There’s still time to register for the annual Ocean Innovation Conference at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The conference is scheduled to take place in UNCW’s Burney Center from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Virtual registration closes Friday. The fee to register to attend the event virtually is $30. Questions will be taken from virtual participants for keynote speakers and panelists and some virtual innovation fair booths will be available to those who register to attend online.

In-person registration runs through to the day of the conference and costs $129. Seats are limited.

All UNCW students may attend in-person or virtually for free. Tenants with the university’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship receive a 50% discount and CIE members and coworkers a 25% discount.

For more information about discounts contact cie@uncw.edu.

Now in its third year, the conference brings together UNCW’s deep research expertise, the entrepreneurial ecosystem of southeastern North Carolina and those passionate about the ocean and coastal communities to spark conversations about topics including marine biotechnology, alternative materials, living shoreline projects, ocean data science, and emerging innovations.

Highlights of the conference include updates on marine and coastal research, trends in blue economy innovation, and showcasing opportunities for investment, collaboration, and action.

This year’s featured keynote speakers are Deborah Westphal, author and executive advisor at The Karen Toffler Charitable Trust, and world surfing champion and author of The CODE Method Shaun Tomson.

Sessions are held throughout the day and will focus on the regional blue ecosystem, cutting-edge ocean technologies, and efforts to preserve and restore ocean resources.

The event is organized by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Alliance for the Blue Economy (All Blue).

With eyes roughly the size of softballs, it may stand to reason that one of the largest mammals on Earth should have exceptionally sharp vision.

Humpback whales have some of the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet, or the oceans in which they migrate thousands upon thousands of miles during their lives.

But their journeys through open seas are done with limited vision, according to a newly published study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Duke University.

These mammoth creatures have to be very close to an object in order to see it in fine detail, which explains why they are particularly vulnerable to getting tangled up in fishing gear.

“Humans have exceptionally high spatial resolution of vision by comparison to most animals,” said Dr. Lori Schweikert, an assistant professor of biology and marine biology at UNCW. “But what is surprising is the fact that whales have the structure of the eye to support even better vision, but they don’t have that.”

Using a specimen of a humpback whale eye archived more than a decade ago at UNCW’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program, researchers were able to measure a humpback whale’s vision at 3.95 cycles per degree, or CPD.

CPD measures the number of black-and-white line pairs that appear within 1 degree of space.

To grasp this measurement of sight, Schweikert gave this example: hold one arm straight out and put your thumb straight up. The width to your thumb is about 1 degree of your visual space. Human eyes can resolve about up to about 60 cycles per degree.

Most animals have low spatial resolution of vision. In animals, the larger the eye, the greater their spatial vision. But for humpback whales, “they are just way off the line,” Schweikert said. “Way off.”

What researchers found when they cut into the eye is that humpbacks have unusually thickened eye walls. Nearly half of the depth of the whale’s eye was filled with its own wall, shortening the distance from the center of the lens of the eye to the retina.

That distance is called focal length.

“The longer the focal length, the sharper the vision that’s possible,” Schweikert said.

Researchers also found that the cell density in humpback whale eye retina was exceptionally low. These cells send visual information to the brain.

Based on their calculation of 3.95 CPD, researchers then modeled how humpback whales might visually perceive things in their natural environment.

The reality is, their vision, or lack thereof, is suited to their environment.

Humpbacks prey on huge bait balls of fish or krill that silhouette against an open light field, or light that is projected directly into a space without being redirected. They have few predators – mainly orcas, or killer whales, false killer whales, and large sharks, particularly great whites. And, when a humpback whale searches for a mate, it can see a potential love match well enough from a distance.

So, humpbacks did not need to evolve with the ability to see fine-scale things, Schweikert said.

Where a humpback whales’ sight gets it into trouble, she said, is when it comes across a structure in the ocean that has more visual fine-scale information, such as a net or gillnet. One of the leading causes of humpback whale deaths is entanglement in fishing gear.

