The Indelible Bonobo Experience

China’s black market for fish parts is probably messing up marine ecosystems. Shark finning, for instance, is removing one of the main predators. The unexpected consequences that arise when a species is knocked out of an ecosystem are called trophic cascades.

For instance, as North Atlantic sharks have been killed off, the populations of their prey have grown. And since that prey typically eat coastal bivalves, those have become increasingly scarce. That, among other things, caused a North Carolina scallop fishery to shutter in 2004, and has driven up the cost of clam chowder such that fewer and fewer restaurants in the U.S northeast still serve it. (Note, though, that trophic cascades tend to be incredibly complicated, meaning that the causal relationships are poorly understood. That means that one effect of shark-finning was an oversimplification of the marine ecosystem that “villainized” the cownose ray, resulting in the “Save the Bay, Eat a Ray” campaign — and now that population could eventually be at risk of being overharvested ).

China is dramatically under-reporting what it’s taking from the world’s seas. The average it told the UN Food and Agriculture Organization over the last decade was 368,000 tons each year. A recent European Parliament report puts that number at 4.6 million tons — some 12.5 times more than what China reported. 

(via China is Plundering the Planet’s Seas - Gwynn Guilford - The Atlantic)

funnyordie:

The 13 Strangest Craigslist Requests

Believe it or not, there are some weirdos on Craigslist.

some people like seafood, what’s wrong with that?!

climateadaptation:

End of fish, in one chart. WaPo via WWF

red means overfishing, orange - intense fishing. moreover:

• Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent 
• The full WWF report (PDF), meanwhile, is full of brightly colored graphs charting the decline of wildlife across the globe. All told, global vertebrate populations have declined by some 30 percent since 1970. But that number masks a lot of variation. Wildlife actually appears to be recovering in the temperate areas, while it’s disappearing at a rapid rate in the tropics. It seems there have been some modest conservation successes in the wealthier temperate regions — the European otter is staging an impressive comeback, for instance.
• The major point the WWF paper emphasizes is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may shrink, but there’s plenty for us now.
• So is there any way to stop the slide? After all, it’s not like people can just stop eating fish altogether. Pauly, surprisingly, is fairly optimistic. He argues that strict government quotas on catches can help stop the slide. “There is no need for an end to fish,” he writes, “or to fishing for that matter.” (He’s not sold on aquaculture, or fish farming, since it often requires huge harvests of smaller fish to feed the big carnivorous ones in farms.)
• The hitch is that when governments have tried to institute such quotas in the past — as they’ve recently attempted with Atlantic bluefin tuna — the rules can sometimes get watered down under lobbying pressure. Or occasionally shadowy black markets emerge to flout the rules. But no one said it was easy, halting the end of fish.

(via dougcmatthews)