WP: Oceans Have Fewer Kinds Of Fish, Study Says

[DeepModem Mom]

Oceans Have Fewer Kinds Of Fish
Overfishing Among Causes, Study Says

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 29, 2005; Page A03


The variety of species in the world's oceans has dropped by as much as 50 percent in the past 50 years, according to a paper published today in the journal Science.

A combination of overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change has narrowed the range of fish across the globe, wrote biologists Boris Worm and Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and three other scientists. In some areas, such as off northwest Australia where a wide variety of tuna and billfish used to thrive, diversity has declined precipitously.

"Where you used to put out a fishing line 50 years ago and catch 10 species, now you catch five species for the same amount of effort," Worm said in an interview yesterday. "That's a recipe for ecological collapse and disaster."

The study, which marks the first worldwide mapping of predatory fish diversity, identified five hot spots in the world that have a rich variety of species, two of them in U.S. waters. The hot spots are areas off the east coast of Florida, south of Hawaii, near Australia's Great Barrier Reef, near Sri Lanka and in the South Pacific north of Easter Island.

"These areas are really of global significance," Worm said. "It's really important to protect them now, because 20 years from now they may not be there."...


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801752.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. D'oh Old Indian proverb say...

...you piss and shit your industrial crap in the waters and they will turn bitter ugly and kill living stuff, including you and your children. D'Oh.

In our ANCIENT traditions this is called HAVING HALF A FRIKKIN CLUE, or sometimes, more politely, COMMON SENSE.

[wli]

2. ... and the huge anoxic "dead zones?"

50% species reduction in 50 years, so much for the Permian-Triassic extinction event's record.

[Squatch]

9. Actually, 95% of ocean species went extinct in the Permo-Triassic

extinction event

[wli]

13. and the speed of the extinction?

The worst estimates I've seen claimed it happened over the course of several million years, nothing like 50% in 50 years.

[Squatch]

14. 1 Ma or less

http://talc.geo.umn.edu/courses/1002/Lecture30_PrmTr.html

[wli]

17. okay, then the speed claim is unjustified

Obviously pinning the Permian-Triassic extinction event down to under 1M years is about as close as you're going to get. It could have happened overnight and we wouldn't be able to pin it down much further.

[Squatch]

18. That's very true.

Geologically speaking, the PT extinction occured in the fraction of a blink of an eye.

[shockra]

3. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd writes well on this.

In fact, he kicks ass. This first article gave me a chill.

6/11/2005

The Cassandra Principle and the Demise of the Cod

Commentary by Paul Watson
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

<snip>

Cod, which used to sit on the top of the food chain, have now been replaced by smaller fish.

That also trickled down to the lowest members of the marine food chain – zooplankton and algae – which are being depleted at a faster rate because more and more fish are feeding on them. This has also raised the concern that the smaller fish species could diminish the nutrients they rely on.

“Their levels have now decreased because they're being eaten heavily by the exploding group,” said Mr. Frank, who works for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. “It was always known that when you deplete a predator, its prey will increase. But it was never suspected that this would cascade or extend all the way down to the base of the food chain.”

Let me see, “it was never suspected?” Of course not, because the government of Canada was listening to biologists and not to ecologists. Of course, it was suspected. I suspected it and I was told I was crazy at the time for suspecting it.

http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_050611_1.html

6/27/2005

You Can’t Harvest Crabs Like Apples

Commentary by Paul Watson Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Another Canadian Fishery Heading for Collapse

The Newfoundland fishermen, famed for massacring defenseless baby seals and destroying the Northern Atlantic cod fishery, are now energetically working towards wiping out another species.

This time, their greed is impacting the Atlantic snow crab. Currently, the crab fishery is hauling in some $500 million annually and employing about 4,000 fishermen in the Atlantic Provinces. About $300 million worth of crabs are taken in Newfoundland.

The Canadian Department of Oceans and Fisheries (DFO) is seemingly intent upon repeating the same mistakes they made with the cod. The focus being to protect the current profits and not the species.

http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_050627_1.html

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Thanks for adding these links, shockra. nt

[SemperEadem]

11. earlier this year

they had that Humboldt squid invasion on the coast of southern california---their natural predators, sharks, had been so overfished that there was nothing to check the squid population and they began beaching themselves.

Mind you, this ain't the calamari squid you order in the restaurant--which are up to 10 inches in size. Humboldts are 3-6 ft in length and hunt in packs like wolves. THey can take a bite out of you the size of an orange.

[OKthatsIT]

4. expect more shark attacks...and stop whinning about it

DOH

[shockra]

21. But we're eating the sharks, too.

Or rather, just their fins.

"It is a fact that over 100 million sharks are being slaughtered each year and a great majority of this slaughter is to provide shark fins for tasteless, non-nutritive, expensive, superstitious soup meant to impress family and friends as a status symbol."

http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_050621_1.html

A bowl of shark fin soup goes for $50 to $400 in the U.S.

http://www.seashepherd.org/longline/longline_shark_finning.html

[pinniped]

5. Well, say goodbye to the Patagonian toothfish...

aka Chilean seabass.

Dissostichus eleginoides



I still see a lot of greedy restaurants serving this stuff.

http://mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp

[shockra]

6. Cows are eating too many fish.

Because of over-consumption of fish, all 17 of the world’s major fishing areas have reached or exceeded their natural limits. One-third of the world’s fish catch is fed directly to livestock.

http://www.earthsave.org/environment.htm

What'll we feed them if not the fish they crave? I guess more chicken manure, plastic, cardboard boxes, euthanized dogs and cats, other cows, feather meal, and cement.

