TOKYO: Ocean animals threatened with ‘major extinction that can be linked directly to human activity. A study conducted by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara and released yesterday in the journal Science, concluded that humans are “on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
Said scientist Douglas J. McCAuley, one of the study’s authors, “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event.”
Why are sea creatures so threatened? One factor is overfishing. People are eating more fish and seafood than ever before, depleting some stocks of animals to the point where they cannot effectively reproduce. Various fishing practices also affect how sea animals survive. For example, many fishing nets unintentionally catch turtles, octopus, and other creatures that die before they can be returned to the water. Plus, bottom trawlers that scrape their nets across the sea floor have already degraded 20 million square miles. Mangroves that would team with sea life are being replaced by fish farms, which usually raise monocultures of fish that can be processed into food. Whales, as big as they are, are no match for the container ships they collide into.
Climate change also wreaks havoc on sea life. Coral reefs have declined by 40% worldwide in part due to waters that have gotten too warm to support coral that prefer the cooler temperatures they evolved in.
Mining the seabed for various minerals is also taking its toll, not only by wrecking the ocean floor and surrounding areas, but by increasing the amount of pollution the ocean must somehow figure out how to offset. That’s not easy when so much raw sewage and industrial run-off are already polluting seas all over the world.
While the outlook is bleak, scientists haven’t given up hope yet. Large parts of the ocean still remain wild, which enables the animals that live there to continue to reproduce or escape some of the depredations they face closer to shore. Dr. Stephen R. Palumbi of Stanford University, another author of the report, says “If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are on now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean.
