How can we do this? By creating marine protected areas (MPA) across the globe that don’t permit destructive activities like fishing or mining.
We asked ocean researchers from the IOF to envision how this target might be achieved, how the world might look different if it were achieved and how their work might change if 30 per cent of the world’s oceans were protected.
Dr. Jacqueline Maud
Jacqueline Maud is a plankton ecologist and post-doctoral researcher in the Marine Food Webs Working Group of the IOF’s Hakai Coastal Initiative. She’s currently investigating the still-mysterious diets of zooplankton using several key zooplankton species in the Strait of Georgia as a case study.
While previous studies have zoomed in on zooplankton diets by slicing the ocean critters open and peering at them through a microscope, Maud is using a process called molecular gut content analysis and another process called DNA metabarcoding to get a high-resolution picture of what they eat. DNA from inside the zooplankton gets extracted, amplified, and then sequenced so that Maud can identify the DNA of all the organisms that the zooplankton has consumed.
Zooplankton from the Strait of Georgia. ©Brian Hunt
“Up to now, we’ve known only half of the story,” Maud said. “A lot of copepods, for example, were historically thought of as strictly herbivorous, but we now know that this is not the case. It is molecular gut content analyses that are revealing the full range of taxa that they can feed on and we know they feed on other marine microzooplankton, including jellyfish as well.”
Knowing the diets of zooplankton may help us predict how climate change will alter food webs, according to Maud.
Maud thinks that if the 30×30 project is successful, her work might take on a slightly different perspective.
“MPAs aim to conserve and enhance biodiversity and preserve ecosystem health, and policies tend to look at the oceans from the top down, for example, by preventing commercial fishing at the top of the food web,” she said. “My research looks at the ecosystem more from the bottom-up, so how phytoplankton and zooplankton and the balance of these smaller species at the bottom of the food web can affect the larger animals higher up, like salmon. We need to understand the baseline feeding behaviour if we are to fully understand the benefits of policies such as MPAs. I can imagine a scenario where the dominant zooplankton species may shift in response to, say, increasing top predator numbers, through cascading effects down the food web.”
As for whether the 30x 30 goal is achievable, Maud thinks several challenges will arise during the implementation of such an ambitious ocean protection strategy, the primary one being logistics.
“It’s a huge task because you’ve got to include all of the stakeholders,” she said. “You need to include fishers, mining, tourism, environmental economics; you have to consider the different species in the proposed MPA, which species were there previously, and whether some species will leave the MPA because of climate change.”
“I don’t think it’s feasible in 10 years,” she said. “It’s an awesome goal to aim for and we need to protect as much of our oceans as we can, but I think it will be tricky.”
By Riley Tjosvold
Tags: food webs, Hakai Coastal Initiative, IOF postdoctoral fellows, Jacqueline Maud, Marine protected areas, Pelagic Ecosystems Lab, plankton, Women in Science, World Ocean Day, zooplankton