Slashdot Mirror
The World Oceans Now 70% Shark Free
wheresjim writes "According to a study published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society, the world's oceans are now about 70% shark free. This is a bad sign for the sharks, the oceans and of course, journalists during slow news cycles."
Nothing for you to see here, please move along
70% appropriate.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I think this means it is time for a half-jaws, half-free willy environmentalists movie. in the spirit of free willy, michael jackson will obviously be chosen for the theme. i see the theme as being, itself, a cross between "beat it" and "don't stop til you get enough." it's probably not a coincidence that this also seems to be his take on children.
I am shocked to hear this kind of pro-shark fascism being spewed on Slashdot. As we all know, sharks are vile, evil creatures who are a danger and threat to all life and liberty.
Why do you hate America?
Are circling around Australian beaches.
Czech language for absolute beginners
Does this mean that the ocean is 30% sharks by volume? I AM NEVER SWIMMING AGAIN!
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
... our waters are now 70% shark free! We are now the safest planetary water park in the galaxy for your children! Come now and get 20% off your water slide pass!
Offer only valid in the next 10 minutes.
Because if it is, that means that the Oceans are now 30% shark, 70% water... Not a good mix. GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I blame Batman for dumping his anti-shark-spray into the ocean.
(if you get that joke you're really old)
What was the percentage in recent years? Assuming the trend is decreasing amount of sharks, how fast is it going? If ten years ago, the sharks percentage was decreasing at .0025/year, but now it's .005/year, that's probably really bad. If now the rate is now .001/year, that's more or less a good thing. At the highest point, what percentage of the ocean had sharks?
Kind of like having a 50% off sale without saying what the original or final price is. Sounds great...
Graphs are really nice.
Zing!
This is a bad sign for the sharks, the oceans and of course, journalists during slow news cycles.
Actually, if some shark species are threatened by extinction, that is bad news for all of us.
The savage overexploatation of our oceans is a terrible shame. I get furious when I read about EU subsedies keeping huge Spanish and British fishing fleets running.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Apparently not, as they can just write another story about how there are fewer sharks than before.
The ones that are left obviously ate the ones in the other 70%.
Who ordered that?
100 Million per year are caught.
http://www.bigmarinefish.com/sharks.html
Da da. Da da. Da da.....
(Sorry sharkies.)
The article neglects to cover the numbers of land sharks still roaming the earth. Despite their service to candygram distributors the seem to have fallen from public notice as of late.
See online journals of the Royal Society -- it can be found under Proceedings of the Royal Society B:Biological Sciences titled "The absence of sharks from abyssal regions of the world's oceans".
What are these ocean things you speak of?
They've got something to do with beaches, right?
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
I for one farewell our shark overlords.
I wish the Japanese would stop killing for fins. What gives them the right?
That's an ocean that's still 70% full of sharks...
Task Mangler
While sharks, as apex predators, are a good indicator of overall biodiversity / availability of tasty biomass in the oceans, figures on some other species are probably at least as alarming.
I've seen (at things like the UN informal consultative process on oceans and the law of the sea, and the 3rd global conference on oceans, coasts and islands just last month) presentations showing fisheries catch decade-by-decade worldwide, and the trends are just plain scary.
So many things are being done in totally unsustainable ways that popular tasty species have come close to being wiped out over large areas. Cod around Canada, for example. Tuna in some other areas.
I like tasty fish and don't want them to all go away. (Yes, here I am subscribing to sustainability defined as "making sure your grandkids get to hunt Bambi, too.")
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Looks like the sharks with lasers on their heads are slowly taking over.
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
Now that's a short "article".
It doesn't even tell how shark free the oceans were before human influences.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...that the sharks are essentially as common as land? If so, count me out of that trip to Hawaii next summer...
This also begs the question: Which part of which ocean was this "proof" obtained in? I'd say the North Atlantic might be a lot more 'shark free' than, say, the Gulf of Mexico...
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
I can't tell much of anything from this report.
