Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

[GliderGuider]

Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, -- with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama -- was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected," Worm says in a news release.

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

"If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds.

Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90% -- a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.

But the issue isn't just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.

"A large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; thus the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences," Worm and colleagues say.

The researchers analyzed data from 32 experiments on different marine environments.

They then analyzed the 1,000-year history of 12 coastal regions around the world, including San Francisco and Chesapeake bays in the U.S., and the Adriatic, Baltic, and North seas in Europe.

Next, they analyzed fishery data from 64 large marine ecosystems.

And finally, they looked at the recovery of 48 protected ocean areas.

Their bottom line: Everything that lives in the ocean is important. The diversity of ocean life is the key to its survival. The areas of the ocean with the most different kinds of life are the healthiest.

But the loss of species isn't gradual. It's happening fast -- and getting faster, the researchers say.

[Turbineguy]

1. Can republicans wait that long?

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. If we lose the oceans, all bets are off.

I notice you left out the date however. (November 2, 2006, 6:00) Why is that!?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/fish-stocks-on-the-rebound.html?_r=0

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Fish Stocks on the Rebound[/font]

JUNE 30, 2014

[font size=3]To the Editor:

In “Why Are We Importing Our Own Fish?” (Sunday Review, June 22), Paul Greenberg raises salient questions about how the globalization of seafood markets has untethered us from any connection to the source of seafood and the well-being of our undersea ecosystems on which the fish — and we — depend. Luckily, there’s one action that’s already helping us restore and reconnect with the American seafood we bring to our shores.

Thanks to the American fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, many American fish populations, including summer flounder and black sea bass, have recovered from depletion and are being managed sustainably for the first time in more than a generation.

Since 2000, 34 commercially important fish populations have recovered; overfishing has been cut in half over the last eight years; and commercial catch and revenues in 2011 were the highest in 14 years. Yet this success is threatened by shortsighted efforts in Congress to weaken these safeguards. Fortunately, many fishermen and others citizens are resisting these rollbacks, advocating that the future of American seafood depends on a strong fisheries law.

DAVID NEWMAN
Oceans Attorney
Natural Resources Defense Council
New York, June 25, 2014[/font][/font]

http://www.cdapress.com/news/national_news/article_5feea35d-c055-5a00-a235-ba6a2f491c6f.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Fish species on the rebound[/font]

Posted: Wednesday, September 3, 2014 12:00 am | Updated: 12:31 am, Wed Sep 3, 2014.

[font size=3]ssociated Press | 0 comments

SAN FRANCISCO - Twenty-one species of fish made the leap Tuesday off a watch list of seafood to avoid as unsustainably overfished, leaving conservationists and many fishermen and chefs celebrating the turnaround of a West Coast fishing ground declared an economic disaster area by the federal government just 14 years ago.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium upgraded the 21 species of West Coast bottom-dwelling fish known as ground fish - including rockfish, sablefish, and other workhorses of the white-fish seafood fillet market - from its "avoid" category on the Seafood Watch list, meaning the food industry and consumers now should feel free to sell and eat those fish without guilt.

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At the time, Walter assumed the ground-fish fishing ground "was going to be closed for a very, very long time, like most of my life," Walter said. The fact it reopened after only 14 years "is a great thing because it really shows when you have the fishermen and the NGOs and the government working ... they can turn around a fishery."

Key actions that helped the West Coast ground-fish rebound include greatly increased government monitoring and control of fishing boats' take, assigning fishing quotas to individual fishermen rather than to types of fish, and closing off some areas of the ocean to safeguard vulnerable habitat, those involved said.

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How about that!? We can learn!
http://www.nrdc.org/oceans/rebuilding-fisheries.asp

[GliderGuider]

3. I left off the date because it was early in the morning and I didn't even notice it.

I got the article from a FB share.

Nice to see the rebounds you posted. We'll see if they hold.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. FaceBook’s a great source for good science!

http://www.wcs.org/press/press-releases/fisheries-management.aspx

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Climate Change Impacts Countered By Stricter Fisheries Management[/font]

[font size=4]WCS study finds strong management can protect fisheries – and local fishing-based economies – otherwise affected by climate disturbances[/font]

[font size=3]NEW YORK (October 24, 2014) – A new study has found that implementing stricter fisheries management overcame the expected detrimental effects of climate change disturbances in coral reef fisheries badly impacted by the 1997/98 El Niño, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The 17-year study led by WCS fisheries scientists found that rapid implementation of fisheries restrictions countered adverse climate effects and actually increased fisheries catches, counter to predictions and findings in other studies without stricter management. This is good news for the millions of people who depend on coral reefs fisheries, as it provides a management solution for fisheries predicted to decline with global warming.

The authors examined the environment and fisheries catches before and after the severe El Niño event of 1997?1998, an unprecedented climate disturbance that killed half of the corals in the Indian Ocean. A comparison of catch rates in southern Kenya found a preliminary decline in catches that was followed by an increase of catches. This increase was closely associated with improved fisheries restrictions that were implemented shortly after the disturbance.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.3354/meps10925

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Catch rates and income are associated with fisheries management restrictions and not an environmental disturbance, in a heavily exploited tropical fishery[/font]

T. R. McClanahan1,2,*, C. A. Abunge1,2
1Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY 10460, USA
2Correspondence address: Kibaki Flats 12, PO Box 99470, Mombasa, Kenya
*Corresponding author: [e-mail]

[font size=3]ABSTRACT: We evaluated and compared the influence of the largest temperature anomaly in recent history, the 1997-1998 El Niño-Indian Ocean Dipole anomaly that killed half of the corals in the Indian Ocean, with a nearly coincident increase in fisheries management restrictions on coral reef fisheries in southern Kenya. Seawater temperatures, benthic primary producers, and fishing effort and catch rate and income time series collected over the 1993-2012 period were evaluated using time series and variable cointegration methods. An observed decline and subsequent increase in catch rates was closely associated with the implementation of increasing fisheries restrictions and was not predictably cointegrated with the temperature or the primary producer’s time series. This may have occurred because the disturbance was pulsed with a limited 6 yr impact on the primary producers and the fishery was heavily utilized and composed of fast-growing generalist species with broad diet and habitat needs. Consequently, under these conditions, promoting fisheries restrictions is expected to attenuate the predicted declines in fish catches projected by global warming.

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[GliderGuider]

6. It's a good source for links to interesting news stories. nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. Remember to check sources

I generally like to find the primary source.
http://www.pml.ac.uk/News/US-led_summit_on_ocean_exceeds_expectations_%E2%80%93_and

[font face=Serif][font size=5]US-led summit on ocean exceeds expectations – and may deliver more[/font]

02 July 2014

[font size=4] The Our Ocean conference, organised by the US State Department, finally took place on 16-17 June in Washington DC after being postponed, due to the US government shut-down last October, and despite the latest developments in Iraq. This was seen as an indication of how strongly US Secretary of State John Kerry feels about ocean issues.[/font]

[font size=3] Indeed, while you might expect someone with Kerry’s busy agenda to turn up to make a few brief introductory remarks and then not be seen again, Kerry dominated the conference – giving four speeches, as well as remarks at lunchtime and at an evening reception.

The conviction of Kerry’s speeches, exhorting the world’s decision-makers not just to hear the science but to act on it – gives rise to optimism.

Three of the most serious problems that threaten the ocean: over-fishing, pollution and acidification, formed the focus of discussions. None is an intractable problem, but overcoming these challenges will require considerable national and international political will ‒ to improve fishery regulation and traceability; keep rubbish out of the seas; and at least make a start on changing energy policy to reduce, and eventually halt the ecological impact of ocean uptake of CO[font size=1]₂[/font].

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[GliderGuider]

4. Here's a 2012 article: "Netting Better Data on Global Fish Stocks"

Netting Better Data on Global Fish Stocks

Overfishing is a major global concern—but that concern tends to focus on just a few well-studied fish, such as salmon and herring. Current assessments cover only 20% of the world's fish stocks, so the true state of most of the world's fish populations is still murky. Now, a new method based on catch data and fish characteristics suggests that those unstudied stocks are declining—but also that better management of global fisheries could boost the status of many of those stocks and could also increase the global sustainable fish harvest by as much as 40%.

When fisheries are managed well, they can be a source of large amounts of food and economic value without irreversibly disrupting ecosystems and depleting fish numbers. But industry lobbying, corruption, fears that reducing fishing capacity will lead to unemployment, and other economic and political obstacles have made sustainable fisheries management difficult in practice.

Meanwhile, even as they discuss measures for sustainable management, conservation scientists and fisheries scientists are locked in a disagreement about whether global fish stocks are in crisis. In 2006, marine ecologist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues published a paper in Science that projected that if current practices remain unchanged, all fish stocks would collapse by 2048. This projection received heavy criticism from fisheries scientists, who said that the number of recovering stocks actually shows an overall improvement.

Fish like salmon and herring are, in general, strictly managed. Their condition is assessed through sampling to determine stock size, as well as through catch data and population models that examine factors such as the fish's growth, how often they reach maturity, and how quickly they reproduce.

But no such assessment takes place for 80% of current fish stocks, which include more than 7000 populations. This neglect applies to many uncommon fish species, as well as to some stocks of well-known species such as cod and tuna. So scientists try to get a grip on these stocks in several ways. They extrapolate from assessed stocks to provide population estimates for unassessed fish of similar size and habitat. They also use catch data provided by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and tap into the knowledge of local fishermen about the size and health of caught fish. These figures contain several flaws, however. Local knowledge can be biased and limited, and the FAO data incorporate mislabeled and misreported catches and don't account for illegal fishing.

Now, environmental economist Christopher Costello of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues propose a novel method. To estimate the size of the unassessed stocks, the team first collected as much information as possible about assessed stocks, including the assessment data, FAO catch data, and data from the FishBase database. FishBase, run by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, contains information on traits such as taxonomy and geographic distribution. Since all of these data, except the assessment data, are also available for the unassessed stocks, they built a model using all these data to calculate the stock size for these unevaluated stocks. Costello's team then compared these biomass estimates to the sustainable population sizes at which catches would be optimal without shrinking the stocks, as calculated by regional fishing authorities (such as the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea for most European stocks).

They found that 64% of the unassessed stocks are below their sustainable numbers—comparable to the below-sustainability estimate of 63% for assessed stocks reported in Science in 2009. The findings indicate that unassessed stocks, such as cod and miscellaneous coast fish, are in decline—and are in particularly poor condition in developed areas like the Mediterranean Sea. (The team declined to publish data on the health of individual stocks, but reported only aggregate results, emphasizing that the study isn't intended as a replacement for actual assessments.) The analysis also showed that whereas many assessed stocks have been recovering for about 10 years, most are still just below the level for maximum sustainable yield, which means they are only slightly overfished.

[packman]

7. Another alarm about the oceans

the acidity level is rising:

"For tens of millions of years, Earth's oceans have maintained a relatively stable acidity level. It's within this steady environment that the rich and varied web of life in today's seas has arisen and flourished. But research shows that this ancient balance is being undone by a recent and rapid drop in surface pH that could have devastating global consequences.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, fossil fuel-powered machines have driven an unprecedented burst of human industry and advancement. The unfortunate consequence, however, has been the emission of billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists now know that about half of this anthropogenic, or man-made, CO2 has been absorbed over time by the oceans. This has benefited us by slowing the climate change these emissions would have instigated if they had remained in the air. But relatively new research is finding that the introduction of massive amounts of CO2 into the seas is altering water chemistry and affecting the life cycles of many marine organisms, particularly those at the lower end of the food chain. "

First affected, coral reefs and small shelled sea creatures. Then as more CO2 is absorbed the seas become more acidic. Battery acid in the making.

http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-ocean-acidification/

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Please use the Excerpt feature to differentiate between a quotation and your opinion

The seas are not “battery acid in the making.”

I don’t mean to diminish the seriousness of ocean acidification. It's a serious problem. However, “battery acid” is about 30% pure sulphuric acid which is a highly corrosive acid. CO[font size=1]₂[/font] plus H[font size=1]₂[/font]O makes carbonic acid which is a relatively weak acid (found in carbonated water, or “soda.”)

[packman]

10. I love hyperbole

and thanks for the education on carbonic vs. battery acid ( I was a chem. major in college and know my Ph shit).

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. Hey, that’s great!

However, there are a number of people who read this who do not “know (their) Ph pH shit” and may take your “battery acid” comment literally.

FWIW: The oceans have become more acidic by about 0.1 pH unit. This is more serious than it may sound at first.
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-ocean-acidification/

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On the pH scale, which runs from 0 to 14, solutions with low numbers are considered acidic and those with higher numbers are basic. Seven is neutral. Over the past 300 million years, ocean pH has been slightly basic, averaging about 8.2. Today, it is around 8.1, a drop of 0.1 pH units, representing a 25-percent increase in acidity over the past two centuries.

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