The idea of depleting a marine resource is ubiquitous and familiar these days, with the bluefin tuna even featured as the cover article of the New York Times Magazine this past June. The idea may be commonplace now, but this was not always so. A 2003 paper by Nicholas Dulvy and others enumerates the reasons why it was long believed that marine populations were more resilient than terrestrial species, and less likely to go extinct due to overfishing, habitat loss, invasive species, disease, and other causes. Jean Baptiste de Lamark himself was a proponent of the “paradigm of ocean inexhaustibility" due to the high fecundity of fish. He (and others) argued that because fish lay so many eggs and have excessive offspring (with little care put into each), we could never actually catch enough of a population to cause any damage. One problem with this argument is that fecundity often increases with size of an individual. Since we selectively catch larger fish, we're catching the most reproductively able of a population and causing a large impact per fish caught. Other arguments about the impossibility of aquatic extinction include broad geographic range and dispersal, and that economic extinction of a fishery would precede biological extinction of a species (all of which have counter-arguments).
In all the discussion of overfishing, it is always humans that are doing the fishing to the detriment of non-human species, either through depletion of a fished species itself, or by reducing resources for other species that rely on it for prey. It is we humans who must reduce our impacts and allot resources for other species on our fair planet. Read the full report here.
Source: by Admin, The Southern Fried Science Network.
