failed to follow a
homeowner's rule of thumb: Be careful what you
dump in the swimming pool, and make sure the filter is working.
"We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of
evolution," Jackson said, "a half-billion years
ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria."
The 55-foot commercial trawler working the
Georgia coast sagged under the burden of a hefty
catch. The cables pinged and groaned as if about to snap.
Working the power winch, ropes and pulleys,
Grovea Simpson hoisted the net and its dripping
catch over the rear deck. With a tug on the
trip-rope, the bulging sack unleashed its massive load.
Plop. Splat. Whoosh. About 2,000 pounds of
cannonball jellyfish slopped onto the deck. The
jiggling, cantaloupe-size blobs ricocheted around
the stern and slid down an opening into the boat's ice-filled hold.
The deck was streaked with purple-brown contrails
of slimy residue; a stinging, ammonia-like odor filled the air.
"That's the smell of money," Simpson said, all
smiles at the haul. "Jellyballs are thick today.
Seven cents a pound. Yes, sir, we're making money."
Simpson would never eat a jellyfish. But shrimp
have grown scarce in these waters after decades
of intensive trawling. So during the winter
months when jellyfish swarm, he makes his living
catching what he used to consider a messy nuisance clogging his nets.
It's simple math. He can spend a week at sea
scraping the ocean bottom for shrimp and be lucky
to pocket $600 after paying for fuel, food, wages
for crew and the boat owner's cut.
Or, in a few hours of trawling for jellyfish, he
can fill up the hold, be back in port the same
day and clear twice as much. The jellyfish are
processed at the dock in Darien, Ga., and
exported to China and Japan, where spicy
jellyfish salad and soup are delicacies.
"Easy money," Simpson said. "They get so thick you can walk on them."
Jellyfish populations are growing because they
can. The fish that used to compete with them for
food have become scarce because of overfishing.
The sea turtles that once preyed on them are
nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively.
As their traditional catch declines, fishermen
around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of
jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago.
This is a logical step in a process that Daniel
Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of
British Columbia, calls "fishing down the food
web." Fishermen first went after the largest and
most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod
and grouper. When those stocks were depleted,
they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain.
"We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," Pauly said.
In California waters, for instance, three of the
top five commercial catches are not even fish.
They are squid, crabs and sea urchins.
This is what remains of California's historic
fishing industry, once known for the sardine
fishery attached to Monterey's Cannery Row and
the world's largest tuna fleet, based in San
Diego, which brought American kitchens StarKist,
Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea.
Overfishing began centuries ago but accelerated
dramatically after World War II, when new
technologies armed industrial fleets with sonar,
satellite data and global positioning systems,
allowing them to track schools of fish and find their most remote habitats.
The result is that the population of big fish has
declined by 90% over the last 50 years.
It's reached the point that the world's
fishermen, though more numerous, working harder
and sailing farther than ever, are catching fewer
fish. The global catch has been declining since
the late 1980s, an analysis by Pauly and colleague Reg Watson showed.
The reduction isn't readily apparent in the fish
markets of wealthy countries, where people are
willing to pay high prices for exotic fare from
distant oceans — slimeheads caught off New
Zealand and marketed as orange roughy, or
Patagonian toothfish, renamed Chilean sea bass.
Now, both of those fish are becoming scarce.
Fish farming also exacts a toll. To feed the
farmed stocks, menhaden, sardines and anchovies
are harvested in great quantities, ground up and processed into pellets.
Dense schools of these small fish once swam the
world's estuaries and coastal waters, inhaling
plankton like swarming clouds of silvery vacuum
cleaners. Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, the nation's
largest estuary, used to be clear, its waters
filtered every three days by piles of oysters so
numerous that their reefs posed a hazard to navigation. All this has changed.
There and in many other places, bacteria and
algae run wild in the absence of the many mouths
that once ate them. As the depletion of fish
allows the lowest forms of life to run rampant,
said Pauly, it is "transforming the oceans into a microbial soup."
Jellyfish are flourishing in the soup,
demonstrating their ability to adapt to wholesale
changes — including the growing human appetite
for them. Jellyfish have been around, after all,
at least 500 million years, longer than most marine animals.
In the Black Sea, an Atlantic comb jelly carried
in the ballast water of a ship from the East
Coast of the United States took over waters
saturated with farm runoff. Free of predators,
the jellies gorged on plankton and fish larvae,
depleting the fisheries on which the Russian and
Turkish fleets depend. The plague subsided only
with the accidental importation of another
predatory jellyfish that ate the comb jellies.
