Washington: Next 100 years present major challenges to marine life, say scientists who found that the same patterns that led to the collapse of wildlife populations on land are now occurring in the oceans.
Researchers at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB) and colleagues reviewed the past, present and future of marine animal life. A consortium of scientists said that wildlife populations in the oceans are as healthy as those on land were hundreds or thousands of years ago. However, they warn, that may be about to change as the next 100 years promise to present major challenges to marine life.
The new research compares the march of the Industrial Revolution on land to current patterns of human use of the world's oceans.
"A lot has changed in the last 200 years," said lead author Douglas McCauley, a professor in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). "Our tackle box has industrialised," said McCauley. "There are factory farms in the sea and cattle-ranch-style feed lots for tuna," said co-author Steve Palumbi of Stanford University. "Shrimp farms are eating up mangroves with an appetite akin to that of terrestrial farming, which consumed native prairies and forest.
"Stakes for seafloor mining claims are being pursued with gold-rush-like fervour, and 300-tonne ocean mining machines and 750-foot fishing boats are now rolling off the assembly line to do this work," said Palumbi. According to the researchers, increasing industrial use of the oceans and the globalisation of ocean exploitation threaten to damage the health of marine wildlife populations, making the situation in the oceans as grim as that on land.
"All signs indicate that we may be initiating a marine industrial revolution," McCauley said. "We are setting ourselves up in the oceans to replay the process of wildlife Armageddon that we engineered on land," said McCauley. "We need creative and effective policy to manage damage inflicted upon ocean wildlife in the vast spaces between marine protected areas," co-author Robert Warner, a research professor at UCSB said. Among the most serious threats to ocean wildlife is climate change, which according to the scientists is degrading marine wildlife habitats and has a greater impact on these animals than it does on terrestrial fauna.
The finding was published in the journal Science.
