Slashdot Mirror
Gulf Oil Spill Disaster — Spawn of the Living Dead
grrlscientist writes "A recently published study, intended to provide data to commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico so they maximize their catch of Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, whilst avoiding bycatch of critically endangered Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, suggests that the Deepwater Horizon oil leak may devastate the endangered Atlantic bluefin population, causing it to completely collapse or possibly go extinct."
When a single bluefin tuna can bring $75,000 at market, it's not Deepwater Horizon, no matter how horrific, that's causing bluefin tuna to go extinct.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's pretty simple actually, biological diversity is important.
crazy dynamite monkey
Straw man much? No one is claiming we should save every species. You yourself say we shouldn't poison or hunt species into extinction. That is all anyone is talking about here, so you could have just said that and left out the straw man completely. It's not as if these tuna were about to go extinct on their own, and now there is a huge campaign to save them. We are responsible, and not to the tuna but to the people whose livelihood depends on them, and to the people like me who find them delicious.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, in this case, it is in humanity's self-interest, if nothing else, because bluefin tuna are legendarily tasty.
The ethical duties, if any, of environmental preservation are debatable. The fact that crashing the population of a species you like to eat is stupid and self-defeating isn't.
I don't think it is our responsability to save "every" species...but I think it's our responsability to save species that we have directly endangered through our own actions, whether those actions are on purpose or a mistake.
Living With a Nerd
Like the other poster said, biodiversity is key. It makes natural systems resilient; it means every ecological niche has a backup plan. Everything's in a web of relationships.
When a species goes extinct, the species in some relationship with it are put under stress or imbalance; it ripples through the system. Eventually the system gets overwhelmed and collapses.
Just to be clear, our petroleum and pesticide-based agriculture can go so far, and you do not want to live on a planet with collapsed ecosystems after you've destroyed it for a quick buck. It'll be like Easter Island - miserable survivors with no wood to repair their boats, fighting and cannibalizing each other.
The ecosystem survives but typically the top predators are all replaced.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I really have to agree with this sentiment. Both of these are Tragedy of the Commons events, where single individuals (corporations) are overexploiting all of us, consequences be damned. Unfortunately, we've built a system where corporations have no responsibilities to anything or anyone beyond their own profit motive.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'm afraid you're mixing up "the origin of species" with Highlander. "Survival of the fittest" implies that within a species, only the ones that are most fit to deal with their environment will survive. Darwin never claimed that "in the end, there can be only one". In fact many species live in mutual beneficial relationships with each other.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
And to be very specific, I don't think you, or anybody else, is going to die because one species of tuna collapsed in the North Atlantic.
Very true. But at some point, the accumulation of species extinction is going to hit us, and especially if that species happens to be a keystone species. God help us all if krill happens to become extinct. It'll be Soylent Green for all of us.
The point is that arguing that a) in the long run, it's all a wash and b) it's just one species manages to both be way to far-sighted and way to short-sighted. The collapse of the blue-fin Tuna has to be seen in the context of the collapse of a lot of other fish species. It's not that it is just one species that might disappear, it's that it is another one in a long line of species.
Finally, the big problem is that disappearance of one species indicates that more issues might be afoot in the environment, which could cause more species to disappear.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Cool.
So it's really not about saving the Bluefin Tuna after all, but about preserving existing diversity so we humans can continue to thrive within it in ways that we're already familiar with.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Kid-proof tablet..