Monday 21 May 2012

Plenty less fish in the sea: Dramatic pictures show how ocean life is dying


Oceans full of “dead zones” where nothing lives could only be 40 years away - and in some places that is already reality 
Imagine a sea full of slime, where only jellyfish flourish – and fish have been slaughtered in their millions by stinging tentacles.
Imagine oceans full of “dead zones” where nothing lives, the water poisoned by fertilisers and human sewage.
Imagine seas so acidic the water damages seashells – and oceans so over-fished that many of the species we take for granted no longer exist.
This apocalyptic vision is only 40 to 50 years away, according to The Ocean of Life, a new book by marine biologist Professor Callum Roberts.
And in some of our seas it is already a reality.
Prof Roberts shows pictures of fish landed in Key West, Florida in the 1950s.
Smiling, bare-chested fishermen pose with their enormous catch – fish with names like “Goliath Groupers” that dwarf the humans on the quayside.
In the 1980s, at the same spot, the fish are about half the size.
Then, there are pictures of fishermen at the same quay now, with a catch of tiddlers.
The tourists are still smiling, he says, because they don’t know any different.
But the fish have completely changed.
“The oceans have changed more in the past 30 years than in all of human history before,” says Prof Roberts, who advised the BBC on natural history series The Blue Planet.
“In most places, the seas have lost upwards of 75 per cent of their megafauna — large animals such as whales, dolphins, sharks, rays, and turtles — as fishing and hunting spread in waves across the face of the planet.
“For some species, like whitetip sharks, American sawfish and the once common skate, numbers are down as much as 99%.”
In some cases, he says, there will be “seas without fish” and some marine turtles also face extinction.


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