“In our modeling of how they might be able to resolve this detail in the environment is that, at roughly three to four body lengths away would be where they might be able to start resolving the structure of the net. Based on swimming speed, that only leaves them a few seconds to get out of the way,” Schweikert said.

This helps explain why humpback whales get entangled as frequently as they do.

Humpback whales live in every ocean on the planet. They have one of the longest migrations, with some populations swimming up to 5,000 miles, of any mammal on the planet.

In additional to entanglements, vessel strikes are also a leading cause of humpback whale deaths.

To figure out ways to try and mitigate such human impacts to humpback whale, more studies will need to occur.

“I think that understanding how animals will interact with things in their environment is certainly more complicated that any one study or even a mix of studies that would take in all their sensory abilities to detect what’s in their environment,” Schweikert said. “It’s one thing to know if an animal can see it, but it’s totally another thing to know how they will respond. It’s quite possible that they can see some of the threats in their environment, but behaviorally, they are just not making the decision early enough to move out of the way.”

This study could be considered in the larger puzzle of those types of considerations, she said.

MOREHEAD CITY – There probably are relatively few people who understand the importance that the U.S. military, particularly the Marine Corps, places on understanding and protecting the environment of the land and water it uses.

Hans Paerl, professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, is one of them. He and colleagues from UNC and other universities are preparing to publish a paper that will outline the results of a multi-year study they conducted in and around the New River, which flows as an estuary through Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, then enters Onslow Bay in the Atlantic Ocean through New River Inlet.

The overall study, funded by the government, looked at the terrestrial portion of the area as well as the aquatic, and Paerl’s portion mostly involved quantifying the carbon and nutrient flows through what’s technically called “the freshwater-marine continuum of a temperate, micro-tidal estuary.”

Carbon, of course, is the building block of life as we know it. But carbon dioxide, or CO₂, the main greenhouse gas that most climate experts believe traps the Earth’s heat and is leading to significant changes in the climate, including sea level rise. And because Camp Lejeune and many other Marine Corps bases are near coastal waters – Marines are the nation’s amphibious fighters, and need to train in and around those waters – sea level rise and coastal habitat changes are important to them.

“They want to know what’s going on, on their properties and around them,” Paerl said. “And they want to know what their role is in what’s going on.”

Part of that is economic, part of it is planning.

“Many of the generals and others at the top are very forward-thinking,” Paerl said. “They can look down the road and see that at some point in the future, there might very well be carbon regulations and taxes. They want to know where they stand.”

In Lejeune’s case, Paerl said, the base is in pretty good standing. The study shows that 85 percent of the “nutrient budget” in the estuary – carbon is a nutrient, as are such things as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium – comes from upstream, not from the base.

The river, which is only about 50 miles long and entirely contained in Onslow County, rises in the northwestern region and flows east-southeast past Jacksonville, where it widens into a tidal estuary about 2 miles wide. But before it gets to Jacksonville, it flows through mostly rural and agricultural land. That agriculture includes not only row crops, but also many hog farms with millions of hogs and their necessary waste lagoons. Nutrients abound.

So, Paerl said, it’s not surprising that the estuary’s nutrient load mostly comes from upstream, and the military officials are surely “delighted” to know that.

“What it means is that if we start getting more nutrient regulations, they’re in a pretty good position to show that they are not primarily responsible” for the problems that cause the need for regulations, Paerl said.

And there are plenty of examples of regulations arising from water quality problems. The state declared the Neuse River “nutrient sensitive” in the 1980s, after numerous algae blooms and fish kills, and developed and implemented rules designed to regulate sources of nutrient pollution in the basin, including wastewater, stormwater and agricultural runoff. The rules also require vegetative buffers along the water.

But beyond that, Paerl said, the Marine Corps and other branches of the military are concerned about climate change. At Camp Lejeune, they want to protect and maintain their ecosystem, because it’s similar to conditions in many areas of the world that Marines might have to fight. So they need to train in that ecosystem. Sea level rise and other ramifications of climate change could threaten those training grounds.

