I recently began working for the United States branch of the Last Ocean as a social media/marketing intern. The experience so far has been illuminating and intensely educational. I am working with two brilliant people, Cassandra Brooks and John Weller. These two people are working tirelessly to spread the word about numerous areas of the ocean that need our help, particularly the Ross Sea, Antarctica. They use art, science, and news to promote global ocean awareness and I am honored to be working with them. They have changed my way of thinking about our oceans in such a remarkable way.

Adélie Penguin on Pack Ice (photo by John B Weller)

Growing up, I went to Cape Cod, Massachusetts every summer where I swam in the crisp waves and enjoyed an abundance of fresh lobster rolls. As many people do, I took it for granted. I have always had a connection to the Ocean, and now it goes even deeper. Now, not only do I enjoy the leisurely activities that our beautiful oceans provide, but I am also starting to grasp the vast intricacies of our seas. They are in trouble and desperately need our help.

When I started at the Last Ocean I learned about the Ross Sea, Antarctica for the first time. I was alarmed to learn that the Ross Sea is considered by many scientists as the most pristine marine ecosystem left on our planet. It is one of the only areas of ocean that is still mostly unharmed by human activities. As you can probably imagine this sort of thing has created much controversy in environmental groups all over the world. Many organizations want to make the Ross Sea a marine reserve, which would mean that it would legally become protected against human impact.

Killer Whale and the Royal Society Range (photo by John B Weller)

Unfortunately, not everyone is on board with these ideas. In the late 1990s New Zealand fisherman started fishing for “Chilean sea bass” or Toothfish in the Ross Sea. Chilean Sea Bass is a fancy name that restaurants can put on their menus instead of “Toothfish,” which doesn’t sound as appetizing. After more than a decade of fishing, scientists are now concerned that toothfish are beginning to decline – like many other species in our seas they are likely being overfished.

The wonder of the Ross Sea has very much sparked my attention. I truly believe that this phenomenon of a still untouched and biologically diverse ocean is precious to our planet and needs all of our attention in order to make a change. We need to save this area from the annihilation that has caused irreparable damage to so much of our planet.

Seastars and Anchor Ice (photo by John B Weller)

I invite you to stay tuned to our blog, and check out our Facebook page to inform yourself. Please follow us as we continue to grow and educationally make an impact. Hopefully more people will become as inspired by protecting the Ross Sea just as I was. Knowledge is a powerful tool and I am truly excited to learn more! Thanks for reading!

Trematomus bernacchi, one of many Notothenioid fishes (photo credit: John B. Weller)

Recently the home page of my web browser highlighted the discovery of 123 new species of vertebrates and invertebrates in the remote tropical forests of Borneo, an area in Indonesia now protected by the World Wildlife Fund due to its tremendous biodiversity.  Even Darwin called the island “one great luxuriant hothouse made by nature for herself.”

Why would I mention this at the beginning of a piece focused on Antarctic fish and the Ross Sea?  While the Ross Sea may not match the unrivaled taxonomic biodiversity of the tropics, the waters of the Antarctic shelf – exemplified by the Ross Sea, contain spectacular radiations of large marine animals. As used here, radiation means the divergence of members of a single evolutionary line into different niches. These include three species of killer whales, four species of seals, an enormous biomass of two penguin species and about 100 species of fish, including the two-meter long 100 kg Antarctic Toothfish. Numbers of species aside, the high latitude waters of Antarctica, especially the Ross Sea, are a world-class evolutionary site.

Joe Eastman with Icefish (photo courtesy of Joe Eastman)

Evolution in Antarctic waters

Though I am an Ichthyologist, I first went to the Ross Sea in 1971 to study Weddell seal anatomy at McMurdo Station on a National Science Foundation grant. During the trip I met Art DeVries, a physiologist who had been studying Antarctic fishes since the early 1960s. While dissecting seals was my daytime activity at McMurdo, at night Art took me fishing and introduced me to the fish fauna, including the Antarctic Toothfish – the largest fish predator in the Southern Ocean.

I didn’t know much about the ecology of the notothenioid fish (the dominant family of Antarctic fish) but I was aware of Art’s work because that summer I read his paper in Science on the discovery of antifreeze proteins in notothenioid fish.  Art’s paper described how these antifreeze proteins cause a depression in the freezing point of blood that allows notothenioids to survive in subzero water.  Today we call these antifreezes a “key innovation” because they permitted notothenioids to radiate (expand evolutionarily) in these cold waters.  If they were not first protected from freezing, this could not have happened; I would not have devoted decades of my career to studying their evolution and I would have nothing to write about here.

