Marine Life & Conservation Blogs
We Reap What We Sow…
We Reap What We Sow… It’s an old saying, but one that has not lost its legitimacy over the years.
This morning I watched a BBC interview with Ross Edgely who aims to be the first person to swim the 2,000 miles around the UK coastline to help raise the awareness of our dying seas due to overfishing, plastic waste and pollution. It’s an amazing thing to do and at the same time such a tragedy that someone has to go to these lengths to try and raise such awareness. I was dismayed and not surprised, yet again, by the reporter’s lack of understanding or even care about marine issues. There was more interest in stories of stinging jellyfish than the facts of marine devastation.
When Ross was asked what he had seen on his epic journey, he replied that it was not so much what he had seen but what he had NOT seen that was so upsetting. Only a few fish, a few dolphins and sea birds but little else, except that is for jellyfish.
We clamber to the seaside and coast each summer for our holidays and complain about dangerous jellyfish ruining the sea. Well, really it’s mostly down to us that they are there in such great numbers. Jellyfish have no ‘mean streak’ and are not there solely to spoil our summer break. They are simple marine life forms that fill an ecological void when it is created. As we remove fish, crustaceans, cetaceans and sea birds from our oceans, the jellyfish are able to thrive.
We have decimated their main predators such as tuna, sharks, swordfish, turtles and salmon. One species of jellyfish may well eat another but this is not enough to control numbers. We have now tipped the balance in favour of these simple, gelatinous animals. We are rapidly returning our seas to their primordial state.
Do we care? Possibly. Enough to do something about it? Possibly not.
We can certainly talk the talk, but that’s as far as it goes. There are a few protected areas in the world. There is some legislation for over fishing. Is it enough? No. Year after year our seas decline in health and species.
Yet we still love to go the sea, to swim, to surf, and to dive. We are thrilled to see dolphins or a turtle, sharks and fish. But if we don’t see them, are we heartbroken? No. For divers, a shark or whale encounter is wonderful, but so is a rust-ridden wreck of a long forgotten ship.
We complain about plastic waste. Who is to blame for it all? The manufactures, the supermarkets, the disposal companies? Or us, you and me. Most of the plastic we use is simply for convenience and, just as conveniently, we throw it away. Everywhere I go -be it in the car, boat, walking, swimming – I see plastic thrown away by some lazy person who has no care at all for the world in which we all live.
Every beach, hedgerow, roadside, mountain, field and town has its share of discarded waste from people who are too ignorant to take it home or take a few moments to dispose of it sensibly.
Healthy oceans give us the air we breathe, our atmosphere and our climates. They also give us a sense of wonder, they excite our imaginations and are the foundation of all life on this planet. They are where we came from. We can’t afford to lose them.
There are still people on this earth who depend on sea life for survival but they are also in great trouble as fish disappear. While these people struggle to feed themselves much of the rest of humanity live in a world of excess. Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted – www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/
Where is the sense or reasoning behind that?
Some people do care… but most don’t. Are our lives too busy to worry about the sea? There are mortgages to pay, children to school and bring up. But what kind of world are we bringing these kids up to live in? When your children and grandchildren ask you one day where all the marine life went you can tell them, with shameful pride, that we, human beings, killed it all. First, by systematically hunting it for food and then for money, ultimately polluting and destroying the marine food chain causing mass starvation.
What a tragic legacy. Is it too late to do anything about this? Possibly. Is it worth trying? Yes.
So what am I doing personally. Well for a start I will continue to not eat any produce from the sea until perhaps one day it truly becomes sustainable. As a family we will continue to recycle and minimize our use of plastic. We will continue to support marine conservation groups. I would love to know what you are doing or what you would like to do.
Write to me at jeff@scubaverse.com
The Ocean Cleanup, the global non-profit project, has removed a verified all-time total of ten million kilograms (22 million lbs.) of trash from oceans and rivers around the world – approximately the same weight as the Eiffel Tower.
To complete its mission of ridding the oceans of plastic, The Ocean Cleanup uses a dual strategy: cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) to remove the plastic already afloat in the oceans, while stopping the flow of plastic from the world’s most polluting rivers.
Through cleaning operations in the GPGP and in rivers in eight countries, the cumulative total of trash removed has now surpassed ten million kilograms. This milestone demonstrates the acceleration of The Ocean Cleanup’s impact, while underlining the astonishing scale of the plastic pollution problem and the need for continued support and action.
While encouraging for the mission, this milestone is only a staging point: millions more tons of plastic still pollute our oceans and The Ocean Cleanup intends to continue learning, improving and innovating to solve this global catastrophe.
