Spain, 297
species:
alien, 182–83, 191, 221; see also invasive species
barriers dividing, 181–82
movement of, 80–89, 221
sponges, 201
squid, 77, 78, 79, 177
Stellwagen Bank National MarineSanctuary, 325–26
Stern Report, 238, 316
Stevens, Guy, 321–22
Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 143, 265
stresses, 202, 212, 222–23, 225, 234–35,240, 287, 298, 316
sturgeon, 36, 38, 246, 248
styrene, 161
Suez Canal, 192
sulfur and sulfides, 17, 20–21, 23, 73–75, 220, 235
seeding atmosphere with, 284–85
Sumerian creation myth, 122
Sun, 12–13, 16
sunfish, 218
Sunken Billions, The, 307
sunlight, 70, 84
surgeonfish, 1, 32
sushi, 144
swordfish, 49, 144, 315
tagging programs, 324–25
technology, 41, 215, 238
Thailand, 291
Thompson, Benjamin, Count Rumford, 59, 60–61
Three Gorges Dam, 123
Thurstan, Ruth, 43, 45, 48, 55, 229, 300
tidal barrages, 276, 277
tilapia, 244, 248, 249, 257, 315
Time, 261, 344
Tiran Island, 165
toadfish, 81, 175–76
toxoplasmosis, 206
tragedy of the commons, 309
trawling and dredging, 42–45, 49, 50, 54, 208–9, 228, 229–31, 271, 292, 299, 301, 303, 345–46
bycatches of, 251–52
pollutants and, 264
Triassic period, 25
tributyltin, 145
trilobites, 23, 25
trophic levels, 249–50
trout, 246–47, 248
tsunamis, 102, 156, 320
tuna, 32, 49, 76, 77, 144, 249, 315, 320
bluefin, 34–35, 56, 215, 233, 248–50, 300, 309, 320, 326–28
“dolphin-friendly,” 315, 324
turbot, 247
Turley, Carol, 106
turtles, 1, 24, 28, 136, 213, 293–94, 315, 319, 322, 326, 333
leatherback, 213, 218, 326
mahi-mahi fishing and, 323
plastic and, 159–60
sea grasses and, 118, 128, 187–88
tumors on, 128, 200
Tuvalu, 96, 98
Tyack, Peter, 169, 170
unique habitats, 81–82
United Nations, 243, 281, 327, 332, 335, 350
Convention of Biological Diversity, 305–6
Convention on the Law of the Sea, 325, 329, 330–31
Verhaegen, Marc, 28
Veron, Charlie, 111, 278, 285, 337
viruses, 115, 201, 203–6, 210, 254
tumors caused by, 128, 200
volcanism, 25
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 181
walruses, 87
Ward, Jessica, 201
water vapor, 64
wave power, 276–77, 279
wetlands, 91, 101–4, 186, 260, 263, 337
whales, 24, 54, 111, 135, 141, 191, 206,219–20, 253, 319, 320, 322, 325–26, 331, 333
bowhead, 347–48
bubble-net feeding of, 326
communication of, 167–68, 172
hunting of, 204
noise and, 166, 169–72, 177, 178
orca, 293–94
plastic and, 160–61
pollutants and, 142
Whitby, 302
whitefish, 38, 246
whiting, 55, 252, 300, 303
Wickett, Michael, 107
Wilson, E. O., 239–40
wind farms, 173, 274–76, 345
winds, 58, 70–72
Coriolis effect and, 69–70, 152
trade, 152
upwellings caused by, 70–74, 77, 220
wolffish, 300
World Bank, 307
World Summit on Sustainable Development, 301, 343–44
World Wildlife Fund, 342
wrecks, 290
Yangtze River, 123
Yarsley, Victor, 150–51
Young, Rob, 103
Young, Neil, 281
zinc, 143
zircons, 11–12, 13, 15
CREDITS FOR PHOTO INSERT
Page 1 (top): Monroe County Library, Florida; (middle): Monroe County Library, Florida; (bottom): Loren McClenachan, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Page 2 (top): AKG-images/Gilles Mermet (Sousse Archaeological Museum); (bottom): AKG-images
Page 3 (top): author’s collection; (middle): author’s collection; (bottom): Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, (ppmsca.12771)
Page 4 (top): Elizabeth Gates/PISCO, University of Oregon; (bottom): Adrian Scottow
Page 5 (top): Katharina Fabricius, Australian Institute of Marine Science; (bottom): Katharina Fabricius, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Page 6 (top): Jeremy Young, University College London; (bottom): Chris Deacutis
Page 7 (top): William Rodriguez Schepis, Instituto EcoFaxina/SeaWeb Marine Photobank; (bottom): Bob Talbot, LegaSea Project/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 8 (top): Glen Tepke/SeaWeb Marine Photobank; (bottom): Cynthia Vanderlip, University of Hawaii
Page 9 (top): Silke Stuckenbrock/SeaWeb Marine Photobank; (bottom): Tim Pusack, Oregon State University
Page 10 (top): Lisa Cox, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; (bottom): Victor Hugo Casillas Romo/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 11 (top): Bryce Beukers-Stewart, University of York; (bottom): Stephen McGowan/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 12 (top): Callum Roberts, University of York; (bottom): Link Roberts/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 13 (top): Steve Spring/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 14 (top): EcoFaxina, Brazil; (bottom): Marco Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Page 15 (top): Marco Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; (bottom): Nancy Boucha, www.scubasystems.org/SeaWeb Marine Photobank
Page 16 (top): Guy Marcovaldi/SeaWeb Marine Photobank; (bottom): Guy Marcovaldi, Projeto Tamar
Catch of goliath groupers landed from a recreational fishing charter boat into Key West in Florida, in the 1950s. The swollen bellies of the fish show that they are full of eggs and were caught from a spawning aggregation.
