 Your new post is loading...
A look at the expansion of the global fishing industry — and the collapse of fish stocks. Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted. Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent.
A small pilot study found higher levels of toxic mercury in dolphins downwind of power plants than in captive dolphins. Public health officials are concerned about human consumption of mercury, particularly in a form called methylmercury, because it can damage the brain and other parts of the nervous system, especially in young children. Dolphins that ingest too much methylmercury can suffer similar harm. Mercury is emitted as a gas from coal- and oil-fired power plants. Some makes its way into the ocean, where bacteria turn it into methylmercury, which moves up the food chain. Eventually, it turns up in the large fish that serve as dinner for wild dolphins. Once ingested, the heavy metal makes its way into the animals' bloodstream, where it can begin to damage the nervous system.
Scientists identify thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane stored for millennia is bubbling out, potentially accelerating global warming. "The Arctic is the fastest warming region on the planet, and has many methane sources that will increase as the temperature rises," commented Prof Euan Nisbet from Royal Holloway, University of London, who is also involved in Arctic methane research. "This is yet another serious concern: the warming will feed the warming." How serious and how immediate a threat this feedback mechanism presents is a controversial area, with some scientists believing that the impacts will not be seen for many decades, and others pointing out the possibility of a rapid release that could swiftly accelerate global warming.
So is it better for us or not? Well 40% of bottled water is actually filtered tap water. Some are known to be better, some worse. No matter what water brand you buy though, there is one key that should give us the answer.
It is called a 'Used by date'. Water does not go off in rivers and lakes or in our taps so why does it have a used by date? It is because plastic water bottles contain toxins that leach into the water, contaminating it and also affecting the taste. It's that plastic taste you get occasionally. It's actually killing you slowly. What are these toxins? The big one is Bisphenol A (BPA).
There are more and more studies these days on this toxin and it has been proven to cause breast cancer, ADHD, autism and the list continues to grow. To put it bluntly, toxins in plastic consumed during pregnancy is a major issue. Heating kids drinks and food in plastic just adds to the issue.
The ocean is our playground. We sail on it, we swim in it, we fish from it and without it we don't have 60-80% of the world's oxygen........So why do we abuse it? The reason we abuse it is because most of us don't even realise we are. As a professional skipper in the Whitsundays I began pulling Dead Sea turtles out of the water so they could be inspected by marine parks. The key moment came when one of the turtles I pulled out was found to have a plastic bag formed perfectly in its stomach. It had died of starvation but not before trying to eat 12 cigarette butts, a plastic water bottle cap and 1/2 a coke can. I set out to educate people of the issue and this is my crusade.
The Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) launched its latest report card this week at the World Fisheries Congress in Edinburgh. It focuses on how climate change is affecting the fish and shellfish around the UK and Ireland because understanding this is fundamental to managing activities in our seas. To produce this report the MCCIP commissioned three groups of scientists to consider how climate change is affecting marine fish, fisheries and aquaculture and what the social and economic consequences could be. The key findings of the scientists documented in the 2012 report card include that there are clear changes in the depth, distribution, migration and spawning behaviours of fish - many of which can be related to warming sea temperatures; that cultivated fish and shellfish are both susceptible to climate change, although fish farming technologies offer good potential for adaptation; and that controlled or closed fishing areas (a type of protected area) that can be adapted in response to climate change have the potential to help protect commercial and vulnerable fish stocks.
A subsea turbine which uses tidal power to generate electricity has successfully completed initial tests off Orkney. The turbine was lowered into position during winter storms and Scottish Power Renewables said it was performing well. The 100ft-high 1MW (megawatt) Hammerfest Strom HS1000 device is already powering homes and businesses on the island of Eday. There are plans to create a 10MW tidal power array in the Sound of Islay.
After widespread dolphin deaths, thousands of boobies and pelicans wash up on Peruvian beaches. A lack of anchovies and other small fish triggered by unseasonably warm waters has left thousands of seabirds starving to death along Peru’s Pacific coast, experts say. This month, the corpses of 5,000 birds, principally pelicans and boobies, have been discovered on beaches up and down the country, according to official government reports. It is the second mass die-off this year in Peruvian waters, after hundreds of dolphin carcasses also mysteriously washed up on beaches in the northern regions of Piura, Lambayeque and Tumbes.
