Yet another coal-laden ship has capsized in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.

On Saturday, “MV Sea Horse-1”, a cargo vessel carrying 1,235 metric tons of coal, sank in the Shela River in Sundarbans. The sunken vessel is currently lying at nine to 12 metres below the surface of the water, and hasn’t been salvaged yet, media reports say.

The incident occurred near Tambulbunia, which is a critical habitat for the threatened Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) and the endangered Gangetic dolphin (Platanista gangetica), according to Abdullah Harun Chowdhury, a Professor at Khulna University in Bangaladesh.

Sundarbans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is also home to the endangered Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), and several other threatened and rare species of fish, crabs, otter, crocodiles, birds and other wildlife. Capsizing ships severely threaten Sundarban’s unique ecology and wildlife, experts say.

In December 2014, for example, an oil tanker collided with a cargo vessel, spilling over 350,000 litres of Heavy Fuel Oil into the Shela River. Then, in May last year, a ship carrying 500 metric tons of fertilizer sank in Bhola River in the Sundarbans. A few months later in October, a coal-laden cargo vessel carrying 510 metric tons of coal sunk into the Passur River in the Sundarbans.

Following Saturday’s incident, the Bangladesh government has suspended other ships from plying the Shela River. Instead, the Shipping Ministry has asked all shipping vessels to use the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel until further notice, according to local media reports.

However, similar bans in the past have been withdrawn quickly. For example, after the December oil spill, the government had banned cargo ships from plying the Shela River. But within a month, the ban was lifted and the route was re-opened.

Conservationists have repeatedly warned that permitting movement of cargo vessels through a sensitive region, such as the Sundarbans, poses a serious threat to Sundarbans’s wildlife and people.

Chowdhury’s team, for example, showed that the December oil spill has been catastrophic for the Sundarbans. Their investigation revealed that the oil has seeped into the forest floor, contaminated the waters and killed several animals such as otters, crocodiles, dolphins, fish, and frogs.

Coal, too, can be disastrous for the Sundarbans. According to Chowdhury, coal and coal waste products, including fly ash, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury, nickel, vanadium, beryllium, barium, cadmium, chromium, selenium and, radium. When coal-carrying vessels sink, these heavy metals mix with the water, endangering aquatic life, he said.

“Mercury from coal is converted into methyl mercury, a toxic compound that harms people and others animals like crocodiles, dolphins, birds, fishing cat, and otter that consume contaminated fishes,” he said. “Population of the aquatic animals will decrease and long time impact on aquatic lives like loss of breeding capacity, habitat loss, injury of respiratory organs, hearts, eyes and skins will happen due these heavy metals.”

Heavy metals can also affect the growth and survival of major mangrove trees such as the Sundari tree (Heritiera fomes), Chowdhury said. Moreover, the mixing of coal, fly ash and fertilizer in the Sundarbans can also damage the spawning grounds of shrimp, he added.

The forest department has filed a case against the owner of MV Sea Horse-1 and five others, seeking nearly $640,000 in compensation. The department has also formed a four-member committee to investigate the sinking of the vessel.

Conservationists say that cargo ships carrying coal, oil, fertilizer and other chemicals simply add to the numerous threats that already plague the Sundarbans, such as deforestation, increasing salinity, natural disasters, poaching and illegal wildlife trade. Moreover, despite major backlash, Bangladesh is planning on a coal-fired power plant close to the Sundarbans.

To protect the Sundarbans, all kinds of chemicals and fly ash containing ships must be prohibited inside, Chowdhury said.

“Alternative river transportation routes must be launched from Mongla port to other parts of the country as soon as possible,” he added. “The rules and regulations of international conventions like Ramsar, UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, and the Convention of Biological Diversity must be implemented properly. A national political commitment is necessary to stop all kinds of activities which may create a problem for the fragile ecosystem of the Sundarbans.”

Article published by Shreya Dasgupta, source: Mongabay

We know that human-induced environmental changes are responsible for coral bleaching, disease, and infertility. Loss of the world’s stony coral reefs – up to 30% in the next 30 years, according to some estimates – will mean loss of their services, including sequestering some 70–90 million tons of carbon each year and supporting enormous marine biodiversity. Yet despite many advances, we are still far from understanding the causes and processes contributing to the corals’ demise. Weizmann Institute researchers have developed a new experimental platform for studying coral biology at microscale resolutions, which is already providing new insights into this complex problem.

The tiny – often less than a millimetre in diameter – animals that build coral reefs create a thin layer of living tissue surrounding the calcium-based skeleton. These animals live in symbiosis with single-celled, photosynthetic algae that provide nutrients and oxygen in return for carbon dioxide and shelter. “In order to understand what happens during bleaching, when this symbiosis is broken,” says Dr. Assaf Vardi, “we need to understand what happens to these organisms at the cellular and molecular levels under various conditions.”

Vardi and his team – Orr Shapiro, Esti Kramarsky-Winter and Assaf R. Gavish of the Weizmann Institute’s Plant and Environmental Sciences Department – together with Roman Stocker of MIT (currently at ETH, Switzerland),created a system they call “coral on a chip.” For the first time, the scientists were able to examine living coral polyps in the lab, under highly controlled conditions. This system is based on microfluidics technology, which had been developed to track cellular processes under life-like conditions. Taking a small piece of coral, Vardi and his team induced stressful conditions – in this case by increasing salt content – which caused the corals to release polyps, a process sometimes referred to as “polyp bail-out.” Settling the bailed-out polyps into prefabricated microfluidic wells, the scientists were able to observe, via continuous observation under a microscope, how miniature coral colonies called “micropropagates” grow and behave in different conditions.

Using their system, the team recorded, for the first time, the growth of individual aragonite crystals – the basic building blocks of the coral skeleton. The group was also able to directly visualize the initiation of coral disease, pointing to a little-known path of infection. Subjecting coral micropropagates to high light intensities, known to induce coral bleaching, enabled the team to follow the elimination of the symbiotic algae, one cell at a time.

Vardi’s lab group is already in the process of adapting the coral-on-a-chip system to track the nutrient and carbon cycles of reef-building corals, as well as delving further into disease and bleaching processes. “Many corals are running out of time; it is crucial to know how our actions are affecting their survival, and how they affect ours,” he says. “Our method can help researchers investigate everything from the coral genes that affect survival, to the strategies coral use to build reefs, to their effects on the marine carbon cycle.” Indeed, as corals represent an early stage in the evolution of multicellular organisms, Vardi envisions the coral-on-a-chip platform establishing coral micropropagates as a new model system for research.

Dr. Assaf Vardi’s research is supported by the Benoziyo Fund for the Advancement of Science; the Angel Faivovich Foundation for Ecological Research; the Rothschild Caesarea Foundation; Dana and Yossie Hollander, Israel; Roberto and Renata Ruhman, Brazil; Selmo Nissenbaum, Brazil; the Brazil-Israel Energy Fund; the Lord Sieff of Brimpton Memorial Fund; the European Research Council; the estate of Samuel and Alwyn J. Weber; the Germaine Hope Brennan Charitable Foundation, and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). Dr. Vardi is the incumbent of the Edith and Nathan Goldenberg Career Development Chair.

Source: Ocean News & Technology