South African, Namibian Penguin Populations Crashing - Off 40% In Five Years -Mongabay

[hatrack]

African penguin populations have fallen by 40 percent in the past few years according to an article published in the March 2, 2006 issue of Science. Biologists are puzzled by the decline.

Rob Crawford, a penguin expert with South Africa's Environmental Affairs Department, is quoted as saying the trend is "quite disturbing." He believes the drop may be due to scarcity of sardines and anchovies around penguin colonies, a development that may be the result of over fishing or larger environmental changes. The article notes that the South African government is evaluating various measures to protect penguins including "establishing no-fishing zones around several breeding islands."

The article says the African penguins numbered more than 1.5 million in 1910, but guano scraping and egg harvesting over the past century reduced their population by 90 percent. While the population rebounded in the early 1990s, two oil spills (1994 and 2000) took a further toll on the species. Today there may be fewer than 120,000 remaining in the wild, the bulk of which live in South Africa. Smaller numbers are found in Namibia

EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0302-penguins.html

[phantom power]

1. Let me try and break this down...

what we have here, is several major areas around the globe where populations of marine birds and mammals and fish are all collapsing.

Meanwhile, we have other stories from widespread regions around the globe of phytoplankton die-off, failure of nutrient upwelling, salinity and pH changes well into "WTF?" and headed toward "mass extinction"

And, fundamentally, we still know so little about the ocean ecosystems that in most cases, nobody has any explaination except to say that it's all "very puzzling" and "quite disturbing."

Am I in the ballpark?

Oh, and that's just the oceans. Somebody else can recap the continental situation, because if I try to do it all at once I'll black out.

[hatrack]

2. Interlocking phenomena, that's for sure

In California it's been the loss of the cold-water upwelling - or at the least its delay - that may have caused the crash in plankton/fish/seabird populations.

In the North Sea, it's been the loss of the sandeel, a keystone species for both fish and seabirds, which has brought reproductive failure in most UK seabird colonies close to 100% in the past two years, along with rapidly warming water pushing the cod in the general direction of Svalbard.

And throughout the oceans, it's been steady and very rapid acidification thanks to CO2 deposition. According to the Scripps/Woods Hole project, the Ph of the Pacific (that's the whole Pacific) has dropped 0.026 in just ten years, which is absolutely jaw-dropping.

Oh, and did I mention changes in wind patterns, drops in salinity levels and all the anthropogenic trash (toys, shoes, toothbrushes) in the world?

[phantom power]

3. It seems "obvious" to me that loss of the larger species...

is fallout of this other stuff happening at the bottom of the food chain. Loose the nutrient upwelling, and the phytoplankton, etc, and it's no mystery what's going to happen to the marine birds, mammals, etc, at the top of the food chain. It's just a matter of time. I'm sure there are complications, but I don't find the big-picture story to be "puzzling." "Disturbing," definitely.

[Wilber_Stool]

4. I remember in the mid

60s, that silly man, Jacques Cousteau, said that if we weren't careful, we could lose the oceans in one lifetime. Nobody listened. I didn't.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. We're still not listening

We'll go to our graves with our fingers in our ears and a surprised look on our faces.

[progressoid]

6. What's that you say? Something about Brittney's hair?

[bighughdiehl]

7. I'm actually starting to worry

I've seen the stories about this kind of thing increasing the past year or two. But, there have always been some, so I thought of it being like fundie rapture stuff until last night....I had dinner with my aunt. She said out of the blue "things are going to be different ten years from now.....a lot different. I think we're at maximum sustainable food production, and the oceans are dying almost like in Soylent Green."
That's all it took, you see, she has been quite the corporate clone her whole adult life.
She is not someone on the net who for all I know could be a high school dropout sitting in their mom's basement...with a roll of Reynold's wrap standing buy. There's also a couple less prominent examples where I'm now starting to hear this stuff from people who are not total losers and are not trying to cause a scare for some grant funding or some such. It now kind of clicks.

Sorry. I made some dumbass posts here in E/E. When I registered at DU, I found E/E a very interesting, but excessively credulous place. Maybe not.

[GliderGuider]

8. Good for you!

It's encouraging to hear others' stories of awakening. Congratulations on keeping an open mind and actively thinking about the issues being raised. I started my journey four years ago as a committed skeptic and a faithful follower of Bjorn "Don't Worry, Be Happy" Lomborg. I didn't have as distinct an epiphany as it sounds like you had, but I remember a month during which the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that humanity and the planet were in enormous trouble.

For me the clincher was the degree of consensus I discovered in the scientific community. Not just consensus on climate change, though that has been most remarkable, but similar conclusions coming from all areas of environmental research. The conclusions all point back like spokes of a wheel to the hub of the problem - too many people using up too many of the planet's resources and feeding it too much garbage in return. There is simply too much agreement from too many quarters for it all to be the result of tailored conclusions for grant funding. This is the real deal.

Keep investigating for yourself - the truth is out there. :thumbsup:

[bananas]

10. What month was that?

My impression is that you became concerned about global warming after you became concerned about peak oil.

[GliderGuider]

12. Actually, it worked the other way around.

I'd just finished reading a GW skeptics' book called "Taken by Storm", and I was spouting off about how the hockey stick was bullshit and there was too much ambiguity in the evidence etc. etc. SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) said, "You pride yourself on your scientific objectivity. I'm pretty sure there's more evidence out there than that book and Lomborg, why don't you dig around a bit more?"