After Art sparked my interest in notothenioids, I received my own National Science Foundation grant to work on the anatomy of a variety of different body systems that had changed over time from their ancestral condition.  Notothenioids lack swim bladders (the mechanism by which most fish stay aloft in the water column) and are therefore supposed to be bottom dwellers. Yet we caught some of them, like the Antarctic Toothfish, on hooks set a couple hundred meters above the sea floor.  As Art and I collaborated, we soon discovered that indeed a few notothenioids, like the toothfish and the silverfish, were neutrally buoyant and permanent inhabitants of the water column.

Over the next two decades I worked on various aspects of the buoyancy and morphology of notothenioids, with periodic trips to McMurdo to replenish my supply of fish.  To expand the diversity of my catch, I participated on research cruises out in the Ross Sea on the Nathaniel B. Palmer.  By the late 1990s I had encountered dozens of species, a few of them new to science, and gained a greater appreciation of the diversity and dominance of notothenioids in the high shelf Antarctic ecosystem.  Over the last decade or so, an average of one new Antarctic fish species has been discovered every year.

A new species Pogonophryne stewarti that Richard Eakin, Tom Near and Joe Eastman described in 2009. It was taken at 1,700 m as bycatch on a toothfish longlining vessel (figure courtesy: Joe Eastman).

Antarctica has 327 fish species, a small number considering the global diversity of fishes (about 31,000 species total) and the large size of the Southern Ocean (about ten percent of the world’s ocean). But this relatively low species diversity does not indicate the fauna is uninteresting in comparison to the species-rich faunas of tropical lakes, rivers and coral reefs.

Biodiversity is not just about numbers. It has three levels or dimensions: genetic, taxonomic and functional.  Genetic biodiversity refers to the information in various DNA molecules, while taxonomic biodiversity refers to the number or quantity of different species, and functional biodiversity includes all aspects of ecosystem function, such as the importance of organisms in the food web.

In the case of the Ross Sea ecosystem, which harbors 95 different fish species, the functional biodiversity of these fishes is paramount. The isolated waters of the Ross Sea shelf form a unique evolutionary site where the abundance, biomass, and functional biodiversity of the notothenioid fishes confer uniqueness on the structure of the Ross Sea ecosystem.  By this I mean that instead of having a variety of unrelated fishes filling the various niches, as is the case in all other shelf areas of the world, notothenioids fill nearly all the niches in the Ross Sea.  Furthermore, notothenioids eat each other and in turn are eaten by the large vertebrates (birds, seals, and whales).  In short, they are the linchpin of the ecosystem and it could not function without them.

Nathaniel B. Palmer in pack ice (photo credit: Joe Eastman)

The importance of notothenioid functional biodiversity was truly brought home to me while bottom trawling from the Nathaniel B. Palmer near Beaufort Island, just north of McMurdo Sound.  Here notothenioids made up 77 percent of the species, 92 percent of the individuals and 91 percent of the biomass of our catch.  No other shelf area in the world has such lopsided figures.

Not only were notothenioids dominant on the bottom, but they also made up most of the fish we found throughout water column – a mark to their incredible diversification.  As I mentioned above, all notothenioids lack swim bladders and the original stock was confined to the seafloor.  However in the shelf waters some species have undergone morphological and ecological diversification during their evolution to confer neutral buoyancy, which allows them to occupy pelagic niches at various depths on the shelf and slope. Diversification in buoyancy is the ecological hallmark of the notothenioid radiation and was accomplished by a combination of reduced skeletal mineral content and deposition of low density fat.  They also have a tendency to retain larval features (the technical term is pedomorphy), like cartilage, that makes them less dense than if they were bony.

The toothfishes, Dissostichus mawsoni and D. eleginoides, and the Antarctic Silverfish, Pleuragramma antarcticum, are the prime examples of neutrally buoyant species.  Both D. mawsoni and Pleuragramma are abundant and ecologically important in the Ross Sea as the top piscine predator and the primary forage fish, respectively.  A net towed through the upper few hundred meters of the Ross Sea shelf comes up with nothing but silverfish (Pleuragramma) – their sheer abundance helps sustain whales, seals, and penguin populations in the Ross Sea.  Bottom line here: in the Ross Sea a single group of fishes, the notothenioids, fills most of the ecological niches and their functional biodiversity is unrivaled In comparison with any other marine shelf area of the world.

Filling a frozen niche

How did notothenioids alone become the dominant fish group on the Antarctic shelf?  Mostly they were in the right place at the right time. Tectonic, oceanographic and climatic events associated with Antarctica moving south and breaking off from the supercontinent Gondwana caused a severe decline of the cosmopolitan taxonomically diverse fish fauna from the Late Eocene 34–40 million years ago.  With little competition from other fish groups, the notothenioids (which were an innocuous benthic group at that time) took advantage of the newly opened niches and radiated opportunistically.  In doing so, they expanded from a single lineage into five families and 104 species – all found only in Antarctica.

