{"id":887,"date":"2012-03-11T11:23:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T11:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farmforward1.wpengine.com\/?p=887"},"modified":"2022-10-06T23:24:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T23:24:05","slug":"empty-ocean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/news\/empty-ocean\/","title":{"rendered":"Empty Ocean"},"content":{"rendered":"\t<section class=\"normal_content bg-white padding-top-small padding-bottom-large\" style=\"\">\n\t\t<div class=\"container\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"row center-md\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"col-md-7\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"content-styled\"><p>Our oceans are emptying at an alarming rate. Oceanographers monitoring the Marine Trophic Index\u2014a measure of the stability of the ocean\u2019s food chain\u2014have discovered a disturbing trend over the past 50 years: Human consumption of marine animals has been drastically upsetting the balance of ocean life since the beginning of large-scale industrial fishing in the 1950s.<\/p>\n<p>The culprit for this relatively sudden change in the ocean\u2019s ecosystem is what University of British Columbia scientist Daniel Pauly describes as \u201cfishing down the marine food webs.\u201d<a class='endnote' href='#endnote1'>1<\/a> After our overfishing of alpha-predators like tuna and salmon leads to their rapid dwindling, we begin eating lower down the ocean\u2019s food chain. In the absence of their predators, species further down the chain experience a temporary population boom. Fishers respond to this newfound abundance by fishing <em style=\"font-weight: inherit;\">them<\/em>\u00a0out of existence\u2014and so on, down the food chain.<\/p>\n<p>If this trend continues unabated, Pauly suggests, the future of seafood will be an unvarying supply of \u201cjellyfish sandwiches.\u201d<span style=\"font-size: 13.3333px;\"><a class='endnote' href='#endnote2'>2<\/a><\/span>\u00a0An initially skeptical scientific community has confirmed Pauly\u2019s fears, even going so far as to project an approximate date by which the world\u2019s seafood supply will have run out based on the current rate of ocean fishing: as soon as 2050, according to the journal\u00a0<em style=\"font-weight: inherit;\">Science<\/em>.<a class='endnote' href='#endnote3'>3<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fish are not the only marine animals to suffer from aggressive commercial fishing practices. Techniques such as \u201cbottom trawling\u201d (in which nets are dragged thousands of miles across the ocean floor) indiscriminately destroy entire habitats of deep-sea species. Both bottom trawling and longlining (using large numbers of baited hooks on an extended line) devastate populations of dolphins, whales, sea turtles, seabirds, and other marine animals who are trapped in the nets or hooks as \u201cbycatch.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Unless we take immediate steps to dramatically reduce our consumption of sea life, the long-term damage to our oceans\u2019 ecosystems may well be irreversible.<\/p>\n<p><em style=\"font-weight: inherit;\">Please\u00a0join the Farm Forward mailing list\u00a0to receive updates about our work and important information about how you can get involved.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our oceans are emptying at an alarming rate. Oceanographers monitoring the Marine Trophic Index\u2014a measure of the stability of the ocean\u2019s food chain\u2014have discovered a disturbing trend over the past 50 years&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-and-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.farmforward.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}