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."
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
I for one farewell our shark overlords.
I wish the Japanese would stop killing for fins. What gives them the right?
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.
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
Or enjoy movies out of the 6 dollar bin at walmart :)
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.