Because they evolved in isolation in this remote locality, 97 percent of the notothenioids (along with some of the other Antarctic shelf vertebrates and invertebrates) are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else on earth. As a result the waters around Antarctica contain, in the words of the well-known biogeographer John C. Briggs, “the world’s most distinctive marine biota.”

Antarctic Toothfish, also known as "Chilean sea bass" (photo credit: Rob Robbins)

Fish are not the only organisms that make the high Antarctic shelf and the Ross Sea a noteworthy evolutionary site.  With the breakup of Gondwana, invertebrates were also experiencing bursts of diversification, including some lineages of bryozoans (moss animals), pycnogonids (sea spiders), echinoderms (sea stars) as well as shrimp-like amphipods and isopod crustaceans.  Four species of seals (Weddell, crabeater, Ross and leopard) and two species of penguins (Emperors and the Adélies) also took advantage of this new cold and open environment.  Finally, the Ross Sea has three species of killer whales.  Type A preys on minke whales, type B feeds on seals, and type C (considerably smaller that the other two) lives in dense pack ice and eats primarily Antarctic Toothfish.  The Ross Sea has quite an impressive array of conspicuous and inconspicuous marine life.

Pagothenia borchgrevinki, Notothenioid family (photo credit: John B. Weller)

Let’s wind this up.  In the mid 1980s I was surprised to see Chilean sea bass (D. eleginoides) in my local Kroger’s for $7.00 a pound.  An obscure fish from a long way off, but I didn’t connect the dots.  The contemporary Chilean sea bass (now comprised of both D. eleginoides and D. mawsoni) is now $24.99 a pound, too pricey for Kroger’s, but found sporting an “MSC” certification label in the local yuppie fish market.

We did not spot any toothfish longlining vessels during a 1998 cruise in the Ross Sea, as they were not yet out in force.  Now there are multiple toothfishing vessels within site of McMurdo Station at nearly 78 degrees south in the Ross Sea – as far south as a ship can sail.

Who saw it coming?  I didn’t and I don’t know what the future holds.  I wish I could say that the eyes of the world were turning towards the Ross Sea and its fauna, closely monitoring the health and welfare of the ecosystem as intently as the latest sports scores or episode of “Dancing with the Stars.”  But we know this is not the case.  Evolution knows no geographic or thermal bounds and, unfortunately, neither does commerce.  The Ross Sea deserves protection for its status as an unparalleled marine habitat—currently underappreciated by the general public, but equivalent in its biological significance to World Heritage Sites such as Lake Baikal, the African Great Lakes, the Galápagos and portions of the Hawaiian Islands and Madagascar.  Hopefully my two cents worth here will at least serve to bring a slightly higher level of appreciation to this area and its fauna, and will hasten the day for a broad recognition of the Ross Sea as a fascinating cold evolutionary hot spot.

The Ross Sea, Antarctica (photo credit: John B. Weller)

Photo USAF

This is by no means the first time that a fishing vessel has got into difficultyin the Ross Sea  and brings home how dangerous this fishery is. An Olympic style fishery (a race until the quota is caught) is highly competitive, boats want to catch as much as they can, as quickly as they can and the highly competitive nature of fishing undoubtedly pushes crews and their vessels into marginal areas. I have seen these boats departing for the Ross Sea from New Zealand and they do not fill you with confidence.

While the stranding of these vessel brings this fishery in the Ross Sea to media attention and raises questions about the potential for further environmental disasters, what is often not asked in the heat of the moment is the simple question – why are these boats here in the first place? The answer would reveal another impending disaster  – this one far more insidious and far reaching, it is the destruction of the last near intact marine ecosystem on Earth.

Rescue Mission Coordinator Neville Blakemore said the crew was continuing to pump water from the ship using the on-board pumping equipment and one that was delivered yesterday by the NZ Airforce.

“They are keeping ahead of the water ingress using two pumps,” Mr Blakemore said. “But they are having difficulty in trying to fix a patch to the damaged part of the hull because they need to stop one of the pumps to do this, and then the water level creeps up again.” Mr Blakemore said Sparta’s stability was currently the number one priority for the rescue operation.

Check out TVNZ’s story here.

All the very best to those involved in the repair work and rescue, it’s in all out interests that we get this ship repaired and back home as soon as possible – hopefully to never return.

