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THE SPEED AT which marine life is becoming threatened with extinction is accelerating at a far more rapid pace than experts previously thought.
A scientific report has found that a number of factors, including climate change, over fishing and pollution, are combining in new ways to have a drastic effects on a wide range of plant and animal species in the world’s oceans.
A group of marine experts that have gathered at a workshop in Oxford this week warned that entire ecosystems such as coral reefs could be lost in a few decades, the BBC reports.
The panel was brought together by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean and includes fisheries experts, coral reef ecologists and toxicologists.
The group will report formally later this week. Alex Rogers, the IPSO scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University said the scientists were seeing changes in ocean life that they didn’t expect to see for” hundreds of years”.
He said the rate of change had also increased vastly in comparison to what they had expected, even just a couple of years previously. These changes include the melting of the Anatartic and Greenland ice sheets, rapid increases in sea levels and the release of methane in the sea bed. Professor Rogers said:
We’ve still got most of the world’s biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] – and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event.
In addition, the experts noted that life on earth had gone through five extinction phases and that human beings would most likely create the sixth phase, which would be far more rapid than the previous phases.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the experts maintain that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is to blame for increasing ocean temperatures.
This rise in sea temperatures was boosting algae levels, which is in turn leading to a fall off in the levels of oxygen in the water and increasing acidity levels.
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The problem is there are too many of us, 9 billion and counting, we eat any thing the grows, swims, flys or walks, we consume whats left of the wilderness to support the notion that every human is entitled to breed as they want and own a car (or two). Peak oil and climate change are the least of our problems! DeeCee.
Derek thanks for echoing my sentiments and we humans talk like wer’e the most intelligent species!!! What a joke!!!! and who are we kidding….ourselves.. Alligators have superior intelligence because they have survived from the age of the Dinosaurs…..something we Humans will not achieve for sure..
There are many reasons why fish stocks being depleted.Over fishing for one thing, using hugh factory ships is a major problem,for every 10.000 tone of fish sold in world markets another 10.000 tone are jumped back because they are no markets for them.Remember these fish are dead that are being dumped back, having quo-toes is a joke, skippers have to dump tones of good quality fish that have been caught in their nets because if these fish are brought into Irish ports they lose their licence.
As for Coral reefs,I saw first hand how the Great Barrier reef is exploited by people in the tourist industry,bring hundreds of people to these very sensitive areas,and allowing idiots to jump off these cruisers and break off pieces of the coral.And this is supposed to be a protected area national park. Yes big questions have to be asked of everyone including governments.
The Oceans are my passion. From Fishermen to scientists, from Activisits to explorers the story is the same, dying poluted oceans.
Overfishing is a major issue across the globe, but also specific species fishing is having a catastrophic effect on the oceans. 75,000,000 sharks are killed in the oceans every year, some of the species are critical and may not be able to recover. Recently in Killybegs I was talking to a fisherman there who told me that since the Japanese long liners had been off the coast, all the blue tip sharks had been killed. Within a short period of time the fish in that area declined and vanished. The sharks as an apex preditor had kept the fish stocks healthy, but without the sharks the fish had secumed to disease and died. The oceans need a diverse range of ocean life, and habitat to survive.
While there is a lot of legislation to protect some ocean life, States, Governments and legislators are not enforcing this legislation so poaching is a massive problem. We all hear about Elephant, Rhino and Tiger poaching because its on land and visable to us, but out in the vastness of the unprotected ocean poaching is a massive problem.
it’s like this: recently i read an article about clownfish (subfamily “Amphiprioninae”) going deaf with increasing ocean acidification (hearing being vital for them to sense predator-rich places, & avoid these, in their very convoluted coral-reef homes full of potential hiding places and death traps!)…and the news is on Care2,it’s on BBC,it’s on ScienceDaily it’s everywhere now…the point is: this was not or could not be foreseen,therefore the combination of factors which we deliver on the Oceans with our carelessness might well cause other such unforeseens to occur which will totally shock us…but then again,we didn’t tread lightly did we?! Nor did we take appropriate action timely enough! I support Direct Action on all matters destructive of our aquatic biosphere,directly linked to food chains on land,and therefore directly linked to our survival!
Fiddlesticks. Another excuse to increase the price of my favourite seafood dishes at Roly’s.
I remember in the 80′s when the dinosaurs died all these ‘experts’ saying we’d be f**ked,same thing again except now it’s fish,alarmist scaremongering once again
Alarmist scaremongering? It’s basic ecology. We are part of a single planetary ecosystem. To survive we all need water or air or both. If both these are becoming heavily polluted, well, use your nut!
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