Greenhouse gas suspected in oyster woes

The collapse began rather unspectacularly.

In 2005, when most of the millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to reproduce, Washington’s shellfish growers largely shrugged it off.

In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation’s oysters — the epicenter of the West Coast’s $111 million oyster industry — everyone knows nature can be fickle.

But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery’s oyster larvae died, too.

Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean — icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries — may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.

First successful mission with new experimental ocean observatory

– Investigation of ocean acidification in the Baltic Sea –

For the first time scientists and engineers of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, successfully operated an offshore observing system to study environmental changes in the oceans. The so-called mesocosms, which resemble oversized test tubes, are used to simulate the future ocean under close to natural conditions. IFM-GEOMAR scientists used six of these mesocosms, each enclosing about 60,000 litres of seawater, at the observing station Booknis Eck in the Baltic Sea to study effects of ocean acidification.