Take the salmon run in the North Eastern Pacific as an example. On top of that, the salmon run bonanza forms the staple diet of a host of carnivores, including grizzly and black bears, wolves and a whole plethora of marine creatures. Wherever the location, the disappearance of fish would likely lead to a huge imbalance in the natural world. It is likely that vulnerable habitats such as coral reefs and kelp forests would be overrun first and only the most adaptable, resilient species will remain, in a far less dynamic and diverse ecosystem.
It could be that fish are displaced by more energy efficient jellyfish and the very nature of the marine ecosystem shifts, with these resilient ocean wanderers thriving in the absence of predators. Once this happens, it may be the point of no return for fish stocks, which will struggle to re-establish their once long-held dominance under the waves.
So what does the future look like? Well, there are some reasons for hope. First and most importantly, we are aware of the scale of the problem. Secondly, measures are coming in albeit slowly which are trying to address and reverse these declines.
A lot of those dinosaurs never went truly extinct; they're now known as "birds," and quite a few mammals made it, and evolved into humans, in pretty short order. This earlier event, the Permian—Triassic Extinction, is frequently called "the Great Dying" by paleontologists who like historical events to sound like Morrissey album titles. It made the Earth pretty quiet for a while—the oceans quietest of all. In , Payne and several colleagues looked into the source of the aforementioned extremely bad stuff that led to the Great Dying.
They concluded that temperature-dependent hypoxia—loss of oxygen due to changes in temperature—caused about 70 percent of the losses. An oddly familiar culprit was fingered for this temperature change: "rapid and extreme climate warming. A previous study had found that the Great Dying had resulted from rising carbon emissions—caused at that time by geothermal events—that occurred over the span of two to 20 millennia ; in other words, the blink of a geological eye.
To buy this book, go here. Thanks to our species' multi-pronged and comprehensive approach, humanity's present day "Kill All the Marine Life" project is going extremely well.
Here's a quick cheat sheet listing our main strategies:. We dump several milliion metric tons of plastic garbage into the oceans every year.
Bottom trawling, or dragging fishing equipment across the seafloor, is turning "large portions of the deep continental slope into faunal deserts and highly degraded seascapes" according to a report on the long-term effects of this widespread practice The planet is heating up really fast, and the resulting extinctions are happening in real time. Although, for the record, at this rate it will take a few more centuries for this effect to reach the lifeforms at the deepest depths of the oceans.
Ocean acidification—the other major side effect of CO2 emissions besides global warming—is causing countless die-offs, most famously in corals, the backbone of coral reefs, the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth. Fertilizer and pesticides poison the ocean, and when combined with the above factors, they help create "dead zones," nearly oxygen-free patches of ocean where almost nothing can live. According to a paper published in Science magazine, dead zones make up four times as much of the oceans as they did in We eat the sea's living creatures—which is the number-one cause of their declining numbers.
There are rates at which we can supposedly fish sustainably—meaning in such a way that we don't run out—but the fishing industry operates in volumes that meet, or surpass the peak equilibrium rate. Right now, we're hauling up 90 percent of fish stocks globally, according to the UN.
In other words, we're killing as many fish as we possibly can as a byproduct of our industries, and then on top of that, we're also eating as many as we can. To be clear, the Great Dying wasn't percent caused by warming either. But whatever the cause, out of marine invertebrate genera we know of died back then. All the trilobites and blastoids died, for instance.
Every single one! But no one mourns the trilobites and blastoids, and that actually helps illustrate why we fail to grasp that we're annihilating life in the oceans.
There's actually a sociological term for this phenomenon: it's called a shifting baseline. The term refers to our tendency to perceive our own early experiences of ecology as the norm, in contrast to what we see later in life. To explain with a non-oceanic example, my own childhood memories of summers in California's Inland Empire include street gutters choked with thousands of California toads.
Twenty years later, those toads are mostly gone—likely decimated by chytrid fungus infections. Their loss leaves me with the false impression that the natural order in Southern California has vanished in a very short time, when actually, the damage humanity has caused here is of much longer duration and much larger in scale than the loss of one species of toad a species that arguably wasn't "supposed to be there" in the first place.
Much more serious losses of biodiversity have been rolling out for centuries, but I don't miss animals like the Southern California kit fox, which went extinct over a century ago, because my own baseline never included them. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem.
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