Federal scientists tallied a tenfold increase in
jellies in the Bering Sea in the 1990s. They were
so thick off the Alaskan Peninsula that fishermen
nicknamed it the Slime Bank. Researchers have
found teeming swarms of jellyfish off Georges
Bank in New England and the coast of Namibia, in
the fiords of Norway and in the Gulf of Mexico.
Also proliferating is the giant nomurai found off
Japan, a jellyfish the size of a washing machine.
Most jellies are smaller than a fist, but their
sheer numbers have gummed up fishing nets, forced
the shutdown of power plants by clogging intake
pipes, stranded cruise liners and disrupted
operations of the world's largest aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan.
Of the 2,000 or so identified jellyfish species,
only about 10 are commercially harvested. The
largest fisheries are off China and other Asian
nations. New ones are springing up in Australia,
the United States, England, Namibia, Turkey and
Canada as fishermen look for ways to stay in business.
Pauly, 60, predicts that future generations will
see nothing odd or unappetizing about a plateful of these gelatinous blobs.
"My kids," Pauly said, "will tell their children: Eat your jellyfish."
The dark water spun to the surface like an
undersea cyclone. From 80 feet below, the
swirling mixture of partially treated sewage
spewed from a 5-foot-wide pipe off the coast of
Hollywood, Fla., dubbed the "poop chute" by divers and fishermen.
Fish swarmed at the mouth — blue tangs and chubs
competing for particles in the wastewater.
Marine ecologist Brian Lapointe and research
assistant Rex "Chip" Baumberger, wearing wetsuits
and breathing air from scuba tanks, swam to the
base of the murky funnel cloud to collect
samples. The effluent meets state and federal
standards but is still rich in nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients.
By Lapointe's calculations, every day about a
billion gallons of sewage in South Florida are
pumped offshore or into underground aquifers that
seep into the ocean. The wastewater feeds a green
tide of algae and bacteria that is helping to
wipe out the remnants of Florida's 220 miles of
coral, the world's third largest barrier reef.
In addition, fertilizer washes off sugar cane
fields, livestock compounds and citrus farms into Florida Bay.
"You can see the murky green water, the green pea
soup loaded with organic matter," said Lapointe,
a marine biologist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic
Institution in Fort Pierce, Fla. "All that stuff
feeds the algae and bacterial diseases that are attacking corals."
Government officials thought they were helping in
the early 1990s when they released fresh water
that had been held back by dikes and pumps for
years. They were responding to the
recommendations of scientists who, at the time,
blamed the decline of ocean habitats on
hypersalinity — excessively salty seawater.
The fresh water, laced with farm runoff rich in
nitrogen and other nutrients, turned Florida's
gin-clear waters cloudy. Seaweed grew fat and bushy.
It was a fatal blow for many struggling corals,
delicate animals that evolved to thrive in clear,
nutrient-poor saltwater. So many have been lost
that federal officials in May added what were
once the two most dominant types — elkhorn and
staghorn corals — to the list of species
threatened with extinction. Officials estimate that 97% of them are gone.
Sewage and farm runoff kill corals in various ways.
Algae blooms deny them sunlight essential for their survival.
The nutrients in sewage and fertilizer make
bacteria grow wildly atop corals, consuming
oxygen and suffocating the animals within.
A strain of bacteria found in human intestines,
Serratia marcescens, has been linked to white pox
disease, one of a host of infectious ailments
that have swept through coral reefs in the Florida Keys and elsewhere.
The germ appears to come from leaky septic tanks,
cesspits and other sources of sewage that have
multiplied as the Keys have grown from a
collection of fishing villages to a stretch of
bustling communities with 80,000 year-round
residents and 4 million visitors a year.
Scientists discovered the link by knocking on
doors of Keys residents, asking to use their
bathrooms. They flushed bacteria marked with
tracers down toilets and found them in nearby
ocean waters in as little as three hours.
Nearly everything in the Keys seems to be
sprouting green growths, even an underwater
sculpture known as Christ of the Abyss, placed in
the waters off Key Largo in the mid-1960s as an
attraction for divers and snorkelers. Dive-shop
operators scrub the bronze statue with wire
brushes from time to time, but they have trouble keeping up with the growth.
Lapointe began monitoring algae at Looe Key in
1982. He picked the spot, a 90-minute drive south
of Key Largo, because its clear waters, colorful
reef and abundance of fish made it a favorite
site for scuba divers. Today, the corals are in
ruins, smothered by mats of algae.
