The Dying Oceans

Coral reef

There is something scary about the new.  Not so much for children, for whom everything is new, but as some point in life, once we feel we have our feet on the ground, and we know how things are supposed to be, what's normal, what's right, then challenges to what we know become, well, uncomfortable.

Certainly, there is something disruptive about the new.  I cannot go to a medical conference any more without hearing about the genetic code underlying disease and normal physiology and I know next to nothing about the molecular biology, so I just have to take the word of the speaker that the smudge he's showing on his power point really does show the gene for whatever it is he's talking about.

Coral reef polyps

In genetic code there is power, and it may help save the environment. In the April 18th issue of the New Yorker the intrepid Elizabeth Kolbert reports on two efforts to insert or replace genes in efforts to make organisms resistant to environmental stresses.  She first travels to Hawaii, where a marine biologist named Ruth Gates is trying to breed coral reef organisms which can withstand the warming and acidification of the oceans between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where the coral reefs live. And these reefs are, in fact, alive, at least some of them remain alive and they sustain life in the oceans and without them, Kolbert tells us, the seas would return to their slimy state of Precambrian times. I'm not exactly sure what Precambrian times were or what a slimy ocean would be like, but it doesn't sound good. Anyway, Klobert hung out with Dr. Gates, who is trying to breed a "super coral reef" with genetic manipulation, but there are obstacles of scale and of technology.

Elizabeth Kolbert

(Wouldn't you love to have Elizabeth Kolbert over for dinner? She must have great travel tales.)

Spreading Chestnut tree

Chestnut trees, once a dominant species in North America, were wiped out by an Asian fungus, but Kolbert tells us, there may be hope for creating a tree resistant to this scourge of chestnuts. An entirely new kind of chestnut tree, in some ways, but different from past chestnut trees in just single gene, introduced by something called a "promoter." 

The mosquito which carries Zika virus may ultimately be controlled not by DDT, but by genetic manipulation:  Make the mosquito sterile, by changing its genome and releasing the sterile mosquitoes into affect areas, and the population of mosquitoes collapses. 

All this, I would submit, sounds like progress, or hope for progress.  There are likely unknown unknowns, but the known dangers facing coral reefs, chestnut trees and pregnant women with Zika strike me as scary enough to take a chance here and there.

kelp forest

Some environmental catastrophes occur for complex reasons: Kelp forests are not visible to most of us, but, apparently, without kelp forests we are in big trouble.  And the kelp forests have all sorts of problems. The ocean temperatures are warming, which the kelp hate and things eat kelp.  The things which eat the things that eat kelp are essential to save the kelp.  

Sea otter with urchin (which eats kelp)

This comes down to otters.  Otters east sea urchins, which ravage kelp. But when things start killing off otters, the urchins mow down the kelp. 

Sharks eat otters, but in the past, not so many as to damage the population. But when killer whales found their supply of seals diminished, they shifted to otters and that spelled trouble for kelp forests. Killer whales do no eat sea urchins.

So far as I know there is no genetic fix for Killer whales eating otters.