Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific has launched a new project aimed at putting the conservation spotlight on the stars of the marine ecosystem — the plants and animals — in an effort to forge a stronger connection with the public.
“People don’t really care about biodiversity,” said Peter Kareiva, president and chief executive of the Aquarium of the Pacific. “They care about the species that they know. They care about real animals, real birds, real fish.”
To that end, the aquarium on Thursday released an inaugural Marine Species Report Card, a collaborative effort that assesses the population status of 30 species found on the California coast.
The report card spans marine mammals, fish, birds, kelp and invertebrates — including ocean celebrities like gray whales and lesser-known cast members such as owl limpets, sea snails that “often get mistaken for rocks,” according to the National Park Service.
Scientists and researchers from more than two dozen institutions and organizations contributed to the report card, which is available to view online. The plan is to update it every three to four years.
No letter grade is assigned to the species, but each is labeled with an arrow to signify whether its ranks are increasing, decreasing or staying the same. An accompanying narrative provides a more in-depth overview of how they’re doing.
Kareiva believes the conservation movement has shifted its focus to what he described as more abstract concepts, such as biodiversity. But he said it was a mistake to underestimate how much people care about species.
Spotlighting species helps foster a connection to the public and reveals a nuanced picture of the ecosystem in the throes climate change, in which some plants and animals are thriving while others are barely hanging on, he and other aquarium staffers said.
“When we get up to the biodiversity questions or the ecosystem questions, it’s harder to say, ‘Here’s where our successes are’ or to drive people to want to invest,” said Brett Long, vice president of animal care at the aquarium. He added that establishing a connection through digestible information can serve as a pathway for broader conversations.
The report card encompasses several distressing tales, including that of white abalone, which were perilously overfished in the 1970s and ‘80s. The endangered marine snail with a coveted iridescent shell remains threatened by a disease called withering syndrome, which it may be more susceptible to due to the stress of ocean warming and acidification, according to the report card.
But there also are more heartening stories. Giant sea bass also were overexploited to the brink of extinction, but they’ve started to rebound in recent decades as a result of a ban on commercial gill nets, according to Jeremy Claisse, a professor in the biological sciences department at Cal Poly Pomona who worked on the report card.
Then there are conservation narratives that are harder to sum up as good or bad. Once thought to be extinct, southern sea otters rebounded but have plateaued at about 3,000 animals in their existing range — which is nowhere near their historic range.
“By telling these individual stories, we can learn a lot about how different management efforts are working, or how climate change is going to impact one species versus another,” Claisse said.
More than a dozen of the species on the report card can be found at the Long Beach aquarium. Sleek sea otters dive and twirl in a tank before awed visitors. Captive-bred white abalone are the under-the-radar stars of another exhibit showcasing their habitat to raise awareness of their plight.
Kareiva described the project as a response to what he said was an evolution in the main concerns of large conservation nonprofits.
He said these groups used to be focused on the “organismal” aspect of conservation but for good reason concentrated their attention on broader ecological and policy-focused concepts, leaving zoos and aquariums to essentially be the spokespeople for plants and animals.
“They’re so concerned with succeeding at scale,” policy-wise, he said of the organizations, citing the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Kareiva previously served as vice president of science for the Nature Conservancy.
“Politically and strategically, it was probably the savvy move if you’re operating at the national level,” he said of the conservation movement. He said the result is that when data are collected, not enough attention is paid to species.
The goal of the report card “is to reinvigorate the species and the organismal part of conservation,” he said.
Joe Walston, executive vice president of Wildlife Conservation Society Global, said in a statement that the nonprofit hasn’t changed its “ultimate focus from wildlife and wild places” but explained the rationale behind championing ecosystems.
He said dealing with threats such as over-hunting, illegal fishing and deforestation are no longer sufficient to protect wildlife.
“With the extraordinary pressures from climate change, we need to extend our influence and ensure that we are focusing on ‘the health of the whole’; the ability to maintain the resilience of these ecosystems that not only protects the wildlife from the local threats, but also ensures their ecosystem remain[s] robust and resilient in the face of the larger pressures,” he said.
Sophie Parker, the interim science director for the Nature Conservancy’s California chapter, said the nonprofit has a long history of working with zoos and aquariums — including a current collaboration involving the Aquarium of the Pacific — to recover imperiled species. “We also need to ensure that broader habitats and systems are healthy and connected, so that when we reintroduce species, they can thrive,” she said in a statement.
Many, including Kareiva, don’t see conservation approaches centered on the ecosystem or the organism as mutually exclusive but complementary.
Brendan Cummings, conservation director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said there’s an extinction crisis imperiling thousands of species, a dire phenomenon worthy of priority. And the same time, the loss isn’t just percentages — it’s actual living things.
Cummings said that’s a separate matter from what resonates with the public — and how to achieve conservation goals. For several years now, he has worked to protect the western Joshua tree, and he said its iconic, beloved status helped get a state law passed to protect it. But those protections also extend to the wider ecosystem — such as the yucca moth.
“If we had waged a campaign on behalf of the yucca moth, I doubt there would have been as much public attention to it as the Joshua tree. But protecting one, protects the other, and acts as an umbrella to protect entire desert ecosystems,” he said. “So there’s many pathways to the shared goal of protecting biodiversity, preventing extinction and, more broad-brushed, protecting nature on a landscape scale.”
Beyond prioritizing plants and animals, the report card also is intended to be a practical resource for the public and policymakers. Kareiva said he envisioned students tapping it for papers as well as using the data to underpin a still-conceptual effort to create biodiversity credits.
Others involved with the project said it highlighted the power of long-term monitoring efforts — and the need to keep funding them.
The list of species under consideration for the report card was roughly double the current 30, and one way it was narrowed down was whether there were data available, said Jennie Dean, vice president of education and conservation at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
One species they were interested in but dropped for this reason was leopard sharks, a striking fish adorned with spots and dark ovals stretched in neat rows across its back. She said “it would be wonderful” if sustained monitoring of the slender sharks happened in the future to shed light on how they’re doing.
Not doing the monitoring can have consequences. Data points stretched 10 years apart, for example, can leave a gaping knowledge gap.
“There’s a substantial chance that something significant could happen that you have been too late to the party to address,” she said.
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