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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.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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.
100 Million per year are caught.
http://www.bigmarinefish.com/sharks.html
Da da. Da da. Da da.....
(Sorry sharkies.)
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".
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
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.
I've made my plans; they involve some fava beans and a nice chianti.
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
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.
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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
they prefer to be called little people eaters
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...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.
That we aren't going to need a bigger boat after all.
What gives them the right?
That they're higher in the food chain.
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.
... 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?
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.