Cattle are often fed hundreds of pounds of Cement Dust to increase their weight before going to the slaughter house. (referred to as CKD -- Cement Kiln Dust in a report to Congress).

http://www.healthfree.com/V5-10a.htm

Fish meal is also fed to other animals.

Worldwide, millions of tons of fishmeal are produced annually. The majority of the fishmeal produced is included in commercial diets for poultry, swine, dairy cattle, mink and fish.

http://www.antwifarms.com/chickennutrition.shtml

[DeepModem Mom]

8. I had no idea! nt

[shockra]

24. Another reason it's bad to feed animals fish meal.

From John Robbins's Diet for a New America:

"Toxic chemical authorities agree that human contamination with PCB's comes mainly from eating fish from waters in which PCB levels are high. Fish have a remarkable ability to absorb and concentrate toxic chemicals from their watery environments. For one thing, their food chains are extremely long, with phytoplankton being eaten by zooplankton, who are in turn eaten by tiny fish, who are then eaten by larger fish, and so on. More significantly, fish literally breathe the water they swim in, so they are also continually accumulating more and more contaminants in this manner. The net effect is almost as if they were underwater magnets for toxic chemicals. The EPA estimates fish can accumulate up to 9 million times the level of PCB's in the waters in which they live!"

"By the food chain effect, fish may thus become loaded with enormous concentrations of these toxic chemicals."

"Shellfish that filter water, such as oysters, claims, mussels, scallops, and other mollusks, are especially vulnerable to pesticide saturation. An oyster will filter up to 10 gallons of water every hour. In only a month, an oyster will accumulate toxic chemicals at concentrations 70,000 times the amount in the water."

They don't often test for chemicals in animal feed, because it's expensive. In instances where it's been found, millions of pounds of animal feed, millions of chickens, or millions of eggs have had to be destroyed. And they only test a tiny fraction of the feed. PCB's accumulate in the fat of animals just like they do in the fat of fish.

Guess who's responsible for PCB's?

"PCB's were first introduced by Monsanto, a company whose motto, "Without Chemicals, Life Itself Would be Impossible," seems ludicrous in view of what PCB's are doing to human fertility. It wasn't long after Monsanto began producing PCB's that it became apparent that these chemicals posed major problems for human beings. Three years after production began, the faces and bodies of 23 out of 24 workers in the Monsanto plant had become disfigured. But that didn't stop Monsanto. Since then, more that 750,000 tons of these deadly poisons have been produced. They can be found today in every river in America, in the snows of the Arctic and Antarctic, and probably in the tissues of every single fish in the waters of this planet."

http://www.ban.org/Library/garbage.html

PCB stands for polychlorinated biphenyl, a synthetic chemical whose use is now broadly restricted. At one time PCBs were used in products ranging from adhesives to microwave ovens and various electrical equipment. PCBs don’t break down and they don’t decay. If they get into the water table, they stay there forever, or until they are absorbed by animals or humans. They are probably carcinogenic, and are definitely known to cause birth defects, gastric disorders and skin diseases.

Edit: line added

[THUNDER HANDS]

10. people should stop eating fish

Never liked the taste of fish anyway. I prefer chicken. Nobody ever worries about the decline in the number of species of chicken.

[Squatch]

12. The rearing of farm animals is causing part of the problem

[THUNDER HANDS]

15. ok

lets eat bagels. Everyone likes bagels.

[Squatch]

16. Fertilizers used to grow the wheat used in bagels are

polluting bays, rivers, and other watersheds.

I think you're safe if you just stick to hi-protein paste.

[shockra]

19. If you're talking about animal waste, that's certainly true!

Excrement:

*Production of excrement by total US human population: 12,000 pounds/second
*Production of excrement by US livestock: 250,000 pounds/second (including 25 pounds of manure per cow per day)
*Sewage systems in US cities: Common
*Sewage systems in US feedlots: None
*Amount of waste produced annually by US livestock in confinement operations which is not recycled: 1 billion tons
*Where feedlot waste often ends up: In our water
*Gallons of oil spilled by the Exxon-Valdez: 12 million
*Gallons of putrefying hog urine and feces spilled into the New River in North Carolina on June 21, 1995, when a "lagoon" holding 8 acres of hog excrement burst: 25 million
*Fish killed as an immediate result: 10-14 million

http://www.stopthehogs.com/general_news.htm

[shockra]

22. In fact, they're creating new ones.

Bald chicken 'needs no plucking'

Feather coverage is greatly reduced on the birds

Scientists have bred a controversial featherless chicken which they say is faster growing. The birds, created at the Hebrew University in Israel, will not need to be plucked, saving money in processing plants.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2000003.stm

But without chicken feathers, what would we feed the fish?

Here in New Zealand it has recently been revealed that two large salmon farms have been feeding their fish with chicken feathers: more precisely chicken feather meal provided by an Australian supplier. The farms involved say that the meal is a high quality safe source of protein. The feather meal is apparently heat treated to destroy any bacteria and claimed to be devoid of chicken faeces. Clearly the consumption of the feather protein is going to alter the chemistry of the salmon flesh.

http://www.yourhealthbase.com/farming.htm

[Zorra]

20. Also: U.S. Beaches Getting Dirtier, Report Finds

More and more U.S. beaches are being closed due to contamination, in part because there is more pollution and in part because of better monitoring, the National Resources Defense Council said on Thursday.

The group's annual clean beaches report finds that beaches were closed or the subject of a health advisory on nearly 20,000 days in 2004, up 9 percent from 2003 and the most days since tracking started 15 years ago.
snip---
"Just this week, Congress cut the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, the main federal support for water infrastructure. We're going backward," Stoner said.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0729-02.htm

[struggle4progress]

23. kick