Earth's endangered life support system
A new exhibition points to the plight of cleaning up and maintaining a clean ocean gets underway at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute.
“Often people think the ocean is something separate — it’s beautiful and great for vacation,” explains assistant director at the Centre for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, Kathleen Frith. “We’re trying to help people understand the ocean nurtures the basic life support systems we can’t live without, and supports all life on earth, including our own.”
In order to do this, the Centre has created a number of educational tools, including the interactive exhibit that will be featured at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) this week.
The exhibit, which is also being shown at aquariums and other learning institutions like the BUEI across the US, is based on three themes, The Ocean Heals, The Ocean Nourishes, The Ocean Sustains, and within those three themes they discuss what services are provided to human beings by the ocean.
“In Ocean Heals, we talk about how diverse and rich the make up of a coral reef ecosystem is, and how it has allowed us to find organisms that produce chemicals and substances that have medical benefits for us,” she explains. “Such as the organism commonly known as a Cone Snail, a very diverse organism that defends itself by coating a harpoon in a sort of chemical cocktail of conotoxins that will stun pray so the snail can eat it.”
According to Ms Frith, there are about 500 different species of cone snail, each producing a unique set of about 100 different conotoxins. If you do the math that means there are something like 50,000 different, unique conotoxins that we know about.
“Just one has been researched and investigated thoroughly and it is now being used on the market as a pain killer, it’s common name is Prialt,” she adds. “It’s phenomenal, the substance is about 100 times more potent than morphine but it does not lead to addiction or tolerance. And not leading to tolerance, that’s a medical breakthrough.”
With opiates you have to keep administering more and more of the drug in order to elicit the same relief from pain: “This drug works very specifically between channels, between neurons where pain is being experienced, it’s more cost effective in terms of those suffering from chronic pain, which is costly and a debilitating condition globally. The ability to treat chronic pain without tolerance is a real breakthrough.
“We’re realising that we’re just starting to tap the surface of what may be beneficial in this rich, diverse ecosystem.”
At the same time, she adds, coral reef ecosystems are one of the most threatened areas in the natural world, because with climate change comes the changes of sea surface temperatures, and coral can only survive in a small envelope of temperature. Add to that the other pollutants that decrease the resistance of the reefs — if they aren’t bleached they’re becoming sick and they can’t back from other stressors.
>The second focus, The Ocean Nourishes, talks about the roll of the ocean in our global diet and global economy.
“It points out that seafood provides the most animal based protein in the world — more than poultry, pork or beef - and how healthy that protein is,” Ms Frith explains. “It’s incredibly good, high in omega 3s, protective against heart disease, and so much more.”
As a species, she says, we’ve been harvesting the seas for a very long time and now we are over-fishing and depleting fishing stocks and contaminating the remaining stocks: “Mercury is a more prevalent contaminant in seafood and is primarily sourced by coal burning plants. Mercury in the atmosphere gets circulated and rains out in a precipitation event.
“Because most of the globe is ocean, most events happen over the ocean and mercury enters the ocean environment, bound to micro-organisms, enters the food web and bio-accumulates. The rule of the thumb is, the larger the fish the more mercury is has. This isn’t always the case but keep that in mind.”
Mercury has neurodegenerative properties. Although scientists aren’t sure how exactly mercury effects the brain’s functioning, many studies show people who have been exposed to high levels, especially as a foetus, have impaired skills and it has also been shown to cause heart damage.
“Again, saying here’s the ocean providing protein for us, in order to continue to reap the value, we need to source our energy in ways that don’t contaminate the healthy food supply,” she stresses.
The last theme, The Ocean Sustains, talks more holistically about how the ocean drives the climate and weather. It’s ground zero for the water cycle and it’s the basis of life in terms of climate on the planet.
“We’ve been observing changes happening in the atmosphere and in the ocean because of carbon dioxide levels rising so high that we have started to change the balances that have provided such a stable climate over a long period of time,” Ms Frith says.
“This section talks about how the ocean has nurtured life on earth and how now, because of our own activities we’re starting to make changes to the system that will inevitably hurt us.”
