09-05-2003 - Biodiversity

sagar: Author=’Jorge Salazar’ program=’3896′ video=”Courtesy of SARC, Univ. of Oslo, from the USA Today website._DB:_ This is Earth and Sky. Ransom Myers of Canada’s Dalhousie University is lead author of a recent study about the big predators of the ocean – like marlins and great white sharks.

_JB:_ His study shows that in the last 50 years, over 90% of this sort of fish has vanished. Meyers told us why these large fish might go the way of the dinosaurs.

_Myers:_ I think the analogy that I think of is, that if you go back to the Pleistocene, when humans developed hunting techniques to hunt large animals, whenever humans arrived in a continent -North America, South America, Australia – you had a tremendous loss of bio-diversity of the large animals… The same pattern is repeating now, I believe, but it’s just beginning as we exploit the ocean….

_DB:_ Meyers said that by using the latest technology, fishermen can catch almost down to the last fish.

_Myers:_ Remember, we’ve killed off woolly mammoths and mastodons using nothing more than sharpened stones attached to sticks. And the human mind’s the most powerful weapon ever devised [laughs], so we can certainly do the same thing in the sea, which means that we have to fish in a responsible and sustainable manner.

_JB:_ For more – come to earthsky.org. Thanks to the “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration”:http://www.noaa.gov/ and to the “National Fish and Wildlife Foundation”:http://www.nfwf.org/. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.

Written by EarthSky