Although coral reefs cover less than 1% of the
ocean floor, they are home to at least 2 million
species, or about 25% of all marine life. They
provide nurseries for fish and protect oceanfront
homes from waves and storm surges.
Looe Key was once a sandy shoal fringed by coral.
The Key has now slipped below the water's
surface, a disappearing act likely to be repeated
elsewhere in these waters as pounding waves
breach dying reefs. Scientists predict that the
Keys ultimately will have to be surrounded by sea walls as ocean levels rise.
With a gentle kick of his fins through murky
green water, Lapointe maneuvered around a coral
mound that resembled the intricate, folded
pattern of a brain. Except that this brain was
being eroded by the coralline equivalent of flesh-eating disease.
"It rips my heart out," Lapointe said. "It's like
coming home and seeing burglars have ransacked
your house, and everything you cherished is gone."
The ancient seas contained large areas with
little or no oxygen — anoxic and hypoxic zones
that could never have supported sea life as we
know it. It was a time when bacteria and jellyfish ruled.
Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the
Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has
spent most of her career peering into waters that
resemble those of the distant past.
On research dives off the Louisiana coast, she
has seen cottony white bacteria coating the
seafloor. The sulfurous smell of rotten eggs,
from a gas produced by the microbes, has seeped
into her mask. The bottom is littered with the
ghostly silhouettes of dead crabs, sea stars and other animals.
The cause of death is decaying algae. Fed by
millions of tons of fertilizer, human and animal
waste, and other farm runoff racing down the
Mississippi River, tiny marine plants run riot,
die and drift to the bottom. Bacteria then take
over. In the process of breaking down the plant
matter, they suck the oxygen out of seawater,
leaving little or none for fish or other marine life.
Years ago, Rabalais popularized a term for this
broad area off the Louisiana coast: the "dead
zone." In fact, dead zones aren't really dead.
They are teeming with life — most of it bacteria
and other ancient creatures that evolved in an
ocean without oxygen and that need little to survive.
"There are tons and tons of bacteria that live in
dead zones," Rabalais said. "You see this white
snot-looking stuff all over the bottom."
Other primitive life thrives too. A few worms do
well, and jellyfish feast on the banquet of algae and microbes.
The dead zone off Louisiana, the second largest
after one in the Baltic Sea, is a testament to
the unintended consequences of manufacturing
nitrogen fertilizer on a giant scale to support
American agriculture. The runoff from Midwestern
farms is part of a slurry of wastewater that
flows down the Mississippi, which drains 40% of the continental United States.
The same forces at work in the mouth of the
Mississippi have helped create 150 dead zones
around the world, including parts of the
Chesapeake Bay and waters off the Oregon and Washington coasts.
About half of the Earth's landscape has been
altered by deforestation, farming and
development, which has increased the volume of
runoff and nutrient-rich sediment.
Most of the planet's salt marshes and mangrove
forests, which serve as a filter between land and
sea, have vanished with coastal development. Half
of the world's population lives in coastal
regions, which add an average of 2,000 homes each day.
Global warming adds to the stress. A reduced
snowpack from higher temperatures is accelerating
river discharges and thus plankton blooms. The
oceans have warmed slightly — 1 degree on average
in the last century. Warmer waters speed microbial growth.
Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia
Institute of Marine Science, has been tracking
the spread of low-oxygen zones. He has determined
that the number is nearly doubling every decade,
fed by a worldwide cascade of nutrients — or as
he puts it, energy. We stoke the ocean with
energy streaming off the land, he said, and with
no clear pathways up the food chain, this energy
fuels an explosion of microbial growth.
These microbes have been barely noticeable for
millions of years, tucked away like the pilot light on a gas stove.
"Now," Diaz said, "the stove has been turned on."
In Australia, fishermen noticed the fireweed
around the time much of Moreton Bay started
turning a dirty, tea-water brown after every
rain. The wild growth smothered the bay's
northern sea-grass beds, once full of fish and
shellfish, under a blanket a yard thick.
The older, bottom layers of weed turned
grayish-white and started to decay. Bacteria,
feeding on the rot, sucked all of the oxygen from
beneath this woolly layer at night. Most sea life
swam or scuttled away; some suffocated. Fishermen's catches plummeted.
Most disturbing were the rashes, an outbreak
often met with scoffs from local authorities.
After suffering painful skin lesions, fisherman
Greg Savige took a sealed bag of the weed in 2000
to Barry Carbon, then director-general of the
Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. He
warned Carbon to be careful with it, as it was
"toxic stuff." Carbon replied that he knew all
about cyanobacteria from western Australian
waters and that there was nothing to worry about.
