Overfishing is driving marine mammals extinct
[Overfishing is driving marine mammals extinct. Luckily oil will soon begin a relentless decline and fishing boats won’t be able to travel to the ends of the world using spotter planes to net the remaining schools of fish. And it only takes 30 to 40 years for a factory-fish vessel to rust.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]
Payne, J. L., et al. September 16, 2016. Ecological selectivity of the emerging mass extinction in the oceans. Science 353: 1284-1286
Humans risk causing a mass extinction of large sea creatures on a scale never before seen because of over fishing, scientists warned this week. If the biggest fish vanish, their loss will have serious consequences for other ocean ecosystems, said the study in the journal Science.
“We’ve found that extinction threat in the modern oceans is very strongly associated with larger body size,” said study author Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University. “This is most likely due to people targeting larger species for consumption first.”
If a sixth mass extinction occurs—and some scientists believe it is already under way—it will look very different than past extinctions caused by asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters.
Mass extinctions of the past typically unfolded over thousands of years.
The sixth extinction could occur in the span of a human lifetime.
“What is happening in the modern oceans is really different from what has happened in the past,” said co-author Noel Heim, also of Stanford.
Researchers used a database of fossil records to examine the links between extinction threat and traits such as body size for nearly 2,500 mollusks and vertebrates over the past 500 years, and even farther back, as long as 445 million years ago.
Because fishing efforts target the biggest creatures in the sea, the odds of being threatened with extinction have risen significantly for large marine creatures. “What our analysis shows is that for every factor of 10 increase in body mass, the odds of being threatened by extinction go up by a factor of 13 or so,” said Payne. “The bigger you are, the more likely you are to be facing extinction.”
Global warming “does not appear to be the dominant driver of extinction threat for the taxa examined here. Rather, human fishing and hunting define the dominant threat to modern marine fauna,” said the study.
Overfishing threat
Fish provide 17% of the animal protein consumed in the world, now home to more than seven billion people. But some of the planet’s largest fish, including tuna and swordfish, are below 10% of their historical level, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. And more than 70% of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted, the FAO has said.
Report in the journal Science 16 September 2016 (abstract): ‘http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6305/1284.full‘
The Guardian: ‘https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/14/humanity-driving-unprecedented-marine-extinction‘
Article: ‘http://www.ecowatch.com/oceans-overfishing-mass-extinction-2005701998.html‘
The six mass extinctions: ‘http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html‘