AHN – The number of shark attacks in the United States has dropped sharply with the number of deaths from attacks dropping to unprecedented levels, according to the University of Florida’s annual shark attack report. There were 28 unprovoked shark attacks 2009, down from 41 attacks in 2008, the report found. The decline is about 30 percent nationwide and 40 percent in Florida, where most attacks occur.Worldwide, there were 61 attacks, including 20 in Australia and six in South Africa. In 2008, there were nearly the same number of attacks, 60. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fish Watch says sharks are particularly vulnerable to overfishing because they take many years to mature and give birth to a few offspring at a time. Apart from overfishing, from which the species take years or decades to recover, sharks also fall victim to finning, an illegal practice the involves removing fins and discarding the carcass. Read Article
National Geographic – Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.”Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.” The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Oceanographers have found that a vast floating island of rubbish in the Pacific has doubled over a decade and is now nearly six times the size of Britain. The giant waste collection, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” lies between California and Hawaii and has been gradually growing for 60 years. It contains everything from plastic bags to shampoo bottles, flip-flops, children’s toys, tyres, drink cans, Frisbees and plastic swimming pools. The soupy water is heavy with toxic chemicals and the broken-down plastic particles are now turning up inside fish. Up to 26 pieces of plastic were recently found inside a single fish and researchers have warned that the chemicals will work their way into the human food chain. Read Article
Ed – As we have reported many times previously there are similar ‘islands’ of rubbish in all the other oceans too.
Science Daily — A nanoparticle growing in popularity as a bactericidal agent has been shown to be toxic to fish, according to a Purdue University study. Tested on fathead minnows — an organism often used to test the effects of toxicity on aquatic life — nanosilver suspended in solution proved toxic and even lethal to the minnows. When the nanosilver was allowed to settle, the solution became several times less toxic but still caused malformations in the minnows. Read Article
The Times – THE government’s chief scientist and his wife have made £500,000 in the past year in a company overseeing commercial fishing that allegedly threatens one of the world’s most pristine marine environments. Professor John Beddington and his wife, Caroline, are joint shareholders in Marine Resources Assessment Group (MRAG), a London-based consultancy that manages fisheries and provides specialist advice around the world. Conservationists claim that a fishery managed by the company in British territorial waters in the Indian Ocean has been catching threatened species including blue sharks and manta rays. It is estimated that between 2003 and 2008 more than 120,000 were caught as “bycatch” from commercial tuna fishing. Read Article
AP — Researchers say a high concentration of plastic debris is floating in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean. The study’s principal investigator said Tuesday the findings are based on more than 64,000 tiny bits of plastic collected over more than 22 years by Sea Education Association undergraduates. Researchers believe surface currents carry the debris to the area between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude. Similar currents also deliver trash to a spot between Hawaii and California known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Read Article
Ed – As the last two articles illustrate there are far, far bigger environmental issues for mankind to address than whether or not the global temperature may or may not rise back to the level it was in the Middle Ages, and whether or not that temperature rise is caused by human activity or the sun. You are part of the same food chain that the plastic is currently polluting.