Recreational fish catch from Key West in the 1970s.
Recreational fish catch from Key West in 2007. The number and size of fish have become smaller over time. Most of today’s anglers are unaware of the extraordinary decline in Florida’s reef fish revealed by these images.
Fishing methods were well developed long ago in the Mediterranean as this second-century mosaic panel from the Catacombs of Hermes in Hadrumetum, Tunisia, shows. It illustrates the use of throw nets, octopus traps made from perforated amphorae, drift nets, and hook and line, as well as the wonderful diversity of marine life.
The Fishmarket by the Dutch artist Frans Snyders (1579–1657). Although the composition is fanciful, the animals and their sizes were representative of those available to customers of the day. A huge wolffish gapes from the center of the painting and lies across enormous sturgeon and halibut. To the left are large cod, ling, and salmon steaks while turbot hang from hooks at the back. Other creatures that might surprise present day shoppers include lamprey, porpoise, seals, common skate (now extremely rare in spite of the name), and pike. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Carpentras, France.
Auction scene at Grimsby fishmarket, UK, from the early days of steam trawling around 1900. Not only is the size of the catch extraordinary by today’s standards, but so was the size of the fish. The long, slim fish in the background are mainly ling, while those in the foreground are predominantly cod.
Late nineteenth-century catch of thirty thousand salmon from Puget Sound, Washington State.
; Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York City, posing with a three hundred–pound halibut at the Fulton Fish Market in 1939. By this time, giant halibut had become scarce in the North Atlantic, but they were common at the time the Jamestown colony was founded in Virginia in the early seventeenth century.
Dungeness crabs killed by the encroachment of a deep layer of low oxygen water onto the continental shelf off Oregon. Such events are linked to stronger winds blowing parallel to the shore, a probable result of climate change. As deep water contains more dissolved carbon dioxide, it is more acidic than the shallow water layer that usually bathes coastal seas off the West Coast of the United States.
The “Thames Barrier” is a movable floodgate that protects London from flooding during periods of extreme high tides and storm surge. Rising sea levels will demand similar protective measures for many other cities across the world in the coming century.
Healthy Papua New Guinean coral reefs bathed in seawater of normal pH.
Reefs exposed to carbon dioxide bubbling from submarine vents that are subject to water acidity levels equivalent to those that could be reached by the late twenty-first century under a business-as-usual scenario of carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere.
These microscopic coccolithophores are phytoplankton (plant plankton) that produce exquisitely ornamented shells made from calcium carbonate. Each ball is a single cell that measures about 1/6300th of an inch across. Fossilized skeletons of coccolithophores are a major ingredient of chalk. They are expected to be highly susceptible to rising acidity as dissolved carbon dioxide accumulates in the sea.
A kill of menhaden fish in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, due to a severe low-oxygen event in August 2003.
Plastic contamination of the Santos estuary, São Paulo, Brazil. Estuaries are especially prone to waste buildup as they often receive garbage washed downstream from highly populous cities.
California sea lion trapped in a piece of monofilament gill net. The fishing net has gradually tightened in a slow-motion noose as the animal has grown in size.