A leaked document to journalist Michael Field revealed that New Zealand was to veto full protection of the Ross Sea. His subsequent article makes grim reading for those wanting to protect this remarkable piece of ocean – but take heart in the fact that the lines of this MPA are yet to be fixed. According to sources within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) , New Zealand’s proposal for a Ross Sea MPA is still a work in progress. While this article highlights the challenge we face in shifting the Government’s position, it by no means spells the end of our opportunity to make a difference.

Adelie Penguin with Chick. Photo John Weller

I’m sure politicians do listen to the people that put them there and what this article highlights is the need to take our message to the public, where I believe common sense is on our side. It’s not rocket science – DON’T DESTROY the world’s LAST UNTOUCHED OCEAN. Fishing, undoubtedly will.

What value do we place on protecting this last wild ocean? Is it worth the few million a few companies make by selling toothfish to fine dining restaurants and Casinos in North America? It will keep money flowing into economies for a little longer – but take a moment to consider the cost. The real cost of this catch is not what’s found in the markets, it’s what’s lost in the Ross Sea.

A few years of fishing will destroy what nature has built over millions of years. Ben Halpern’s Global map of human impact on the world’s oceans found the Ross Sea to be the most pristine piece of ocean on our planet. We now know.  Given the state of the world’s oceans and the planet, the reality is we can no longer afford to NOT protect these last wild places.

As a documentary cameraman, I have filmed on every continent on Earth, from Serringetti to Siberia, from Himalaya to the deep water canyons of Kaikoura. Believe me, the Ross Sea Ecosystem is one of the world’s great natural treasures and fully deserves full protection.

Michael Field’s article should be a call to action. We know New Zealand’s likely stance and we know we have limited time to change that. CCAMLR, the organisation that provides Governance over the Ross Sea will decide on the extent of marine protection in the Ross Sea in November 2012. New Zealand is a key player in that decision making process. So please make your thoughts known, tell a friend, sign our petition, write to the NZ Minister involved or your local MP.

In 1996 New Zealand lead the charge into this fishery -  we should now lead the charge out by supporting the proposal to protect the entire Ross Sea - the last (near) intact marine ecosystem on Earth.

In two weeks time I begin editing my Last Ocean documentary. It will bring the story of the Ross Sea (and the campaign to protect it), to the big screen and hopefully to a big international audience. I will keep you posted on the film’s developments, in the meantime enjoy these words of wisdom from Antarctic Scientist Stacy Kim,  Executive Director of ASOC James Barnes and Ocean Campaigner, Ted recipient,  National Geographic Explorer, and much much more… Sylvia Earl.

Shortly after reading a paper on threats facing Antarctica’s Ross Sea, the award-winning Boulder-based photographer John Weller became part of a team dedicated to saving this last pristine open ocean ecosystem on Earth. On October 6, Weller will be in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to present an exhibition of his intimate photos capturing the at-risk environment: “The Last Ocean: Antarctica’s Ross Sea Photographs by John Weller” will be on display October 1, 2011 – January 29, 2012, at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

“Adélie penguins, Weddell seals, minke whales, scientists and Southern Ocean fisherman are all bound together,” says Weller.  “The Ross Sea story is not just about science, not just about the incredible organisms that live at the edge of the world. It is a story of interconnected communities. It is our story, the story of our struggle to become sustainable.

Through his remarkable photographs, Weller celebrates the Ross Sea as one of the last healthy marine environments, offering a glimpse into the lives of wildlife from Emperor penguins to silverfish, inhabiting the remote region both above and below the ocean’s surface.  Weller, a SeaWeb fellow and photographer/writer based in Boulder, Colo., received a 2009 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation to support his work to promote protection of the Ross Sea.  For more information on those efforts and to view the exhibit online, visit John Weller’s photography website, or The Last Ocean Charitable Trust website. The exhibit is sponsored in part by Antarctica Ocean Alliance.

When the film competition was announced I didn’t hesitate to begin planning a film – one look at the top prize of a trip to the sub-Antarctic islands was all I needed to spur me into action.

I live in Port Chalmers, the main harbour town of Dunedin. From here, many expeditions have departed for the Antarctic region.

Above the town stands a stone monolith commemorating the doomed expedition of Robert Falcon Scott and his crew on the Terra Nova in 1910. I decided to use this very real link to Antarctica and the Ross Sea as a hook for my film.

New Zealand stands at the gateway to Antarctica – and in my mind that position carries a responsibility to care for it and take an active role as stewards of the last great wilderness of Earth.

I will use the trip south to further my research and gather photographs for a book I am writing about whaling in New Zealand. I would like to thank Peter and the Last Ocean Charitable Trust for opening our eyes to this incredible corner of the world and the urgent need to protect it for the future

Bill Morris.