AP – A study of plastic debris floating in the Pacific between Hawaii and California shows researchers have been sharply understating the amount of trash there, a researcher said Tuesday. Giora Proskurowski, an oceanography faculty scientist with the Sea Education Association, said winds push plastic from the ocean surface down into the upper ocean. This causes researchers collecting debris from the surface to miss a large share of the trash in the water when it’s windy. His group determined this by gathering debris in two nets towed behind a boat. On one day during a light breeze, the surface net gathered 431 pieces of plastic, while another net 16 feet below gathered 240 pieces. Read Article
The Times – The 24-year-ban on commercial whaling could be over-turned by the end of the year, allowing Japan and other whaling nations to resume limited commercial hunting under proposals released today by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The draft plan will bring scientific whaling under the commission’s control, closing the loophole that allows Japan to continue killing whales in the Southern Ocean. However, in a compromise aimed at ending the deadlock between anti-whaling nations and whaling countries Japan, Norway and Iceland, and saving the 88-member IWC from collapse it will allow limited commercial hunting. Read Article
The Guardian – Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown Read Article
Washington Post – I keep reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that floating island of trash between California and Hawaii. Can we ever clean it up? And should we even bother? The Lantern always thought the Garbage Patch was a huge, waterborne landfill — sort of like a massive hair clog in a big drain. In reality, it’s not so much an island of trash as a thin, soupy area of litter, mostly in the form of tiny flecks of plastic, studded here and there with old fishing gear and children’s toys. Even if you were to sail right through the Patch, the water probably wouldn’t look too remarkable, unless you scooped some up and looked at it closely. So cleaning this part of the ocean isn’t as simple as you might imagine. Read Article
UPI — The overfishing of shrimp has pushed the Canadian government to decide it will close its ports to ships from Greenland and the Faroe Islands, authorities say. The North Atlantic Fisheries Organization sets catch limits for each member, and Greenland and the Faroes allegedly refuse to abide by the quotas, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said Sunday. Federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said the ports would be closed Monday. Read Article
A comprehensive and regularly updated list of all the apparent effects of Anthropogenic Climate Change according to the mainstream media over the last two decades. CLICK HERE TO READ
EDITORS WARNING: Do not read this analysis if you are of a nervous disposition, easily confused or easily scared.
Latin American Herald Tribune -The species of fish and shellfish most consumed in Mexico “are at risk” due to overfishing, according to Greenpeace, which presented Tuesday a list of the ones that are most endangered. Red snapper, shrimp, sardines, sharks, rays, tuna and groupers from the Gulf of Mexico, salmon from the Atlantic and grey mullet are all on the Red List prepared by the environmental organization. “We Mexicans want to continue eating fish and shellfish, and we should not wait for their populations to be exhausted,” Alejandro Olivera, coordinator of the oceans-and-coasts campaign for Greenpeace Mexico, said in a communique. He blamed the National Fisheries Commission, or Conapesca, for the overfishing, since the current fishing policy has put “many” populations at risk and has impoverished the fishing sector by having more and more people working in it while undersea resources are disappearing. Read Article
“For too long our society has been left to fend for itself to judge the safety of environments. Corporations churn out thousands of new products and chemicals each year, advertising their functionality, convenience, efficiency, aesthetic and health promoting effects. Rarely do we hear about their ingredients, or eventual fate as waste. Public discourse, too, is dominated by the private sector, which has effectively shaped our values, our consumer behaviour, and how we assess risk. The effect has been the creation of more chemicals, pollution, and waste than ever before in human history, which in turn has accelerated the chemical transformation of the planet and our bodies, as well as the growing incidence of human illness associated with degraded environments”
- Prof. John Wargo, Green Intelligence
Jakata Post – By declaring 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity, the United Nations has demonstrated its strong commitment to saving threatened biodiversity around the world. The fact that the most diverse ecosystem on Earth is the tropics should those us who live tropical countries more aware about threats to biodiversity. Tropical forests contribute to large portions of nature’s rich diversity, just as coral reefs are a major component of marine biodiversity. The massive destruction of these species’ rich ecosystems will lead to a global species extinction crisis. An ecosystem is an integrated living system. The loss of one species does not only mean that we just lose that species, but also means it is a decline for the ecosystem. Since humans are part of nature’s system, the loss will also affect human survival. The lost biodiversity may have medical importance or act as a biological control.Habitat degradation is the major driver of extinctions of many tropical species. In many tropical countries, including Indonesia, deforestation is the major form of habitat loss. Read Article