Laysan albatross live in the North Pacific and fly thousands of miles over the open sea in search of food for their young. Unfortunately they cannot distinguish floating plastic trash from food, with heartbreaking results.
Remains of a Laysan albatross chick from Kure Atoll in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. This chick starved to death on a diet of “junk food.”
Humpback whale and calf near Tonga. Whales are highly vocal animals, few of them more so than humpbacks. They use the remarkable sound-transmitting properties of water to call each other over distances of hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. But their ability to communicate has diminished in the last fifty years due to the rising clamor of human-generated noise in the ocean.
Red lionfish on a shallow water reef in the Bahamas. In the space of less than twenty years, this native of the Pacific and Indian oceans has successfully invaded coral reefs throughout almost the entire tropical western Atlantic, munching its way through countless indigenous fish.
A stand of invasive smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) has taken over mudflats of Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge near San Diego, California.
Jellyfish possess an ethereal beauty, which belies their ruthless efficiency as predators of the planktonic realm. They are highly effective opportunists that are beginning to benefit from overfishing, coastal pollution, and climate change. As a result, dense blooms of jellyfish have reached plague proportions in some places, driving people from the water, blocking power station cooling water intakes, and killing stock in fish farms.
A scallop dredge being lifted into a boat in the Irish Sea. Each individual dredge is composed of a steel frame with vertical teeth that dig up the bottom, and a chain-link bag to collect everything that it kicks up (usually a wide assortment of rocks, weeds, fish, and other invertebrates). Scallop dredges are notorious for their collateral damage.
Catch from a prawn trawler in the Torres Strait, Northern Australia, showing a large weight of unwanted bycatch, mainly small fish and invertebrates, that will be thrown away (mostly dead) when the prawns have been removed. Bycatch often outnumbers prawns by 10:1 or 15:1 in trawl catches like this.
Red mangrove in the Galápagos Islands. Many tropical coasts are protected by dense forests of mangrove. Their interlocking roots stabilize sediments and protect coasts from waves and storms. By trapping mud and growing upward over time, healthy mangroves could help shield coasts from the worst effects of sea-level rise. In many countries, however, they have been cleared to make way for shrimp ponds and other coastal developments.
A barge load of retired New York City subway cars destined to be dumped in the sea to create “artificial reefs.”
Tires dumped into the sea off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the 1970s to create an “artificial reef”—garbage by any other name. Forty years later, there isn’t much evidence of flourishing marine life on this “reef.” Natural habitats do the job far better than artificial ones.
Aquaculture ponds for shrimp and fish cram the coast in China’s southern Bohai Sea as this view from space shows. Much of the Bohai coast looks like this and natural habitats are hard to find in this crowded and highly polluted sea.
Coastal cleanups have become regular events in many parts of the world. This one is from a community near São Paulo, Brazil. Despite long-standing bans on dumping plastics at sea, the amount of trash is still on the increase in most places, some of it dumped illegally, some blown to sea from land, and some washed offshore by rivers.
Cabo Pulmo Marine National Park in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula underwent a spectacular recovery of marine life following its protection from fishing in 1999. By 2009 the weight of predatory fish in the park—like many of those in this photograph—had increased by a spectacular eleven times.
It may take many years for protection from fishing to rebuild depleted populations of big, old fish like this black seabass in California’s La Jolla Marine Reserve, near San Diego. Such animals are usually the first affected by overfishing and the last to recover.
Shark populations across the globe have fallen into a steep spiral of decline in the last two decades due to demand for their fins, the signature ingredient of a prestige food in Chinese cuisine: shark-fin soup. Economic growth in China has driven a soaring demand for the fins, many of which are stripped from the animals on deck before they are dumped over the side to suffer a prolonged death. This animal was found among many others in a “shark graveyard” on a reef in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Protecting sharks will require measures to curb demand for shark-fin soup alongside restraints on overfishing.
For centuries, green turtles were hunted for their eggs and meat. These days they are protected by law in most countries but nonetheless still often fall victim to other fisheries as unwanted bycatch. This abandoned fishing net with seventeen dead green turtles was discovered drifting off the coast of Bahia, Brazil, days after a storm. Leatherback turtle numbers have plummeted over the last twenty year, s from such bycatch and they are now on the verge of extinction.
Although protecting the giants of the sea requires decades of dedicated work, there are encouraging success stories. In Brazil, the number of olive ridley turtle nests has increased by fifteen times in northern São Paulo since conservation efforts were launched in 1980 by a national environmental organization, Projeto Tamar.
The Ocean of Life Page 47
