The Empty Ocean
I’m reading another book on the state of our oceans, and it’s pretty depressing. The book leads with this quote, and then proceeds to fill in the picture in painful detail:
Few modern ecological studies take into account the former natural abundances of large marine vertebrates. There are dozens of places in the Caribbean named after large sea turtles whose adult populations now number in the tens of thousands instead of the tens of millions of a few centuries ago. Whales, manatees, dugongs, sea cows, monk seals, crocodiles, codfish, jewfish, swordfish, sharks, and rays are other large marine vertebrates that are now functionally or entirely extinct in most coastal ecosystems. Place names for oysters, pearls, and conches conjure up other ecological ghosts of marine invertebrates that were once so abundant as to pose hazards to navigation, but are witnessed now only by massive garbage heaps of empty shells.
—Jeremy Jackson et al., “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems”
Read more in The Empy Ocean
July 10th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
A depressing topic, with the single bright note being the rising cost of fishing due to fuel charges. If you’re interested in further reading, look at the introduction of a recent paper by Pauly and Palomares called “Fishing down marine food web…”. Daniel Pauly is the creator of the concept called ‘fishing down the food web’, in which it has been demonstrated that global fisheries are harvesting progressively smaller and simpler organisms, having taken most of the large ones already. The source is at http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/members/dpauly/journalArticles/Fishing%20Down%20Marine%20Food%20Web%20It%20is%20Far%20More%20Pervasive%20than%20we%20thought.pdf
July 11th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Thanks. I’ll check that out when I can face it.