The ocean covers more than 70% of the earth’s surface, and it’s a major part of the ecosystem that we rely on. Phytoplankton are responsible for about half of the oxygen produced worldwide. More than 1 billion people rely on fish for a significant part of their diet. The ocean provides food, recreation, clean air, carbon mitigation, inexpensive transport, and many other things that we take for granted. Yet, we’ve been treating the ocean like a dump for centuries. That may have been fine when society produced trash on a very small scale and all of things we threw away were biodegradable, but technology has changed that. There are thousands of phantom fishing nets that keep killing fish after being abandoned. Sunken ships leak millions of gallons of oil and billions of styrofoam cups end up in the water every year. Even when these events happen thousands of miles away, they have a ripple effect that’s felt worldwide.
The governments of Honduras and Costa Rica have today proposed protections for scalloped hammerhead sharks under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). According to the Pew Environment Group, who have praised the initiative, CITES is widely considered one of the best-enforced international conservation agreements. “It’s time for strong international protection for endangered scalloped hammerhead sharks,” said Maximiliano Bello, senior adviser to the Global Shark Conservation Campaign of the PewEnvironment Group. “Other governments should join Honduras and Costa Rica in supporting a sustainable future for these sharks.”
“Even when the largest mammal on earth is still in the endangered species list, we’ve sighted around 115 groups of these cetaceans just a few miles off the coast from Valdivia”, said Rodrigo Hucke and Jorge Ruiz, responsible for the report which is basically a monitoring of the whales in the rich in nutrients waters of the Chiloé archipelago.
“What we are finding out is that as we move further north in our prospecting, the feeding area of the blue whales is far larger than we thought, we’re talking of 600 kilometres of lineal coast along which the whales feed”, added Huckle.
Swimmers have killed about 500 fish in a northern Germany lake, with their urine causing algae that poisons marine life. The mass death in the past two weeks has occurred in Eichbaum lake, in the port city of Hamburg. "Swimmers who urinate in the lake are introducing a lot of phosphate," fishermen's spokesman Manfred Siedler told Bild newspaper. "We're calculating half a liter [0.15 of a gallon] of urine per swimmer per day."
Applying anti-phosphate -- at a reported cost of $667,000 -- hasn't worked, fueling an ongoing feud between fishermen and those who swim in the lake. Swimmers have been banned from the lake until the algae outbreak is addressed.
The population of eastern Pacific gray whales shows a huge dip at the same point that whaling increased in the early 20th century, a new analysis of ancient whale genes shows. Eastern Pacific gray whales are a subspecies of grey whale that lives in the Pacific Ocean, migrating from the Arctic to Mexico yearly. Their population is currently estimated to be around 20,000. They are up to 46 feet (14 meters) long and weigh up to 99,000 pounds (45,000 kilograms).
|
A clear change in salinity has been detected in the world's oceans, signaling shifts and an acceleration in the global rainfall and evaporation cycle. "The ocean matters to climate -- it stores 97 per cent of the world's water; receives 80 per cent of the all surface rainfall and; it has absorbed 90 per cent of the Earth's energy increase associated with past atmospheric warming," said co-author, Dr Richard Matear of CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship. "Warming of the Earth's surface and lower atmosphere is expected to strengthen the water cycle largely driven by the ability of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture." He said the intensification is an enhancement in the patterns of exchange between evaporation and rainfall and with oceans accounting for 71 percent of the global surface area the change is clearly represented in ocean surface salinity patterns.
Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world, says report... "The scale of groundwater use is as vast as it is unsustainable: over the past half century 18 trillion tonnes of water has been removed from underground aquifers without being replaced. In some parts of the world, the stores of water have now been exhausted. Saudi Arabia, for example, was self-sufficient in wheat, grown in the desert using water from deep, fossil aquifers. Now, many of the aquifers have run dry and most wheat is imported, with all growing expected to end in 2016. In northern India, the level of the water table is dropping by 4cm every year."
In addition to well-known currents near the surface of the sea, such as the Kuroshio current around the coast of south east Asia, Japan and China, there is a massive global current that flows unseen in the deep, thousands of metres below the surface, called oceanic general circulation. Ocean water becomes heavier when it is colder and when it contains more salt. Around the polar regions, ocean water is cooled down by air and forms ice. Because the ice does not contain salt, the salinity of the surrounding sea water rises, which results in ocean water near Antarctica or the North Atlantic sinking to join oceanic general circulation. The oceans are said to be able to hold about 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere can. If all the oceanic water in the world released enough heat to reduce its own temperature by 0.01°C, the temperature of the atmosphere would be 10°C higher.
