THREATS TO SEALIFE

THREATS TO SEA LIFE

Each year we fish ninety million tons of wild fish, and half is fished by only one percent of fishing boats. This is rampant over-fishing, done by factory ships, long-line fishing vessels with lines up to 80 kms long and thousands of baited hooks. Some trawling nets measure 40 kms and trawlers now go down to 3000 m—three kilometres deep, destroying the ecology of the sea floor.

Most of this catch goes to the industrial nations where people are already eating too much protein and would choose something else if sea food was not available.

Eighty percent of global fish stocks have been declared over-exploited or fully exploited and 90 percent of the biomass of the predators has disappeared. The Atlantic bluefin tuna is on the verge of extinction, yet is still fished legally in the Mediterranean Sea. A top quality tuna can be sold for 500,000 Euros. It appears to be impossible to protect animals with such high commercial value.

The methodical killing for shark fin soup has contributed to the loss of over 90 percent of oceanic sharks, and in some vast areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea, sharks have been reduced to less than one percent of former levels. Habitat loss and the destruction of nursery areas, due to human-driven changes and development, has contributed to their demise.

For every ten pounds of fish killed, a hundred pounds of marine life is thrown away. This waste of an estimated fifty billion pounds of marine life yearly, including sharks, seabirds, dolphins, small whales, and turtles, is casually referred to as ‘by-catch’. All this results in less food for the sea life that remains.

Twenty-six million tons of catch are thought to be taken by pirate industrial scale fishing illegally and there is no effective authority to police international waters.

Four kilos of wild sardines are needed to produce one kilo of farmed fish—fish farming is an industry based on a wild resource so is not a solution.

Meanwhile, climate change is impacting the ocean by melting the icecaps, changing major ocean current systems, warming waters, and raising sea levels. Along with industrial and plastic pollution, these changes pose serious threats to marine life.

The release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has resulted in the acidification of the ocean as it absorbs CO2. Temperatures, chemistry, ocean stratification, food, and oxygen supply are affected, and the changes cascade down through the ecological networks. This puts increasing numbers of organisms in poor environments. One example is the threat to polar bears and some species of seals as the polar ice melts. The loss of sharks and other key species has added to the damage.

A quarter of corals have died in less than fifty years and plankton have moved 1200 km further northwards. This has already redistributed marine life, while all over the ocean, there more and more jellyfish.

Four hundred marine areas have already been declared dead.

Marine debris poisons, chokes, and entraps sea life of all types, while oil spills kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals through coating and poisoning them. Small operations of a variety of sorts along the coasts have great impact taken together, while disturbance, submarine noise, and ship strikes pose increasing dangers to marine reptiles and mammals, such as turtles, manatees and whales.

Oil is now being pumped from the sea bottom 7000 m down and there are 20,000 oil rigs on the world’s seas. Every year we burn the equivalent of a million years of laying down of plankton on the seafloor and our industrial revolution has cost the planet one hundred million carbon years.

There are six hundred million containers circulating on the ocean and our fleet of container ships has tripled in the last ten years. Three thousand more are under construction in China, Korea and Japan—ships 400 m long, the area of four football fields.

Deep sea fishing should be stopped permanently, and so should factory fishing. If only local fishermen were allowed to fish, the ocean might have some chance of recovering into a state of relative health.

2018