So long and thanks for all the fish

I recently came across this summary of the state of the world's marine life after decades of industrial scale pollution, warming, acidification, trawling, nutrient runoff and overfishing. It is from this paper.

Where have all the fish gone?

"Just don't go to the mall. Bush told us to win the war by going shopping. But if we want to really win the war about the economy, don't go shopping, and don't buy all the crap that sits in your cupboard and you never use. So, we can't [just] unscrew a lightbulb. We have to fix everything at the same time now. We have to stop overfishing, we have to stop pollution. We have to stop climate changing. When people ask me, 'what's the biggest problem: fishing, climate change or pollution?', I say 'yes' because it's all of it. And this requires fundamental changes in the way we fish, the way we raise our food, the way we produce our products and the way we get our energy for everything we do. And that's scary."

- Jeremy Jackson, Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Today is world oceans day, so I thought I would share this thoroughly depressing lecture. If you'd like to sleep tonight, might be better to skip it. I am not sure why the slides are blurred (I assume some kind of copyright issue). It's a shame, but you can still make most of them out. A couple of pithy quotes worth taking down:

"Ninety-five percent of what passes for conservation biology is the ever more sophisticated refinement of the obituary of nature, rather than doing something about it."

"What is farmed salmon? We're raising cows to feed to tigers, to eat tiger burgers. That's what salmon is. It's an apex predator. We go out and we drag the oceans and we get all this trash fish which we turn into forty percent protein pellets to feed to the salmon."

While we're on memorable quotes about the ocean, here are two from a fascinating documentary on overfishing called End of the Line, which I've been intending to blog about it for some time. The two money quotes are “We are fighting a war against the fish - and we are winning!” and “People always ask me - where have all the fish gone? and I tell them, we have eaten them!” Here is the trailer.

And while I'm compiling a somewhat random collection of things related to ocean ecology, here are three more links:

• Acidification: why small numbers matter. A change of pH of 0.1 might seem small, but if it occurred in your bloodstream, it would be sufficient to make you quite sick.

• FAO: Fish consumption reaches all time high.

• Science Daily: Ocean acidification will reduce diversity.

Happy World Oceans Day!