Wild Tobago

Dr. Anjani Ganase considers the latest ocean research. Microplastics are everywhere. Some mussels are adapting. Corals continue to lose as the climate changes. Our ocean is a vast and wild place with much more to be discovered. Ocean research may seem irrelevant to our day to day lives but the knowledge we obtain from studying the deepest darkest places and the teeny tiniest organisms have significant implications to our climate, health and wellbeing. Let’s delve into some of the latest research. Targeted research may focus on a handful of species within a location but these studies are the building blocks for regional and global understanding to guide policy and management. World War II mussels Mussel beds off Dillon Beach in Northern California continue to thrive even under climate change. This is what a group of University of California students was able to discover when they came across an unpublished report of a survey of the mussel beds from 1941, during ...

People are hard at work in vacation places. Fortunate are those who vacation and are allowed into other working lives, other enterprises. Pat Ganase visits Charlotteville, centre of the Northeast Tobago Man and the Biosphere Reserve. (All photos courtesy Anjani Ganase)   It is late August in Charlotteville. The rising sun lights up Campbleton. Rainbows from the misty horizon dance over Booby island. The sea is a pond, calm, clear to the bottom; its channels of sand shimmer between boulders and bouldering corals. This is our holiday place on the northwest coast of Tobago where the water is warm, the rainforest resplendent and the sunsets startling. Here is the heartland of the Northeast Tobago, as different as can be imagined from Southwest Tobago.   Walk along the beach from the Man-o-War Bay cottages to the village. Check the Heron keeping an eye on you while chasing a crab on the sand. Pass the end of Bay Road looking for what the sea washed up ove...

As we enter 2024, Dr Anjani Ganase presents some of recent findings from ocean studies.   A school of hammerhead sharks, Mikimoto, Japan. Credit:  Masayuki Agawa / Ocean Image Ban k Shark mortality rises even with legislative measures   A recent study highlighted the continued increase in shark mortality from fishing, up from 76 million to 80 million between 2012 and 2019, despite widespread regulation changes. About 25 million of those catches are threatened shark species. In this time, there was a ten-fold increase in international regulations on shark fishing across 29 countries and overseas territories. Unfortunately, the majority of the measures focused on the banning of shark finning rather than policies that focused on reducing shark mortality. The ban on shark finning created a broader incentive in the shark fishing industry for the fishing and marketing of the whole shark for different purposes.   Shark fishing continues to i...

  Dr Anjani Ganase, coral reef ecologist, discusses little known facts of the undersea animals that are indicators of healthy oceans and coast   Mysteries of coral reproduction Not much is known about coral reproduction. Most coral species synchronise mass spawning releasing sperm and eggs into the water column. This event would be timed to seasonal and lunar cycles for optimal fertilisation. However, little is known about dynamics of the sperm and eggs when they are released into the water column.   How does a sperm increase its chances of finding a suitable egg to fertilise in a sea of 100 million eggs and sperm of many different species of corals and other organisms? Turns out there are universal strategies that coral gametes may use to find their mate. Eggs release unique chemical signals that trigger sperms to become motile. Echinoids (sea urchin and sea star eggs) are known to release calcium ions into the water to trigger sperm motility and a similar method i...

When you make changes in a self-regulating system, everything else changes. Dr Anjani Ganase wonders about how we are intensifying the acidic ocean.     Chemistry behind ocean acidification   Our ocean absorbs about 40 % of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. When carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean it reacts with the water releasing hydrogen ions to form carbonic acid making the ocean acidic. Having more carbon dioxide in the water means that the ocean becomes more acidic as carbon emissions increase. Ocean acidification limits the availability of carbonate ions for the formation of calcium carbonate shells and skeletons (think of clams, crabs, conchs, lobster).   Shells eventually break down to form sand. Shells collected at Pigeon Point. Photo by Anjani Ganase   The ocean, the largest body of water on the planet, has absorbed over 525 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution. Under more aci...

How some animals and plants are responding to a warming world. Dr Anjani Ganase looks at some creatures’ adaptations to survive the changing climate.   We are in the anthropocene – the current geological era where human activities have significant impacts on the environment and climate. Indeed, humans are currently driving the sixth mass extinction. To date we are losing species to extinction at a rate of about 2000 species every year (WWF est.). While many die off, other animals and plants are undergoing adaptation for survive either the warming conditions directly or adapting to shifts in habitat conditions, food supply and environment. Scientists who have been monitoring and conducting genetic studies over the last 50 years have been able to match changes in animal physiology (body shape and size) or behaviour (migratory timing) to changes in temperature. There are a few creatures that do benefit from the warmer conditions, although the extent of such bene...