A new study from a Pacific atoll reveals the links between native trees, bird guano, and the giant manta rays that live off the coast. "McCauley and his colleagues followed up that initial hunch with rigorous scientific tests. And it turned out they were right. Each hour that they spent surveying manta rays off the coast of native forests, the scientists encountered, on average, four fish. Off the coast of coconut palm stands, they found none. ... When the scientists surveyed Palmyra’s birds, they found that the native forests had five times more birds than the palm forests. ...
McCauley and his colleagues also found that the zooplankton — the tiny animals that graze on the phytoplankton — was three times more abundant off the coast of native Palmyra forests than off the coasts of palm forests. ... "
As people pump groundwater for irrigation, drinking water, and industrial uses, the water doesn't just seep back into the ground -- it also evaporates into the atmosphere, or runs off into rivers and canals, eventually emptying into the world's oceans. This water adds up, and a new study calculates that by 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year. "Other than ice on land, the excessive groundwater extractions are fast becoming the most important terrestrial water contribution to sea level rise," said Yoshihide Wada, with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.
A number of BirdLife partners, including the RSPB, met in Berlin on 3-4 May to look at the problem of seabird bycatch in gillnet fisheries in Europe and identify best practice in ways to tackle the issue. Gillnets kill many hundreds of thousands of seabirds a year in European waters – the birds go after fish, get caught up in the nets and then drown. The extent of the problem and how it’s affecting bird numbers is still unknown because of a lack of studies on the subject, but it could be very significant.
The planet is warming up, especially at the poles. How do organisms react to this rise in temperatures? An international team led by a CNRS researcher from the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology has shown that little auks, the most common seabirds in the Arctic, are adapting their fishing behavior to warming surface waters in the Greenland Sea. So far, their reproductive and survival rates have not been affected. However, further warming could threaten the species.
Oceana CEO Andrew Sharpless estimates that if we managed the world’s oceans better, wild seafood could potentially be a major protein source for our world’s ever-growing population. He says, “a fully productive ocean could provide the entire animal protein diet for a billion people, or 13 to 15 percent of the animal protein produced on the entire planet,” by 2050. His claim has been questioned by some fisheries economists, who say the numbers are way inflated, and by environmentalists opposed to the idea of promoting fish consumption at a time when the most of the world’s marine life is in peril. But the head of the largest international organization working to protect the world’s oceans, believes his theory makes practical sense, since one can’t effectively ban the eating of meat, fish, and animal protein. I spoke with Sharpless about his “Save the Oceans and Feed the World” idea and other threats to oceans when he was in San Francisco last month. An excerpt from our conversation.
People who eat plenty of fish may have a lower risk of colon cancer and, even more, rectal cancer, according to an analysis of 41 studies from around the world. The analysis, which appeared in the American Journal of Medicine, is the latest report that ties fish consumption to a number of possible health benefits. Jie Liang of Xijing Hospital of Digestive Diseases in Xi'an, China, and colleagues combined the results from 41 studies published between 1990 and 2011 that measured fish consumption and tracked cancer diagnoses. This included research from the United States, Norway, Japan, Finland and elsewhere.
" ... huge annual jellyfish blooms have been cropping up not just across the Mediterranean, but also the Black Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Yellow and Japan Seas. Is this a bizarre blip in the continually changing balance of oceanic life, or the beginnings of a new state change in marine diversity? ... Last year alone, nuclear power plants in Scotland, Japan, Israel and Florida, and also a desalination plant in Israel, were forced to shutdown because jellyfish were clogging the water inlets. The entire Irish salmon industry was wiped out in 2007 after a plague of billions of mauve stingers – covering an area of 10 sq miles (26 sq km) and 35ft (11m) deep – attacked the fish cages. Two years later, a fish farm in Tunisia lost a year's production of sea bream and sea bass after jellyfish invasions. Perhaps the most extraordinary blooms have been those occurring in waters off Japan. There, refrigerator-sized gelatinous monsters called Nomuras, weighing 485lb (220 kg) and measuring 6.5ft (2m) in diameter, have swarmed the Japan Sea annually since 2002, clogging fishing nets, overturning trawlers and devastating coastal livelihoods. These assaults have cost the Japanese fisheries industry billions of yen in losses."
Biodiversity is essential for human well-being, as it provides valuable services, such as food, medicines or clean air. At the same time, it is under threat from exposure to environmental degradation, pollution and unsustainable resource exploitation, like over-fishing. Climate change poses a new challenge as it often exacerbates the impacts of other pressures. RAPIDLY rising greenhouse-gas concentrations are driving ocean systems toward conditions not seen for millions of years, with an associated risk of fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation.
|