Mercury News – Deep below the pale blue shimmering surface of Monterey Bay, lies a ton of trash. “We have even seen artillery shells – large artillery shells, spools of cable and a little unbroken teapot just sitting on the sand,” said Diana Watters of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Center. Watters and her co-workers have been recording the amounts of debris lying on the ocean floor since 1993. More typically the researchers have seen discarded or lost recreational and commercial fishing gear or simply bottles and cans. The most common item in the debris is monofilament fishing line, the line used in rod-and-reel fishing rods. Read Article
ABC – The director of a new documentary on overfishing says Australia needs to act now to protect its fish stocks or it will suffer dire consequences. Rupert Murray is in Sydney to promote the film The End of The Line, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and opens to Australian audiences in April. The film warns that 70 per cent of global stocks are now in trouble and there could be no seafood by the middle of the century unless practices change. He says the depletion of fish stocks worldwide is a major environmental problem. Read Article
ENS – Marine scientists set sail from Bermuda on Thursday to document the extent of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre, a swirling vortex of ocean currents in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The scientists and crew are aboard the 72-foot sloop Sea Dragon sailing across the Sargasso Sea to the Azores Islands. The husband and wife team of California researchers, Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins, are the first to study the plastics that accumulate in all of the world’s five oceanic gyres. The gyres are formed by winds and currents in North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific and the Indian oceans. In these gyres, plastic food and water containers, toys, plastic bags, six-pack rings, condoms, fishing lines and nets discarded on land or at sea float and whirl endlessly, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces but never completely disappearing. Read Article
BBC – France has added its voice to calls for a ban on the global trade in bluefin tuna, the numbers of which have dwindled through overfishing. France wants a ban after an 18-month delay to allow scientists time to study the data on tuna stocks, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said. The bluefin tuna trade might be curbed at world conservation talks in March. Read Article
De Spiegel – Thousands of tons of trash are thrown into the sea each year, endangering humans and wildlife. A classified German government report obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE indicates that efforts by the United Nations and the European Union to clean up our oceans have failed entirely. Since the world’s oceans are so massive, few people seem to have a problem with dumping waste into them. But plastics degrade at very a slow rate, and huge amounts of them are sloshing around in our oceans. Wildlife consumes small pieces causing many of them to die, since the plastics are full of poisons. And, as experts warn, we’ve reached a point where it’s even getting dangerous for humans to consume seafood. Read Article
ScienceDaily — Extensive commercial fishing endangers dolphin populations in the Mediterranean. This has been shown in a new study carried out at the University of Haifa’s Department of Maritime Civilizations. “Unfortunately, we turn our backs to the sea and do not give much consideration to our marine neighbors,” states researcher Dr. Aviad Scheinin. The study, which was supervised by Prof. Ehud Spanier and Dr. Dan Kerem, examined the competition between the two top predators along the Mediterranean coast of Israel: the Common Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) and bottom trawlers. (Trawling is the principal type of commercial fishing in Israel and involves dragging a large fishing net through the water, close to the sea floor, from the back of a boat.) These two predators off the coast of Israel trap similar types of fish near the sea floor, so the researchers decided to examine the nature of the competition between the two. Read Article
BBC – The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television. Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it. The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world. Read Article
LA Times – Much of the Southern California coastline, particularly near river mouths, is littered with bottles, cans, tires, shoes and shopping carts. Read Article
Keys News – Coral bleaching is a condition often associated with the summer doldrums, but extreme cold weather, like what the Florida Keys experienced earlier this month, also can cause coral to bleach and die. This month’s cold snap has the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and other coral conservation groups conducting a survey to determine the extent of the damage. During the next two weeks, teams of scientific divers from federal and state agencies and nongovernmental and academic organizations will be surveying coral colonies from the Dry Tortugas through Martin County to assess coral reef health. Read Article
AP – Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he is nearly ready to begin an environmental analysis that could lead to drilling in areas up to 200 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. Salazar told reporters he will soon launch a 45-day comment period on a planned study of how drilling would affect the ocean floor. He said federal officials know little about the Atlantic Coast because of a long-standing moratorium on oil and gas exploration across much of the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf. Congress lifted the moratorium in 2008. Read Article