It's 70% free compared to what? I don't know. As we explore the depths - do we have any baseline to compare too or is this normal? One possible explaination - what are the others? How good are the others?
The article cited is so horrid on this I can't get worked up over it. I have no idea what the 70% means, is this compared to known baselines or less than someone somewhere expected, or is it something else?
I suspect that the original scientific article would clear much of this up, but the report quoted is about as horrid as one can get. I'm not sure if you tried you get any less informed from this. Maybe it has dire ecological warnings - but all I can get is "Someone somewhere thinks something might not be what they expect but have never observed" - which isn't much to get worried over.
At least it didn't make the front page of slashdot.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
They are currently being mounted with lazers in secret labs! the /. crowd should have known that!
Now they live in Lawyer offices.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
And make some plans for what you will do for food in 2012.
And make some plans for what you will do for food in 2012.
I've made my plans; they involve some fava beans and a nice chianti.
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
Television shows have gotten 70% much better.
Wow, that is the single lamest comment I've ever read on Slashdot. I've read quite a number of lame comments, too, so that's really saying a lot.
The article's spin is that shark populations are dwindling, but what the scientists actually discovered is that sharks do not live in the oceans' abyssal zone, "in perpetual darkness at depths below 6,560 feet". One reasoning given for this is the lack of food at that depth. However, has abundant food ever existed there? Current pelagic trawl fishing nets only descend one half a mile, or 2,640 feet. In addition, sea conditions below 6,560 feet have only capable of being explored by one sea vessel -- the French bathyscaph Trieste -- at least according to Wikipedia. So we have little research into whether fish populations are growing or shrinking at these depths.
But maybe shark's CAN'T live at these depths due to the lack of light and high water pressure? Most fish in the abyssal zone are pretty bizzare, including the Deep Sea Angler. Why aren't people worried that goldfish aren't down there?
And the whole "70% shark free" calculation is based on the fact that 70% of the ocean's volume is below 6,560 feet.
In conclusion, it's nice to know that sharks do not live at the great depths of the ocean, but there's much to learn about that environment before one can form a relationship between that fact and overfishing.
my blog
Is it time for more MythBusters Shark Week yet?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
So lawyers play golf now instead of going on cruises. Who'd have guessed...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"So long, and thanks for all the surfers"
Keep an eye out for Vogons, people.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
The article states that the world's oceans are largely Sharkless.
Kinda like the World is 70% water and of that 70%, you would only find sharks in 30% of it. So basically, it is saying that the absence of sharks from what everyone would assume is safe zones in the middle of nowhere can't be assumed because they can't find those supposedly safe sharks that are maintaining the hidden population. So... the sharks that are caught every year are the population and thus... we are putting the sharks into danger.
That was my interpretation.
but they're still 30% shark!
you forgot it in the length of time that it took you to get the link, read it, AND then post it. So that is not really a case of IIRC.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they prefer to be called little people eaters
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
So does this decline mean that sharks have jumped the shark?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The oceans are 30% shark? Yipes.
That we aren't going to need a bigger boat after all.
In related news, 40% of the Earth's land area is infested with sharks. Scientists blame evolution while religious leaders said it was some god's punishment for something they hate and lots of people enjoy or something.
This is a bad sign for the sharks
Not to mention freakin lasers!!
"Would be easier if we just ran out of people."
If you believed that, you wouldn't be here.
You'd have already gone postal AND suicidal.
If 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans and 30% of that is sharks, that must mean that 21% of the Earth is covered by SHARKS!
More of that oceany good taste without the shark to expand your waistline.
99% fat free means the food is 1% fat. I guess we can now conclude that the ocean is 30% shark.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Scientists do not know why sharks are absent from the deep, but suggest one possible reason might be a lack of food
Unlike people they move to where the food is?
Sharks also have a high demand for oxygen too. How much oxygen is available in the water at those depths?
employed at law firms around the world.
I believe the Rhino phase was next on the agenda?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
...it's called a "Marine Protected Area" (MPA). See http://www.mpa.gov/
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
When I clicked on the article for the reference I predicted a 75% of it coming from the UK and 90% chance coming from somewhere in Europe. I wonder why?
Actually, a study showed that during the year of the last big frenzy of shark attack stories, there were significantly fewer actual shark attacks and significantly more news stories about them than the previous year.
If that trend holds, we can expect nothing but 24 hour shark attack coverage once sharks actually become extinct.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks. Generally, their
procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as
to infest the waters. I would estimate that the primary food source of
sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making
documentaries. Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly
listless. The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another
documentary." So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking,
under the guise of Scientific Research. "We know very little about the
effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply
scientific voice. "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White
in the testicles with a cattle prod." The divers keep this kind of
thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and
then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very
dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all
along.
-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
Seems like the documentary people has stopped feeding the sharks
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
Wild Alaskan salmon tastes a bit like shrimp. This is unsurprising, because they eat krill. (krill is like shrimp)
Farmed salmon taste a bit like corn. Hmmm. Any guess why that might be?
The ones from the thermal vents! They are eatin all the sharks!!! (Been watching too much Surface).
Stern made that mistake when mini-me was on.
Those little people have the MOST anger per volume of anyone I've ever met!
or heard about from the trustworthy mainstream media at least
Hmm, thinking about it though, on the nuclear tangent, if we grouped enough of these small people together, made disparaging remarks about their height and general worth in society, do you think the heat radiating from their (very) small and angry faces would be enough to power anything worthwhile?
I mean, who cares if it's expensive energy, these people are funny by nature!
Less Talk. More Stab.
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?gen re=article&id=doi:10.1098/rspb.2005.3461">linky :0
Professional courtesy.
How exactly does one cordon off a line one trillion miles in length?
Sharks are not schooling fish like tuna.
I used to see lots of sharks when I dove, I love them, now its rare to see one.
Too many people misunderstand sharks, leave them the hell alone, they have been here longer than us.
Sharks rule.
I heard something on the Discovery channel not long ago... I don't remember the exact numbers, but the magnitudes are right: "Sharks kill about seven human beings a year. Humans kill 60 MILLION sharks a year."
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Does this mean that 30% of the total volume of the ocean is sharks? Damn that is pretty scary.
Maybe it is by weight........
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
So, now you really ARE more likely to get hit by lightning than eaten by a shark!
Anonymous cowards? :)
Washington law firms report a bumper year for recruitment.
What's the normal shark / ocean percentage? The assumed detail being that it's normally 100% filled with sharks? Does anyone even know?
We can do it!
I, for one, blame all our "reality" TV shows for constantly jumping our few remaining sharks.
Although the depopulation may eventually increase the number of quality TV shows when they run out of sharks to jump, this could harm the world's supply of pirates by depriving them of valuable scrimshaw, and could thus contribute to global warming. Made by commercial whalers (who are also in decline; another symptom of our fragile ecosystem), shark scrimshaw is especially valuable given that shark bones are particularly rare and highly prized for some reason.
This reaseach is a very grave finding, certainly for the sharks, but also more importantly for the health of the biodiversity of the oceans as a whole. The role of the sharks in the general health of the oceanic eco-systems very well documented. Ie, we'll certainly miss them when they're gone.
However, there are signs that shark numbers ARE depleting. Take for example the grey nurse shark. There are now less than 300 grey nurse sharks on the entire east coast of Australia.
So disregard the many comments here poo-pooing the content of the article. The article is highlighting a very important finding.
70% of the oceans are fwee?
That is because they are on the land you see
Those dastardly Shawks are up to no good
In yows and my neighbowhood
Those pesky Shawks, in skin suits they hide
Can't even tell if you look in their eyes
So how can you tell who is one?
By baiting those bastawds with a bucket of chum
If that don't work, when you try
Then check for gills baby, thats no lie...
http://www.shawks.net/
I miss those guys...
Disclaimer: All misspellings are intentional. I am responsible for all the bad poetry.. Check for gills!
My guess is that the suits didn't realize how campy and unserious they had made it. The sort of comic book Batman as Dark Avenger (I mean hey, the character is a vigilante, so you would expect his character to be somewhat outside the law instead of a mere "civilian contractor" to an incompetent police chief) was developed, of course, in the Tim Burton treatment. The suits skipped over that part of Batman, perhaps to make it more kid friendly.
Here, it is The ocean does not have 70% less sharks than at some time in the past. The fact that sharks don't and cant live in the deep ocean, probably due to energy metabolism, is not new and their distribution in ocean waters is not new, its just that we don't have to guess any longer about where they do live.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
It's really all the Shark-fin Soup we've been eating lately. And is it ever so tasty! :)
...that the GP didn't know of that link before he read this article. There's a possibility the link was in his bookmarks and he had infact read the relevant information much prior, thus incurring a need to "recall correctly".
particle physicists have discovered a new form of fundamental matter: the shuark. Oceanographers working with a team from the Los Alamos particle accelorator have successfully observed shuarks which are confirmed to be in superposition orbits around the helium molecues in salt water...
You Americans are sooo ignorant of the outside world. And BTW the Governor of California isn't from here either. GEEEZ!!
...the other 30% of the ocean consists of shark? That's a lot of damned shark!
Ah Statistics.
I lived in the north west of Australia where there has, up until recently, been large biodiversity in the areas oceans. Whale sharks, white pointers and others were common in their migratory seasons. Australian fishing has always been regulated and only a select few licenced fleets were able to take a quota of shark from that area, which is common for most fish taken for consumption in domestic and export markets. In general things were sustainable through good management of resources.
In the last decade there has been an exponential increase in Indonesian fishing boats illegally coming into Australian waters to poach fish, shark and trocus shell - anything worth a dollar (or rupiah) to their employers. They have no regard for sustainability and take everything leaving the reefs barren of life. They "hide" albeit not terribly well, on the small islands less than a kilometre from the mainland where they are very visible.
I've seen footage of their shark boats with hundreds of shark fins drying out on deck. It's repulsive. Their practice in "finning" sharks is the most cruel and inhumane I've ever seen. They reel in their longlines bringing each shark onboard, cut off their dorsal and pectoral fins (the only part of shark worth lots on East Asian markets due to their medicinal properties: good at strengthening the waist, supplementing vital energy, nourishing blood, invigorating kidney and lung and improving digestion despite being very high in mercury) and then toss them back into the ocean regardless of whether they are still alive or not. Most sharks bleed to death or drown.
The illegal fishing issue has been a hot topic for local and national political debate but as yet there has been no resolution. It's creating pressure on the legal fishermen to take the law into their own hands, which is dangerous for all concerned. The navy has patrol boats in the area but the best they can do by law is fire warning shots across the bow of the offending vessel. The offenders generally are able to prevent authorities boarding their vessels by fitting knives across the sides of their boats. This way they can "run the gauntlet" and escape any repercussions. What annoys me is that those who are caught get detained for a few weeks and are flown back at taxpayers expense. They are even paid an allowance by our government while detained! For them, it's win if you do, win if you don't.
What is needed is effective education on the impact and eco-footprint we leave with such practices, but it seems we are fighting an uphill battle.
Now it's rare again. Not clear why.
If you haven't had shark, it's a tougher meat than trout or salmon. Try it broiled with lemon or lemon butter; don't overdo the sauces.
... or the wouldn't be getting their arses kicked so badly. What they need are laser beams on their fricking heads to even things up a bit.
... only 30% to go. Let's not slack off now ...
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Farm raised catfish taste like the food they are fed. And they feed them something very similar to dog food. I have eaten catfish caught in the wild, lakes and rivers. Farm raised is ok, but nowhere near as good as fresh wild catfish.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling