Category: Environment
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Have we reached “peak fish”?
During the 20th century fishing became a heavy industry, expanding rapidly to the global scale, and fishing pressure now appears to be near—if not beyond—the ocean’s capacity to provide. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recently reported that “the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been…
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Radioactive Water Leaking Into Ocean From Japanese Nuclear Plant
You knew this was coming… From the NYT: Highly radioactive water is leaking directly into the sea from a damaged pit near a crippled reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, safety officials said Saturday, the latest setback in the increasingly messy bid to regain control of the reactors. Although higher levels of radiation have…
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Anchors aweigh — into hot water
There are a wide range of reasons to be concerned about the changing climate, as John has explained in recent posts. And because policies to address these challenges involve very large stakes, economically speaking, the issue is mired in intense debate, skulduggery, and deviousness on a colossal scale (despite the very clear scientific evidence). But…
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Impacts of the Japanese tsunami on ocean life
As terrible as the impacts of the Japanese tsunami have been, one issue barely being covered by the media is the potentially massive effects on ocean life and ecosystems. I can’t say too much as a scientist simply because there is no data on what is happening; nobody is measuring sediment input, toxin levels in…
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Fish Know to Avoid the Spear
A successfully speared medium sized Oriental Sweetlips Plectorhinchus orientalis. This is towards the upper end of the size range of fishes typically targeted by Papua New Guinean spear fishers. Fish are not as dumb as people sometimes think: marine scientists have found that fish that are regularly hunted with spearguns are much more wary and…
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Revisiting the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Claudia Dreifus recently published a great interview with oceanographer Dr Samantha Joye in the Science section of the New York Times (here). Until a year ago, the marine scientist Samantha Joye studied a fairly obscure natural phenomenon: the seepage of oil from undersea deposits into deepwater environments. Then, in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon…
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New study finds growth of corals on the Belize Barrier Reef is slowing
A new study just published in PLos One (Castillo et al 2010) indicates massive corals (Siderastrea sideria) on the outer reefs of the Belizean Barrier Reef are growing more slowly than they did during the early and middle 20th century. Lead author Karl Castillo (a post doc in my lab) is from southern Belize near…
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Who pays for overfishing? Poor people in Africa
The pervasive detrimental impacts of overfishing on marine life and ecosystems have been widely publicized in recent years, ratcheting up calls for stricter regulation and protection. A counter-argument commonly heard in debates on this issue is that fishing (like coal mining, oil drilling, pillaging of old-growth forests, etc.) provides essential jobs, revenue, and food, particularly…
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Loss of Plant Diversity Threatens Earth’s Life-Support Systems
An international team of researchers including SeaMonster’s Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has published a comprehensive new analysis showing that loss of plant biodiversity disrupts the fundamental services that ecosystems provide to humanity. Plant communities — threatened by development, invasive species, climate change, and other factors — provide humans with food,…
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Ocean Symphony with Jack Black
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC5P7mBu_XY[/youtube] Learn more about shifting baselines here