And, Paerl noted, military officials have long been concerned that an increasingly less stable climate with more droughts that disrupt food supplies, more major storms and continually rising sea levels, will create less stability in other countries, possibly leading to more need for U.S. intervention. They’re interested, perhaps more than most politicians these days, in limiting climate change.

What did the study find out specifically about organic, or vegetative, carbon and carbon dioxide, that predominant greenhouse gas, in the New River estuary?

Interestingly, Paerl said, it turns out that the estuary is, in general, pretty balanced between being a carbon sink, or holding carbon so it’s not released as carbon dioxide, and a contributor of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

“But that can change year-to-year,” he said. It turns out that much of that variation is related to weather, which is affected by climate.

“What we’ve found is that when we have major perturbations, chiefly storms, much more CO₂ is released,” Paerl said. “There were five or six major perturbations (during the study period), and we had the opportunity to look at (the effects) of those.”

What they’ve found is that “you can lose almost as much carbon to the atmosphere” from one major storm as had been stored away, or “fixed” by plants, in the estuary during the entire year in which the storm occurred.

“It’s kind like a gigantic ‘burp,’” the scientist said, that can, instantly negate a year of carbon storage by the algae and other plants.

Algae, another area of expertise for Paerl, can be terribly bad for estuaries, as it robs the water of oxygen when it decomposes, sometimes leading to fish kills. But, Paerl quipped, “I don’t think storms are really a good way to clean up our estuaries.”

At any rate, it sets up what Paerl said is a classic feedback loop.

“The more storms we have, then (based on the research) the more emissions we get,” he said. “And the more emissions we get, the more unstable the climate is likely to become, which means more storms. You have to wonder where it ends. Are we eventually to going to end up with 10 times more storms?”

It’s not, of course, “a perfectly linear world,” Paerl acknowledged, as there are other factors, such as El Nino, that influence the number of hurricanes and other storms. But you have to look at it not just from one year to the next, but decade by decade.

The New River work pretty much confirmed what previous work by Joseph Crosswell, also of UNC-IMS, found previously through work in the Neuse River, the largest tributary of the huge Pamlico Sound estuary, Paerl said.

The bottom line, he added, is that estuarine systems are very effective at holding carbon, unless disturbed. Some carbon even comes out and is “stored” by humans, through harvest and consumption of seafood.

But when those storms do hit, the negative atmospheric carbon effects can be quick, as in the windy Hurricane Irene in 2011, or slower and more sustained in the case of other, less windy storms that are mainly rainfall and flooding events.

Paerl said the overall study was funded by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, and has been headed by RTI International, an independent, nonprofit research institute based in the Research Triangle Park. Other researchers have come from private companies, as well as from Duke University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

“It’s been a big effort, with a lot of parts,” Paerl said, and he credits the Department of Defense for being interested.

“They are really pretty good stewards of their environment, and it makes sense for them to be,” he said.

Paerl noted that the military also help preserve habitat outside the base gates by sometimes giving money to local governments to protect properties in the flight paths of Marine Corps aircraft that would otherwise be developed.

That’s happening now in Carteret County, where Emerald Isle is working with Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point officials to get money to help pay for the purchase of 30 acres of undeveloped land behind the town hall. That property, mostly maritime forest, has been zoned for years for more than 200 condominiums, and is in the flight path of planes going to and from nearby Bogue Field, an auxiliary landing strip for Cherry Point.

If the town gets the land, it will preserve up to 20 acres of it.

“A lot of people don’t realize how much they do,” Paerl said of the Marines. “It was good to work on this project to try to help them identify what’s going on in the estuary that runs through (Lejeune).”

And, he said, the study aids the cause of science and scientific research, which has recently been under attack in some circles, because the modeling involved should be applicable to not just other coastal military installations, but to similar estuarine systems that aren’t in government hands.

“We’ve learned a lot,” he said.