So I said, "Sure, I'll show you!" and started to dig. Oddly enough, I ran across a ton of evidence from reputable scientists saying it was a real problem, and most the stuff that disputed it seemed to be published either by cranks or front organizations. Once I accepted that GW was real and CO2 was the culprit I started looking at where it was coming from and what we could do about it. About three web pages later I had my Peak Oil "Oh Shit" moment.

It was the immediacy of the oil problem that captured my attention and made me vocal. Climate change is a species-buster in the medium to long term, but oil depletion may be a civilization-buster in the short term. I've focussed on it because it's by far the most urgent problem we face over the next ten years.

[bananas]

14. I see, I assumed your emphasis on peak oil was because

that was what first grabbed your attention.

[bananas]

11. Welcome to DU. nt

[phantom power]

13. I think things are now changing so fast that people just don't believe it's possible.

I don't know that there was any one moment for me when I realized how fucked we're about to be, but I do remember one particular moment when I realized that the scientists out in the field were coming back frightened. Not in an abstract "our great-grandchildren will be disappointed in us" kind of way, but viscerally frightened of the near-term future. I forget who said it, but there was this one scientist a few years ago who said "I don't mean to be alarmist, but I'm alarmed."

The narrative always used to be the opposite. It was the armchair ecologists (like me) who were getting all worked up, and the working scientists who were the level-headed ones with the perspective. I suppose that still is the popular narrative. But cultural hysteresis has reversed everything. John Q. Public still thinks the real scientists "know" things aren't as bad as they look, while in the meantime the real scientists are actually looking around and realizing that things are much worse, and changing much faster, than anybody thought possible 20 years ago.

And then there's the tidbits like "we're actually changing the pH of the oceans, and to the extent where sea animals won't be able to grow shells." It's hard to read shit like that and not get a little knot in the belly. And it just keeps coming. Week after week. year after year.

I mostly blame hatrack for clamping back my eyelids and making me watch. Over and over...

[The2ndWheel]

15. An appropriate response to the situation

I'd have to say my moment was 9/11. It's not that I didn't care or didn't follow things before that day, but I was a little over a month away from turning 23, and something happened after that week of non-stop, non-commercial television coverage. I remember the first thing I did was start reading about the Taliban. Then it was reading about chemical weapons, dirty nukes, etc. Then after a few months of a slump, I was listening to a guy on a semi-sports talk radio show who mentioned an article about PNAC. I read that in the late winter/early spring of 2002. That article lead me to this one, that one, another one, and here I am. If you ever want to worry more, I suggest reading "The Culture of Make Believe" by Derrick Jensen.

[jpak]

16. The collapse of the Newfoundland Cod Fishery is old news

as was the collapse of New England ground fish fishery...

and the collapse of the North Atlantic Blue fin Tuna fishery...

and the basin-wide collapse of Atlantic Salmon populations...

etc., etc....

This is not happening in the future - it happened a years ago...and it's not "wacko environmentalist claptrap".

It's for real.

[bighughdiehl]

17. Is there anywhere I can get a timeline.....

for other things that are likely to happen(food scarcity, etc.)...and when things are likely to become noticeable to my braindead freeper friends and family? I have heard "wait about ten years"...but is there any consensus about a timeline in the scientific community?
Limpballs, Hannity, "Survivor", etc. do seem to be helping this administration walk us right off a cliff before enough people notice.

[The2ndWheel]

18. The problem with our quest for certainty

We unlearn to trust ourselves.

With science comes distance. It is the observer and the observed. The watcher and the watched. We lose our connections that way. Don't worry what the scientific community has to say about a timeline, which is artificial anyway. Science has played a large part in getting us into this mess by using it to take so much, and we want to use the process again so that we can take even more. We really do have to learn how to trust ourselves again. If we don't, we'll all end up braindead with learned helplessness. It would make sense though; the expert and the experted.

[GliderGuider]

9. And then there are the albatross chicks full of plastic.

This problem was identified as long as 12 years ago :

Plastic ingestion by Laysan Albatross chicks on Sand Island, Midway Atoll, in 1994 and 1995.

Ninety-five dead and 39 injured Laysan Albatross chicks were necropsied in 1994 and 76 dead and 41 injured Laysan Albatross chicks were necropsied in 1995. Of these 251 chicks, only six (2.4%) did not contain plastic. Plastic items comprised chips and shards of unidentified plastic, Styrofoam, beads, fishing line, buttons, chequers, disposable cigarette lighters, toys, PVC pipe and other PVC fragments, golf tees, dish-washing gloves, magic markers and caylume light sticks. Non-plastic items included neoprene o-rings, pieces of rubber and a lightbulb.

The same problem was reported in the recent LA Times article:

Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas

As they scour the ocean surface for this sustenance, albatross encounter vast expanses of floating junk. They pick up all manner of plastic debris, mistaking it for food.

As a result, the regurgitated payload flowing down their chicks' gullets now includes Lego blocks, clothespins, fishing lures and other pieces of plastic that can perforate the stomach or block the gizzard or esophagus. The sheer volume of plastic inside a chick can leave little room for food and liquid.

Of the 500,000 albatross chicks born here each year, about 200,000 die, mostly from dehydration or starvation. A two-year study funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that chicks that died from those causes had twice as much plastic in their stomachs as those that died for other reasons.

The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, grisly wreaths of feathers and bone surrounding colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line and small Styrofoam balls. Klavitter has calculated that albatross feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway.