By Juliet Eilperin, Wednesday, June 22, 1:01 PM
How many fish can we harvest to feed growing populations without entirely depleting ocean reserves? What kind of damage did last year’s oil spill actually cause to the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife? And when is it safest to swim in waters that man-eating sharks sometimes haunt? The way to find out: Attach electronic tags to ocean-going creatures and send them out to do the research.
That’s what a team of researchers did in a decade-long project that has shone unprecedented light under the waters of the world’s biggest ocean — the Pacific — and proved the value of methodology that can be adapted to unlock key secrets of the deep elsewhere around the world.
The Census of Marine Life’s Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, published Wednesday in the online version of the journal Nature, deployed 4,036 tags on 23 different species of ocean predators, including following a single salmon shark for more than 31 / 2 years. It reveals the eastern Pacific Ocean is akin to Africa’s Serengeti, teeming with wildlife and crisscrossed by migration corridors used by sharks and seabirds. But the census’s greater value might be in advancing knowledge of a largely uncharted underwater world on which we increasingly depend.
“It’s precedent-setting. It’s a tremendous tool for conservation and management,” said Jesse Ausubel, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and co-founder of the Census of Marine Life. “We were literally blind. We can now see. We know what’s underneath now.”
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