This announcement comes as governments from around the world meet to continue negotiations to develop a new legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution at INC4 in Ottawa, Canada. Representatives of The Ocean Cleanup will be in attendance and the organization will be urging decision-makers to collaborate towards a comprehensive and ambitious global treaty which addresses plastic at all stages of its life cycle and in all marine environments worldwide, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
It is encouraging to see that the need for remediation is reflected in the various options for potential treaty provisions. It is essential that the final treaty contains clear targets for the remediation of legacy plastic pollution, and reduction of riverine plastic emissions.
Tackling plastic pollution requires innovative and impactful solutions. The treaty should therefore incentivize the innovation ecosystem by fostering innovations that make maximal use of data, technology and scientific knowledge – such as those designed and deployed by The Ocean Cleanup.
‘After many tough years of trial and error, it’s amazing to see our work is starting to pay off – and I am proud of the team who has brought us to this point.’ said Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. ‘While we still have a long way to go, our recent successes fill us with renewed confidence that the oceans can be cleaned.’
The Ocean Cleanup was founded in 2013 and captured its first plastic in 2019, with the first confirmed catch in the GPGP coming soon after the deployment of Interceptor 001 in Jakarta, Indonesia. After surpassing one million kilograms of trash removed in early 2022, the non-profit project has since progressed to the third iteration of its GPGP cleaning solution, known as System 03, and a network of Interceptors currently covering rivers in eight countries, with more deployments set for 2024.
About The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup is an international non-profit organization that develops and scales technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. They aim to achieve this goal through a dual strategy: stemming the inflow via rivers and cleaning up the legacy plastic that has already accumulated in the ocean. For the latter, The Ocean Cleanup develops large-scale systems to efficiently concentrate the plastic for periodic removal. This plastic is tracked and traced through DNV’s chain of custody model to certify claims of origin when recycling it into new products. To curb the tide via rivers, The Ocean Cleanup has developed Interceptor™ solutions to halt and extract riverine plastic before it reaches the ocean. Founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup now employs a broadly multi-disciplined team of approximately 140. The foundation is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
For more information, visit: theoceancleanup.com and follow @theoceancleanup on social media.
In this series, the Shark Trust will be sharing amazing facts about different species of sharks and what you can do to help protect them.
This month we’re taking a look at the Dusky Shark, a highly migratory species with a particularly slow growth rate and late age at maturity.
Dusky sharks are one of the largest species within the Carcharhinus genus, generally measuring 3 metres total length but able to reach up to 4.2 metres. They are grey to grey-brown on their dorsal side and their fins usually have dusky margins, with the darkest tips on the caudal fin.
Dusky Sharks can often be confused with other species of the Carcharhinus genus, particularly the Galapagos Shark (Carcharhinus galapagensis). They have very similar external morphology, so it can be easier to ID to species level by taking location into account as the two species occupy very different ecological niches – Galapagos Sharks prefer offshore seamounts and islets, whilst duskies prefer continental margins.
Hybridisation:
A 2019 study found that Dusky Sharks are hybridising with Galapagos Sharks on the Eastern Tropical Pacific (Pazmiño et al., 2019). Hybridisation is when an animal breeds with an individual of another species to produce offspring (a hybrid). Hybrids are often infertile, but this study found that the hybrids were able to produce second generation hybrids!
Long distance swimmers:
Dusky sharks are highly mobile species, undertaking long migrations to stay in warm waters throughout the winter. In the Northern Hemisphere, they head towards the poles in the summer and return southwards towards the equator in winter. The longest distance recorded was 2000 nautical miles!
Very slow to mature and reproduce:
The Dusky Shark are both targeted and caught as bycatch globally. We already know that elasmobranchs are inherently slow reproducers which means that they are heavily impacted by overfishing; it takes them so long to recover that they cannot keep up with the rate at which they are being fished. Dusky Sharks are particularly slow to reproduce – females are only ready to start breeding at roughly 20 years old, their gestation periods can last up to 22 months, and they only give birth every two to three years. This makes duskies one of the most vulnerable of all shark species.
The Dusky Shark is now listed on Appendix II of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS), but further action is required to protect this important species.
Scientific Name: Carcharhinus obscurus
Family: Carcharhinidae
Maximum Size: 420cm (Total Length)
Diet: Bony fishes, cephalopods, can also eat crustaceans, and small sharks, skates and rays
Distribution: Patchy distribution in tropical and warm temperate seas; Atlantic, Indo-Pacific and Mediterranean.
Habitat: Ranges from inshore waters out to the edge of the continental shelf.
Conservation status: Endangered.
For more great shark information and conservation visit the Shark Trust Website
Images: Andy Murch
Diana A. Pazmiño, Lynne van Herderden, Colin A. Simpfendorfer, Claudia Junge, Stephen C. Donnellan, E. Mauricio Hoyos-Padilla, Clinton A.J. Duffy, Charlie Huveneers, Bronwyn M. Gillanders, Paul A. Butcher, Gregory E. Maes. (2019). Introgressive hybridisation between two widespread sharks in the east Pacific region, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 136(119-127), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2019.04.013.
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