Then he opened the bag and held it close to his face for a sniff.
"It was like smearing hot mustard on the lips,"
the chastened official recalled.
Aboriginal fishermen had spotted the weed in
small patches years earlier, but it had moved
into new parts of the bay and was growing like never before.
Each spring, Lyngbya bursts forth from spores on
the seafloor and spreads in dark green-and-black
dreadlocks. It flourishes for months before
retreating into the muck. Scientists say it
produces more than 100 toxins, probably as a defense mechanism.
At its peak in summer, the weed now covers as
much as 30 square miles of Moreton Bay, an
estuary roughly the size of San Francisco Bay. In
one seven-week period, its expansion was measured
at about 100 square meters a minute — a football field in an hour.
William Dennison, then director of the University
of Queensland botany lab, couldn't believe it at first.
"We checked this 20 times. It was mind-boggling.
It was like 'The Blob,' " Dennison said,
recalling the 1950s horror movie about an alien
life form that consumed everything in its path.
Suspecting that nutrients from partially treated
sewage might be the culprit, another Queensland
University scientist, Peter Bell, collected some
wastewater and put it in a beaker with a pinch of
Lyngbya. The weed bloomed happily.
As Brisbane and the surrounding area became the
fastest growing region in Australia, millions of
gallons of partially treated sewage gushed from
30 wastewater treatment plants into the bay and its tributary rivers.
Officials upgraded the sewage plants to remove
nitrogen from the wastewater, but it did not stop
the growth of the infernal weed.
Researchers began looking for other sources of
Lyngbya's nutrients, and are now investigating
whether iron and possibly phosphorous are being
freed from soil as forests of eucalyptus and
other native trees are cleared for farming and development.
"We know the human factor is responsible. We just
have to figure out what it is," Dennison said.
Recently, Lyngbya has appeared up the coast from
Moreton Bay, on the Great Barrier Reef, where
helicopters bring tourists to a heart-shaped
coral outcropping. When the helicopters depart,
seabirds roost on the landing platform,
fertilizing the reef with their droppings.
Lyngbya now beards the surrounding corals.
"Lyngbya has lots of tricks," said scientist
Judith O'Neil. "That's why it's been around for 3 billion years."
It can pull nitrogen out of the air and make its
own fertilizer. It uses a different spectrum of
sunlight than algae do, so it can thrive even in
murky waters. Perhaps its most diabolical trick
is its ability to feed on itself. When it dies
and decays, it releases its own nitrogen and
phosphorous into the water, spurring another generation of growth.
"Once it gets going, it's able to sustain itself," O'Neil said.
Ron Johnstone, a University of Queensland
researcher, recently experienced Lyngbya's fire.
He was studying whether iron and phosphorous in
bay sediments contribute to the blooms, and he
accidentally came in contact with bits of the
weed. He broke out in rashes and boils, and
needed a cortisone shot to ease the inflammation.
"It covered my whole chest and neck," he said.
"We've just ordered complete containment suits so we can roll in it."
Fishermen say they cannot afford such pricey
equipment. Nor would it be practical. For some,
the only solution is to turn away from the sea.
Lifelong fisherman Mike Tanner, 50, stays off the
water at least four months each year to avoid
contact with the weed. It's an agreement he
struck with his wife, who was appalled by his
blisters and worried about the long-term health consequences.
"When he came home with rash all over his body,"
Sandra Tanner said, "I said, 'No, you are not
going.' We didn't know what was happening to him."
Tanner, a burly, bearded man, is frustrated that
he cannot help provide for his family. Gloves and
other waterproof gear failed to protect him.
"It's like acid," Tanner said. "I couldn't
believe it. It kept pulling the skin off."
Before the Lyngbya outbreak, 40 commercial shrimp
trawlers and crab boats worked these waters. Now
there are six, and several of them sit idle during fireweed blooms.
"It's the only thing that can beat us," Greg
Savige said. "Wind is nothing. Waves, nothing.
It's the only thing that can make us stop work.
When you've got sores and the skin peels away, what are you going to do?"
Times staff writer Usha Lee McFarling contributed to this report.
Resources
More information about endangered oceans is
available at these educational and governmental websites:
http://scripps.ucsd.edu
http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/
http://www.hboi.edu/
http://www.initrogen.org/
http://www.millenniumassessment.org
http://www.epa.gov/owow/estuaries/guidance/
http://www.hboi.edu/
http://www.initrogen.org/
http://www.seaaroundus.org
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