Traveling through New Zealand’s Southern Alps, I am mesmerized by the green smoky mountains and glacial blue braided rivers. Lost in thought, I wonder (as I always do when immersed in a new place) has this stunning eco-scape always looked this way?

West Coast South Island New Zealand (photo by Cassandra Brooks)

I came to NZ to work on a project called “The Last Ocean.”  Collectively we are trying to tell the story of the Ross Sea, Antarctica, a region that’s been deemed the last intact and healthy marine ecosystem.  This southernmost stretch of ocean has remained beyond the reaches of widespread pollution, mining or large-scale fishing (until recently).   Most incredibly, the Ross Sea still has near virgin abundances of all its top predators.

As I drove through the rugged New Zealand mountain passes, the weight of this hits me.  Prior to human arrival, the largest inhabitants here were birds unlike those anywhere else in the world.  Giant flightless birds known as moa dominated the land, hunted only by the Haast Eagle, a massive raptor.  I tried to imagine moas, which stood ten feet tall, grazing in the mountain lowlands while the Haast Eagle, with a nine-foot wingspan, soared above.

Giant Haast Eagle attacking New Zealand moa, artist rendition (published in PLoS Biology, downloaded from Wikimedia)

I tried to imagine grizzlies still roaming through California, wolves and mountain lions in my childhood home of New England.  But we’re lucky to see any of these animals in our lifetime.  If we do, it’s likely in a national park, reserve or zoo – all tiny relics of the past preserved in space and time.

And yet, there are pockets of the world where animals have either persisted or returned, many of them within the ongoing presence of humans.  After all, an ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their environment, whether we like it or not, that includes us.

As I watch the sun set in the Southern Hemisphere, my mind drifts north to my current home in Point Reyes, California.  I think of all the large predators I’ve seen there – bobcats, coyotes and even great white sharks. I think of the mountain lions, the herds of elk and deer, many grazing amongst the cattle.

Elk at Tomales Point, Point Reyes National Seashore, California (photo by Cassandra Brooks)

Here on the Point Reyes Peninsula we’ve somehow found a way to peacefully coexist – a national park amidst ranch land where the ecosystem seems to have settled.  The environment seems healthy – by that I mean the region is rich in biodiversity, invasives exist, but don’t dominate, plants and animals aren’t suffering from disease, the air and water are relatively clean.

Of course, Point Reyes supports a tiny population of a few hundred people while at the time of writing this our human population has now topped 6.9 billion people.  That’s an awful lot of us tapping resources, polluting, and if not actively, certainly passively bulldozing biodiversity.

Our planet Earth (photo from NASA/Wikimedia)

Our big human brains are surely to blame.  We’ve devised such cunning ways to live easier lives, exploit more efficiently, overcome disease and dominate the planet. Perhaps its time we use our big brains to become responsible members and active participants in our ecosystem. Try as we might, we cannot live outside of it. All we do to our environment comes back to us – all of our resources, our food, water and energy, come from the earth; all our waste goes back into it.

The first step to healing our environment is simple and depends solely on human will. We need a paradigm shift in our way of thinking so that we consciously see ourselves as part of our environment. In this new ecology, perhaps we could find a way to create as much as we destroy, so that we do not deprive future generations of clean air, fresh water, food, and energy.  Perhaps we will stop causing extinction, and instead find ways to support biodiversity.  Perhaps once we see ourselves as an extension of the Earth, we will fight to protect those systems that are still intact and work towards repairing the rest. If we do there is still a chance to provide a hospitable planet for generations to come.

Scientist on the ice in the Ross Sea, Antarctica (photo copyright John B. Weller)

Last Ocean Founder John Weller and his work in the Ross Sea featured in the July/August issue of American Photo.  Download the full article here: LIQUID COURAGE

Peter Young interviewed Dave not too long ago for his upcoming documentary about the Ross Sea. Dave spoke with conviction about the beauty of the Ross Sea and the need to protect this remarkable place.

Visit the auction page to find out more and bid on the photo.

Dave talks about his photo – “A thirty minute ride north from Scott Base onto the Ross Sea ice, this igloo was built for fun by base scientists. It housed 12, although not having council approval or resource consent, the roof was never finished. I love the way the drift has blanketed it and the light is magical. A few days prior I experienced the most glorious, windless silence here. Indescribable.”

The resource is divided into chapters covering the geography, climate, wildlife and human aspects of the region. It will be available to download as a .pdf from our website by late September and we are currently seeking funding to print and distribute 1200 hard copies to schools across New Zealand… so if anyone out there has sponsorship ideas, please don’t hesitate to contact us.