Our Taste for 'Aquatic Bushmeat' Is Killing the Sea
Our Taste for 'Aquatic Bushmeat' Is Killing the Sea
By Douglas Main 8/9/15 at 9:11 PM
Sylvia Earle fell in love with the ocean as a teenager in the 1950s. She marveled at the wealth of aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico, near her family's home in Clearwater, Florida. She was entranced by the inquisitive grouper fish, playful shrimp and even the vastly underrated plankton, which produce most of the Earth's oxygen.
Earle grew up to have a remarkable career as an oceanographer. In 1970, she made headlines when she led the first all-female team of aquanauts on a two-week expedition, living underwater in a module off the Virgin Islands. She became the first female chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; set diving records and spent more than 7,000 hours underwater; helped start a couple of companies that make submersibles; and she is now a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. But over the past 40 years, she's also had to watch the ocean and the life in it suffer dramatically.
Since 1950, Earle says, "we've seen greater changes in the ocean than in all preceding human history." One 2003 study found that the amount of large oceanic fish had declined 90 percent in the preceding half-century. And it's not getting any better; a 2014 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report estimates that 90 percent of the world's fisheries are overfished or depleted.
Since Earle spent that time in the coral in the Virgin Islands, Caribbean reefs have declined by half, driven in large part by the dying out of sea urchins and parrotfish, which eat algae that, when allowed to grow unchecked, block coral's ability to photosynthesize. Both sea urchins and parrotfish have been decimated by overfishing.
More:
http://europe.newsweek.com/our-taste-aquatic-bushmeat-killing-sea-331376?piano_t=1